by Ann Harries
The sugar bird’s feeding behaviour is interconnected with his mating behaviour: he perches on the furry heads of the fynbos and screeches for a mate, then leaps into the air and flicks his streaming tail (twice or even thrice the length of his body) over his back. After thus advertising his territory he plunges his long curved beak into the cup-shaped sugar bush and extracts its nectar. He flutters off to the next bush covered in pollen, a perfect example of co-adaptation in nature. I was able to photograph several examples of each one of these stages, though doubted whether I had been able to capture the bird in flight.
Many bird-watchers may find this display of interest, but I find myself comparing it unfavourably with that of the South American humming-bird, a creature which holds some fascination for me even though, like the sugar bird, it squeaks and twitters in a very irritating fashion. However, to see this minute little fellow hovering before the flower of his choice, his tiny wings a brilliant blur reminiscent of a delicate, extended piano trill, is to wonder at the extent to which the species is prepared to modify. Well do I remember that extraordinary release of humming-birds into the greenhouses of the Botanic Gardens when the members of the Oxford Zoological Society were allowed to observe at first hand such varieties as Loddiges’ racket-tail, slapping its spherical feathers together during its courtship flight, a more exotic performance altogether than the sugar bird’s. A well-known mathematician in our midst calculated that the tiny creature’s wings beat seventy-eight times a minute. Mirabile dictu!
After photographing these antics for precisely one hour, I noticed what I at first thought to be a very large sea bird swaying among the shrivelled hydrangea heads. Sometimes it is possible for the brain to be entirely mistaken in its perception of objects viewed through the glass plate of the camera: like the retina of the eye, the plate receives its image upside down, and although it is remarkable that the brain can instantly invert this image, visual errors are easily made. I removed my head from the cloth and on closer inspection with the aid of the pair of binoculars which accompanied me everywhere, I was obliged to conclude that the black and white shape was, in fact, a well-worn white Panama hat encircled by a black band. Further inspection revealed that a couple of women and two very young children were moving about on the colonnaded verandah or stoep which stretches along the back of the house (and which reminds me, perversely, of a giant centipede waiting to scuttle off on its multitude of whitewashed stucco legs). One child was a mere baby, the other a smocked creature scarcely yet steady on her feet. A nanny figure clapped hands with the child while the mother bounced her baby on her knee. I was about to pack up my equipment, already planning to enter the Great Granary by way of the front verandah, and thereby avoid an exchange of pleasantries with women and children, when I heard a voice murmuring in the hydrangeas. An adult male voice. An English voice. A private, lowered voice, speaking intimacies.
Floating out of the hydrangeas from under the Panama hat came a stream of love-words. Not the language of inflamed passion or romance, but words suffused with such tenderness that, though the subject matter was trite, I felt myself to be eavesdropping on the beatings of a human heart.
‘… who was full of ’satiable curtiosity, and that means he asked ever so many questions. And he lived in Africa, and he filled all Africa with his ’satiable curtiosities. He asked his tall aunt, the Ostrich, why her tail-feathers grew just so, and his tall aunt the Ostrich spanked him with her hard, hard claw. He asked his tall uncle, the Giraffe, what made his skin spotty, and his tall uncle, the Giraffe, spanked him with his hard, hard hoof. And still he was full of ’satiable curtiosity! Just like you, O Best Beloved!’
‘Mother has an ostrich fevver,’ piped a juvenile voice, of the age when it is impossible to distinguish gender.
‘O is for Ostrich and Mother’s new bonnet Has lots of fine fevvers of Ostrich upon it,’ came the grave reply.
‘Go on about the effelen’s child,’ commanded the gender-less voice.
Needless to say I disapprove of the anthropomorphism of animals, yet I have to admit, unwillingly, that nowadays this literary technique seems an essential ingredient of children’s stories q.v. Dodgson’s March Hare and White Rabbit; Oscar’s Nightingale and Swallow. Why cannot these animals, miraculously endowed with human speech and clothing, at least exhibit species-specific behaviour and thus educate as well as entertain their young audiences? In this story it seemed that everyone was spanking the elephant’s child because he kept asking what the crocodile had for dinner (though why this should remotely interest an elephant is beyond me, particularly as the African elephant is the only form of wildlife immune to that ghastly predator’s jaws). A bird with a nonsense name advised him: ‘Go to the banks of the great grey-green, greasy Limpopo River, all set about with fever trees, and find out.’ These words were delivered as a kind of mournful howl, and the Panama hat rotated wildly among the hydrangeas.
