My Natural History

by Simon Barnes

  Dawn duly came, as we thought it might, but it was a miracle nonetheless. We looked out across the October garden and the lemon sun gave it a light. Dave retreated from the balcony to put “Here Comes the Sun” on the stereo and we smoked a joint, the last, contemplating the miracle, and if there were tears in Jim’s eyes, no doubt there were in mine. The plants of the garden – the garden we had to get back to – were growing before us, while the smoke of burning botanic substances – our proposed route to this garden – was in our lungs, and its virtues or its vices were fizzing in our heads. We were young and foolish and still growing as the garden grew before us.

  Jim and Brian and I attempted to keep the Room Six thing going. We weren’t as cool as the departed trio, but we did our best. Me, I felt that Jim rather let the side down in the matter of Rudi’s dope. Rudi had got The Fear and lent Jim a biggish lump of dope so that the Pigs wouldn’t get him. We were smoking our way through this very acceptable loan when Jim saw a Pig in the very corridors of Burwalls. Jim at once got The Fear himself, and ran up the stairs three at a time to Room Six, where Brian and I were enjoying yet another sampling of Rudi’s dope. Jim seized the plastic bag that contained it, opened the window and whirled the bag around his head like the young David with his sling. In this manner, he hurled five quids’ worth of perfectly decent Moroccan into the trees. Brian and I failed to find it despite a lengthy search. It turned out that the Pig in question was there to investigate the question of a stolen bicycle.

  But I was soon off exploring thrilling possibilities beyond Burwalls: penetrating into Clifton, visiting Simon, Dave and Tony, and meeting thrilling girls: Miriam, and especially her best friend Lesley. Brian met a darkly pretty girl called Janet, and was at once utterly taken up. But all the same, there was some sort of default mechanism in place, one that threw the three of us together in Room Six on a regular basis.

  Getting into nature. Sometimes, that meant nothing more than listening to Pink Floyd in a darkened smoke-filled room. The Incredible String Band pleased me far more: I still maintain that the sitar is an underrated rock instrument. In some ways, cultivating a love of nature was a search for maturity, for no one is less aware of the wild world around him than a teenager, who would turn down an hour at the most beautiful place on the planet for ten minutes in the bus shelter with his mates. In another way, we were striving for something beyond the ordinary, beyond the obvious: for the world undiscovered by Straight Society. And, in a curious way, there was a time when everything in Room Six was perfect, when we seemed to have found what we were looking for. Or at least, to be on the brink of finding it.

  In my memory this enchanted period lasted an entire summer, but that can’t be right. Perhaps it was just a few days, between the exams and the long, long vacation. It seemed to stretch on, though, for night after night: a series of ancient revels, sacred rites as spring turned to summer, and we three were up there in Room Six stoned again (we had acquired some of the light, almost champagne-like grass full of cheerfully exploding seeds), the stereo (Brian’s, 30 quid from Boots) doing its stuff and the talk and the noise-filled silence and the laughter. And with it, the sense, ridiculously futile but utterly compelling, that we were on our way to reaching something beyond ourselves: that we were part of a great global phenomenon, a move towards a better way to live, and a better way of understanding the world. And time and again we would open the curtains and peer though the smoke at the spreading light, and then raise the giant sash windows and bring in the deafening sound of song: “Oh God! It’s the fucking tweeties again!” We compared the din unfavourably with Captain Beefheart playing the sax, but we stood on the balcony and listened to it anyway and hid the roaches away from prying eyes when all was done.

  It was the garden that made these times idyllic, or at least it seemed to have done so in my memory: the lovingly mown sward, or series of swards, the grand trees, their inseparable songsters. What were they? It seems astonishing that I couldn’t pick out a single one of them in those days. Today, drunk or sober, I could name every bird that sang there. What would we have been listening to? Well, blue tit and great tit and chaffinch and wren and robin and dunnock and blackbird and song thrush; that’s for certain, along with house sparrow and wood pigeon and greenfinch. Maybe a crow or two. Nuthatch, I’ll bet, and mistle thrush. Woodpeckers, green and great spotted, certainly, and maybe lesser as well. And the migrant warblers: there’d surely have been chiffchaffs and garden warblers. And certainly there’d have been blackcap: that rich, bubbling song, fruity and fluty, a great favourite of mine. But in those days all I heard was the music of the spheres, or the soundtrack of the cosmos, and if it was good, it wasn’t enough. I needed more precision: perhaps we all did. But at the time, a love, unspecific and directed in the manner of a scatter-gun, seemed enough.

