The Girl With No Name: The Incredible True Story of a Child Raised by Monkeys

by Marina Chapman

  But again and again, something was telling me I shouldn’t. No sooner would I launch myself than I’d feel a sudden crunch and the unmistakeable sinking feeling that the vine I was holding onto was coming loose from its anchor. I’d then be sure of one thing only. That I was about to get my back, arms and legs thoroughly grated. The first couple of times this happened, my fall was mercifully short, because the vine tangled in another and I jerked to a stop. I also had the consolation, once I’d got over the painful bit, of a fresh crop of scabs to sit and pick.

  But one day my run of luck ran out. I had clung on and launched myself on what had seemed a sturdy line, when only a second later I felt the snap of the vine breaking free. This was closely followed, inevitably, by a stomach-churning plunge and the feeling of pure terror that only the sight of the ground rushing up to meet you can provoke. Thankfully, I was spared by the embrace of a spray of branches which slowed my fall sufficiently that I was able to grab them as I hit them and get enough purchase to stop me plunging straight on down to my death.

  Hanging there with the forest floor dizzyingly far below me, I perhaps should have felt some sort of powerful instinct. That I wasn’t like my simian family. That I wasn’t a monkey. That I was simply not built to be swinging through the trees.

  I didn’t. I was much too busy clinging on for dear life. But I would learn, as it turned out. And very soon.

  8

  With my existence now contained within the all-encircling vastness of the jungle, it was perhaps natural that at some point I stopped thinking about the life I’d lived before and began feeling part of my new monkey family. Now that I had access to what I realised was their main home, up in the canopy, I could be with them all of the time, which made my life all the fuller and richer.

  The monkeys were incredibly intelligent. They were so inventive, so sensitive to their surroundings and so inquisitive, and, most of all, they were very quick learners. As well as being my friends, the monkeys were now my school class and my tutors, though the knowledge I was acquiring bore no relation to what I might have been taught in school. I was a child, and like all children I wanted to play. And though the young monkeys would always beat me at tree climbing, there was no longer much else they could do that I couldn’t.

  But they had incredible energy. They would often tire me out with their games of rough and tumble, and I soon learned that sometimes it was best if I just sat still on the ground as a way to signal that I had no strength left to play any more. Similarly, when they became too rough, I learned how to make the right kinds of noises to show my irritation and send them on their way.

  But they seemed to have as much emotional intelligence as they had energy, and if I got cross with them they’d sometimes lie down on the ground beside me, tongue lolling, and make a soft, melancholic sound. It was almost as if they felt guilty for upsetting me, or perhaps it was their way of apologising.

  Such nuances of emotion felt every bit as real to me as human feelings, for my monkey family were sensitive and complex. All shades of emotion seemed to exist here: humility and pride, surrender and protection, jealousy and celebration, anger and happiness. I was now finely attuned to their relationships; I could readily see if one of them felt lonely or isolated, or if another craved affection and was hoping for a cuddle, or if another felt aggressive or possessive.

  I also became continuously more aware of the diversity of their language, from their strident warning shrieks and howls to expressions of annoyance or joy, to the gentle fluting sounds of their everyday conversations. They were social beings, who lived within a hierarchy of relationships. There were few moments, day or night, that they didn’t spend together, whether grooming or playing or communicating in some other way, and I was just happy to be one of them – to feel included. I felt that I belonged where I was now.

  *

  For all that I loved to be with the monkeys, one thing I never did was sleep up in the canopy. Not after the first time I tried it, anyway. Reassuring though the idea had seemed in the daytime – I would no longer have to sleep alone – being so high up in the dark was a very different matter. For one thing, the treetops would sway, which was frightening and made it very difficult to fall asleep. If I did, I’d then begin to toss and turn, which was equally unnerving, because I could so easily tip off the edge of my perch. And, of course, eventually, I did.

  I wasn’t at the very top of the canopy the night I fell to what could so easily have been my death, but, even so, the fall was terrifying. It was also a great shock, as I had been fast asleep and I hit my head and hurt myself badly. Badly enough that it was something I knew with some certainty that I had absolutely no intention of repeating.

  Instead, I returned to sleeping in my hollow tree trunk, though, following the monkeys’ example perhaps, I began to make it cosier. I collected moss to line the base to make my bed. I also hung some on the walls, along with flowers that I thought particularly pretty. I have a strong memory that I would also talk to the moss, after a fashion, using my new simian language. I have no idea why; I only know that it made me feel better, perhaps in the same way a child would cuddle and converse with a teddy bear.

  I did have company in my tree trunk, though it took the form of bugs rather than teddies, and in time I grew not to mind their various scuttlings and whirrings. I always took care, though, to cover my ears with my hair before sleeping, in case they found them too inviting to resist. And though I would have dreams in which I was being chased by hungry animals, I also grew less afraid of the real predators that I would hear passing by my tree from time to time at night. Perhaps it was because I knew I was well hidden, or perhaps just because I knew I had no choice in the matter. It was certainly preferable to feel a little anxious than to plunge from the boughs of a very tall tree.

