Dancing Fish and Ammonites: A Memoir (16 page)

Membership of the Board was quite a commitment: ten meetings a year of three hours or so, each meeting served by a batch of papers that certainly took me half a day or more to read. Some ancillary commitments. Board membership carried a modest salary; you had been appointed by the secretary of state. In my day there were, I think, twelve members, who included the three senior executives of the Library. Eleven suits, and me; for three years I was the only woman on the Board. The sole advantage of that, from my point of view, was that my isolation made it virtually impossible for the chairman to avoid my eye if I wished to say something: discrimination, that would have been.

I enjoyed those Board years – learning corporate speak, a language new to me, watching the St.Pancras building rise from the rubble of its construction site, for this was the point at which the Library was about to leave its old home in the British Museum. We had conducted tours, wearing hard hats, being briefed about the problems with wiring and shelving. It was a dismaying process at times; you thought you had signed up for involvement with the running of a great library, instead we found ourselves presiding over the travails of one of the most elaborate and complex construction processes this country has known. There was plenty of white water – boardroom confrontations between our project manager and that of the Department of Arts and Libraries, responsible for the construction, angry letters flying from the Library to the Department. I listened to civil service speak, also new to me. But at last the new Library was there. I remember a triumphant completion tour: the acreage of shelving, the marvels of the book delivery system, the light-flooded reading-rooms. The safety measures: the sprinkler system, the steel doors that would close in the event of fire. One of these was demonstrated – the imposing shutter that inched slowly and remorselessly down. And I remember that Matthew Farrer, a fellow Board member, looked at me and we both said “Gagool!” – being of the generation that read
King Solomon’s Mines
. A neat instance of cultural community, and nicely appropriate to the Library.

The technologies of today were relatively new, back then, but the Library was at the cutting edge. Turning the Pages became available, that enthralling process whereby you can wipe a finger across a screen and leaf your way through a virtual Luttrell Psalter or Sherborne Missal. The then director of information technology gave a presentation on current innovations, and was asked by someone what he thought the most significant information development so far. Without hesitation he replied: “The book – user-friendly, portable, requires no infrastructure, relatively non-degradable.”

Since then, the e-book. I don’t care to read on an e-reader myself, though I would under certain circumstances – when traveling, or if in the hospital – and I get bored by the exclusive defense of either paper or screen. Future readers will require both, I assume, but I can’t imagine that many would wish to own a personal library that consisted of the Kindle on the coffee table, rather than some shelves of books, with all their eloquence about where we have been and who we are.

There is a devastating poem by Tony Harrison about his mother’s death, about love and grief, about the distance between him and his father:

Back in our silences and sullen looks,

for all the Scotch we drink, what’s still between’s

not the thirty or so years, but books, books, books.

I can hardly bear to read that poem; it is so sad, and so true. Books can have a divisive power. They can estrange – but can also unite, of course. Great courtship material, books – that discovery of a shared enthusiasm, the exchange of gifts. We read to bond, to oblige, to discover how someone else reads. And read to persuade, to agree or disagree. Why weren’t book groups around when I was a child-tethered young mother in Swansea in the 1960s? Why didn’t we think of starting one up? They are a marvelous concept, combining a social and intellectual function: you spend time with like-minded others. You read something you might not otherwise have read and are provoked to defend, or criticize.

Cultural community is shared reading, the references and images that you and I both know. Books are the mind’s ballast, for so many of us – the cargo that makes us what we are, a freight that is ephemeral and indelible, half-forgotten but leaving an imprint. They are nutrition, too. My old-age fear is not being able to read – the worst deprivation. Or no longer having my books around me: the familiar, eclectic, explanatory assemblage that hitches me to the wide world, that has freed me from the prison of myself, that has helped me to think, and to write.

My house has many
things
, too, besides those books – the accretions of a lifetime. Not many of them are valuable; some of them are eloquent. People’s possessions speak of them: they are resonant and betraying and reflective. When house-hunting, I used to find myself paying more attention to the furnishings than to the house one was supposed to be inspecting. They spoke of the people who lived here.

So in this last section I have picked out six of the things that articulate something of who I am. This is to plagiarize myself, in a way – I used a similar device in
A House Unlocked
, making objects in my grandmother’s house speak for a time, for the century. But self-plagiarization seems to me permissible. And, at this late point in life, I have seen these objects in the house imbued with new significance – I have seen how they reflect interests, and concerns, how they chart where I’ve been, and how I’ve been.

I imagine them in an estate sale, or an auction room, mute, anonymous, though perhaps each might be picked up, considered, thought to have some intrinsic merit – or not. The bronze cat would be a snip – someone would bag that. The Jerusalem Bible might appeal, and the sampler. The leaping fish sherd and the ammonites and the duck kettle-holders are probably in a box of assorted junk, unwanted.

But before that happens let me give them each their story – theirs and mine. A sort of material memoir.

