My Natural History

by Simon Barnes

  Lamma was another Eden, and naturally, not without a serpent or two. Others paid me visits, though I only had to take lethal actionon one other occasion, thank God. So if this was an idyll, it was one in which the difficulties, the ugliness, the danger, the ferocity and the fragility of life were always very clear. To believe that something is perfect is to demean it. To believe that something is perfect is, above all, an admission that you have failed to understand it. Perhaps that’s why Ruth and I, after having established what I, at least, thought a perfect relationship, parted company. She went to live on the neighbouring island of Cheung Chau. I learned an awful lot of lessons about perfection while I was living on Lamma Island.

  11. Little cormorant

  Palacrocorax niger

  The rest-house had run out of beer. It might have been a disaster, but I saved the day. I happened to have with me a bottle of arrack, the indigenous Sri Lankan spirit. That’s how I met Bob; that’s how my life changed. We both wanted beer, I offered him a glass of arrack, he accepted. It was a fork in the road: once the decision had been reached and I had been taken, more or less been frogmarched onto the path less travelled by, there was no going back. And that made all the difference.

  This strange and unexpected journey began, bizarrely enough, with a visit to Sam, my cockroach-killing friend from Lamma Island. I had business in town one Saturday, and finished a little before noon. I had an inspiration: Sam usually worked on Saturday morning, so I would collect him and buy him a beer, and then he would buy me a beer and then I would buy him a beer: and so a pleasant afternoon was in prospect for us both.

  I had this brilliant idea as I was passing the building on Hong Kong Island that housed the office of his advertising company, so rather than telephoning, I took the lift up. It being a Saturday, there was no receptionist, so I opened the office door in a matey fashion and asked for Sam. He wasn’t there. Ah well, never mind, I could always buy my own beer. I said farewell and turned to leave. “Aren’t you Simon Barnes?”

  I admitted that this was the case. “Would you be interested in doing some work for us?” I was a freelance writer: I was interested in doing work for anyone on any subject for 50 cents a word minimum. They had a contract with Korean Airlines: would I write some copy for their in-flight magazine? Nine 500-word profiles on Asian cities?

  Not a problem. I had even been to six of the cities. In this bustling metropolis, ancient and modern exist side by side. I could do that.

  75 cents a word?

  And I left.

  By the time the lift hit the ground floor, I realised I had missed a trick. This was a bloody airline contract, after all, and airlines have bloody aeroplanes. I ran my eye down the list of nine cities. It rested on one of the three I hadn’t been to. Colombo. I called back up from the phone in the lobby: “How about a barter deal?”

  “What had you in mind?”

  “Two return tickets to Sri Lanka.”

  So we went. Me and Cindy. Cindy my – to put this briefly – love, my wife, my life, mother of our children, my for-all-time companion and friend. At this stage we had known each other a few weeks, but I knew more or less all of those things already. And so we spent a few more weeks arguing and laughing and loving our way round the lovely and troubled island of Sri Lanka.

  By the time we reached the beerless rest-house, we had been there for some time. When we felt in need of a treat, we stayed at a rest-house: places that had been built for colonial chaps to spend the night and take tiffin and a noggin or two when up-country. These buildings had an airiness and spaciousness that you don’t find in places designed for air-conditioning, not that we could afford to stay in places that had air-conditioning. Even a rest-house was push-the-boat-out time, but we had decided that we deserved it on this occasion. It was an epochal decision.

  There were two other guests, both English, a man and a woman, travelling independently. Bob was, I suppose, in his early 60s, and possessed of all the gregariousness of a man who lived and travelled alone. He was an unstoppable talker, and even before we spoke, I liked him hugely, because of the zillion watts of good cheer he was firing out in all directions. That’s why I offered the drink. The woman was maybe ten years younger, quietly capable, a good and experienced traveller. I overheard the exchange with the waiter as she and Bob requested beer and the dreadful news came back.

