My Natural History

1. Greater horseshoe bat

Rhinolophus ferrumequinum

T
he animal kingdom came to my rescue. It always has done. I suspect it always will. It rescued me at Sunnyhill Primary School, it rescued me in my
adolescence
, it has rescued me over and over again throughout my adult life. The first, and perhaps the greatest rescue came when the animals rescued me from Mrs Watson, and at the same time, from Peter Miller, Raymond Stapleton and Philip Cunningham. It was the animals that rescued me from all the weariness and misery that Sunnyhill Primary School was able to provide. It was the animals that gave me hope. Animals have also given me sadness, profound distress, even despair: what do you expect? Love is always more complicated than you bargained for.

But first, to Mrs Watson and Sunnyhill. She was the headmistress. She was brutal, sadistic and mocking, and she hated me with all the delight of a nature rich in the
talent
for loathing. Not that I was alone. Among the many others she hated was Peter Miller, which should have made for a bond between us, but it didn’t. If anything, it made him more eager for my chastisement. What Mrs Watson liked were well-behaved girls who sat at the front of the class; Susan Knight and Zoe Wright (for the latter of whom I had a small passion) basked in her favour. She also liked cheerful, manly little lads, boys who were neither dunces nor swots, good at football, loud, and popular: people like Peter Renvoize and Robert Faulkner. She didn’t care for disruptive pupils from the meaner streets of Streatham; she cared even less for pupils with even the mildest pretensions to a more exotic background. Peter Miller and I represented two extreme forms of her
disapproval
.

Perhaps you think that I am making Mrs Watson too much of an ogre: that I am too eager to dramatise my
run-of
-the-mill childhood troubles. Believe me, Mrs Watson would be a remarkable figure now: perhaps she was even then. She consistently mocked a girl who wore a hearing aid. She was brutal to Michael Coleman, who failed to live up to her ideals of manliness. He attended Nancy Robinson School of Dance in Streatham High Road, the only boy from Sunnyhill to do so. He preferred to spend playtime
gossiping with the girls: “Go out and play football with the boys!” Mrs Watson would bellow. He became a principal dancer with the Royal Ballet.

Sunnyhill School’s catchment area was, in those days, mostly the domain of the least pretentious kind of middle class (a category that did not include my lot, of course) with a good sprinkling of working class, in days when such distinctions were reasonably clear, at least to grown-ups. There was one black boy in our class; he was universally popular. Even Mrs Watson tolerated him. My class had 45 pupils. Mrs Holland was our class teacher; she followed Mrs Watson’s tastes but lacked her single-minded approach to the extortion of pain and misery.

Again, don’t think I exaggerate. I remember an
occasion
when Peter Miller incurred Mrs Watson’s displeasure, as he did on a regular basis, this time by running about on the tops of the desks. He was summoned to her room: he emerged with half a dozen weals across his calves. I remember the shock of seeing them: he had been beaten with genuine savagery. He was perhaps nine at the time, and seemed genuinely indifferent to it all. Perhaps he was used to far worse things. All the same, the stuff Mrs Watson got up to every week would be a newspaper
scandal
and a sacking offence today.

For her, humiliation was not a whim but an addiction. I remember the time Mr Gray denied her. I could sense the danger even then. He stood up to her at Assembly, in front
of the whole school, in a manner I’ll never forget; after all, it was me, among others, he was standing up for. It was his painful duty to report on an away match played by the school chess team, of which I was a member. The dozen of us were called to our feet before the whole school while Mr Gray delivered his match report. This was no pleasure. I had been beaten in three moves: the sequence known as Fool’s Mate. I wasn’t alone: the same horrible fate befell three or four of us. Mr Gray explained that the team had been soundly beaten: but that it was all his fault. He should have taught us Fool’s Mate and how to guard against it. Mrs Watson’s response was characteristic: “Oh, show us the fools!” she demanded, with great heartiness.

“No, I won’t do that,” Mr Gray said. “I think they all feel bad enough already.” I could have kissed him. I
certainly
recognised a man of both courage and principle. He left soon after that. Mrs Watson was furious at this act of defiance: but then she was always furious: “I am
exceedingly
angry,” she would boast, most days, when she led Assembly. If she had an aim as a teacher beyond humiliation, it was teaching the recorder. She had a passionate belief that every child should play the damn things; it was the sole route to salvation. In sporadic pursuit of this
principle
, she would sometimes invade a classroom, interrupt a lesson and force everyone to start blowing. The problem here is that she was a dreadful teacher. I never understood what she was on about, and nor did many others: we were
rendered deaf and blind through terror. But I was the one who incurred her wrath that day, and it was dreadful. Even now, as a grown-up, though I love early music, especially when played on period instruments, I still prefer a flute to a recorder.