  But as dawn broke each day and the sun showed its face, my confidence rose along with it. During daylight hours, I would now spend the majority of my time in the canopy. And like the monkeys, I would often have a siesta up there, away from the cloying humidity down below, enjoying the caress of the cooling breeze instead.

  It was afternoon – the sun was burning low in the sky – and I had just woken up from one such dreamless slumber when, looking down, I saw something glinting up at me. The forest floor was way, way below me, the air full of dewy mist, as ever, but whatever it was, it was brilliant enough to cut through this and catch my eye. The jungle had just been through a period of heavy rain that morning, so my first thought was that whatever it was down below me was simply glistening as a consequence of its drenching, but as I continued to look I could see that this wasn’t the case – it shone far brighter than anything else I could see.

  I was still drowsy, but whatever it was had sufficiently caught my interest to prompt me to make my way back down to the undergrowth to investigate. I climbed down carefully, keeping my eyes fixed on the spot where I’d seen the diamond shimmer of brightness, and, once back on the ground, I set off to investigate. What I found when I reached it was unfamiliar. It was a wedge-shaped piece of some hard, shiny material, the like of which I didn’t think I’d ever seen before. It was sharp at its apex and curved at the other end, and was tiny enough to fit easily into the palm of my hand.

  I played with it for a moment, inspecting it carefully, intrigued by the way it seemed to flash and glimmer in the sunshine, how its edges felt rough but its surface was so smooth. One side was dark, while the other, though scratched, seemed (at least to me) almost to be made of light itself.

  I drew it closer, to better see how this light effect worked, and it was then that I got the shock of my young life. Two eyes were staring back at me – the eyes of some wild animal? I dropped the thing in terror and stared ahead of me again. The eyes had vanished. What was there? What had been looking at me? And where was it now?

  But there was nothing, and, eventually, though I still felt quite frightened, I crawled across to where I’d thrown my treasure, rummaged around till I found it, and, heart r
acing with anticipation, picked it up again. This time I drew it more slowly to my eye line, and once again I saw two eyes staring back at me. It was then that some long-buried memory must have surfaced, because I realised what I was staring at wasn’t a vision of a wild animal. I was looking into a mirror that was reflecting a face.

  I was transfixed. In all this time I had never once seen my reflection. Perhaps I might have, had my fear of water not been so profound. Perhaps, had it occurred to me to seek out my reflection, I might have made a point of investigating it every time my little pond re-filled with rain. But I had never done so.

  It was barely bigger than a thumbprint, but my little mirror enthralled me. I could see so little, but enough that I could tell it was me. Though I didn’t know my face, I could immediately see the relationship between what I made it do and what happened in the mirror. I blinked my eyes, I moved my mouth – the shard of mirror obligingly did likewise. I changed my expression and the face in the mirror changed hers too.

  Shocked and thrilled, I remember I let out a hoot of great excitement and bounced around, looking for someone who could share in my discovery. I can’t really describe just how it felt to have made it. My best attempt would be to say that it was both scary and exciting. To discover you have a face – it felt amazing! But at the same time I was frightened to see myself in it, because I had begun to believe that I looked just like the monkeys. I knew my body was a little different, but for some complicated reason – perhaps a human need to belong? – I felt my face would be exactly the same as theirs.

  I was astonished to find that this wasn’t the case, and I clutched the tiny piece of glass to me as if I’d found something magical. And as I carried it around, looking for a safe place in which to keep it, I wondered quite how it had found its way into the jungle, because it was like nothing I had ever seen in there before.

  But my feelings of euphoria weren’t to last, because with the coming of the evening came a subtle change in me. Is it a necessary evil, I wonder, that, with the darkness, comes a shift in the way everything emotional feels? I have no idea, but what I do know was that as day turned into evening, my earlier ebullience was replaced by anxiety. The more I looked at my cracked image, the more obvious it became to me that I was mistaken in my belief about who and what I was. I wasn’t one of my monkey family, I was different – a different animal. One with wide eyes, smooth skin and a tangle of long, matted hair. And as soon as those thoughts had taken shape in my mind, it was as if a door had been forced open inside my head. It was a door that had been shut for as long as I could remember and which led me back to feelings I’d either forgotten or suppressed. I had been in denial – that had been my protection. But now, all at once, I felt horribly alone again. I was lost here, completely isolated from a world I could barely recall but which at the same time I now remembered I had been ripped from.

  Once again I was a creature without an identity. I didn’t want that. It shook me and chilled me, made me feel hollow to the core. I had forgotten I was human and now I’d been reminded.

  And very soon I’d receive an even stronger reminder.

  9

  My little shard of mirror was the first and only thing I ‘owned’ for the whole of my time in the jungle, and over the coming days, I guarded it carefully. Initially the monkeys were very inquisitive about it and would clamour to see what I had found that took up so much of my attention. They would fuss round me, anxious to get it off me, but once they had all worked out that, as I hadn’t eaten it, it probably wasn’t edible, they lost interest and stopped trying to pull it from my grasp.

