My Natural History

by Simon Barnes

  My mother’s considerable intelligence was her weapon, her stock-in-trade, her social persona. Tart, sometimes venomous one-liners gave her huge private delight. She meant no harm, or not much: but she could never resist the temptation of saying bad things. Mostly, this was the well-intentioned malice of gossip and complicity. But it was a dangerous game, and though highly adept at playing it, she was always capable of giving pain – especially to backsliding sons.

  Sherlock Holmes was a shared joy. By the age of 12, I had the Holmes canon more or less by heart: partly because I loved the tales, partly also because my mother loved them still more. Holmes gave us a language, it gave us a canonical text. We would play private games on long car journeys involving abstruse references to Holmes stories. We would concoct tabloid headlines, and the other person had to guess the story to which they referred. “Ancient riddle is crowning glory.” “Too easy – The Musgrave Ritual.”

  The downside was the terrible bollockings, the shaming, accusing, horrendous tellings-off I received when my academic shortcomings were believed to have a basis in idleness, in insufficient ambition. When failure was of my own making, she was utterly unforgiving. This was ultimately to become counter-productive. As the 60s unfolded, it became an increasingly hard time for parents, particularly those seething with vicarious ambition. This was, after all, the first generation that had to learn that their sons and their daughters were beyond their command.

  But even at the gaudy height of revolution, I still valued the literary conspiracy I had with my mother. She was a writer: I was an evolving writer. For a time, my literary tastes were skewed towards hers: I read Jane Austen, and though I realise now that I only sort of enjoyed the books – certainly I have never reread them – I valued them because a Jane conversation always put us on good terms. I read some of the other detective stories she loved: Josephine Tey, Michael Innes, Ngaio Marsh – but my enjoyment fell far short of unconditional love.

  Besides, I was, treacherously, developing literary tastes of my own. I had violent crushes on TS Eliot and James Joyce, and so moved outside my mother’s literary sphere. She was not an intellectual, not in the sense that loves analysis: but she had a profound sense of story. She wrote the Blue Peter historical pieces, and, with my father, co-wrote the Blue Peter Special Assignments. She had the knack of seeing history as a series of tales, and could bring that tale to life by finding a beginning, a middle and an end. A professional historian may curl his lip at such an approach: but stories are what humans love, and it is by stories that children – that all humans – most readily understand the world and the complexities of human life.

  But me, I was forging in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race, and the sweet Thames ran softly while I sang my song. Duty became a less pressing matter than literature, than fomenting revolution with Ralph, than fomenting still greater things with Christine, my lovely first girlfriend. I could feel the grasp of imposed ambition slipping, and that was intoxicating: but not as intoxicating as the rhythms and the wordplay of Joyce and Eliot. “He would create proudly out of the freedom and power of his soul… a living thing, new and soaring and beautiful, impalpable, imperishable.” Not just him, I thought. Not just him.

  Appropriateness. That was the key to my mother’s soul, that was the secret of the universe. To say something was “suitable” was the highest form of praise. The idea of what was appropriate or suitable or fitting was what powered her religion, her view of society and her narrative technique. Good manners, right feeling, the Anglican faith – we sang “Firmly I believe and truly” at her mother’s funeral, appropriately, and then, still more appropriately, at her own. The way that things fitted in, one with the other, bringing about a completion, a resolution, a meaning, was something that, in a quiet kind of way, enthralled her throughout her life. The right kind of thank-you letter, relations – she alone knew the difference between a second cousin and a first cousin once removed – the relationship between liturgy and scripture, the relationship between worldly life and a practical religion; all these were linked by a series of cosmic strands in her mind, making a glorious celestial map of connections and relationships. There is a moment in Anthony Burgess’s Earthly Powers, when the narrator runs into Joyce in a café in Paris. “Joyce was drunk. He had an empty Sweet Afton packet in his hand, the cigarettes themselves lying on the ground virginal and wasted in a kind of quincunx pattern. Things tended to form into patterns for Joyce, but he could not see the fallen cigarettes at all…”

  A quincunx pattern, by the way, is one like the five on a die. My mother would have liked this fact: she was always happy when in possession of privileged information. She would also have like the way I said die, correctly, rather than dice, which, being plural, is here incorrect. For things tended to form into patterns for her, too, though rather different patterns from Joyce’s, and for that matter, mine. When she and my father had a mass said for their silver wedding, she chose the gospel, selecting the first miracle, the wedding at Cana in Galilee: the one in which they saved the best wine for the last. Suitable, you see. Appropriate. Very.

