The Insect Farm

by Stuart Prebble

  “Where’s Roger?” I asked. The look on my mother’s face was enough to tell me that the more diplomatic thing would have been to express joy at seeing her.

  “Oh, Roger’s at home. He said he’d see you when you got there,” she said.

  I was disappointed. “Didn’t he want to come to meet me?”

  “I don’t know,” said my dad. “He was preoccupied.”

  “What with?”

  It was clear that my parents didn’t want to talk about Roger. They were eager to know how their younger son had fared during his first extended stay away from them. But at that age you don’t care about the stuff that has happened already; that was great, but it’s in the past, and what’s the point of going over it with someone else who wasn’t there? So I didn’t tell my parents that I had had a great time but had missed them both. I didn’t mention how much I had missed my mother’s cooking and a goodnight cuddle. Now that I think about it, I don’t think I ever got round to telling my parents properly that I appreciated them, or that I knew what they had done for me. By now all of my attention was focused on Roger, on seeing him again and finding out what he had been doing. How had he coped without me?

  Our family home was a small terraced house in Croydon, south-east London, though if anyone had describe it as “terraced” within earshot of my mother she would instantly have put them right. She preferred the expression “one of three” which meant that we had a semi on one side of us and a semi on the other side of us – leaving our house most accurately described as “terraced”, but not to my mother. The house was one of those between-the-wars mock something or other, with fake timbers embedded in pebble-dash, which characterized the southern suburbs of London and no doubt many other towns and cities.

  “Where’s Roger?” I said again as we got out of the car and he was nowhere to be seen. I thought that if he couldn’t come to meet the coach, he might at least have been waiting at the window, but there was no sign of my older brother, no twitch of the nets to indicate his presence. When I burst through the front door in late August of 1959, it took me all of forty seconds to put my head into every room in the house, and to reach the conclusion that Roger wasn’t in any of them.

  “Where’s Roger?”

  Considering that the purpose of my banishment to summer camp had been to loosen my ties with my older brother, my mother and father now seemed to take pleasure in my enthusiasm to see him again. Which parent of siblings would not take pride in such closeness?

  “I guess he’s in the shed,” said my mother. “That’s where he spends most of his time lately.”

  There was a tiny garden at the back of the house laid to lawn with a few ornamental flower beds carved into the soil and filled with specimen roses, the names of which were written in black magic marker on yellow labels affixed like a dog collar to the stems. Beyond the boundary fence there was a garage which was designed to accommodate just one car, but was filled to the rafters with my dad’s tools, offcuts of timber and some garden equipment. Next to that again was a large wooden shed which had been allocated to Roger and me for use as a den. Over the years the shed had doubled as a cave (in our Batman and Robin phase), as a stable (in our Wyatt Earp phase) and as a spaceship (in our Dan Dare phase).

  “What’s he doing?” It had never occurred to me that Roger could effectively occupy himself without me. I was thinking of all our games together – most of which involved an inseparable pair. “How can he be spending time in the shed when I’m not around?”

  Roger had his back to me when I yanked open the shed door and threw myself in. Just beyond him I could see what looked like a pane of glass, all smeared and dirty, with a bank of soil behind it. The atmosphere smelt of the damp and dank of wet earth, the smell you associate with nightmares of being buried alive.

  “What’s that?” I asked him.

  “Oh, hi, Jonathan,” he said, more or less as he would have done if I’d popped back to the house five minutes ago for a glass of orange squash. “It’s my insect farm.”

  “What’s an insect farm?”

  He hesitated, as I might have hesitated if someone had asked me what the moon is. As though the answer is obvious, but you want to find the right words which don’t imply you think the person asking the question is an idiot.

  “It’s a place where you keep insects so that you study them.” Roger still had not turned to look at me.

  “What kinds of insects?”

  “Well you can keep any kinds of insects you like. All you have to do is to create the right conditions for them to live in. These are ants.” Roger stood back to allow me a better view through the gloom at the installation in front of him. It looked like an aquarium that you might use for tropical fish, except that the panes of glass were only an inch or so apart at the width. “Come closer and have a look.”

  I did, and on the edge of my vision I caught a glimpse of Roger in the half-darkness. It had been only a week or two, but something about him seemed older. Or if not older, then perhaps more mature or in command. That was probably the first time I noticed a little bit of downy fluff in front of his ears and across his top lip. Roger was fourteen and entering puberty, but at the time I didn’t know what puberty was, and was much more interested in examining whatever had preoccupied him so thoroughly that he hadn’t had the chance to miss his younger brother and only real friend. Still, the only thing I could make out was a mass of what looked like soil, squished up against the glass.

  “Closer still.”

  It was not until my face was a few inches away and my eyes began to adjust to the gloom that I could identify anything other than the sludge. Gradually I began to focus, and I could make out tiny avenues carved into the soil, little thoroughfares in which I detected the shapes of tiny creatures. Dozens and dozens of them slowly materialized, scuttling backwards and forwards, tripping and clambering over each other, apparently oblivious to anything other than whatever was their task at hand.