The duck kettle-holders from Maine

These are, strictly speaking, American folk art. They are a pair of circular kettle-holders, about nine inches in diameter, each with a duck worked in colored wools on sacking. They were sent me by my friend Betty, many years ago, as an addition to our collection of emblematic ducks which had accrued – inevitably – when we lived in Oxfordshire at the seventeenth-century farmhouse called Duck End. Decoy ducks, gift shop ducks, small oriental papier-mâché ducks.

These particular ducks had been made by an old lady living at some rather remote spot in Maine; she made such things for sale at local fairs and was working nicely in the American folk art tradition. The ducks are closely woven in wool, simple, stylized, and with their markings picked out in different colors. Betty breeds border collies and is a renowned sheepdog handler and demonstrator at sheepdog trials. She was on a trip to one such trial up in Maine, had rather lost her way and was in desperate need of water for her dogs. She stopped off at the old lady’s house to ask for water and directions. The old lady invited her into her kitchen, filled a can, and Betty spotted the ducks and exclaimed. It was apparent that this was by way of a (very small) business, and she asked if she could buy them. The old lady demurred: trouble was, she needed something for the craft fair next week, she was right out of burlap so couldn’t make some more, and if she let these go she would have nothing to show. Okay, said Betty, what if I drive to a store, get you some burlap – then could I have them? That would be fine, it seemed. So Betty sought the nearest store (some way away), achieved a yard of sacking, and the ducks were hers. And, in due course, mine.

The ducks are stitched on a mottled gray-brown background, and outlined in blue. They have brownish-buff sides, a blue band at the tail end, with some white, cream-white head and breast, short beak and rounded head. Precisely portrayed ducks. And it seems to me that this lady who had lived all her life in rural Maine, amid its wildlife, would not have adorned her kettle-holders with any old made-up duck. These would be some actual duck. So – I must turn to Peterson –
A Field Guide to the Birds East of the Rockies
.

American Peterson is lavish, compared to our own familiar European Peterson. We have five owls (British, that is – we can’t claim European exotics such as Tengmalm’s owl); they have twelve, and that’s east of the Rockies only. Eleven woodpeckers for heaven’s sake, as against our own mere three. A whole page of what we call “little brown jobs”: Confusing Fall Warblers. You can say that again – they look more like Indistinguishable Fall Warblers to me. And a whole squad of them, when we have only to deal with chiffchaffs and garden warblers and the willow warbler and a few more.

But what about my ducks? There is nothing in Peterson that exactly corresponds, but the harlequin duck is not a bad fit. The harlequin duck has brown sides, glimpses of blue at the tail and is described as a “smallish slaty duck with chestnut sides and odd white patches and spots.” And – aha! – the range is right and the habitat is described as “tumbled mountain streams, rocky coastal waters.” Plenty of rocky coast where Betty was driving. So I choose to think that the kettle-holder ducks are the old lady’s personal take on the harlequin duck. And she worked them in the fine tradition of American folk art, probably just as her own mother and grandmother had done.

I have a copy of American Peterson because for as long as I can remember I have bird-watched, in the most amateur way possible, just if and when an opportunity arose. I have a
Field Guide to the Birds of Australia
as well, and I sometimes take that up just to browse in wonder among its esoteric offerings: helmeted friarbird, Australian king parrot, flame robin. And to remember the morning a kindly couple of ornithologists in Adelaide took me to a salt-marsh bird sanctuary: pelican, egrets, ibis, storks. And the rosellas in suburban gardens, the flocks of sulphur-crested cockatoos in the bush, the tiny sapphire wren I once saw. Australian bird-watching made our own homely collection seem tame indeed.

So the Maine ducks tap into a lifelong fringe interest, for me. I always notice birds. A small triumph when I have spotted egrets in the Exe Estuary from the train, going to a literary festival. Keeping an eye out for red kites over the Berkshire Downs, driving to Somerset with Josephine. Looking for the pair of jays that sometimes appear in my London square. And, time was, I kept the Official Duck End Bird List beside my desk in Oxfordshire; species seen as I worked there. The rule being that the bird must have been seen as I sat, without getting up. Around thirty, I think, including treecreeper, nuthatch, all three woodpeckers, flycatcher, all the tits. I can’t think how I got any work done.

In Orkney, once, we had the experience of being taken to a sea-bird cliff on Papa Westray by the young woman ornithologist whose summer job was to record the success or failure of the nesting birds – a daily record, with each nest site plotted on transparent paper laid over photographs of the cliff. The populations to be thus assessed, and whether stable or falling. The cliff face was a tenement, its assorted occupants at different levels – fulmars, razorbills, guillemots, kittiwakes . . . And other treats in Orkney, flagship of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds: an outing with Eric Meek, its area manager there, who would indicate a speck on the far side of a loch – “and there’s a female merganser,” pick out a hen harrier amid a distant flock of gulls, stare at something bobbing about invisibly in some reeds – “A phalarope!” The real ornithologist sees with enhanced vision; they speak another language. But the rest of us can potter about on the nursery slopes, finding out.