  The garden was a lovely thing, and indeed, I dallied there briefly with one of the waitresses who served us at our formal meals: but this was an informal occasion and we were ungowned. When I left Burwalls at the end of the summer term, I borrowed a wheelbarrow from the gardener, along with the extension that made the thing twice as deep, which he used when collecting autumnal sweepings. I put my books and my clothes into this capacious vehicle and trundled it across the Suspension Bridge to West Mall, to Dave’s flat, and moved in. Ready for some new adventures. It struck me that I had more to learn about nature.

  Jim stopped smoking dope that summer; I rather think Brian did the same, though we lost touch. I took less and less pleasure in the late-night sessions and stopped smoking the stuff entirely a year or so later. Simon, the cool one, the one that wasn’t me, became a writer and a traveller and, it must be said, a great adventurer and lover, and worked for National Geographic. We are still friends. Jim makes films for television and wrote a book about Abelard and Heloise and is working on another about Dante; we also remain friends and he is godfather to my older boy. Brian became a solicitor and married Janet, which was a wise thing to do. Dave and Tony, alas, were undone by that ruinous stuff LSD, a desperate waste of two fine people.

  7. Red deer

  Cervus elephus

  For a while, I was a creature of the night: a moth, a bat (a greater horseshoe bat, of course), an aye-aye. Night-walking answered a profound need: a vast suite of needs. When the fit was on me, I would set off into the black, marching rather than strolling, always with the wild gorge as the centre-point and about one a.m. as the average starting-time. This walking was essential for many reasons. For a start, I lived in a madhouse. My flat comprised two gloriously elegant and unspeakably sordid rooms on the drawing-room floor of a house in Clifton, dramatic, peeling and austere. To be more pedantic, the flat was one enormous room divided by folding doors and a kind of proscenium arch. It was utterly lovely, decaying, crumbling, filled with a random collection of tenants, and intermittently full of strangers. It housed, albeit intermittently, three other rent-payers, at least at the beginning, paying £2 a week each. You never knew how many people you would find behind the door when you opened it: sometimes many, sometimes none, sometimes a couple in search of solitude, sometimes several, sometimes a large gathering of hard-smoking truth-seekers, sometimes a crowd of strangers, sometimes a cluster of lovely women. I was something of an eccentric: I occasionally cleaned things, washed things up, cooked. (Oddly enough, one of our number became a rather talented chef.) The flat in the film Withnail and I was not dissimilar in general principles, but in the film they toned it down, in order to make it believable.

  From this flat in its gracious and tree-lined square – mad old woman on the ground floor, jazz band in the basement – I would set out, sometimes in search of company, sometimes in search of solitude. Sometimes I was just in search of violent movement, for I could never bear to be cooped up for long. But above all, I was seeking some kind of order, some kind of calm, some way of achieving an understanding of the night. Many things drove me to these mad marches: mostly madness itself, for on the whole it was sanity I was seeking. At tim
es I made these walks in company, to talk about great things, or just to walk, and then sit on a bench and smoke a cigarette, moments at which it seemed that the entire universe was back under control, no longer spinning off its axis in that disconcerting way that universes have when you are young.

  Sometimes these nocturnal jaunts were taken when drug-addled. On these occasions, when I was in company, we would often climb over the wall into Ashton Park, gates locked at sunset, and walk the wooded paths in fatuous wonder. But more often, I would take to the streets alone: to clear my mind on those evenings when smoke-filled rooms and ditto minds became intolerable: when the thought of listening to one more rock album in the company of the same horizontal figures – upright only to roll another one – was more than I could bear. I would set off on another march and the cool air would wash my forehead and my temples and the rhythm of marching would still my thoughts and calm my anxieties and the night would show me that there was, indeed, more to the universe than four walls, Jerry Garcia and Paki black. The all-male nature of such gatherings also oppressed me: I wanted to find female company instead; no doubt when I did so, Mrs Watson would have rebuked me for this weakness and told me: “Go and take drugs with the boys!”