  These patterns always linked us. Our conspiracy against the rest of the family, the rest of the world, continued almost in spite of ourselves. But I didn’t make it to Oxford, falling at the fence of the Latin exam. It would have been appropriate if I had gone to Oxford, appropriate if I had righted the wrongs of her own life: my failure to do so was a disappointment on a cosmic scale. Her world view had failed her. Or I had. A cosmic thank-you letter had not been written. The connections had not been made.

  There was to be consolation for her. When I was at school, I used to take The Times at half-price, a special offer, one designed to create a life-long loyalty. (Ha.) Before long, she began to steal it from me each morning without shame. She began to identify with the paper: not the politics, but the ambience. The newspaper had a considerable sense of what was appropriate and what was not – and besides, the crossword soon became a daily confirmation of the cleverness of her mind, a confirmation of herself. I tried, for a while, to do the crossword myself, for the sake of our alliance, but it was a case of sorry, I can’t manage it. For me, words were things that exploded with infinite possibilities: for her, words led to a single correct answer. It seemed that we had different ideas of what was appropriate.

  But when, many years later, I began to write for The Times, it was a cosmic sign that things had not gone so badly wrong after all. Despite the difficult times on local papers, and the gloriously disreputable years in Asia, I was back in the world of appropriateness. It was a confirmation that things could work out well: that people could, in a phrase she always relished, “behave properly”, even if they took their time about it. It was as if the universe itself had done her a favour – a favour it most certainly owed – by behaving properly. Would she have withheld her love, or some of it, if things had worked out differently, if I had behaved less properly, if I had failed to find professional success, if I had stayed in Asia writing novels? This was not put to the test, and as Aslan says in the Narnia stories – stories she always enjoyed for the serene patterns they drew with imagination and the Christian faith – no one is ever told what would have happened.

  What did happen is that time passed and we all grew older, and my two sisters produced children and my mother was a grandmother and very pleased about it. She loved the large, noisy, bibulous family gatherings we had always gone in for, now with children underfoot adding to the hubbub; she was pleased that all her three children were in stable marriages and led interesting professional lives. She revelled in travel, though hated the turbulence travel brought with it. “We’re off to Bali tomorrow and it’s all absolutely ghastly,” she once wrote to me on a postcard.

  There were shadows in her life, no question about that. She grew overweight and was prone to tiredness; I suspect she suffered for most of her life from an undiagnosed thyroid problem. She also suffered from depression: “Churchill called it the Black Dog.
But it isn’t a dog. I like dogs. It’s a Black Cloud.” And often she sat in her black cloud, unable – as is the way with depression – even to try and escape its clutches.

  She suffered a stroke in her late 60s, and it killed about half of her. She was told she would never walk again, but in a truly heroic effort, the last, she got back on her feet. We were optimistic that she would carry on much as before: it was not to be. Most of her joy in life was killed when the stroke hit her. She was no longer consistently clever: though there were still moments when the sharp-tongued picker-up of all references and nuances would suddenly appear in the conversation like a ghost.

  I would visit her often, or quite often anyway, and frequently I would read from her favourite books, a recapitulation of the old alliance. She could still read well enough for herself, but it tired her to do so for long periods. Besides, the alliance gave pleasure to us both. But also we would talk, and two things bothered her: bothered her to the point of obsession. One question was whether her grandchildren would remember her only a sick old woman, rather than the acute person she had been when whole. I said they would always remember their gran who loved them: but that was no consolation at all. And the other question was worse: why? Why did she have a stroke? What had she done to deserve it? For her mind required that life should be tidied up and that even illness should be appropriate. And this wasn’t. This wasn’t appropriate, this wasn’t suitable, this wasn’t fair. “It’s a biological caprice,” I told her. “It’s nothing to do with fairness. It’s just fucking horrible luck.” And she would shake her head and weep a little.