What is it about birds? The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds’ current membership stands at over one million, topped only by the National Trust. Is it that they are ubiquitous – town or country? That we have been educated by television nature programs? That we recognize the last gasp of the dinosaurs? Perhaps that bird-watching as an activity costs little – unless you insist on some state-of-the-art telescope – can be done almost anywhere, including out of your own window. Garden bird-feeders are national suburban equipment, and apparently make a significant contribution to the survival of some species. Suffice it that many people respond to birds, more than to any other creature. I once stood watching a pair of pied wagtails on a railway platform – you don’t so often find wagtails making a living at a train station. They were largely ignored, and then I noticed a woman intent upon the birds; we exchanged little conspiratorial smiles: “You too!”

I have never seen a harlequin duck, and I don’t expect I ever shall. But somewhere there is one foraging on a rocky coast, tenuously linked to the kettle-holders in my kitchen.

The blue lias ammonites

Fossils. Two little curled shapes, an inch across, that hang in the gray ocean of a sea-smoothed flat pebble of blue lias, itself just larger than an opened hand. I picked it up on the beach at Charmouth, in Dorset, long ago. I have other ammonites – exquisite polished sections, but bought from the fossil shop at Lyme Regis, which is not nearly as satisfying as the one you found yourself. They amaze me, these small creatures that expired together once, in just such proximity, I suppose, so many million years ago, and remain thus, propped on my bookshelf.

Between one hundred and ninety-five and two hundred million years ago, since the blue lias is late Triassic and early Jurassic, the seam of rock that runs down across the country from Yorkshire to the south coast at Dorset, taking in north Somerset and parts of south Wales. Ammonites are marine invertebrates, and, quite apart from their own immense antiquity, their very name races back through time, owed to Pliny, who called these fossils “horns of Ammon” because their spiral shape resembled tightly coiled rams’ horns, associated with the Egyptian god Ammon. It is like the night sky being named for Greek mythology – Andromeda, Cassiopeia, Aquarius, Orion, Pegasus – the physical world demanding a much deeper reference than our own small slice of time.

Ammonites lived in open water, for the most part, cruising in ancient seas, myriads of them, falling on their death to the sea floor where they were gradually buried in the accumulating sediment. The ammonoids show rapid evolution; species evolve and become extinct at faster rates than other groups, making them useful index fossils, used to date the sedimentary rock in which they are found. Our own Jurassic ammonites seldom exceed nine inches in diameter – my two are mere babies at an inch. But there was a German monster over six feet across and others in North America at four feet, while the Portland stone here can offer a two-foot species.

Ammonite taxonomy is vast – there were masses of them, evolving, becoming extinct. Because of where they were and when, my two in their little slab of blue lias must be some kind of asteroceras or promicroceras, but it is impossible to tell which, or what they were within their genus –
Asteroceras confusum
(is that a joke?),
Asteroceras stellare
,
Promicroceras pyritosum
– goodness knows.

Paleontology is awe-inspiring, sobering. Deep time. It puts you in your place – a mere flicker of life in the scheme of things. I take note of that whenever I walk on one of the north Somerset beaches. The blue lias surfaces here, lifting out of the Bristol Channel – the gray and pink pebbles at Watchet, the cliffs seamed with equally gray and pink alabaster. My aunt Rachel used the alabaster for sculpting, foraging for chunks at the foot of the cliffs after winter storms. It was tiresome material to sculpt – too soft, too liable to crumble under her tools – but we have two of her successes, a long, gray, rather primeval-looking fish, a relative of the coelacanth, I’d say. And a little maquette, a Henry Moore figurine. I’ve often picked up ammonites at Watchet, both embedded in a stone or as an isolated snail shape. Belemnites, too, those pointed tubular forms. In fact, I think it was on Watchet beach that the deep past first signaled, when I was ammonite-hunting as a teenager.

Ammonites and a paleontologist have surfaced in fiction, for me – an instance of the way in which the things that alert the mind then insert themselves into what gets written. Shape it, indeed. Watchet beach and its ammonites somehow prompted a novel in which the central figure is a paleontologist, whose career trajectory begins when as a child he heaves up a lump of blue lias at Watchet, and sees something intriguing upon it. I don’t think I would have made much of a paleontologist myself – I don’t have a sufficiently scientific turn of mind; he is a surrogate, perhaps. And, for a novelist, it is the accumulation of all these matters grabbing the attention over the years that will direct the sort of stories that get told, the kind of people who will inhabit them. Every aspect of time, for me, from the deep time of the ammonites through the historian’s attempt to analyze the past, to the bewildering operation of memory.