  Other matters also took me to the streets, and out to the downs, the woods and the wilds. And sometimes, rather often in fact, it was something to do with writing. I didn’t walk to seek inspiration, though. Mostly, I walked because there was none to be had. I knew, in some strange way, that I was a writer. The only problem with this little chunk of self-realisation was that I didn’t actually write anything. Not much, anyway: little passages and patches, bad prose and worse poems, and nothing that ever added up, nothing that ever came remotely close to saying anything about anything that mattered. “It’s just a question of being honest,” people told me, when talking about their own attempts to write. I wondered if that was the problem: if what I lacked was not talent but honesty.

  But then I wondered, feet marching in sudden proud rhythm like Stephen Dedalus, what has honesty to do with writing? If honesty was all it took be a writer, then everyone in Bristol might as well be a writer. I knew, as I walked the streets, that honesty wasn’t the answer. It was words. But what did I want them to say? What order did I want to put them in? How did anyone ever finish anything? All those doodles and snatches and verses and paragraphs: did they mean that I was a writer? Or did their lack of completion mean that I was nothing of the kind? And for that matter, why did nobody think my stuff was any good?

  Most often of all, though, it was girls that drove me out into the night. Not physically, not normally, anyway. Just thinking about girls was enough: if I thought about girls for too long, I’d have to be out there again, walking across the Suspension Bridge and looping back down to the river, or crossing the river at the lock gate and climbing to the downs. Often I would take the wild hairpinning path that led to the foot of the gorge, sometimes going down that way, at other times using it to make a breathless ascent. Sometimes, normally when in company, I would visit the Venturers, the all-night café, drink pints of tea, eat bacon sandwiches and observe the clientele of sleepy drivers and preternaturally wakeful drug-users. Sometimes police cars stopped me on my walks, for such activities, though not illegal, were unseemly to the policemanly mind. I would answer their questions politely enough, and then walk on, up the endless hills of Clifton and down the sweeping descents.

  Invariably, the act of walking, the exposure to places a little wilder than the floor of my flat or the floor of other people’s flats, than the bed in my flat or the beds in others people’s flats, would calm my mind. Walking is not an aid to thought: it is an aid to thoughtlessness. It is as near as the Western world gets to meditation: walking brings a mindlessness which can soothe in times of trouble, and into which important matters sometimes leap all unexpected.

  But I was talking about girls. I remember a line about love from somewhere: “Today was happy until luncheon”. All the anxieties of a bad yet necessary love seem caught up in these few words: the anxiety when things are going badly, the still greater anxiety when things are going well. Sometimes love seems to have nothing whatsoever to do with joy: it is a state of uninterrupted worry, a constant sense of needling nagging failure, a feeling of never being quite up to the demands imposed, an ache in which physical desire seems to play almost no part at all. At other times, you find yourself involved for no reason that you can explain to yourself: a love affair that seems to have been embarked on solely out of a desire to pursue one’s education, to find out what you are like and what women are like. It is customary to try and paint the picture of the love life of one’s youth as one long round of orgiastic excess. For the most part, so far as I remember, such set-pieces played a relatively minor role. More often, love was a matter of exploration and confusion, error and counter-error, every manoeuvre made more complex by the lack of any notion whatsoever about what life is all about and what either of us or any of us wanted to do in it.

  Ashton Court lies on the far side of the Clifton Suspension Bridge: just walk past Burwalls and keep going. It was a splendid, dramatically undulating piece of parkland, of the kind I was later to find mirrored in the African savannah: open grass punctuated by imposing trees, their lower branches and leaves trimmed in a straight line by the creatures that inhabited the place. A browse-line, it is called: and different creatures produce the same effect in different places. In Africa, it’s antelope. And Ashton Court, with its different browsing creatures, was not without a certain magic. The shadowy beauties of the landscape were fine and impressive: and it was an incomparable joy to have these big spaces, these giant trees, for my own. It was a personal Eden, but I never had any thoughts of playing Adam and Eve there. Did I suggest this walk, this desperate venture, late one evening? Or did she? Either way, it was the spiritual possibilities of the place that drew us there, and it was the spiritual ones that sustained us when we arrived. We crossed the Suspension Bridge, the lights of the town below us, the river far beneath. We were unstoned. We passed Burwalls: I could see the balcony of Room Six, from which one could greet the dawn. We reached the place I knew well, where the wall dipped and there was a foothold. She was wearing a skirt that swept the ground, but then she always did: she whisked it back to the thighs to climb in. She looked lovely; I said nothing, nor did she. We were just there for a walk in the moonlight. I had no hopes, no plans. It was perhaps one in the morning.