  This shadow life continued for about three years. There were good bits, moments when she was cheerful, moments when her family racketed around her, glasses in their hands. But the bad bits lasted longer.

  The second stroke killed her, but slowly, slowly. It was devastating: it took almost everything. It took the half-person that remained and reduced it to a tiny fragment of life, of spirit. I remember – one of those ineradicably vivid memories – the day she was moved to Putney Hospital, and the rest of us walked from the hospital out onto Barnes Common and then, for the first time that year, I heard the voice of willow warbler. Willow warbler: the sweet lisping celebrant of spring, the bird that tells you that the dark times are over, that the black clouds have dispersed, that the wait has been worthwhile. The willow warbler tells you that spring is no longer a promise but an achievement: that the time for the best of all that life offers is here, is now, is before us.

  I had taken a sublime joy when I heard my first unilaterally identified first willow warbler of spring. That had been the previous year: the song expressed all my delight in spring, in wildlife, in my own growing familiarity with wild ways and wild things. Now, hearing the first willow warbler of the spring on Barnes Common, I didn’t know what to think. Certainly I didn’t take my cap from my head and hurl it into the air, as I had done the year before. And the bird, the song itself: was it a vindictive irony? Or was it, in the end, cosmically appropriate?

  I visited the hospital often, or quite enough, and for the first few weeks, I heard the willow warblers singing every time: singing their ecstatic hymn to territory, to sex, to life; firmly, it seemed, they believed and truly. I would take the train to Barnes station and walk across the common, along the path that lay on the far side of the hedge. I would hope to find her asleep and so have to leave, and then feel dreadful shame at this fearful thought, and hope she was awake, but that she didn’t want me to stay terribly long. At these times, our own pain, our own emotions, seek centre stage, and that is highly inappropriate. So I would find her and greet her, and talk and read to her: I kept a volume of Palgrave’s Golden Treasury in my bag, because the words of the Victorians gave her some kind of peace. Some kind of pain, too, because she always wept. There was a sweetness about her at the end, something she never showed the world, perhaps never knew about herself. That was how I remember the last bit, the last visit: a sweet and mostly unfamiliar person.

  So I left her for the last time, not knowing it was the last time, and Barnes Common stretched out before me; the willow warblers, now silent, were busy with the task of making more willow warblers. So did the willow warblers give me consolation, then? Did they help me to understand that despite everything, despite the bad, sad things that can be thrown at us, life goes on, and that the ineluctable forces of nature continue? Did they give me balance, perspective? Did they give me acceptance? Did they give me sanity? Did they give me a sense of cosmic appropriateness?

  Did they fuck. Bloody birds.

  17. Leopard

  Panthera pardus

  Manny Mvula was one of the first Zambians to pass his exams and become a guide in the South Luangwa National Park. At his oral, he gave a brilliant performance: easy, confident, quietly humorous, ironical, and above all, knowledgeable. One of the panel, white and an old Luangwa hand, asked him: “How did you come to know all this?” With a smile on his face and mischief in his heart, Manny answered politely: “I’ve read a lot of books.”

  I met Manny a few weeks after my mother’s funeral. I was taking a two-month sabbatical, and spending it at Mchenja Bush Camp, thanks to the generosity of Savannah Trails, who were then operating the camp, and in particular, to Bob Stjernstedt, the Baron and birdsong guru I had met on my first trip to Africa. Cindy, with still greater generosity, had given her blessing to the trip,

  For two months, my home was a hut on the banks of the Luangwa River, in a camp that lay at the opening of an ebony glade. I had a plan: I was going to write a wildlife book at the end of it, and I took pages of notes on all the marvels I saw. But I ended up writing a novel. If you spend a couple of months in the bush with the same people, you are going to establish an intriguing dynamic. There was Bob: the son of a Swedish baron and an English architect. There was Manny, the number two guide, and there was Jess, who had left England and ended up in the Luangwa Valley. She was 23, and she managed the catering with varying degrees of panache and panic. And me.