  So I came to the rescue. I explained that panic could be avoided: we could order bottles of soft drinks, politely insisting that the glasses and the bottles came separately. We could then mix the soft drinks with diamond-hard arrack in whatever proportions we chose. We ordered soda, ginger ale, lemonade. I passed around the arrack. We did it again, and then again. Bob grew expansive.

  One of the things that had attracted me to Bob and prompted me to make the offer of arrack was that his conversation with the largely – and necessarily – silent companion kept returning to the subject of birds. It was clear that the subject consumed him. I had already heard him fix a wake-up call for six the following morning, with a pot of tea, please, so he could get in an hour’s birdwatching before the day got going. I admired this.

  Laughing, gesticulating, between serious pulls at his arrack and soda, Bob talked about his travels in Sri Lanka and the birdwatching he had done. In particular, he expanded on the marvellous place he had been to the previous day. It was called Gal Oya. It sounded wonderful. It sounded like paradise. So naturally, I didn’t want to go. I loved hearing about it, loved Bob’s easy familiarity with the wild world, but there was no way I was going to Gal Oya.

  I think now it was because I didn’t want to be disappointed. I didn’t want to see it from the outside: to be there and yet not there, involved yet cut off from the essential meaning of the experience, much as I had been in my 15th-floor flat. I didn’t want to do it wrong. I didn’t know, but I already sensed that it was too important. Too important to risk getting wrong: almost too important to do.

  But we went. Cind, who has been right about a million other things since then, said we should go, so we did. We managed to hire a pair of binoculars in Colombo, and then we set out on a small tour of the wild places of Sri Lanka. Starting, because Bob had made it sound so essential, with Gal Oya. A couple of days later, we were making our way towards a small boat, me filled with all kinds of trepidation.

  The thought that it might be a false experience was almost too much to bear. The idea that I might be close to what I wanted without actually doing it right overwhelmed me. It was as if I had spent my life dreaming about the perfection of a cathedral, and, having finally arrived at its steps, feared to enter, in case it was filled with impious mobs selling postcards; or had spent years thinking about a great beauty spot but feared to go there in case I found nothing but parked coaches and McDonald’s wrappers.

  But it was not really the other people that worried me. It was me. And it. Perhaps I would not respond to the wild world as I had when I was young. Perhaps the wild world was not as wonderful as I had always secretly believed. Perhaps I was not suitable for the wild world; perhaps the wild world was not suitable for me. I remembered the serial disappointments recounted by Proust: how the church in the Turkish style at Balbec was not the brave, wave-lashed cliff-top thing of beauty he imagined but a neat little spot in the middle of town; how Venice was somehow less Venetian that he had always dreamed. For Proust, real life was always a disappointment after the joys of the imagination, or the deeper joys when the past wells up without being summoned and all things fall into place. Perhaps I would be disappointed by the wild world: perhaps I was doomed to an inauthentic experience.

  I had always imagined that somehow, all things would fall into place when I at last entered the wild world. It was fear that all things might not do anything of the kind that kept me away for so long. Now Cindy and I were walking with two Sri Lankans, a boat-driver and a spotter, towards the boat that lay moored on the shores of the vast artificial lake: an unreal – in fact man-made – and distinctly Tolkienesque landscap
e, dominated by a forest of drowned trees. Three rivers had been dammed to create this reservoir: the watery vista, the islands – formerly mere hills – and the landscape of the shores that made up the park.

  The unreal nature of the waterscape added to its air of mystery. The driver yanked the cord, the engine started. God, the sound would drive away every living thing for miles; this was just a joy-ride, a speedboat skirmish through a funky landscape, a cheap thrill. The driver throttled back, and we put-putted gently into the trees.

  And entered a new space. Oh, brave new world that has such cormorants in it!