The woman on the verandah rang a little bell. ‘Tea’s ready!’ she called as Huxley’s stiff military form retreated. I could hear hints of New World intonation coiled in her voice.
Out of the blue hydrangea sea shot the Panama hat, beneath which dimpled a little red-faced man with a massive walrus moustache and beetling eyebrows. His features were almost as familiar to me as those of the Colossus, through cartoons and lithographs attesting to the success of his Indian stories. His eyes glittered behind thick wire-framed spectacles. Kipling was jubilant.
‘Dens!’ he shouted to the group on the verandah. ‘Every child should have one! And you, O best beloved’ – he bent to scoop a small smocked girl out of the shrubs – ‘will have a den of your werry own when we come to live here once upon a time. Until then – your steed awaits you, madam!’ And he fell on all fours, regardless of the creaminess of his flannels, and bore the child on his back across the lawn to the waiting teapot and hot scones.
Rendered invisible by shrieks of pleasure or horror, I packed my equipment and fled to the silence of the front verandah.
The hand of Northern Europe has twisted this house into a misalliance of shapes and styles. Whitewashed Dutch gables, tapering Palladian columns and Jacobean barley-sugar chimneys reflect the brilliance of African sunshine and dazzle the eyes, so that on entering the vestibule one is quite unable to see the carefully constructed Dutch interior until one’s vision has adapted to the sudden darkness. Was this a deliberate ploy by the architect, I wonder, to plunge the visitor into an environment such as one might have witnessed in Holland three hundred years ago, but which manifests itself only as the baffled eye adjusts? The ghosts of tall-hatted men with flowing locks and baskets of green vegetables grown in the Hottentots’ grazing land melt away once the after-image of bright light has disappeared. I feel there is something deliberate about everything in this house, even its illusions, arranged by male hands to overwhelm rather than delight.
Unaided by vision, I was nevertheless able to creep into the silence of the famous library which has afforded me much solace over the past few days. Not only is there a remarkable range of histories, ancient maps, biographies and translations of every kind (though very little in the way of belles lettres, other than all of Kipling’s and Ruskin’s works), many other items of historic interest are openly displayed on shelves and cabinets for anyone to handle. Prominent among them is a large, somewhat menacing soapstone bird, referred to as the ‘Phoenician Hawk’, and acquired from the mysterious ruins of Zimbabwe in Central Africa, along with a selection of objects associated with phallic worship, in which my host has an evident interest. However, it is the bird which has caught the architect’s fancy and has been reproduced in wood at regular points of the banisters (where it causes considerable inconvenience to the trailing hand) and in various gloomy corners where its accusing glare converts visitors into trespassers.
Today a new book, recently published, had entered the library and was ostentatiously opened upon a fifteenth-century Buhl bureau, to display its frontispiece image: a truly shocking photograp
h of a number of dead Negroes dangling from ropes in a foreign-looking tree, while a larger number of white men pose for the picture beneath it, smoking, and at ease, as if unaware of the corpses in the boughs above them.
Curiously enough, I was familiar with this book, Trooper Peter Halket of Mashonaland: written by a woman, a Miss Schreiner, it was certainly not the sort of text to arouse my interest in normal circumstances. In her story – more of an allegory than a novel, with much ranting in the Biblical style – she denounces my host by name, calling him amongst other things ‘death on niggers’ and accusing him of murdering and enslaving the Matabele people so that he could possess their land and give it his own name. In fact, the whole purpose of the book seems to be to expose the sins of the Colossus to the world: quite what Miss Schreiner hopes to gain by her accusations I cannot imagine, other than land herself in a great deal of legal trouble, for surely he will sue. Nevertheless, it is always pleasant to read shameful things about the rich and famous, whether they are true or not, and although I had entered the library to gaze at quite different texts, I found myself stretching out my hand to open the book in order to find the libellous paragraph – when a sonorous greeting floated up from an armchair in the shadows.
