by Ann Kelley
This morning she left her bedroom book by the lavatory and I have been reading bits – The Last Samurai, by Helen de Witt. It’s a novel about a genius child and it’s very difficult and I can’t understand most of it, as there’s loads of maths and Japanese, and even Inuit, but I have learned one thing – a German phrase – es regnete ununterbrochen, which means – ‘it rained uninterruptedly’. I must impress Mum with that. She can add it to the two German phrases she already knows.
Because I have missed so much school over the last few years, I have been educating myself. I read anything and everything I can get my hands on, especially books on nature. I spend my pocket-money on second-hand nature books. You can find really cheap ones at fleamarkets and car boot sales. I love WH Hudson on birds and nature and Fabre’s Insects and White’s Natural History of Selborne. Personal experiences of naturalists are much more interesting than purely scientific accounts.
I’m rereading Jennie by Paul Gallico, one of my all-time favourite novels. It’s about a little boy who has an accident and wakes up to find he has turned into a cat. A stray cat, Jennie, has to teach him how to survive in London and how to behave like a cat, as he still thinks like a boy. It’s the book that made me realise that I hadn’t been seeing our cats properly. It taught me how to watch them, notice their habits and the way they live. In fact, it taught me to observe not only my cats but also other animals, including birds, insects and humans.
Alistair put up two birdfeeders in Daddy’s garden. He’s hung them from the skeletal branches of a copper beech, and Mum fills them with peanuts and sunflower seeds. It still hurts me to lift my arms above my head.
There weren’t many birds around when we first arrived here, but now there are lots – sparrows, starlings, blackbirds, greenfinch, tits, and a robin. I have decided to try to tame the robin. You have to have mealworms though, so we’ll have to find a pet shop.
I find one in the Yellow Pages and nag Mum until she drives me there.
‘Can’t we get Daddy some tropical fish? These blue and yellow ones would look so cool in his flat.’ She ignores me; it’s a tactic she’s developed for not arguing. It usually works. ‘Oh Mum, what about a terrapin?’
‘A piranha would be good. With a Bit of Luck it Might Bite Him.’ She’s still bitter, I’m afraid.
We go home with a carton full of mealworms in a bed of bran. It says in the leaflet they are the larval form of the mealworm beetle, of the order of Coleoptera. They are about 2.5 cm, like the inchworm, and are mostly sold as bait to fishermen or for caged birds. Commercial mealworm growers incorporate a juvenile hormone into the feeding process, which keeps the mealworm in a larval stage and makes them bigger. We humans can’t leave anything alone.
This is how the mealworm beetle mates: first the male chases the female until she gives up. The male then mounts her and curls his aedagus underneath him and inserts it into her genital tract. (I used to think genitals were called gentles.) Once the male has inserted himself, he injects her with semen. In a matter of days the female will burrow into soft ground and lay between 70 and 100 eggs. After 4–11 days tiny mealworms start writhing around. During the larval stage the mealworms repeatedly shed their skin – about 10–14 times altogether. On its last shedding the mealworm loses its skin and then curls up into its pupal form, where it remains for between 6–30 days, depending on the temperature. It starts off creamy white and changes slowly to brown. (Another colour for my colour chart – Mealworm Pupa White.) Then they hatch as beetles, starting off as white and gradually turning brown, at which time they become sexually active and find a mate. And it all begins again.
I am at the pupa stage, waiting for my real life to begin, between a grub and a butterfly or moth, or maybe a mealworm beetle. Except that I mustn’t think that way. Life is now, and I must live it.
One day someone will rename the inchworm the 2.5 cm worm.
I start off my robin-taming programme by putting a few mealworms in a shallow yoghurt pot lid on the ground near the back door, where Mr Robin often finds our leftover breadcrumbs. I put soggy breadcrumbs out there as well.
