My Natural History

by Simon Barnes

  We hired a houseboat on Dal Lake in Srinagar. We walked the streets, we travelled the waterways by shikara, poled about in these crafts of sybaritic luxury. I fell in love with a thousand women, all veiled in the same stunning shade of blue: a kingfisher colour that often went with darkly flirtatious eyes. Every detail of the place was an enchantment. Time and again, I found myself looking at the vignettes of Kashmiri life and wondering at the miracle that I was in the same place: I am in this street with this person, I am standing here looking at that mountain, I am being propelled across the water by this glorious woman. The priorities of the world were remade.

  There was a kingfisher that fished from the slim wires that connected our craft to the shore. It was confirmation, if confirmation were needed, that we were living in a land of magic. It provided a wonderful cabaret, totally unafraid, giving a blowtorch stare at the water and occasionally launching itself in. Mark, fascinated, characteristically started to calculate the success rate: the figure eludes me, but the bird’s efficiency was as stunning as its colours.

  We made many long excursions through the lakes, riding the shikaras, lying back on the cushions that made a gigantic double bed on which we lay haphazardly, mildly intertwined, gazing at the passing parade of beauty and wonder. There is still a photograph from that time, taken by a boatman, the girls lovely, one brown, the other browner, Mark and I, utterly content in our closed society of four. It was a time of almost religious enlightenment: as if this friendship, this shared pilgrimage into grown-up life, was made all right, was made safe, was even made good by the fact that we could, all four of us together, ride the waters of Dal Lake and inspect kingfishers.

  And there was a second kingfisher. This one was much more seldom seen. It was huge, nearly the size of a crow, and black and white: but it was unmistakably a kingfisher, a sword-billed starer at the water, a plunger, a seizer and a swallower. It liked darker, more sheltered places, and, obviously, bigger fish. It was a different species because it lived in a different way: a revelation not only of biodiversity, but also of the reason for biodiversity. Each bird inhabited a different ecological niche: and I had not thought the world possessed a multiplicity of kingfishers. These days, I have on my shelves an ornithological monograph on the most outrageously colourful birds you could possibly set eyes on: Kingfishers, Bee-eaters and Rollers. It lists 87 species of kingfisher, and doesn’t include the Himalayan pied, which it considers a subspecies of pied kingfisher; the scientific name in the title of this chapter comes from another authority. My experience on Dal Lake makes me want to believe that despite the monograph, the Himalayan pied is a good species. But I knew nothing of taxonomy then, still less its changing (like bottled beer) fashions. I knew only the sensational fact that there were two different kinds of kingfisher, and that was a joy enough.

  New possibilities opened before me. I thought they were all to do with travel and friendship and personal development: and I was wrong. It was just that the power of four had brought me to this place, this realisation: a small adventure that inevitably led to much greater ones. I was scarcely aware of it, with all the distractions and delights and excitements of that journey, but the more muted, the more subtle sense of wonder at this, the second kind of kingfisher, had struck extraordinarily deep. I was still not fully awakened, but I was aware of my wonder, my delight in this strange vision of the Other Kingfisher. I had a vague idea of what it meant. I felt some kind of summons in this vision, a need to know more, understand more, see more.

  I half misunderstood it, but only half. Certainly, as soon as I returned to England, I resolved to go and live in Asia. I was changed: I was a traveller, I was a chancer, I was an adventurer. I wanted to seek strange things and see strange sights and listen to strange sounds and breathe strange air. I still didn’t know what I wanted to seek: but at least I had got as far as knowing that I was a seeker.