  For – instantly, melodramatically, absurdly, suddenly – we made a transition from wild to tame. At once we were not near but inside a vast unending colony of birds. Every branch of every tree – bare, water-killed and slowly rotting – bore a cluster of strange black fruit. It was like looking at the stars on a frosty night: endless constellations and nebulae and galaxies of cormorants. Some were attending to their feathers with dandified precision, others struck the traditional heraldic pose of cormorant kind – the correct term is displayed, as in the spread eagle. These cormorants are correctly described as cormorant sable displayed, wings inverted.

  They flew, they fished all around us, they squabbled, they dived. The stench of the whitewashed trees rose around us, and it smelt good to me. I had no idea that there were, in fact, three species of cormorants here: the dominant one being the little cormorant, a cheery, indomitable creature that loves to gather in huge numbers whenever there is enough water and enough fish. There were also great cormorants, the same species you find in Britain, and Indian cormorants. But it was the lure of numbers that got to me on this first complete immersion into the wild world: so many! The fact of biodiversity – a term not yet invented – was the secondary experience. But it was still a matter of great wonder to notice that the darter, with its snaky neck, was quite different from the cormorants, and that of the many long-legged birds gathered around the edges of the lake, there were many different kinds: egrets, herons, night herons, painted storks. There were pelicans: I had no idea what species, or for that matter, no idea there was more than one. There were eagles, too: white-bellied sea-eagle and grey-headed fishing eagle, not that I really cared: I was simply drunk with the thought of being in the same place as eagles, my heart soaring as eagles soar, my imagination with it.

  The spotter spotted elephant, far off, and we made our way towards the island they were standing on; here, the elephants swim from island to island, snorkelling with their trunks. I felt no great excitement at this: rather, a feeling that now we had entered the wild world, nothing, no matter how strange, no matter how beautiful, no matter how terrifying, no matter how wild, could cause me surprise. I was in a trance. I had finally reached the place where I wanted to be: the place I had conjured up a thousand times in the playground of Sunnyhill School, the place I had seen on the television with Zoo Quest and Look, the land I had sought in the Natural History Museum, the place I had pursued without knowing it ever since.

  I had entered: and I knew already that there was no going back. I knew that henceforth, the wild world would be a major part of my life. I had no idea how to organise this, or what to do about it, barring an almost incontinent urge to write something about Gal Oya. I just knew that this was not so much a door as a valve, one that allowed you in but did not operate in the reverse direction. I had entered through the Wardrobe: but now the back of the Wardrobe was sealed for ever. I knew I would look at the world in a different way, understand life in a different way, live in a different way. I didn’t know how or when or why: I didn’t even care. All I knew was that I was back: back in a place I had never been to before, back in a place I had never truly left.

  12. Marsh harrier

  Circus aeruginosus

  I always like to say that seeing a marsh harrier was the high spot of my honeymoon, though sometimes I vary it by saying that in fact, it was the morning I bought the thermal underwear. However, to be perfectly honest, there were some other good bits as well, though I still think I must have been mad to agree to it. Well, I was mad: mad about Cind. And that last sentence is in the wrong tense, but never mind. Where was I?

  We came back to Lamma Island from Sri Lanka after a couple of months of adventures, and we had saved the best till last. The trip around the wildlife sites of Sri Lanka changed the island for us. It also changed Lamma, and as we went on, we discovered that it had changed everywhere else as well.

  Lamma was suddenly strewn with birds. Where had they come from? I remembered The Magician’s Nephew, the book in which the magical land of Narnia is created before the eyes of the observers, the animals rising from the earth itself – “Can you imagine a stretch of grassy land bubbling like water in a pot?… in all directions it was swelling into humps. They were of very different sizes, some no bigger than molehills, some as big as wheelbarrows, two the size of cottages. And the humps moved and swelled till they burst, as the crumbled earth poured out of them, and from each hump there came out an animal.” After that “showers of birds came out of the trees” while frogs burst into the rivers and butterflies and bees appeared from nowhere. I remembered, too, the creation story in Paradise Lost, the egg bursting with kindly rupture, and the smaller birds that solaced the woods and spread their painted wings. The return to Lamma put us, rather unexpectedly, into the first chapter of the book of Genesis, and the fowls of the air were created before us, for surely, they had not been there before. But now they were everywhere and, it sometimes seemed, they were there for me alone. This was at first something to plume myself on, secondly a privilege. These days it also feels like a responsibility.

