by Ann Harries
‘I wouldn’t hear of it,’ said I mechanically.
And the coachman, whose face too bore the mark of tribal etchings, gravely relieved the Viceroy of his vehicle.
‘Well, then – merci beaucoup! À bientôt!’
Childhood
I had lied to Huxley about brothers in the Church and Army. It was necessary for me to invent another family, another childhood.
My real childhood was spent in bed. I had not been expected to survive long after my birth, which had been difficult, my foetal self resisting with all its might an ejection from my mother’s body. My first six months were passed in my sisters’ shared christening shawl: I showed no interest in playing with my toes, or waving my hands before my eyes, or exhibiting the usual infantile behaviour designed by nature to stimulate the senses and awaken the mind. Indeed, for almost a year it was considered that I might be suffering from some form of cortical blindness, as I refused to track a moving light or blink at an advancing hand. For, from the very beginning, I placed more trust in my supernaturally sharp ears than my eyes. The stillness of the body required for intent listening was quite misinterpreted by my family and the physicians, who supposed me to be the victim of some genteel paralysis. But within each ear the chain of ossicle, nerve, muscle and fibre worked with a furious intensity quite invisible to those who study only the orbs of vision for signs of health or intelligence. Thus it was that long before I began to speak myself, I could understand the secret murmurings that accrete in the corners of any large household. More than that: I could interpret an abnormal breathing pattern, a fleeting suspension of breath, a sigh or gasp so infinitesimal that its perpetrator was unaware of the clues he breathed out into the passage of air between his lips and my busy, but externally motionless, ears. In fact, so sharp was my hearing during those first few years of my life that I could even hear the pounding of a heart half-way across the room as fear or joy caused its volume to increase. This remarkable ability was achieved through absolute control over every muscle of my body, a control which enabled me to lie in a state of suspended, though eavesdropping, animation.
My mother, a vigorous woman more interested in horses than humans, kept out of my way, perhaps in preparation for my early exit from this life (I believe enquiries were made about infant coffins). After a year or so it became apparent that, in spite of my stiffness and pallor, I was a perfectly normal child, with full powers of vision but too feeble to move from his cot. As the years passed and nothing changed in this respect, my parents therefore resigned themselves to keeping me permanently in bed, an arrangement which I found much to my taste.
By contrast, seven rosy-cheeked older sisters spun about the Vicarage, always singing with excitement about the toadstools that had sprung up overnight in the middle of the lawn, or the fledgling that had fallen out of its nest into the wheelbarrow. From birth, they had been in the grip of some natural history craze, whether it be bugs, birds, frogs or baby alligators, and could recite the names of dozens of different species of fern or fungus with considerably more zest than they recited their Latin verbs. The fruits of their enthusiasms were crowded into the drawing-room: miniature Tintern Abbeys and Crystal Palaces housed mighty jungles of glossy fern upon bookshelves, bureaux and occasional tables; sea anemones waved their tentacles amidst forests of algae in glass tanks and crystal vases; while above them, on marble and mahogany stands, kingfishers, humming-birds and a barn owl displayed their wings in frozen flight. Pride of place was taken by a glass case on the grand piano containing a red squirrels’ tea party (the squirrels drank from tiny cups and ate even tinier slices of china cake). No wonder my childish mind perceived this museum as an intermediary stage between life and death where my lifeless body would eventually be displayed, pinned down like Gulliver, inside a glass fern-case.
My oldest sisters had, in addition, other more obscure interests which nevertheless required much shrieking and mimicry of each other and a great deal of prancing about in front of the full-length mirror stationed near the end of my bed, into which I chose to gaze soulfully for much of the day. For several years I was unable to distinguish between these older sisters and my mother, who spent most of her time galloping about the countryside on a dappled stallion and digging up rare ferns, instead of attending to my father’s parishioners. Indeed, my only means of maternal identification was the vicious snarl emitted by her coal-black lap-dog whenever he entered my bedroom ahead of his mistress: Kaffir would have nothing to do with my sisters and loathed me in particular, detecting a maleness about me that my family seemed to have overlooked. I think my mother occasionally confused me with her dog, absently addressing me as ‘good boy’ and rubbing my pale halo of hair as if it were animal fur.