  10. Huntsman spider

  Heteropoda venatoria

  The flat was perfect. It had one large, generous room, five-sided, its two outer walls meeting at a shallow angle. There was also a small bedroom, smaller bathroom, imperceptible kitchen. It was on the 15th floor. The big windows looked down on the amazing cityscape spread out beneath: between the high-rises, as if through forest trees, the harbour danced before us. Hong Kong means Fragrant Harbour. We could see the fussy ferries stolidly performing their tasks, the rotund sampans doing whatever sampans do, big ships, liners, container ships, disreputable Conradian cargo vessels, junks, high and square-ended like Spanish galleons, every now and then, one of them sprouting a batwing sail. We were at the bottom of the Mid-Levels, a bit on the respectable side for us but just about affordable. I had a job working for the South China Morning Post as a down-table sub. Ruth was teaching English at the British Council. We had made the great move East: we had arrived: we had set ourselves up. We had done well. Slowly and subtly, the place began to drive me mad. Not Hong Kong but the flat.

  Once you were out, it was hard to get in. This I could deal with, though it made me irritable. But once you were in, it was hard to get out, and this began to play havoc with my mind. There were two lifts serving the building. It was too far to walk down the stairs, even if it could be done. It was common practice in Hong Kong to use the fire-stairs as the depository for all kinds of rubbish, preferably flammable. And of course, the metal gate at the bottom was always kept locked: well, anyone could walk in otherwise. Fire in Hong Kong tended to be a fairly total experience.

  So it was the lift or nothing. And sometimes the lift came at once, but more often it didn’t. You had to wait on the landing outside the flat for five, sometimes ten minutes. This oppressed me. Not just the waiting: more the fact that you couldn’t walk out of your own house. It was as if outside was one place, inside quite another. There was no easy commerce between the two: instead, there was a massive transition to make, across a buffer zone, a no man’s land, a DMZ between two irreconcilable opposites.

  There was a cheerful shop across the road from our building and it sold everything, especially beer. Often enough, I would drop down to get a few cans and then come up again. The process sometimes took 20 minutes. The horizontal distance was about 60 feet. This was madness: not in the wasting of time, but in the vast and complex barrier that had been erected between inside and outside.

  I loved Hong Kong. Right from the start, I felt absolutely at home: its madness found an answering chord in me. I was thrilled and challenged by its alien qualities; I found its bustle and its crowds hilarious. But the sense of being marooned 15 floors up, ten minutes away from outside, nibbled away at me. Once or twice, I made trips out to the outlying islands: to Lantau, Cheung Chau, Lamma. There I felt the sudden absence of traffic noise as a dramatic physical presence: the silence was an assault on the eardrums, making me quite literally feel dizzy, as if the silence had stirred up the semi-circular canals, the balance-regulating mechanism that lies in the inner ear. The extraordinary deep green of authentic tropical vegetation touched my soul: the entire world was full of pot plants, but without pots. I remember seeing the blue flash, dismayingly large, of a kingfisher of colossal size on a coastal walk. It released in me a huge yearning: to see more of the wild, yes, even to live on one of these wild islands. But I knew such a dream was impossible. I was a committed urbanite, was I not? Most nights I finished work at eleven, other nights at two: long after the ferries had stopped running. Besides, I was a townie. The countryside was something you visited, something that cheered you, that restored you and made possible your return to city life.

  This problem was solved for me very neatly. I was sacked. I was penniless. I even owed money to the company. I was in shock. I was in debt. I was in shit.

  So Ruth and I moved out to Lamma Island, sharing a flat with a colleague of hers, a delightfully eccentric Englishwoman called Sallie, who loved The Sound of Music above all other things in life, hated with a passion anything that might “make me think”, and was given to exuberant public farting. I began
to find work as a freelance, so that was all right. And I was at once at home in the pell-mell world of Lamma, the Chinese community of fishing people and market gardeners, and the floating, constantly changing population of multinational oddballs and misfits and bohos and drunks who washed up on the shores of the island.

  The flat was on the ground floor. We seldom closed the door. Anybody could walk in. Anything. And did.

  There was almost no difference at all between inside and outside. We had no air-conditioning, just a couple of fans bought from China Products to blow my papers about. I sat and drank coffee and beer inside or outside indifferently. The weather came right into the flat, just like everything else.

