My Natural History (18 page)

I have been known to push these things too far. Like the time I was covering Nigel Mansell’s first taste of
motor-racing
in the United States in 1993. He was testing at Laguna Seca raceway in Monterrey, California, and I watched him in the morning, did the press conference and got the story, and then, while he was at it again in the
afternoon
, I slipped off to walk along the seafront. The sea lions barked and plunged, but I was looking for something
else. I found it when I found the right bar. It was at the end of a pier, and I sat there drinking Mexican beer and gazing out at the kelp-beds: and there they were, sea otters
swimming
and playing and feeding, so lovely that I longed to swim out into the ocean and join them. I peered through my binoculars, pausing occasionally to order another beer, while the sea otters lay on their backs in the water,
cracking
abalone shells with stones on their tums in the
time-honoured
sea otter way. And they were glorious and the world was ditto, and I had another beer, and said to myself: this is fine. This is wonderful. This is perfect. And to think you are being paid to do this!

It was with a douche of horror that I remembered I was in fact being paid to write about Mansell, and I needed to file copy within two hours. A further douche: what if he had killed himself in afternoon practice and I never knew? This would have been the ultimate journalistic cock-up. I ran incontinently back to my hotel and rang Mansell’s fixer, for this was in the time before mobile phones. I got through first time and was told that Mansell had set a new lap record for Laguna Seca and gone home happy, saying nothing more. And so I wrote my story and filed it, my mind occasionally flitting back to those fabulous fat
sinuous
beasts that plied their trade among the long strands of kelp: the furriest animal on the planet, for the thickness of their coats wards off the ocean chills. I had, I knew, stolen something. I had stolen a fragment of wild from the
routine of the tame. Pausing only to acknowledge to God that I owed Him one, I hammered out a really fairly decent tale, in content if not in style. I was told that I had done well: just how well, I kept to myself.

20. Tiger

Panthera tigris

F
or some years I shared my house with a tiger. Well, he was only intermittently a tiger, but the times when he was a tiger were profoundly significant for us both. I remember the first time: he was at his grandmother’s house and came across a tiger mask. Not precisely a mask: it was more like a hold-the-front-page green eyeshade, but with tiger stripes on the peak and a superstructure that included tigrine eyes and ears. It was a mask, then, without the claustrophobia of masks, and Eddie regarded it
gravely
for some time. When I helped him put it on, as much for my own amusement as his, the transformation, the
transfiguration
took place. Eddie roared. He made his fingers into claws and roared again. After that, for once Eddie has taken a fancy to a notion he is reluctant to let it go, he spent
a great deal of the evening roaring and it seemed likely that we would need to get the tiger mask surgically removed before he went to bed.

Eddie is my second son, and he has Down’s syndrome. Animals have been as important in his growing up as they have been for Joe, as they are for every developing human. The signing system of Makaton has been of immense importance to him, and among the first signs he was able to do (after biscuit) were cat and dog. To sign cat, you draw whiskers on your face with your finger-tips, to sign dog, you stab downwards, paw-like, with two fingers on each hand.

Our dog Gabriel, a black Labrador bitch, helped shape Eddie’s universe. A deep joy in Eddie’s life was to curl up alongside her in her basket. If ever Gabriel causes me passing irritation, I remind myself that she is not so much an angel as a saint, whose generosity to Eddie is worth commemorating on a stained-glass window. She has scarcely uttered a cross word in Eddie’s direction, never once snapped: only occasionally, when the ear-pulling and tail-tugging became too oppressive, she would sigh and walk into another room. Because of Gabe, Eddie knew he was living in a world full of kind and generous creatures.

I was rung up the other day by someone I had never met. His wife had just given birth to a girl with Down’s, and he was struggling. So I was happy to talk about my own experience: to tell him that, really, it’s not something
to get too desperate about. It seldom occurs to me that Eddie’s life could have been something else: I have never for an instant thought that our family is blighted or even compromised by his existence. The exact opposite is true. Nor am I an angel or a saint: I am just another dad, getting on with things as best he can, trying to emphasise love above exasperation.

We had been told after the scans that there was a 50 per cent chance that he would have Down’s. We didn’t go for an amniocentesis, because that might have killed him, and in any case, Cind was not considering a termination: not her way, to evade responsibility for anyone or anything put in her charge. Long before he was born, or before Cind knew of his nature or his condition, Eddie was the beneficiary of the most ferocious love: of a loyalty
without
question or constraint. That’s Cind’s way. Me, I
followed
, a poor but enthusiastic second. So Eddie was born and had two holes in his heart, and our immediate concern was not the nature or the fact of his Down’s syndrome but whether or not he would live. He had open-heart surgery at four months, and now, aged eight, he is built like a little bull.