The first day, it rains hard and the worms are washed out onto the patio and I don’t know what becomes of them. I think a thrush or blackbird might have found them when I wasn’t looking. Today it’s dry. I try again, standing by the door where the birds can see me. Mr Robin can’t believe his luck and sings beautifully from the copper beech. I think he is saying thank you. I go out and crouch, having refilled the lid. After a few minutes the robin appears a few feet from me and nips quickly onto the lid where he picks up a worm or two and flies off. He’s soon back, but this time I have put the worm-filled lid on the palm of my hand, the back of my hand flat on the ground. It’s a rather uncomfortable position for me to hold, but he soon hops across to my hand, stands on my fingertips and eats from the lid. I hold my breath and gaze at his brick red breast feathers, his black beak and bead-like eyes. I cannot feel him on my fingers, he is so light.
He’s away. Flown. I try again, on and off for an hour, but he hasn’t returned. Maybe he’s full and has other things on his mind, like finding a mate and defending his territory – Dad’s back garden and the next one or two. I can hear him singing a long way off – a lilting sweet melody, like a woodland waterfall. I’ll try again tomorrow. The wind chills me and I go inside and curl up on the sofa with a duvet, a hot water bottle and my book. I still sleep lots. It’s an after-effect of the anaesthetic but I don’t like sleeping in the daytime as I usually have bad dreams.
The next part of robin-taming means I have to put the mealworms directly into my palm, flatten my hand on the tiles and wait for the bird to be tempted. He actually lands on my fingertips after about five excruciatingly uncomfortable, freezing minutes and takes the mealworms from my palm. I can’t believe it. I’ll have to continue doing this each day so he becomes completely tame. We need more mealworms. Mum is not pleased. We are already spending a fortune in the pet shop, what with the peanuts and sunflower seeds. She is doing sketches of me with the bird. I think she misses her art classes.
I miss my cats. I remember silly things about them – like when I found a brave harvest mouse leaping up to attack Charlie’s nose. She must have just brought it into the house and had dropped it, like they do, to play with the poor thing before the kill. I got to her just as she had dropped it and instead of running to hide he actually tried to bite her. I managed to rescue the courageous little beastie and release him before the coup de grâce. (I am picking up various foreign phrases that might come in useful sometime.)
One day before my operation I heard a tiny rattle behind the desk. I pulled out the desk and found that there was a mouse trying to chew its way into a walnut shell, which I had thrown for the cats to chase. I couldn’t get the mouse, though I opened the door in the hope that it might find its way out and I put a little heap of birdseed for it behind the chest. No cat in sight, of course.
That same night Flo brought me a lovely, live harvest mouse. I picked it up and managed to drop it again before I could open the door. So then we had two mice in the house. Hopefully they were both males or there’ll be a whole army of them when we get home.
My cats always know what to do on a rainy day. Flo goes hunting – she always catches something when it rains, carries it inside and mews loudly. I have to rescue the creature and put it out, then dry Flo with a towel, which she loves. I hate it when I find half a mouse, or a whole dead one squashed flat. (Why do cats roll on their victims?) The other two cats find their favourite warm spots – a high shelf, a cushion on a stool, a blanket on my bed – curl up and go to sleep to dream of killing and cream. Then they’ll suddenly decide they want a new place to make their nest and they’ll settle there for a week or two, before they’re off again on a search for the perfect bed. They are like nomads.
I think I’d like to be a nomad. I’d buy a campervan and drive it all over the world looking for a perfect beach facing the sunset, or a lakeside meadow where
geese come in their thousands every year at the same time. It might get lonely, although I expect you’d meet lots of interesting people. I could travel to all the places in the world where people are cruel to cats and I could rescue them and set up a travelling hospital for cats in my van. Or birds, of course. I could do what the sisters who started the Mousehole Bird Sanctuary did and look after injured birds. Little children would bring them to me and I would feed them and care for them until they were well and then I’d set them free. Except, of course, that now I have to watch out for cryptococcal or something or other. But that’s okay: I’ll wear rubber gloves and a face-mask like a surgeon.
We are going out the main front door of the building for our walk today, and meet an elderly German gentleman. He’s the tenant of the first floor flat. I’ve seen his name on the door and seen him walking down the road.
‘Guten Abend, Herr Weinberger,’ I say.
‘Guten Abend, Liebchen.’ He smiles and nods and goes off down the street towards the village tapping his long white stick while we go up the hill towards the Heath. He looks rather down-at-heel (another foot expression). I expect it’s because he can’t see very well. It must be a consolation if you have poor eyesight, not to bother with your appearance, not care if your socks don’t match or your collar is frayed, or your buttons aren’t done up right.