  Ants marched in and out of the tiny kitchen in thin red lines. Cockroaches had the run of the place in the dark: chunky, crunchy, chocolatey creatures with long antennae like, in Gerald Durrell’s phrase, a mandarin’s moustache. Mosquitoes materialised at dusk, mostly the little stripy kind, black-and-white house mosquitoes, practised tormentors. Translucent geckos appeared like magic to gobble them, bulbous eyes, internal organs visible beneath the skin, occasionally uttering a high-pitched giggle; the Malays give them the onomatopoeic name of cheechak. On one occasion, I found myself leaping naked onto Sallie ’s bed with Sallie inside it: her scream, more startled than frightened, had summoned me. A green praying mantis, body about three inches long, had settled on the cage that surrounded her fan, directly above her head. A little cravenly, I wrapped it in a tea towel rather than in my bare hands, and took it outside. Sallie thanked me gravely.

  Naturally, everybody I met on the island regaled me with horror stories about wildlife, though nothing prepared me for the shock of my first serious encounter. Mostly, they talked about the centipedes: six inches long and ferociously fanged. The first that came my way was a rather adorable creature, to be quite frank. What was the fuss about? Six inches long and curling up like a liquorice all sort when touched with a broom, these could be gently whisked outside, where they would uncoil and get about their business. They weren’t centipedes but millipedes, gentle vegetarians, creatures of great charm. There was a monstrous misidentification, I thought smugly.

  I was wrong. The real centipedes, carnivorous and ferocious, came later. They moved with speed and swaying, wriggling purpose, and they could give you a most unpleasant bite. Not that I ever experienced one, though my friend Sam was bitten in the balls by one as he lay in bed. Still, he took worse things to his bed while he was on Lamma Island.

  Sam was a New Zealander involved in advertising. He was loud, exuberant, cheerily foul-mouthed, in many ways a deeply silly man. For some reason, he was asked to front up one of his firm’s television adverts. It was for a household insecticide called Baygon. His light tenor was dubbed over with an authoritative American bass-baritone: but you could still imagine Sam’s excited delivery behind: “You spray the fuckin’ stuff all over the little bastards and it fuckin’ kills ’em, yeah?”

  The point of Baygon – the USP, Sam would say as an advertising man – was that the poison lay around for days after you had squirted it, killing everything that touched it. Quite serious stuff, then. But it had no effect on centipedes. Centipedes could be brushed out of the door, where there was every danger of them coming straight back in again, or they could, with considerable difficulty, be broken with the back of a broom. I was surrounded by other houses, on a steep hillside, but with a 30-foot concrete wall at the back. Creatures frequently fell down this and couldn’t get back up again. So they came into the house.

  I was given my first serious test of my commitment to the island life by the huntsman spider. Now let me be frank: I don’t care for spiders. Spiders give me the jumps. Why don’t we get phobias about guns or ten-ton trucks, and other things that can seriously damage you? Instead, there are many people utterly terrified of the snakes they will never see, and bloody fools like me twitching at spiders that are damn-near harmless.

  And God, that first one terrified the life out of me. I came back to the flat, alone, and found it on the wall. I couldn’t believe it was so big. I suppose in legspan across the longest diagonal, it was six inches. It wasn’t one of the furry bird-eaters of tropical forests, just a leggy wolf-spider, like the one you find in British gardens: agile, swift, not a web-maker but a great stalker and chaser and leaper. Magnified to an absurd degree.