But it was as a tiger that I knew him in his early years, for his imagination was unreservedly caught by two books. His understanding has always been much greater than his ability to speak. It is hard for him to make words
physically
, hence the massive importance of the signs. It is not
always obvious how much he has understood of any
situation
or story; the answer always turns out to be slightly more than I assumed.

Like all children, he loved and loves books and stories, and like all children, he loves them particularly when there are animals. Animals were for him, as they are for
everyone
else, the key to language and the gateway to the
imagination
. And so, for many nights, every time when it was me that did the putting-to-bed ritual, we read one or other of the tiger books.

The first was
The Loudest Roar
, by Thomas Taylor, and it is about Clovis. Clovis is a small tiger with an enormous roar, and he lurks about in a jungle full of all kinds of unexpected creatures – Taylor is not pedantic about zoo geography – and he sneaks up on them and he goes – well, I think you can work out what the roaringest tiger always does. But here was a book that Eddie not only enjoyed but also participated in: he too roared. He was Clovis, lurking in the thickets and forests of the blankets and leaping out on unsuspecting hippos and wildebeest and macaws to roar. And it was a special delight for me that Eddie joined in, was fully up to speed with the doings of Clovis. In the end, all the animals gang up and roar at Clovis, and he becomes a much better tiger for ever afterwards… but every night, he regressed and started his programme of lurking and roaring again, and Eddie was Clovis once more and he roared his way towards sleep every night.

The other tiger book was even better. This was Judith Kerr’s masterpiece,
The Tiger Who Came to Tea
. Kerr fled from Germany at the age of ten in 1933 with her Jewish family and settled in Britain. She wrote the 17 Mog books, but none of them can touch
The Tiger
, first published in 1968. Sophie and her mummy are sitting down for tea when there is a ring at the doorbell. Sophie’s mummy opens the door and it’s a tiger. “Excuse me, but I’m very hungry. Do you think I could come in and have some tea with you?” Of course!

The tiger is offered a sandwich, but he doesn’t take just one sandwich. He eats all the sandwiches on the plate! Step by step, he eats everything in the house, and drinks
everything
too, including Daddy’s beer. Then he says: “Thank you for my nice tea. I think I’d better go now.” The
pictures
show the tiger huge, sensuous, wicked, but not unkind. Sophie is fascinated, always as close to the tiger as she can be as he licks out the saucepans and cleans outs the cupboards. It is the most glorious image of the wild world coming to visit the safe and settled and citified: wildlife intersecting mysteriously with tamelife – which is, of course, exactly what I am trying to do with this book, or perhaps I mean with this life.

Joe had also adored
The Tiger
in his time. He was, of course, younger than Eddie when he first encountered it. He was so much in awe of the book, its subject and its themes that he never spoke of the tiger at all. When he
wanted the book read, he asked always for “Sophie”. The tiger was too deep, too mysterious, too awe-inspiring, too important for casual mention. Eddie’s love for the tiger was different from the almost religious feelings that Joe held for it: but it was the same silent fascination, the same glorious respect for the wild possibilities that were
inherent
in the book, in the kitchen, at the tea table. The tiger was a member of our household.

So when it came to National Book Day, and all the
children
had to dress up as their favourite literary characters, there was no questioning the matter. Eddie goes to a
village
school in Suffolk, where he is much cherished and has tremendous support. We got him a tiger costume, and he was so delighted he couldn’t speak. Then came the day in which he was to go to school as a tiger, as the Tiger – but alas, he went down with a cold. A cold is a hard thing for a child with Down’s, because their tubes are extremely narrow. Breathing is difficult even at the best of times; a cold robs Eddie of sleep and of comfort, for he can’t suck his thumb, and it casts him down, utterly. He was deeply dispirited, but determined to go to school as a tiger: a very sad, tearful, snotty, red-nosed tiger he was too. He threw up in his tiger-suit and he had to come home before the day was done. Eddie the sad tiger was a
heartbreaking
sight: it had all started so well and ended so poorly. Eddie lacked the philosophical basis to give these things the perspective most children his age
possess. It was a bitter blow.