‘Very impressive, Gussie. Where did you learn German?’
‘A book.’
‘Say something else.’
‘Es regnete ununterbrochen – it rained uninterruptedly.’
Her mouth stays open for several seconds. Then she starts laughing and can’t stop. I laugh too but it hurts and I have to hold my chest.
There’s a biting wind on the Heath and we only stop long enough by the pond for me to make a few photographs of the fluffed up ducks and swans on the lake. I stride out like I used to do when I was little, before I became really ill. It’s so good to be able to do things other twelve year olds can do. Before, I was breathless even if I only walked across the room.
I wonder if I can teach Daddy to feed my robin? He might really like to do that. It would be almost like having a pet.
There’s a group of science students and their tutors doing an ecological study of part of the Heath, taking notes of every living thing, including plants. Not that there seems to be much living at the moment. They look cold even their hoodies and parkas, woolly hats and gloves. I would love to do something like that. Perhaps I could do a study of our little garden in St Ives. I’ll do it in the summer holidays when everything is alive. It shouldn’t take long: the garden measures about 4 by 5 metres. Maybe Brett would like to help? It would mean dividing the garden into small squares, which I could do with string and pegs. I’ll have to keep the cats out of the way somehow. I bet there are dozens of insect species. Coleoptera (beetles), and Lepidoptera (butterflies and moths) and spiders – what is their scientific name? Have we any inchworms, I wonder? Perhaps I could suggest it as a project at school, when I go back – after Easter, I hope.
We get back to the flat just as Mr Weinberger arrives.
‘Would you like to come and have a cup of tea with me, Liebchen, with your Mutti?’ And to Mum he says, ‘I have some rather good single malt whisky if you would prefer, my dear, to warm you?’
‘Sorry, Herr Weinberger, Ich müss nach Hause gehen.’
‘Another time, thank you, Mr Weinberger, Gussie needs to rest now.’
I like the name Mutti. It’s a prettier word than mother or mum.
The willows on the Heath greening up. Keats Grove is decorated with blossom in all the front gardens. It has been sunny and warm in Daddy’s patio and Mr Robin has come to my hand twice today. He looks at me with his beady black eye, takes the mealworms and flies to the next garden. He’s warbling. It sounds like a trickling stream of water or tiny bells. I wonder if I could tame any other birds?
I’ve found a second-hand book called Birds as Individuals by Len Howard – Len was a woman who allowed wild birds into her home to roost and they trusted her. (I thought Len was a man’s name. Perhaps she wanted to be a man.) She was a sort of female Saint Sebastian. She recognised individual birds and even their facial expressions, and noted bird behaviour.
Sep 26th: Yet another couple of robins are pressing on west Robin and trying to get near the cottage via macrocarpus-tree and surrounding lawn. Four robins are now disputing this tree. From 3.30 until 5 p.m. a chase goes on, round and round the tree and its neighbouring apple-tree on the south-west. Dobs is furious; he sings incessantly with loud emphasis, often flying to the top of the bird-table to display, red-hot anger gleaming from his eyes. His head is enlarged, his body seems shrunken and his figure deformed. He is too agitated by this influx of Robins to take food offered him, he fears to stop singing or displaying for one moment, even to feed… For many hours the flutter of Robin wings is heard, hitting against the leaves as they dash headlong in and out, round and through the leaves. Dobs does not enter the chase but sings continuously from the bird-table, with flashing eyes and alarming contortions of his usually attractive form; also, he now resorts to the splutter-note, which had not hitherto demeaned his song.
In the book are photographs of a blue tit sitting on her finger as she draws, great tits perched on her shoulders and on her desk as she works at a typewriter. I wish I had known her. What was her secret? How did she get birds to accept her? She often mentions the facial expressions of birds. I know my cats’ expressions well. I can tell if Flo is contented or mad. Charlie’s always happy. She’s a smiler. If she comes to me in the night, her eyes are black and round and she tiptoes. In the morning she’s more likely to leap onto the bed, tail up high, mouth curved in a smile of pleasure. Rambo is the easiest cat to read. His tabby face is very expressive. He frowns, smiles, is worried, anxious, terrified – that more than anything else, he’s such a wuss. Flo’s emotions are complex. She shows disapproval very obviously: she glares mostly. If she’s suddenly in need of affection she’ll drool and look cross-eyed and stupid. I do miss my cats.