  “Amazing,” I said, and it was true. Obviously I wanted to be nice to Roger about his new preoccupation, but I genuinely did think it was amazing. “What are they doing?”

  “Look even closer and you’ll see.” Roger handed me a magnifying glass.

  “How come Dad let you play with this?” The magnifying glass had belonged to our grandfather, who had died a decade ago. It was understood that it now belonged to Roger and me, but we hadn’t been allowed to keep it among our stuff because Dad said it was too expensive to be used as a toy. I remember feeling a sting of resentment that Roger had been allowed to use it without me being there.

  “I’m not playing with it,” Roger said. It was a distinction which carried a lot of importance at that age. “I’m using it to study the ants. It’s what it was meant for.”

  I already knew that the magnifying glass wasn’t meant for melting toy soldiers with the focused beam of the sun, as Roger and I had been doing when we were first allowed to try it out. I took it from him and drew it backwards and forwards, Sherlock Holmes style, attempting to focus on the glass frame.

  “Keep watching carefully,” he said, “and you’ll be able to see what they’re doing.”

  Chapter Two

  As the years went by, and my older brother and I passed through our childhood and into adolescence, Roger’s preoccupation with his beloved insect farm expanded and grew, just as did my interest in music, fashion and, of course, girls.

  I always think it’s implausible when characters in police dramas seem to know where they were on the night when the crime was committed, but I can remember vividly and in detail the occasion when I first met Harriet. It was in the end of the autumn term between my first and second year in the sixth form, and I recall it for two reasons – one was, of course, that first sight of her. The other was that it was the evening of the farewell concert by the band Cream.

  A ramshackle group of us had arranged to go to the concert, and I was there with Angela, who was my girlfriend of the moment. Angela was fabulous, or cert
ainly I thought so at the time. Long straight brown hair, as thin as a rake, with tiny, scarcely budding breasts, and those dark shadows below her eyes which we associated with late nights and soft drugs, and which later came to be toughened up by fashion and labelled “heroin chic”. Angela knew the right places to buy the right clothes, was always on the crest of whatever was the latest wave, and somehow managed to be wherever it was “at”.

  Harriet was also with a boyfriend on that night, although she told me later that they were just mates and were not sleeping together. I took some comfort from that, until I realized that this did not mean that they were not having sex. To Harriet, sleeping with someone would have involved a whole level of intimacy that merely having sex would not have come near, but all that represented a dimension of her that it was way in my future to learn about.

  I was besotted with Harriet from the very first. It’s a rarely used word which sounds like something out of Jane Austen, and ordinarily you would never use it or think deeply about its meaning. In this case, though, “besotted” is the right word for what I was. It even sounds like it. Being “sotted”, to be “sotted” – somehow the word suggests that all reason has been lost.

  My most vivid first memory is of the view of her from the south-east – one row back and a few seats along – the back right-hand side of Harriet’s head. The fine silhouette of her chin, partially obscured by her long and curling brown hair, a few stray strands stuck in place by perspiration to that tantalizing area of skin just in front of the ears. Even in the multicoloured glow of psychedelic lights, Harriet shone pink and white.

  No doubt the passage of time filters any negatives from the memory, but I do know that it was not only I who recognized that Harriet was unlike those around her. For one thing, her look was unique. When everyone else of her age was wearing dungarees or tie-dye, Harriet’s big-print floral dresses marked her out from the crowd. When Dusty Springfield wore spiders on her eyelids and Kathy Kirby’s lips shone like a warning to low-flying aircraft, Harriet remained unmade-up. When the world was going barefoot, Harriet delighted in wearing wool socks pulled up to her knees.

  My girlfriend Angela dressed in variations on the theme adopted by all the girls of the same age – flowing clothes, patched jeans, tumbling tresses, tassels and beads in multicolours. All the other girls were cool and sexy and slightly exotic and certainly desirable, but Harriet was not one of them. Where Angela and her friends were of the moment, Harriet’s look seemed timeless. While their femininity was just being discovered and then reinvented in the spirit of the age, Harriet’s brand of sexiness would have worked its magic in any decade past or future. Something about her had a particular way of reaching out and taking an intensely discomforting grip around your groin. To see her was to want her, and it was on that day in November 1969 that I saw her.

  After the concert we all headed onto the street. Angela went into a huddle with the other girls and I stood on the fringes of the group. We discussed what to do next and I saw Harriet hanging back, not quite part of the inner circle. Had she noticed me? She said later that she had, but there was nothing at the time to suggest it. As we reconciled ourselves to the fact that the pubs were closed and we would soon miss the last train home, I tried to make it seem an accident that I fell in alongside her.

  “Some concert, huh?” Her smile was a tiny flicker of warmth, but she said nothing.

  “I don’t like to talk about it.” I expected her to continue, but she did not.

  “Don’t like to talk about the concert?”

  “Not for a little while, no.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Is that just this one, or don’t you like to talk about any concerts?”

  “I don’t like to talk about rock concerts,” said Harriet, “because everything that everyone says about them seems utterly facile, and somehow talking about it devalues the experience I feel I’ve just had.”