But the following year, the two tiger books were still part of our lives, and the Tiger, the one who ate the cakes and drank the tea from the teapot and drank all the water in the tap, was still Eddie’s favourite book. And so he went to school in his stripes once again, this time as a happy tiger. So the story, like all the best stories, has a happy
ending
.

What’s Eddie for? A question worth asking, I think. The Nazis sent people with Down’s to the ovens, because they polluted the purity of the race. And before we
shudder
at such barbarity, we should remember that most women pregnant with a child with Down’s syndrome choose to abort. It’s clear that many people believe that a child with Down’s has no point: that such a being is
extraneous
to human needs, a mere burden on society and in particular, on the parents. Best get rid of them.

The reality of Eddie’s life contradicts all of that. At school, he is held very dear. The headmistress has said that her school is a better place for his presence: because Eddie is there, the school’s small society has become more
caring
, more gentle, more at ease with itself. At the end of the last school year, Eddie won the Peace Prize, voted for annually by the entire class. The prize is given to the
kindest
, most generous and most helpful child.

Eddie comes with us to shops and restaurants and pubs and cafés, and I have never heard a whisper of distaste.
Au
contraire
: Eddie, when in a sunny mood, becomes an instant favourite, the people he encounters relishing the chance to do small things to make him happy.

Is that enough, though? Shouldn’t an individual
contribute
something to society? Eddie’s function is to be loved, and to love in return. Perhaps that is everybody’s ultimate function. Eddie enriches the lives of his family and enriches the lives of those he comes into contact with outside. That seems to me to be a life right on the
cutting-edge
of usefulness.

It’s some time now since Eddie was last a tiger. He is often a dog, and will fetch sticks and bark; and he is
sometimes
a cat. His current favourite book is about a dog called Floppy who rescues a litter of puppies from a fire, part of an inspiring series with which he is learning to read. He does, however, still sometimes give a jocular roar when it seems appropriate. Once a tiger, always a tiger.

21. Morelet's crocodile

Crocodylus moreleti

T
he first thing you need when putting together an expedition to the rainforest is the right company. You want people who love wildlife, are prepared to put up with discomfort, are unfazed by things like remoteness and wildness and lack of room service and what would happen if you got appendicitis, who do not have a problem with the fact that there is absolutely nothing to do except look at wildlife (and in the rainforest, you don't often see very much of it), who will not be overly twitchy about the possibility of snakes and can cope with the omnipresent actuality of invertebrate life. So here's what we came up with: one PR person from Jaguar, one very small female Greek fashion photographer, one very large male Canadian make-up artist, a celeb journo (“I'm not a celebrity
journalist; I mainly write about alternative therapies”), an obsessive birder with a passion for digi-scoping, and me. Oh, and a film star. Darryl Hannah came with us to Belize. She, should you need reminding, was Madison, the
mermaid
in
Splash!
; she was a somewhat unexpected
astronomer
in Steve Martin's Cyrano remake
Roxanne
, and if you seek something more gritty, she was in
Blade Runner
and
Kill Bill
and, since you need to know,
Attack of the 50ft Woman
.

I got involved in this lunatic trip because of a man I met in a pub. John Burton has a long, distinguished and exotic CV, but the first and most remarkable entry is Sunnyhill School.

At our first meeting, over pints in the White Horse, the topography of south London came into the conversation, and one or other of us revealed an unnatural familiarity with the postal district of SW16. Burton then talked of the days he spent Gerry-Durrelling round Biggin Wood,
capturing
hedgehogs and seeking birds' nests in a manner later and rightly considered reprehensible. But it was clear even then that Burton has had a taste for reprehensibility. It was this, allied with recklessness, that prompted him to assemble this extraordinary gathering of rainforest
explorers
.

He was at Sunnyhill a few years before me. Odd to think that Burton was doing for real what I was doing in my imagination: seeking out, contacting, living with wild
creatures, touching the wild world. He has done much the same thing ever since. Not that Burton is eccentric. It's the rest of the world that's a bit peculiar. That became clear as pints became whiskies. He is also a scientist who never got round to collecting any qualifications, a musician with infinitely eclectic tastes, author of a remarkable number of books and a man whose every spare bit of wall is hung with paintings and drawings, almost all of them to do with wildlife. He says it is his ambition to die in as much debt as possible.