My sisters regarded me as a favourite doll, fashioned out of fragile and opaque white china. They liked to trace the blue veins in my neck, legs and arms with their pink fingers. As I lay propped up on seven precisely arranged cushions, they would recreate for me, in blasts of cold air which always followed them into my bedroom, the world called ‘Outdoors’, which seemed to consist entirely of objects to be collected. Through my bedroom window I observed a confusion of trees, flowers and grass, all of which came to an abrupt halt at the wall which bounded the outer edge of the garden, together with a row of small tombstones inscribed with the names of deceased dogs, and grinning at me like a row of unevenly spaced bottom teeth. No wonder I preferred to recline in the soft confines of my bed.
Into this paradise occasionally strayed private tutors who attempted to direct my sisters’ attention to other branches of learning, such as Latin and Arithmetic. These young men, whose interests were not robust, began to wander into my bedroom and, no doubt mistaking me for yet another sister, began listlessly teaching me declensions and logarithms. I had mastered the entire Latin language in a month, and was racing through Catullus and Ovid, when an unsuspecting tutor introduced me to the delights of Linnaeus’ Systema Naturae in order to give my new-found skill some practical application. The veils fell from my eyes; I left Icarus flying towards the sun with his wings of wax and feather; I had discovered taxonomy and the Great Chain of Being. My sisters might Collect, but my role was to Classify – in secret, as the family physician had assured my parents that any mental activity on my behalf would undoubtedly lead to Brain Fever followed by madness and even more premature extinction than was predicted. (I was not even allowed the Bible, the opening chapter of Genesis being regarded as far too rousing for a boy whose heart beat as feebly as mine.) I felt a curious contentment in this immaculately classified universe; and a certainty that this was the correct order of things, as opposed to the terrifying tangle of animal and vegetable life that seethed beyond the Vicarage walls.
Sadly, the tutor concerned soon after moved on to another post, but not before smuggling into my room Species Plantarum (from which I learnt the delights of binomial nomenclature) and Philosophia Botanica (in which I learned the delights of sexual organs). My imagination was inflamed by Linnaeus’ descriptions of plant reproduction: ‘The actual petals of a flower contribute nothing to generation, serving only as the bridal bed which the great Creator has so gloriously prepared, adorned with such precious bed-curtains, and perfumed with so many sweet scents in order that the bridegroom and bride may therein celebrate their nuptials with the greater solemnity. When the bed has thus been made ready, then is the time for the bridegroom to embrace his beloved bride and surrender himself to her.’ Naturally I had no idea as to what this surrender involved but the erotic nature of the language led me to examine my own organs of procreation with some interest.
I hid my books under my bed and bade my nursemaid Elspeth cut me great bunches of every flower in the garden, that I might observe these nuptial delights for myself. Thus did my bed become even more like a coffin prepared for its final journey, and my angelic head, protruding above a cloud of flowers, required only a glass dome from the drawing room for the image of child-death to be complete.
But Elspeth was determined to pr
event me from dying. Elspeth did not believe I was suffering from some wasting disease, boldly attributing my unnatural pallor and apathy to a lack of fresh air and exercise, and a misunderstanding by my parents as to how to bring up Boys. On occasions, when the whole family, my father excepted, was out riding furiously across the hills, she would whisk me out from under the bedclothes, turn me upside down and thump my back while I screeched for mercy. A prolonged, indignant coughing fit would follow, after which my cheeks glowed and my eyes sparkled unwillingly for the rest of the morning. ‘What wouldn’t I give to take you home with me and mix you up with other lads of your age,’ she would mutter. ‘All stuff and nonsense, this bed business.’ The fact that I knew she was right only fuelled my determination to be terminally ill.