  But first came the joy: and the joy has never left. The scrap of garden before our flat called into new being three species of bulbuls: most notably the crested bulbul, an absurd little bird got up like a clown, with red cheeks and a pointed hat. The Chinese bulbul, with a head like a badger, made a shocking din I had never heard before: but now it did it every morning. There was also a red-vented bulbul: how did that get there? How come I had never seen the magpie robin, as jaunty a little bird as exists anywhere in the world? Where had they all come from? I discovered them with the help of Karen Phillips who illustrated A Colour Guide to Hong Kong Birds, the first bird book I had acquired deliberately since I had won the great field guide by learning the multiplication tables.

  Of course, I already knew about the black kites that drifted across the skies of Hong Kong and sometimes delicately plucked stuff from the water’s surface as the ferry chugged to and from Lamma. I had often seen them wheeling about the peak, flapping seldom, twisting their forked tails to steer. But I was shocked to find that some of these kites were in fact white-bellied sea eagles, yes, and there was a strange sense of appropriateness in discovering that this was the same eagle I had seen at Gal Oya. It was part of a pleasing pattern: and I have been falling on pleasing patterns like that ever since. And just a few weeks before, this eagle hadn’t even existed. There had been one kind of big bird: and now there were two. It was as if I had split the atom, sundered like from like and created two unlikes. The eagle carried its wings in a shallow vee, a dihedral, and was altogether more chunky and substantial an aeronaut.

  And the sparrows that cheeped around the house: it was with a shock that I realised that these were not house sparrows at all. Rather, they were tree sparrows, which I knew about from my studies with S Vere Benson: country cousins of the cockney sparrow, birds that habitually have nothing to do with buildings. They had a fine chestnut head, rather than the ashy grey of the house sparrow, something I had never noticed before. But now we were sudden intimates.

  There were other, more exotic birds leaping from nowhere: rufous-backed shrike, blue rock thrush, white-breasted kingfisher, no doubt the large blue bird that had given me such delight in a previous life. You could see reef egrets from the ferry, sometimes great rafts of red-necked phalarope in the Lamma Channel. Once a great frigate bird flew over the isl
and: impossibly slim wings, deeply forked tail. I made an expedition to an egretry: two or three huge trees among the branches of which the long-legged birds looked like giant white fruit. Sometimes the call of the koel echoed across the island, saying its own name, though I preferred to think that it sounded like my friend Al when lit up by enthusiasm and Carlsberg: “Un-real! Un-real!”

  But the bird that gave me most pleasure in this time of Creation was a little thing that I saw every day. That’s to say, I now saw it every day. Very close to the harbour wall was a large boulder: that was its regular perch. Every day, on ten separate occasions, 500 people would pass within ten yards of it going towards the ferry pier and then 500 more would come the other way as they left the ferry for the delights of the island. And the bird, which I had always believed to be the most shy and elusive of all birds, would never twitch a feather. Instead, it would sit there, bobbing its head, glaring at the surface of the sea, occasionally turning itself into an iridescent dart and flying at the water, to return to its favourite perch on the boulder to scoff a tiddler.

  It was a kingfisher. One of the most sought-after and beloved of birds, an outrageous explosion of colour, the bird everybody wants to see: and yet nobody saw it. Nobody noticed because nobody looked. It had been there all the time, or at least I assumed so. But it was as if my awakened eyes had called it into being, summoned it from the rock as Aslan summoned the animals from the boiling ground in Narnia, as God called the birds to burst forth with kindly rupture in Paradise Lost. Perhaps it was the bird I most wanted to see: the bird with which everyone most craves an intimacy: and at a stroke, it was there for me every day. I nodded to it as I went to work; I waved to it when I returned to the island in daylight hours, generally as I was making my way to the bar.