Here, then, is a classic British maverick. As a pioneer conservationist – he worked for the Natural History Museum, ran the Fauna and Flora Preservation Society and founded TRAFFIC, the organisation that monitors the trade in wildlife – he was by definition a maverick. But as conservation established its own orthodoxies, Burton became a maverick of the conservation movement. He founded the World Land Trust, an organisation conceived under the simple, brilliant, cut-to-the-chase, let's-do-
the-show
- right-here notion of saving endangered habitat by buying it. I don't think I am overdoing the filmic imagery here: after all, we have Darryl waiting to take an Amazonian step onstage.

David Tomlinson, the digi-scoper – one prone to
taking
photographs of birds by combining a digital camera and a telescope – has known Burton for years. He has spent most of his professional life working for
Country Life 
magazine, and though a birder before all else, he chooses to play the part of the shootin' and fishin' squire, a role combined sporadically with that of the World War One subaltern. He is also keen on the arts of one-upmanship. He's an agreeable man in many ways, it must be said, and he has been a great supporter of the Trust. I had known him off and on for a good while myself.

Despite posing as a man o' the world, he is nothing of the kind. His Home Counties sensibilities were utterly confused by his arrival in the jungle with this crew of
dazzling
urbanites, none of whom would know an ocellated turkey from a wedge-tailed sabre-wing. This was puzzling for David, especially when you consider that the
sabre-wing
is a hummingbird and the turkey is, indeed, a turkey and genuinely enormous. He was still more confused about the nature of human sexuality. When we arrived at the field research centre, a pleasant place of wooden buildings in a forest glade, above which keel-billed toucans gave us a polychromatic welcome, we divvied up the rooms. I got Burton while David got lucky, and a room to himself.

The following morning, as David and I worked the
forest
edge with Vladimir Rodriguez, a Belizean field
naturalist
, while the fashionistas slept off their jet lag, he finally nerved himself to ask me the question that had been troubling him. “You know that make-up chap?”

“SJ, yes?”

“Well, I thought he was frightfully – you know – camp.”

“Yes.”

“But now he's sharing a room with a young lady!” I hadn't thought David's voice capable of reaching such a note.

“David,” I said as gently as I could. “He is a young lady.”

“Oh!” said David. “Oh… Oh.”

Well, it was a confusing trip. That had to be admitted. Jaguar (cars) were involved because they like to be
associated
with real jaguars.
Hello!
magazine were involved, because they were paying for a photo-shoot of Darryl in the rainforest, plus a celeb interview. David and I were invited as wildlife writers, and it was hoped that all these – apparently quite contradictory – aims might
mysteriously
combine and bring about good things for the forest and the World Land Trust.

I was there because I have a passion for wildlife; SJ was there because he has a passion for Audrey Hepburn. Hepburn's cheekbones are not the subject you expect to discuss when you are staying in a hut in the jungle, but it is a subject that has consumed SJ since he was a boy. I have always been enthralled by passion, no matter what form it takes, and so I asked him over the dinner table on our first night about what mattered to him. SJ spoke his heart. It was clear right from the outset that he loved young ladies.
He was absolutely enraptured by the beauty of women. He had a Hepburn epiphany: “I realised right then that what I wanted to do was to help women look beautiful.” Women did not strike a sexual response within him, but it was women that delighted him above all else in life. Mrs Watson would not have been impressed.

There was a little antipathy, a little wariness between David and the urbanites at first. But this dissipated quickly – in fact, as soon as he became overwhelmed by an
ambition
to take pictures of Darryl Hannah.

Darryl arrived with her gofer, Julie, and took up
residence
, but I shall spare you the details of how her room was prepared by all those with an interest in her comfort and good temper, especially Alison, the celeb writer, who filled the room with samples of all sorts of alternative beauty products in which she had an interest.

So enter Darryl. A strapping, handsome woman in her early 40s, blonde, strong face, worth a look, even two, but you wouldn't say: my God, she must be a film star. Perhaps that's what it's always like when you meet film stars. She was perfectly pleasant with everybody without trying to make conquests of us all; she was prepared to muck in; she felt a certain sense of privilege in being in the forest. She certainly didn't expect the forest to operate with Hollywood standards of cleanliness and freedom from insects. The only way you would realise that outside the forest she was a staggeringly famous person was in the matter of caution.
There was a natural holding-back of herself: something you get to recognise in people from whom everyone wants something. Even people who have never seen your movies want a little fix of your fame.

So the fashionista side of the party set to work at a ruined temple a short walk from camp: a photo-shoot for
Hello!
, with Nana clicking away, Alison flapping about and trying to seize control, while Emma from Jaguar spread massive waves of calm and SJ sought some magical combination of cosmetics that would not only enhance Darryl's already lovely face but stay on it for longer than two minutes.