To begin with, the only member of my family whose presence I could tolerate was my father. A gentleman naturalist of the first order, he collected rare species of moths with beautiful nets specially woven for him by one of his parishioners who, like himself, believed that capturing, killing and displaying the variety of God’s creation was the most Christian thing a person could do. He was certainly at his most content as he sorted out his booty in the privacy of his study lined with dark cabinets containing exhibits of every known species. Boxes of exotic moths from all over the world, usually in the cocoon stage of their metamorphosis, would frequently be sent to him by explorers and globetrotters who knew of his passion. Sometimes, as he opened these boxes, a cloud of winged creatures would tumble out and alight upon his spectacles, his pink lips, his neat grey beard, mistaking him for a multi-sensory, exotic tree. I allowed him to carry me into his room occasionally, where he would remove for my inspection select trays of moths which he had pinned and labelled in microscopic italics.
Attached to his sanctuary was a conservatory filled with moths and plants from every continent. (My sisters begged him to install within it an aquarium balanced upon a sheaf of bronze barley heads and surmounted by a triple fountain in the shape of conch-blowing Cupids, as advertised in Mrs Hibberd’s Rustic Adornments for Homes of Taste: for once he refused them.) He attempted to interest me in the winged creatures that fluttered inside the rustically unadorned conservatory, bringing to my bedside live specimens like the Noctuid moth with brilliant cat’s-eye markings on its wings, or, more daringly, a Death’s Head Hawk moth, Acherontia atropos, that squeaked like a mouse when stroked. He was particularly interested in the camouflage tactics of certain species and would occasionally journey to the outskirts of our nearest industrial city to capture moths that had adjusted the colour of their wings to merge with their new sooty environment. Once in the salubrious atmosphere of his conservatory, the offspring of these moths would slowly return to the colour God had intended, as my father saw it. I think that cleaning up the moths was his way of fighting the adverse effects of the great Industrial Revolution sweeping England, outside the Vicarage.
One day, when all the female members of the family were out riding or collecting, my father invited me into his study with a solemnity that suggested something out-of-the-ordinary was about to happen. By this stage it had been ascertained that I could walk unaided – I must have been about seven years old at the time – so, still swathed in my sisters’ christening shawl (my own christening had been a hasty affair, performed by my father the day after I was born), a woollen night-dress and fur-lined slippers, I tottered into his darkened sanctuary. My father was clearly excited by the visit. I was made to sit in a leather armchair while he proceeded across the room to a small table covered in red chenille cloth, upon which stood a giant aspidistra. First he lifted the aspidistra, placing it, to my surprise, upon the floor; then he removed the cloth, which he folded meticulously, to reveal that the table was in fact not a table but a large metal safe.
‘Now, my boy,’ said he, ‘while the ladies are out of the house I want to show you my most prized possession. Not even your mother knows of its existence. Your sisters I consider to be altogether too rough to be allowed near treasures of this nature. This is to be secret business between father and son, wouldn’t you say?’
And my father smiled at me, revealing a set of large white teeth that always took me by surprise (I too now have the same impressive dental structure which probably helps me to produce my bird whistles with such clarity). Throughout his little speech to me he had indulged in his nervous habit of beard-tugging, whereby, while he spoke, he would locate a particularly thick and springy representative of his facial hair, and rub it between his forefinger and thumb, pulling at it gently, as if about to pluck it from its fellows. He seemed quite unaware of this private activity which he performed regularly in public, much to the distraction of his companions. (Strangely, this is a habit which I seem to have inherited from my father, though I hope I keep it more secret than he. Even as I write, I find a friendly coil of hair between the first and second fingers of my left hand.) I believe the only time he desisted from this habit was during the delivery of his sermons, when he clung with both hands to the pulpit to steady his nerves.
‘Listen!’ he continued, as I sat propped and shrouded, a tiny ghost in the depths of a large armchair. ‘This is the safe inside which my treasure lies. And this is a combination lock.’ He pointed to the round dial surrounded by numbers. ‘I twist it forward …’ – click click – ‘I twist it backward …’ – click click click click – ‘I twist it forward again …’ – click click – ‘And – voilà!’ The heavy metal door leapt open, as if it had been straining to do so all day.
I felt no particular curiosity about the impending revelation. If anything, I felt only mild irritation, as I had been looking forward to spending the morning with Linnaeus without fear of noisy interruption. I watched my father extend his unsteady hands into the safe, slowly, slowly, as if what he was about to grasp might fall apart at the merest touch. In careful triumph he turned to me.