  There was always a delicious wickedness about walking in Ashton Court in these forbidden times of darkness. I remember the big sward, our two moon-shadows marching before us: the trees standing huge, but miraculously drained of all colour, as is the strange way of moonlight. Perhaps we held hands: but if so, it was only because of the beauties of the place.

  And something happened. Something very beautiful and very mysterious. We walked into a herd of deer. We could see them, not well, in the moonlight: dark shapes picked out by the easily visible pallor beneath their tails. This is the caudal patch, I can now tell you, and I now know that its purpose is to flash a warning about danger – they turn their backs on the source of danger, raise their tails, expose their white bums and leg it – should it be the moment to run away. But miraculously, it wasn’t. Perhaps it should have been. But we stayed quiet and still: so did they: us incredulous, them nervous. Their enormous size, their colossal numbers: we seemed in some strange way to be in danger ourselves. We were, though not from the deer. I’m certain we held hands then. Do I imagine the click of the antlers? Have I superimposed such observations, from many subsequent African experiences of great proximity to wildlife, over what happened that night? Certainly I remember the way they looked at us: over their shoulders, solemn-eyed, big-eared. I remember hinds and stags together, though that may not be right. The main impression was of numbers: of huge and shadowed forms: of a profound and utterly different way of living and seeing and understanding the world. It was like an alien landing: creatures that seemed far from us: yet cr
eatures we had some kind of important link with. They seemed wholly real, unnaturally so: yet also they seemed like a fiction, as if we had imagined them, somehow summoned them up by the power of a shared fantasy, as if we had, indeed, got ourselves back to the garden. Very softly, we crept away. Their power was all on us now: the power of place, the power of the wild world. We seemed scarcely human: never more human.

  At the top of a long rise, we stopped to rest, looking out over the perfect sculpted land that fell away. We found that we were in the fork of an immense fallen tree: cosy, hidden between the splayed thighs of its commodious branches, in the great woody crotch of the tumbled giantess. So we kissed. How could we not? We did more, not for pleasure but out of a sense of duty to this wild spot, to the wild creatures we had encountered. The power of the place, the power of the wild world had called us. We were beyond the reach of the tame world now.

  8. Water vole

  Arvicola terrestris

  There is a terrible danger when you make a transition from one element to another. If you get it wrong, you get the bends. If you make the transition in the wrong way, or too fast, or with too much confidence, you can find yourself in trouble. And it looked to me the most terrible step anybody could be asked to take: to move into grown-up life.

  Was it harder to make that step, back in those days? To suppose that life was harder for us than it is for subsequent generations is, after all, the inalienable right of every mature human. I don’t suppose it really was, but all the same, the fact is that we were not simply making a simple change from feckless studenthood to the inevitable horrors of earning a living. Today’s feckless students are all well aware that real life is ultimately unavoidable. But we really believed that we would be able to fly by those nets. When we joined the grown-up world, we had to accept something that none of us thought could ever happen. We had to come to terms with an about-face in reality. We had to acknowledge an error in the way we saw the world. We had to accept failure: for hadn’t we all vowed that we would never return to straight society, that we would for ever live our lives by some sort of code that lay between Hermann Hesse and the Grateful Dead? I was caught between certainties. And, still groping for the meaning and understanding that I would have when I was on proper neighbourly terms with the wild world, I seemed to be cut adrift. Words I had howled a million times on stoned nights, words I had sometimes hummed boastfully to myself on solitary walks, words I had taken to myself as a proud affectation, now became uncomfortably packed with relevance. No direction home.