  “I think I know what you mean,” I said, but I didn’t really, and I hadn’t often met people who used words like “facile” in ordinary conversation.

  “Some of us are going back to my place,” she said. It sounded like a statement of fact rather than an invitation and, in my adolescent infatuation, I failed to understand.

  “That’s nice.” I felt like an idiot. That’s nice? I sounded like Alec Guinness.

  There was a pause.

  “You could come too if you’d like.”

  It turned out that she lived above a shop in Carnaby Street, and she said it with an interrogative in her voice which seemed to question whether it was possible to live anywhere else.

  A dozen of us ended up walking the couple of miles or so from the Albert Hall to Harriet’s flat in the West End. There were far fewer cars on the road in those days, and by now the streets were emptying fast. Angela was immersed in conversation with two friends, and so seemed not to notice my instant infatuation with another girl.

  We were headed towards a flat above a clothes shop, halfway down the street, and next to a pair of red telephone boxes. Despite being one of the most famous streets in the world, at that time of night it was all surprisingly quiet. I learnt that the place belonged to Harriet’s uncle, who lived in the country and used it when he was in town on business; I cannot now remember the actual words she used, but they were designed, I think, to give the impression that he was some kind of a spy. Certainly Harriet’s father worked for the Foreign Office, and he and her mother were on a temporary posting in Hong Kong. They had left Harriet to finish at boarding school. The uncle was on an extended trip somewhere far away, and so she had been allowed to stay in it long term. Seventeen years old, with independence and her own flat in the West End of swinging London.

  The decor and furniture looked and felt like something out of a 1950s film set – a bolt-upright sofa and two armchairs, a small Formica-topped table with four wooden chairs, standard lamps with shades made of discoloured fabric. Someone began playing 45s on the record player and someone else started rolling some joints. It was a small work of art to paste together three Rizlas and roll up the end of a cigarette packet to make a roach, and it was an art form we had all practised. Angela and her friends went into the kitchen to make tea, and I did my best to position myself as close to Harriet as I could, while seeming not to do so.

  I have now had many years in which to turn over in my mind the conversation I had on that evening with Harriet. So frequently have I done so that I believe I can recall it – if not precisely word for word – then as near to accurately as makes no difference. Since I have recalled it so often, what she said has gained the sense of the everyday that comes with familiarity, and so now I have entirely lost any perspective I may ever have had on how weird or otherwise it must have appeared at the time. She had a glass of red wine in one hand and a joint in the other, but seemed to be neither drunk nor stoned. I, on the other hand, had by now had too much to drink, which no doubt added to the mesmeric effect of her words.

  “I am not all that good at drinking alcohol or taking drugs,” she said, as though continuing some earlier conversation of ours without a pause, “but at the right volume and in the right place and time, rock music can do something for me that no narcotic can.” It was as if she had been thinking about this for ages, and had decided that this was the moment to express it. No doubt her mood was partially drug-induced, but still there was something within and about her that made what would usually come across as pretentious rubbish sound real.

  “Music comes into your body through the ears, right?” She raised her eyebrows in enquiry. “But in a weird sort of way I also feel that somehow it comes in through my eyes, my nose and through every pore of my skin.” She paused, her pupils darting left and right and joining the dots between the silver stars upon the purple sky of the ceiling, searching for the right simile. Then she seemed to find it. “It’s like the lovemaking between two people who have come to know each other over many years. A little stimulation here, a hint of a caress somewhere else, the brush of lips
across your skin. The music has the power to join all my senses together, each one overlapping the last, to build me up and up, finally reaching a level where to go forward would tip you over, but to go back would disappoint. And to stay there, for seconds, maybe minutes, before being taken gently or convulsively back down to earth.”

  Maybe it was just adolescent rubbish, but I didn’t think so then, and I still don’t think so now. What I do know for sure is that Harriet wasn’t like anyone else I had met before. Leave aside what she said about the music: I was seventeen for heaven’s sake, and here was this wonderful girl talking about soft kissing and experienced lovers and caresses on the skin.

  “I love the opera,” she continued, “and in the right time and place I love jazz. But there is something about rock music the way we heard it tonight. Something about how those guitar notes seem to come from a union of the soul with the instrument, and flow from the musician to the hearer like the bolt of lightning passing life from God to Adam.” I know, I know, but this is what she said. I was lost. Lost for words, lost for an appropriate reaction, lost in Harriet.

  The Carnaby Street flat was small and there were probably a dozen of us, and so, even if it had been anywhere on her agenda, there was no chance that she and I could have been alone, and that’s not to mention the matter of my current girlfriend. Harriet and I were sitting on the landing on the stairs just outside the door of the flat when Angela put her head halfway out.

  “Aren’t you supposed to be doing something with Roger?”

  Oh God! I was supposed to be home for Roger.

  In the year since I had started studying seriously for my A-level exams, the duty of taking care of Roger had fallen entirely on my parents, and the strain was showing. This is not to suggest that I had been of all that much help before, but just the fact of having me around, able to go with Roger to the cinema or to the football, gave my parents an occasional break from the otherwise continuous responsibility.