‘Do you know what this is?’
Charles Dodgson had not yet published Alice, or I might have been able to guess. What I saw was a large bluish oval shape inside a velvet-lined box.
‘It’s a negg,’ I replied dully.
‘Ah, but what an egg!’ exclaimed my father. ‘This is the last unfertilised egg of the Dodo Raphus cucullatus, a miserable species of bird who lived on an island in the Indian Ocean and forgot to grow wings!’
‘A creature without wings cannot be a bird,’ I piped, mindful of Linnaeus.
My father’s red lips stretched apart in delighted laughter at my pomposity. ‘Ergo, a creature with wings must be a bird, is that so?’ he exclaimed. ‘And yet I can tell you of frogs and squirrels and monkeys that fly, and fish whose fins are busier in the air than in the water!’
I frowned impatiently. ‘I am speaking of the feathered wings common to the species Avis. Frogs and fish do not grow feathers.’
My father’s good humour was inextinguishable, even by the cold wash of my contempt. ‘Thank you for that information, my son. But look carefully.’ He held the box under my face. ‘This egg is over two hundred years old – probably the only one of its kind in the world. When the great gardener Tradescant brought over the last remaining head and foot of that bird to Oxford together with his collection of rarities, he brought with him this egg. It never reached the Ashmole, together with the other rarities, because Tradescant did not know he had it. The egg had been discovered by our great-great-great-great-grandfather, then a young apprentice gardener collecting specimens, unhatched and cold under a bush of oleander – almost as if the Dodo foetus saw no reason to leave the shell only to be slaughtered. Our ancestor never revealed his find: instead the egg has passed from father to son over the generations. I feared that this practice might end – because of your ill-health – but now I see I have a son who will love the objects created by God so that we might know and love Him in return.’
‘But that egg represents the failure of the bird to adapt to its changing environment,’ I replied (for Mr Darwin’s theory already simmered below the surface of Vict
orian doctrine, and was soon to come to the boil). ‘An inept species cannot expect to survive.’
My father’s laugh was a little nervous this time. ‘It is the fate of all species, however fit, to become extinct – in the fullness of time. But we have had enough excitement for one morning. Let me return you to your bed.’
I might have faded away according to plan had the household cat not one day caught a young blackbird which one of my sisters nursed back to health. Instead of releasing it back into the wild she had the idea of procuring a cage, placing the bird inside it, and depositing the cage on the table beside my bed. As it was springtime the bird burst into ear-splitting song at an early hour of the morning, and continued to serenade me at intervals through the day until the room was finally darkened, at which time a most mournful but piercing lullaby issued from the bird’s inexhaustible throat. My initial impulse was to order the creature’s instant removal, for its music drowned every other sound in the house, but I found myself listening with a purely scientific interest to the ever-changing patterns of the liquid trills, whistles and melodic phrases that now poured into my solemn bedroom. When no one was about, I imitated this bountiful song with my own lips, and found I had a talent for whistling. Naturally, I kept this discovery to myself.
It so happened that the spring of that year was a particularly warm one, with the result that the persistent Elspeth threw open with her strong arms all the stiff windows to allow in the warm sweet odours of lilac and honeysuckle, and the brilliant shafts of sunshine unrefracted by panes of glass. While complaining bitterly of the delicate drifts of air which I considered to be dangerous draughts, I was obliged to observe that the songs of my bird were undergoing a subtle change. For not only fresh air, garden perfumes and sunshine now penetrated the gloom of my room through the open windows, but also the torrential music of a hundred different species of bird. A family of blackbirds had nested in a hedge near my window (my room was on the ground floor), and the father and husband announced his territorial boundaries with strident and penetrating song, almost as if trilling into a megaphone. The offspring soon began to try out their own voices, and I was interested to note that their song was similar in structure to my own bird’s efforts, a mere template without the ornate embellishments and flourishes which tripped so easily off the tongue of their progenitor. Almost immediately, the question occurred to me: what would happen if they were deprived of adult song? And then: if they couldn’t hear their own song? I longed to experiment then and there.