  It was in the bedroom. On the wall, like a monstrous plaque. Its stillness was filled with the threat of movement. It was altogether too much for me. I slept on the cushions in the sitting room that night. Alas, it was only the first: giant spiders came into the house on a dismayingly regular basis, and I had to deal with them or leave. At first, in fear and trembling, I Baygoned the fuckin’ bastards, squirting so much stuff on them that they more or less dissolved on the wall, leaving me to sweep the soggy remains out with a finicky horror. But then a terrible thing occurred. I had two cats: one died of Baygon. My cleaning lady, distressed by the number of cockroaches (prey of the huntsman spider, as it happens) had a Baygon blitz. And the smaller of the cats, a dear creature who had few vices beyond the chewing of live cockroaches, ingested too much Baygon and died. So I banned Baygon, despite the cleaning lady’s disapproval and Sam’s nightly recommendations.

  This meant that I had to reach an accommodation with living spiders. And this was nothing less than accommodation with nature. With the wild. It meant that I had to accept that nature was not all nice things. Nature was also things I didn’t wish to stroke or encourage or invite back home. If you want nature, you have to have all of it: not just some of it. This was a dizzying concept. I knew that if I was to continue living on Lamma with my door open and no difference between inside and out, I had to live with six-inch wolf spiders.

  By an effort of will, I did so. I still twitched when they moved without warning. I didn’t like them. I wasn’t brave enough to get rid of them. The only option was to accept them: to live alongside the creatures that peopled my nightmares. I ignored them: or rather, I mixed purposeful averting of my eyes with sudden gazes of horrified fascination. I wasn’t happy with these many-legged giants: but I could live with them.

  Many of the other visitors were welcome enough. Small frogs crept into the bathroom and sat there, looking oddly mournful, and as if carved out of soap. Giant cicadas slammed into the walls and into people as they manoeuvred with the grace of flying Volkswagens. Sometimes swarms of termites came zooming in towards the lights, shedding their wings recklessly all over the floor, leaving you with a dustpanful to sweep up after they had departed. Glorious butterflies thronged the few square feet of garden: dark-veined tiger and lemon.

  I remember one afternoon with special vividness. I was working hard against a deadline on my electric typewriter, a machine I was inordinately proud of. I was wearing, as was my habit, nothing but a sarong tied insecurely around my waist, for I had gone native, gone bad in the Tropics, and very enjoyable it was, too. The flat was empty but for me and the two cats, for the little one was still alive then. The cats were making a terrible racket at my feet, and after a while I got a bit fed up with them and turned to ask politely: “Look, cats, could you please play a little more quietly?” But I only got halfway through.

  On the floor, about six feet from my ankle, was a snake. I gasped: in shock, in horror, in wonder at the extraordinary beauty of the thing on the tiled floor, coiled up, its head ready to strike. It was a bamboo pit viper: green as poison with a red streak on the tail, yellow below, diamond-head much wider than the body, slim, about two feet long. It was utterly lovely. As I watched, Dinah, the bolder of the two cats, danced forward and slashed at it with her paw. She caught the snake on the side of its head and at once danced out of reach, as if she had some idea of what she was about. She had turned into Ricki-ticki-tavi.

  Well, solve the moral dilemma for me. What’s a person to do? A bamboo pit viper is, according to A Colour Guide to Hong Kong Animals, “not usually fatal to man”. I liked that “usually”. I knew that anybody w
ho got bitten got helicoptered off the island: it’s not a snake you take chances with. Bamboo pit vipers had been known to kill children and people with weak hearts.

  Now here’s an important truth about snake-bites: something like 98 per cent of all bites occur to people who are handling them. In my view, there’s a fairly obvious negative suggestion implicit in that fact. I wasn’t going to start handling this snake. So what were the other options? I could sweep it into the garden, from where it would come back into the flat. It certainly wouldn’t climb back up the 30 foot wall, from which it had presumably and inadvertently descended. I could sweep it next door, into my landlord’s garden. Or I could sweep it into either of my other neighbours’ places. Not a neighbourly act, I think you’ll agree.

  So I killed it. I did it badly and uncoolly, but swiftly enough, two blows with the broom being enough to break its back and split its head. It was a desecration. I can see the mess I made of it now: I wish I couldn’t.