It’s warm enough today to sit in the garden in the shelter of the wall for a little while. Daddy has these posh canvas deckchairs in a shed and we’ve got them out, but a small brown spider with a black head has laid its eggs on the seat of one of them. When I open the chair she pops out of her nest ready to defend her brood. I can’t find her in my spider books. Maybe she is a rarity, a new spider, not described before. I could have a spider named after me: Arachnida Gussii.
Little Miss Muffet sat on a tuffet
Eating her curds and whey.
There came a big spider
Who sat down beside her
And frightened Miss Muffet away
I don’t know who wrote that – anon, I expect. She wrote lots of nursery rhymes.
Miss Muffet was the daughter of a spider expert – Reverend Thomas Muffet. When she was ill he made her eat crushed spiders as a cure. No wonder she was frightened of spiders. But most humans feel the same way. We spent a winter in the Seychelles when I was about nine. We had had a terrifying flight in a very small plane from a smaller island back to Mahe in a thunderstorm one evening. I walked into my bedroom, desperate for rest, and saw a hairy spider as big as Mum’s hand on the back of the door. I jumped on the bed and screamed. Mum followed me in and screamed too. We bounced on the bed hugging each other like idiots for a few minutes; then she dragged me out, trying not to disturb the killer spider. We went to the cottage next door where a German family was staying. We needed help. Unfortunately they misunderstood our problem. Instead of removing the tarantula, they sprayed it with some awful slow-acting insecticide and it staggered around for an hour before dying. Worse, they found a whole family of them behind the wardrobe and killed them too. I still feel guilty when I think of it. I am quite brave about them now, well, braver than Mum (Mutti). I do the spider catching in our house. The ones we find in the bath are male house spiders, Tegenaria domestica, who have fallen in while looking for a mate. The
y can’t climb out because they have no gripping tufts of hair on their feet to climb the shiny surface. Maybe Alistair will be her hero from now on. I hope so; it will relieve me of the arduous task.
There’s one other tree in Daddy’s garden. It’s a Black Mulberry. Perhaps he could import some silkworms and start manufacturing silk. They prefer White Mulberry leaves, though.
We had some silk worms at school once. They’re the caterpillar of Bombyx mori – a moth. Someone came to the school and showed us how they live. The silk actually comes from the cocoon. The larva constructs its cocoon from a single strand of silk, laid down in a figure-of-eight motion. When the adult moth emerges it breaks through the silk, damaging the strand. This makes it unusable, as the silk can’t be unwound, so silk manufacturers kill the pupa before the moth inside leaves its cocoon. They place them in hot-air dryers, which dessicates them so the pupae will not putrefy in stored cocoons.
I don’t imagine they feel any pain – I do hope not. But if you think about it it’s a bit like mass abortion. There are hardly any silk worms in the wild, but there must be some as there is such a thing as wild silk. Mankind has farmed them for thousands of years.
Mum has lots of silk: shirts and silk scarves. I better tell her not to buy more unless it’s wild and free range.
As soon as we get settled in the garden the sun disappears and it’s winter again. But it was a promise of sunny times to come.
Mum and I are invited to Herr Weinberger’s flat. There is a wall of shelves full of brightly coloured pottery figures, but no books at all. I look at the names on the base of two figures on horses – Havelock and Campbell, and seated figures of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert.
After he died, Victoria wore mourning black for the rest of her life. I remember that from a radio programme. I like Radio Four, which Mutti listens to most of the time. There’s lots of talking on it, debates, stories, plays – Woman’s Hour and the Today programme. Mutti shouts at one of the presenters sometimes, telling him to shut up so she can hear what the interviewee has to say. I can’t concentrate on things in the morning until I’ve had all my medicines and done my health checks. We have a home spirometry kit: I have to blow really hard and it measures my breathing, which I record in a special notebook with my temperature and weight and what drugs I take and when. If I have a sudden weight loss, I have to phone the hospital in case it’s a sign of some major problem – like rejection.