‘Hello, Wills.’
My brain worked furiously to resurrect the owner of this familiar voice, without having to turn to face him and expose my disadvantage.
‘Well I never!’ it continued. ‘How long has it been – quarter of a century?’
Twenty-five years ago, as a young Natural History student at Oxford University, I found myself in the laboratory of the Botany department, confronted by a number of cassava plants newly arrived from Mexico. My task was to cut open and examine a slice of the bulbous cassava root under the microscope, with a view to examining the elements within it which are converted by the natives into tapioca, flour, starch and alcoholic beverages. (I was then of the opinion that the Spanish invaders would have done better to introduce this tuber to the European public, rather than the glutinous potato without which no British meal is now complete.) I suppose there must have been about half a dozen of these stemless plants, part of a consignment of exotic creepers, ferns and miniature palm trees destined for the drawing rooms of the middle classes, together with several species of rare parrot, fated for the cramped laboratories of the Ornithology department.
The cassava project was hardly challenging: I was aware that the investigation of tropical plant behaviour was standard fare for undergraduates in their first year. With a singular lack of enthusiasm (for Botany was to me the least interesting of the natural sciences) I selected a particularly well-developed plant, emptied it out of its pot, and inserted my laboratory knife into its tangled tuber.
The blade had no sooner penetrated the outer skin than what appeared to be a jet of dark liquid sprayed out from the base of the plant, and attached itself in a hundred gleaming globules to my white laboratory coat. I was about to wipe away the mess with a nearby cloth when I noticed that the globules had sprouted tiny appendages, which were beginning to move in a rather lively fashion. Fortunately, my reflexes have always been quick, and I was able to brush off these surprisingly tenacious creatures (now clearly members of the animal rather than the vegetable kingdom) into an energetic pile in the middle of my table. A large glass dome, always on hand for trapping animal life that might escape from foreign foliage, enabled me to observe the burgeoning insects with proper scientific objectivity. Fellow students gathered round.
Within half an hour it became certain that these were no insects, as no fewer than eight segmented legs arched into angular struts, minuscule flying buttresses to lift the two central body parts into the air. Less obvious than the spiders’ legs were the diminutive jaws and pedipalps that now emerged below the eye area of the head region; at the same time, all appendages were slowly becoming covered in a brilliant orange and brown fur which gave them the illusory appearance of warm-blooded vertebrates – like eight-legged, venomously-fanged tortoiseshell kittens, perhaps. The undergraduates began to guess the precise identity of these exotic arrivals; we were able to recognise the order Araneida and invertebrate arthropod class Arachnida, but the suborder, class and species were as yet unknown to us.
As luck would have it, our tutor happened to have spent two years in the Amazon basin collecting varieties of tropical fungus, and, on being brought over to the seething glass dome, was able to identify its contents as belonging to the family Theraphosidae, and known to the world as the species Tarantula celerrima, so named on account of the extraordinary speed with which the spiderlings increase in size.
A hush fell over the undergraduates as Mr Finnegan Jones made this announcement. We could not fail to remember that the left half of his face was partially paralysed as a result of the bite of a venomous Amazonian spider, and one or two of us stepped backwards. But Mr Finnegan Jones was unperturbed.
They make fine pets, y’know. A tarantula will grow to the size of an adult hand – with spread fingers – and a female can live for up to thirty years. Any takers?’
‘But, sir,’ interjected the younger son of the Earl of Lancaster (now a leading authority on the reproductive system of seven-toed newts), ‘how true are the reports that the bite of the tarantula can cause a man to spin into a wild dance from which he might never recover?’
‘If ye’ll believe that ye’ll believe anything!’ retorted Mr Jones, smiling with the unparalysed side of his face. ‘Those rumours come from Southern Italy, where I believe the male population is much given to wild dancing, whether bitten by tarantulas or not.’