In the rainforest, even film stars sweat: not in drops but in buckets. As we passed by looking for wildlife, I noticed that Darryl's legs bore trickles of blood from the mosquito bites, but she took this in her considerable stride. David, Vladi and I moved on and managed to get close encounters with Yucatan black howler monkey and Central American spider monkey, two great rainforest specialists. The spider monkeys climbed impossibly above us with the fifth limb giving them a convincingly arachnid appearance. The howlers keep in touch across the impenetrable thickness of the canopy by singing to each other. The first time I heard this song was from my bed: I thought for a long time that it was Burton snoring.

We switched camp, to a place by a lake. By this time the tension among the fashionistas had escalated alarmingly.
More than ever, Alison wanted control of everything that everyone was doing: with a bunch of anarchists like this, such an ambition was unrealistic to say the least. When not telling people what to do, Alison suffered. It was sad but true that every insect in the Belizean forest had a personal vendetta against her. She developed a limp from a bite on her ankle: would it never heal? The forest became her enemy. She wasn't happy. She wasn't mucking in. But she wanted her story all right, and what's more, she wanted it on her terms. This ambition made no one happy, herself least of all.

The one thing that really ate her up – apart from the insects, of course – was the feeling that
Hello!
might somehow be deprived of exclusivity. So she made it crystal clear that no one, no one at all, was to take any picture whatsoever of Darryl. To the subaltern inside David, this was a bugle-call to action. David, as a right-wing lover of freedom, at least his own, deeply resented this prohibition. No one was going to tell him what he could and couldn't photograph. So he whipped out his little digital camera and turned it not on birds but on Darryl. He kept sneaking up on the shoot to steal pictures. Alison grew apoplectic; David, at first considered an unassimilable outsider, was suddenly vastly popular.

David and I walked back from a spot of birding with Vladi and came on Darryl not preparing for a shoot or resting between sessions, but for once in the full rigour of
action, action expressed here as a form of dramatic
stillness
. She was wearing a sarong, leaning on the jetty. The waters beyond her were spotted with hundreds and
hundreds
of little bird-houses on posts, homes for purple
martins
. Yet it was not the martins but Darryl that took the eye. She was unrecognisable from the comely woman I had already met. Here was a woman of quite staggering beauty.

This was not just a tribute to the mysteries of which SJ is a master. The beauty was beyond even his artistry, for you can't bring out what is not already there. This
revelation
of Darryl as a beauty of neck-wrenching iridescence was an extraordinary thing. For a start, it was an aspect of performance: a demonstration that beauty comes not just from bones and flesh and expression, but from the desire to be beautiful, the belief in your own beauty, from the knowledge that this was
show time
and so a show must be given.

It was the camera that made her beauty shine from within: take away the camera and the light would fade away. With the camera before her, Darryl, rock-still, was in flight. She looked pretty good in two dimensions, when I eventually saw the
Hello!
spread – but she was
beyond-belief
glorious in three. It was an extraordinary experience to be close to her when she really meant it: when she was prepared to release her inescapably mesmerising, till-then hidden qualities.

Most of us see most wildlife in two dimensions – on the television, in still pictures – and sometimes, it can look as lovely as Darryl as Roxanne, as fierce as Darryl in
Kill Bill
, as absurd as Darryl in
Splash!
But even then, all you see is the shadow on the wall of the cave. All you see is the pale memory of what has vanished. Me, I have been closer. I have shared three-dimensional space with some of the most remarkable beings on the planet; I have seen
loveliness
and ferocity and impossible wonder. But that is what I have chosen to look for. As SJ wanted to be close to female beauty, so I have chosen to be close to the beauty of the wild.

So close, indeed, that Burton was no longer speaking to me, or when he was doing so, he was having a job to
ungrit
his teeth. He had, even then, been to Belize, say 25 times on World Land Trust business. I should add here that the World Land Trust doesn't actually own any land in Belize, or anywhere in the world outside Britain, come to that. This is not a neo-colonial organisation. In Belize, the land is owned by the Belizean organisation, Programme for Belize. WLT helps to fund them, offers advice when required, is there always in support. As a result, in Belize there are 262,000 acres of rainforest safe from the
destroyers
; across the world there are 400,000 acres of endangered habitat that, because of the WLT, are not in any danger whatsoever. This, it became clearer every day that I spent in that forest, is a great organisation.