My Animal Life(15)
To my brother’s amazement Mickey Mouse reported that the B A of B, Margaret Gee, had sent in a ‘book’ about a cowboy ranch. It was true. I had written it by hand, in blue ink, twenty pages of Basildon Bond (the small size, also blue), its own glued-pad-formation reinforced with sellotape. The book had changed course half-way through, to my mother’s disappointment; in the first few pages I was writing about ‘eligible bachelors’, which she sensed, rightly, would be funny, but because I knew nothing about eligible bachelors, I stopped. Encouraged to go on, I swerved into the kind of story I was reading from my elder brother’s bookshelves, full of my real love-objects of the time, horses, and with the kind of happy ending that Mickey Mouse turned out to like. Thus was my handwriting for the first time translated into somebody else’s print.
But grammar school followed, and the Horsham High School Magazine. A succession of poems called things like ‘Autumn Gold’ and ‘Autumn Sunset, Beachy Head’ (seasonal obsession due only to the recurrent winter submission date) were printed year on year, though my English teacher suggested with a grim smile that I remove the simile, ‘like menstrual blood’, from my paean to reddening skies. I replaced it with ‘like fading fireships’, which neither of us realised was worse.
But I do remember an uneasy sense that I might be already out of date. What with schooldays and adolescent angst, I was too busy to pursue the rather modern fictional enterprise that the Budding Authoress had based on the western, so poetry became my outlet, and my masters were nineteenth-century, Tennyson, Matthew Arnold and even Swinburne. There were other, cooler girls at school, slender, arty Jane Ware, for example, dark eyes in a pale matte heart-shaped face and wiry black, well-cut hair, her wand-like waist caught in by the widest of then-fashionable wide belts; she and her friend Trisha were writing fragmented, symbolist poems of haiku brevity while I was still galumphing unstoppably through my iambic pentameters towards autumn sunsets. But Miss Robinson (strong-jawed editor of the magazine) and the other English staff approved of me. Moreover I was in the L or Latin stream, the top stream, whereas Jane had been misdirected into the G for German, from which she was only later fished up into the Latinate light (unbelievably, thinking of the nervous tactfulness with which streaming is concealed today, there was also a C for Cookery class. And this was a grammar school! Stay in the kitchen, dunces.)
Swot that I was, and favoured, I chose TS Eliot’s Collected Poems for my English Prize in 4L, and then moved reluctantly, long after beautiful Jane, into the twentieth century, haunted and enchanted by Eliot’s melancholy ironies and half-lit city streets. I have it still, a hardback, blue, with ‘Margaret Gee’ written inside in my still coltish italic, a little stiff and self-conscious, proud, the signature of a self in the process of creation, trying to become a person, an adult writer, by taking possession of the poet. The print on the spine, ‘TS Eliot’, is still, forty-five years later, faintly silver, numinous.
And Jane — beautiful, gifted Jane — Jane of the haiku, swinging her violin — she died, in her twenties, of cancer.
When I compute the luck in my life, I do not forget her.
My animal luck (iii)
running
My first coherent memory is of brightness and movement, running on a wide flat beach at Shell Bay. I am singular, and dazzled. I am not quite three. An expanse of white light, my parents behind my brother and me, the sea a low brilliant line, far away. Something catches my eye: full-stop. I crouch to pick up a small oblong shell, even whiter than the sand, chalk-white, crisply detailed, covered with regular indentations, which to me are identical to those on my new summer shoes. I name it with absolute certainty: ‘Look, I’ve found a Tennis White.’ Everyone except my brother is very pleased with me, though I have no idea what I have done, no idea it was a metaphor. I have better things to do. I run on.
Animal luck — for ninety-five per cent of us at least — is movement. Unlike plants, animals wriggle and slide, ooze and flip, sprint like cheetahs through the Kenyan sunlight, pivot as swallows do, climb like buzzards, dive like otters. To seek out food, track down a sexual partner or parade before them, escape our enemies on a speedy wave of adrenalin. Or just move for the joy of it: dolphins spurting through blue air above the sea, foals racing across a field.
Dancing on the beach
Plants, on the other hand, stay put. They can send seeds or spores to blow on the wind or hitch a lift on a passing animal, they can push suckers out through the mud and spread their genes across acres, but the parent plants must sit tight and adapt to the place where evolution has deposited them. And they do adapt, fast: the leaves of African violets grow thicker and smaller in drought, mint coarsens within weeks when evicted from kitchen to garden. Plants grow narrow and tall, or broad and bushy, to suit the light and the space they are given.