  There were also two game scouts, uniformed men with ancient, battered rifles whose job was to keep us safe when we walked in the bush. Perry Nyama, tall and impossibly slim, was the cool one. I’d have faced a charging elephant with him. In fact, I did: we were close to a small group, me, Perry, Manny and a tough old girl of an English client, when a small female elephant got wind of us and gave us a bit of a charge. Perry, nonchalantly leaning on his rifle, merely let go of the weapon and gave a handclap; Manny did exactly the same thing at the same moment as the elephant got within, say, 20 yards. She turned and made off, as if embarrassed by her faux pas.

  There was also the backroom staff. Fackson Banda, the cook, was a Friar Tuck figure who had constant rows with poor Jess; Derek Banda, a man with an extraordinarily soft voice, looked after the rooms and woke clients each day with a whispered good morning; Aubrey Njovu could fix absolutely anything and it was he who kept the whole Heath-Robinson organisation on the road.

  I think it was my first night in camp that Bob nearly blew the place up. We had been discussing the voice of the wood owl, and the rhythm of its call. I suggested “now then – whooooo’s a naughty boy?”, but Bob had an alternative version. So he found his tape of wood owl and played it, and then we cranked up the volume and played it at the tree in the middle of camp to see if the resident wood owl was at home. He answered with cheery defiance, so Bob attached the spotlight to the batteries of the Land Cruiser and squirted at the tree until we had a fine view of this handsome owl. After that we went to bed.

  The following morning, Aubrey noticed that there was a certain amount of smoke coming from the Land Cruiser. Bob had placed the spotlight face down on the seat, which was fair enough, but alas, he had forgotten to switch it off first. All night it had heated and smouldered and burned a deep hole into the seat: about the size and shape of a baked beans can. A mercy the thing hadn’t taken light and set off the fuel tank – but Bob has the knack of lucky escapes. The first night of the season,
he was showing Jess the constellations of the African sky when he stepped off the bank and plummeted ten feet below. Jess looked down at him starfished out on the bank. “I’ve only known him three hours and I’ve killed him already,” she thought. But Bob scrambled to his feet, leaving a Bob-shaped hole in the mud, like a cartoon, and got on with running the camp, or trying to.

  This was, then, something of a ramshackle operation. Mchenja was not classified as a lodge, but a bush camp. Its beauty came not from the luxury-in-the-wilderness thing but from the wilderness itself. Since I made my first visit there, it had made one small step upmarket, and one that I regretted. It now had concrete on the floors of the huts instead of river sand. But the rest was unchanged: my hut had two wobbly beds and a rickety table that bore a polite message asking couples not to entwine on the one bed. The showers were carved into living riverbank, and the lavatories were long-drops – that is to say, the seat was mounted over a deep hole. Fackson did the cooking on a fire and the baking in a tin in a hole beneath it. His bread, made fresh every morning, was a daily miracle. But then every day in the camp was a kind of miracle: one of long supply lines, insufficient money and insufficient clients, made good by people like Aubrey and Fackson.

  There were tensions in the camp. Bob was a genius, but not everybody appreciated the fact. His charm, intelligence and knowledge generally overwhelmed the clients, but not all the African staff saw the point of him. Jess, as a first-season greenhorn, had to work hard to earn her respect; and Fackson, being an artist, was easily put out by innovation. “I am a cook,” he would tell her, an absolutely unanswerable argument.

  It was Manny who kept everybody working together smoothly. He would charm Italian clients in Italian, for he picked up languages with the enviable ease of an African. (Most Africans will speak two or three languages, for an African is the least insular person on earth: in fact, most of the people around the camp had picked up a smattering of Italian.) When Manny spoke in English, he could maintain an innuendo around the dinner table without for a second overstepping the mark of polite conversation, nor ever missing the point of the joke. He could talk with assurance of the ecology of the bush, confidently using recondite scientific terms. He knew all the scientific names of the trees, and also he knew all their medicinal properties, something he certainly didn’t get from books. But also, at times when there were no clients in camp, he would disappear into the staff quarters and share nshima and relish: mealie-meal mixed with small amounts of meat and fish and veg, eaten with the hand from a common pot. He was as much at his ease there as he was anywhere else in the Luangwa Valley or, as things transpired, in the world.