by Jay Howard
~~~
“Can I have a go, Grampa?” Adele asked her grandfather.
He smiled at the thought of her using the spring rake; it was taller than she was, but he handed it over for her to try. She took it, looking very serious and determined to do it right, but started off by trying to push it. He reached round her, placed his hands over hers, and demonstrated how to pull the leaves into a pile. “Just walk backwards, little light strokes across the grass,” he said. “That’s the way, well done. We’ll soon have this lot cleared up, eh?”
She grinned up at him. He could see she was relieved he was helping her; she was an independent soul and would never ask for help or admit defeat, even though the rake was much heavier than it looked. The tip of her tongue crept out of the corner of her mouth as she returned her attention to the ground, concentrating hard on the task. The rake bounced unevenly over some uneven ground, individual fingers moving to their own rhythm. “Look, Grampa!” she said. “It’s like it’s playing my piano.”
“With that many fingers it could play a duet all by itself.” He made the rake bounce even more and was rewarded with a giggle. She hadn’t done much of that for the last year, not since her parents died in the car crash.
“I like it best when Nan plays with me,” Adele said. “Much better than when she makes me practice scales.”
“But it’s only through practising the things we don’t like, that we get to do things we do like really well,” he said. He dropped the rake on the ground and stooped to pick up a big armful of leaves to put in the wheelbarrow. From the corner of his eye he saw her reach her small arms as far around the leaf pile as she could, trying to match the size of his own load. The wheelbarrow was soon full and together they wheeled it over to the old brazier.
“Remember how thrilled we all were when you passed your Grade III?” he asked Adele. She nodded and beamed a toothy smile. “Well, you couldn’t have done that without your scales and arpeggios. But passing exams, that’s not the point of them. They’re exercises that strengthen your fingers, make them more agile on the keys. And the more you practice, the more your fingers can fly across the keys without you even having to think about it. Only then will the music you enjoy so much sing out with the voice it’s meant to have.”
“What did you have to practise, Grampa?”
He thought about it a while, leaning on the rake. “You know I love my gardening…” Adele nodded solemnly. “Well there’s one job I never have liked, so at first I didn’t do it very well: cleaning and sharpening my garden tools. But I found that I couldn’t dig a good deep bed if I started off with a fork that had hard, dried-on soil from the last time I used it, and I couldn’t get a good clean cut on a stem if the secateurs were blunt. My plants couldn’t thrive if I didn’t practise taking better care of my tools. It was a bit like your scales; I didn’t want to do it but what I did want to do wouldn’t be as good if I didn’t.”
He dumped more leaves in the brazier and stood back for Adele to add hers. “Nothing worth having comes easily.”
“Nothing at all?” Adele squinted up at the sun. “I don’t have to practise anything to enjoy sunshine. Sunshine’s worth having.”
“Very true,” he said. “We mustn’t ever forget how to enjoy the beautiful things around us, my little chick.” He gently pinched her nose between index and middle fingers, pretended with his thumb between them to have pulled off her nose. She completed the ritual by pulling his thumb to pop it back on her face.
He raised his face to the evening light, used that as an excuse to take a breather before going back for another pile of leaves. “Old Mother Nature, now, she’s been practising what she does for a long time, and she does it rather well, don’t you think?”
Adele nodded again and watched him get out his matches to light the bonfire. The dry leaves and twigs caught quickly, blue tendrils of smoke twisting up through the branches of an ancient apple tree that he’d tended all his married life. Together they watched the smoke rise into the clear blue that was just starting to shade towards night in the east.
“How does nature practise, Grampa?”
“That’s a very good question, Adele, one that philosophers and scientists have been asking for thousands of years. It was Charles Darwin, though, who first pulled all the ideas together, along with his own observations and conclusions. He published his book, The Origin of Species, so that everyone could read it and think about it, debate what he said to see if they agreed.” He paused to pull a stray leaf out of Adele’s hair. “Put very crudely, nature’s way is survival of the fittest, meaning the ones best suited to survive in their environment. He saw evidence Mother Nature often doesn’t get it right first time, and if something she’s made doesn’t work, well its kind just dies out and another species has a chance instead.”
He could see one thought after another chase the expressions across his granddaughter’s face.
“So what did Charles...”
“Darwin.”
“… Charles Darwin have to practise?” she asked.
“He had to practise lots of things: how to observe carefully, how to record what he saw and think about what he saw, how to gather evidence to prove or disprove his theories about what he saw. But first he had to practice how to walk on a rolling ship without falling over,” he mimed reeling about as though on a moving deck, “or wanting to throw up overboard.” He mimed that too and was thrilled to get another chuckle; two in one day was rather a large mark of progress. “The poor man suffered terribly with seasickness. We’re talking about the old days now, with William IV on the throne and Victoria still a young girl; days when sailing ships like the Beagle, the ship he sailed round the world on, didn’t have fancy stabilisers like ships do now.” He held his many-pocketed sleeveless jacket out to each side. “Come on, Adele, hold your sails out to the wind! Let’s skim across the ocean wide.”
They both weaved between the trees, rolling side to side as from a high wind.
“Drop anchor, me hearty, we’ve a cargo to pick up here,” he called, stopping at another leaf pile.
“Where did he go, Grampa? Where did Charles Darwin sail to?”
“Lots of places: all round South America, on to Australia, round the tip of Africa, but where people most remember now is The Galapagos Islands, just off Ecuador, in the Pacific. I’ll show you on a map when we get in.”
They each took more leaves and twigs to the brazier and he supervised Adele while she fed the old iron drum. Orange flames licked up hungrily, consuming the orchard waste with crackling voracity.
“What did he see in those islands, Grampa? Were there monsters? Is that why people remember him going there?”
“Wherever Darwin went he saw evidence of the plants and creatures that had died out, leaving behind their bones and what-have-you as fossils. He realised you could tell how old the fossils were by the rocks they were buried in, and you could also tell what kind of environment they’d lived and died in. Nature didn’t give up when she made mistakes, though, and a good job too or we wouldn’t be here now.
“Darwin saw living creatures that showed how nature had tried out little differences; differences that made them better able to live where they were. Each of the Galapagos Islands is slightly different from the others, and he saw that each island had finches that were slightly different to the finches on the other islands; the little changes made them better suited, not for other islands but for their own particular island conditions.
“For thousands of years people have practised nudging Mother Nature in the direction we want it to go, in getting the right differences for our needs; think of all the breeds of sheep and cows and dogs, just for starters. This tree here,” he patted the gnarled trunk, “is the result of them working with what nature gave us - crab apples - to make what we were given that little bit better. Now Nan can pick Bramleys to make your pies.”
He paused to let that, too, sink in, to allow the whirling cogs of her mind assimilate it all. He felt so
proud of her keen intelligence, so like his son’s. He was ready for another question but was surprised by what the next question was.
“Why are they always ‘she’?”
“Pardon?” he said. “Why is what always ‘she’?”
“Ships are ‘she’, nature is ‘she’, cars and trains are ‘she’… I heard you, yesterday, talking to Tim’s dad about his new car. ‘Isn’t she a beaut,’ you said.”
He nodded and poked the brazier contents about with a long metal rod. “That’s the nub of the matter,” he said. “If it’s beautiful it’s female.”
Adele snorted. “Cars aren’t beautiful!”
“They are to men, and it’s mostly men who control language, just like it’s men who are the ones who write history. But that’s a whole other story in itself. Come on, we’re slacking. Those potatoes we put in the bottom to bake for our tea won’t be very nice if we let the fire go out.”