I do not know what made me speak just then. Perhaps it was the sight of the anaesthetic that a laboratory assistant produced in order to curtail the careers of these multi-segmented creatures who by now had almost filled the glass dome with their fat, furry bodies; perhaps it was the sudden yearning to tame a wild animal and keep it in a box.
‘In the interests of science,’ I said, ‘I should be interested in rearing a tarantula.’
Finnegan Jones could not disguise the revulsion in his eyes (a response not stirred by the spiders) as he listened to me, but with deft, gloved fingers he proceeded to disentangle the most conveniently-placed tarantula from the turmoil of its siblings, who were then quietly executed by the waiting assistant.
‘It’s a male,’ said he, placing the brown and orange spider in a box reserved for soil samples. ‘You can see the enlarged tips of the pedipalps form copulatory organs. You’ll find he’ll attempt to build a sperm web when he’s ready to mate, but presumably you do not plan to breed?’ And my tutor, a father of six, gave me a cold, sideways glance. ‘He’ll want feeding, though. Mice, birds, insects. But bread and milk and porridge will suit him just as well.’
Of a sudden, I knew that this tarantula could be my friend. I began at once to search for an appropriate name for him. I was to find it soon after meeting Oscar.
‘Hello, Alfred.’
At Oxford Alfred Milner had burdened his youthful upper lip with moustaches inspired by Bismarck. Born, and to some extent brought up, in Germany, he exuded the disdainful air of a Prussian prince, and won every academic prize on offer while an undergraduate at Balliol. He and Oscar became close friends during this period: Oscar assured me there was an exotic side to Alfred that certainly was not apparent to me. He was one of those intensely ambitious men whose lack of imagination combined with sabre-sharp powers of logic creates about them an intellectual cordon sanitaire, discouraging to humbler mortals. Last heard of he was streamlining the national budget: what on earth was he doing in this curious library, six thousand miles away from the Athenaeum?
‘Yes, I thought it must be the same Wills. Still carrying your cameras round with you, I see. When did we last meet? You were photographing the Hinksey Road, weren’t you?’ A slight movement on the edges of his heavy moustaches, now streaked with grey, suggested he might be smiling.
It was these very moustaches which had inspired the name for my unex
pected pet of twenty-five years ago. Tarantula fangs are hairy; they fall from the head like a pair of hirsute brackets, suggesting dignity. However, it was not only large moustaches that the two Alfreds had in common.
‘We were very young then.’ To my disgust, I spoke in a meek whisper.
‘And idealistic. The only time I’ve ever known Oscar to indulge in manual labour. Scant preparation for the hard labour that awaited him in prison, poor chap. Do you hear from him?’ Milner’s voice was rich as the flow of good gravy; you heard in it the scrape of Athenaeum cutlery and the gurgle of claret from cut-glass decanter to crystal goblet.
I paused. ‘No.’
‘What a tragedy that was! What a waste of a brilliant mind! Polite society will not mention his name. He is utterly finished. That is what happens when one cannot repress one’s baser urges. One is extinguished. It cannot be other.’ An expression of distaste flitted across his lean face. ‘I believe the name “Oscar” has become a term of abuse among the lower classes.’
‘I beg to differ,’ I said with sudden boldness. ‘I am willing to bet that the name of Oscar Wilde will still be invoked with admiration in a hundred years’ time, when names which are now on everyone’s lips will have been long forgotten.’
‘Oh really? You think disgrace outlives solid achievement?’ He leaned back, extending his too-long legs.
‘I would imagine that generations to come will be appalled by the nature of his punishment.’ My voice shook with emotion. ‘And I believe his epigrams and aphorisms will be repeated as often as Shakespeare’s. An apt phrase may be more valuable and more enduring in its effects than a long campaign and a dozen victories.’
Milner surveyed me down the length of his aquiline nose. ‘What an unpredictable chap you are, Wills.’ The leisurely drawl of his voice was not unlike Oscar’s. But he had had enough of this dangerous topic and sat up straight again. ‘Well, as neither of us will be in a position to see if you are right, there seems little point in arguing with you.’ His sharp gaze moved to the book I was clutching.