  I had a home for it, tucked safely beneath my soft, mossy bed, and would bring it out often and just carry it around with me, wanting only to keep it for ever.

  And then one day, perhaps predictably, I lost it. I dropped it during a fall from a low-ish tree bough and it skittered away down into the undergrowth. The feeling of distress was a powerful one, as I had become obsessively attached to my treasure. I spent many, many hours trying to find it again and covered every single inch of ground in that area. I only gave up when it seemed that the mirror must have fallen into the depths of the pond, from where I knew I would never be able to retrieve it. And though I harboured hope that perhaps the water would one day dry up and I would see that magical glint once again, it never happened, and eventually I accepted its loss, even though it stayed on my mind.

  I was bereft for a long time without my tiny talisman. It was like I’d lost a friend and, even more than that, a protector. Now the genie was out of the bottle and I could sense my difference from my loving family, having the fragment of mirror had made me feel less alone. It was almost as if someone was looking out for me, somehow. Just looking into it made me feel safer.

  *

  That there was a world beyond the boundary of what I now thought of as ‘our’ territory had never been in doubt. Not the world outside the jungle – I had long since ceased to be aware of that – but the world of other territories, other monkeys, other animals. I was reminded of this every time another troop of monkeys came to fight us, or when, while playing up high in the canopy, the breeze would carry strange, distant sounds. And as I grew in confidence and inquisitiveness to match my growing body, so I felt brave enough to explore further afield.

  Initially, I didn’t wander far. I had come to realise that the jungle seemed to be divided into territories, each one home to different kinds of animals. And they didn’t tend to mix; each type of creature seemed to stay in its own region, which I realised was the reason there was always such a big fight when a different kind of monkey troop strayed into ours. There seemed to be any number of these territories. As well as our ‘monkey land’, and others nearby which were like it, there seemed to be a land mostly inhabited by toucans, another by parrots, and, I think, one ruled by big cats of some kind, though I had only once fleetingly seen a big, scary feline, as I was too frightened to venture further to find out.

  There was also a river, I’d discovered since I’d managed to reach the canopy: a wide silver snake that coiled between the pillowy green forests, which I could only see from one part of our territory. I would sit high in my eyrie and watch it for long periods. I was scared of it yet also mesmerised, my fear of water accompanied by a compelling fascination for something so different from the enclosed emerald world I already knew.

  The animals that seemed to rule the river-land were caimans. I didn’t know the name for them at the time, but I would crouch safely up in the canopy and watch them slithering off the riverbank, and instinctively knew that these were creatures I didn’t wish to meet. They would slip so silently into the water, had such a cold, unfriendly look to them, and, even at a distance of many, many feet, I could see just how many pointed teeth they had in their gaping mouths.

  And they were teeth I saw them use to good effect. I soon realised that when any animals ventured to the riverbank to drink, the action – which, frustratingly, I couldn’t always see – seemed to be done in groups, with much splashing. I also noticed how the caimans would lie and watch what was going on, sometimes slipping into the water and causing even more noise, as the animals would splash around in terror.

  It was a big bird, however, that I first saw killed by a caiman. A big, ugly grey bird, which I suspect might have been a vulture and which took its last drink oblivious of the silent devil that watched it from beneath the surface. I had never seen anything so dreadful or so bloody. The bird was gobbled up in three enormous bites.

  But although I was sensible enough to keep away from the river, my curiosity about the world beyond our territory grew. It was to be rewarded by the discovery of a territory that belonged to a whole other species, one that I had never seen before in the jungle and perhaps the last that I would ever have expected.

  Wishing to discover something exciting was a big part of my day. I was curious about the world and had an instinctive need to see and do new things. I was always looking for a new tree to climb, a new vista
, or a chance to observe my surroundings from a different vantage point. Perhaps it might lead me to a new piece of treasure, to replace my last one, or perhaps to the discovery of an abundant patch of exotic fruit.

  Sometimes I would turn back because the ground changed for the worse, the fallen leaves spikier. On other occasions I would simply run out of courage and run scared back to the safety of the territory I knew. But the pull of the new called to me, tempting me, always. So off I’d set in yet another direction.

  On this day I had wandered for most of the morning, far enough to begin to explore places I’d not yet seen but not so far that I couldn’t hear the calls of my monkey family, and certainly not far enough that should I lose my bearings I would be unable to find my way home again.

  Eventually I came to a new and enticing area, where one particular tree – proud and tall and bearing wide, inviting arms – seemed to call to me to climb it, so I did. It was a quick and easy climb, and in no time at all I had reached the topmost branches and had a clear view of the jungle below. I perched there for a moment, breathing in the cooler air, while, still and silent, I surveyed this new territory. Tropical birds circled, flashing blue and green and scarlet, and the wind played its whispering song on the swaying boughs.

  I ranged around for a while, exploring different treetops and different vistas, before settling in the comfortable apex of two branches, happy to spend time just observing the activity around me – the birds and insects flying above me – and the land down below.