It was a recorder lesson that won me promotion from considerable dislike to pure hatred, though I think
promotion
was always coming. The problem was that I didn’t fit in. Nor did my two sisters. We weren’t a proper Streatham family, we had no roots there, we only landed there because we had been evicted by the Church of England. They needed our flat in Pimlico for their own purposes, and chucked out parents and three children between three and seven with a month’s notice. Streatham saved us, but it wasn’t our place. It wasn’t that we were rich. But my father had worked in the theatre and then in television; my mother was a writer and lecturer. So when it came to assimilation, I didn’t have much going for me. I was
hopeless
at sport, undersized, from the wrong social class, and was rather too prone to seek refuge in tears.

When she came into the class with a box of recorders, I knew no good could come from it. We were each issued with one of these things – instruments of torture rather than music – and were shown how to play a sequence of notes. I was at the back of the class, couldn’t hear, couldn’t understand, so I faked it earnestly. But then came the time of judgement: each pupil was required to play the notes as
a solo. Zoë Wright and Susan Knight performed perfectly, because they already “did” the recorder. But soon, far too soon, it was my turn. I hadn’t the remotest clue what to do. Under the terrifying eyes of Mrs Watson, I broke down. Tears overwhelmed me: tears of confusion and
embarrassment
and humiliation. Bad tactic. It led to a long lecture on the recorder, on failure, and the way to deal with failure. Having raised tears, Mrs Watson was eager to keep them flowing. She liked to spin things out. Eventually she
concluded
: what I should have said was “Sorry, I can’t manage it”. Bobby Hawkes was the next one asked to play: “Sorry, I can’t manage it,” he said. It was a betrayal. Or it felt like one: I can’t really blame him for saving his own skin. So on around the class we went: one or two brave pupils essaying a few notes, most uttering the magic formula while, now apparently the sole failure, I sobbed harder and harder. This led to more and many hard words. At last the lesson ended. My humiliation was over.

Ah, but it wasn’t, you see. The following day at Assembly, Mrs Watson was Exceedingly Angry. She told the story of the lesson, the recorder and the tears, my abject failure to say that I was sorry, I couldn’t manage it. Before the entire school, I was held up as an example of the worst possible kind of human being: the sort of person we must all try, at all costs, not to be like. The entire school was, in short, given a licence for contempt: and my
schoolmates
accepted this gift with a glorious delight. Mrs
Watson hadn’t mentioned my name, out of an elephantine delicacy. But my 44 class colleagues had no difficulty in penetrating the anonymity: and so by playtime, I was an object of derision for the whole school. It wasn’t a great playtime: but playtimes were frequently the worst part of the day.

Peter Miller was a soft touch compared to Mrs Watson. All the same, he, Phillip Cunningham and Raymond Stapleton saw it as a duty to beat me up at playtimes on a regular basis. Now as physical punishment, things never went too far: it was all chasing and shoving and biffing, rather than the tortures of the Gestapo. It was merely an exercise in humiliation: I wonder where they got the idea from. The game was about raising tears: and tears were wrong, as Mrs Watson said, so I was wrong and they were right. I was fair game: even I had to admit that.

Sunnyhill School made at least one thing very clear to me: that if I was to do anything interesting with my life, it could only be done outside the school. Neither the lessons nor the social life offered inspiration. But I had the answer: I was mad about animals and birds. I read books, I went to the National History Museum at every opportunity. Picture me, back in those days of innocence, those days before paedophiliaphobia, when, aged nine or ten, I would catch the 49 bus from Streatham Common and get off at South Kensington. There I would walk the few hundred well-loved, well-walked yards through the tunnel to the
glorious façade of the museum: London’s and the world’s great temple to Life. And I would gaze at Diplodocus, gaze at the still bigger blue whale, look with wonder at the Diorama of African Game. I was never tired of the place, never bored when I was there. Every visit produced new wonders and old favourites. It was here, not at Sunnyhill, that I was educated.

Strange to relate, Robert Faulkner sometimes came with me. He was inspired by a school radio programme called
How Things Began
. I liked it myself, even though I knew most of it already: it was strange to find these
glorious
facts and these beloved extinct beasts in a place as alien as Sunnyhill. Naturally, Robert liked the dinosaurs. His mind was captivated by them, and what’s more, he could draw them. I couldn’t; I was hopeless. So he and I resolved to create the definitive book on dinosaurs: I would do the words, he the pictures. He would borrow a canvas stool from the place from which canvas stools could, for the deposit of a shilling, be borrowed, and he would sit on it and sketch dinosaurs while I rambled about and learned. Then we would have jelly with Carnation evaporated milk in the café at sixpence for a bowl and catch the 49 bus home. Life really was like that, back then.

I knew more about animals than any one in the school, largely because no one else cared. I remember explaining to Mrs Watson, in the naïve belief that through this
knowledge
I might win her respect, that a certain seashell on the
school Nature Table was a univalve. (Univalves have a single entrance, like a snail or a whelk; bivalves are hinged and have a notional two doors, like an oyster or a mussel.) “Oh no,” she said. “I think you’ll find that’s not a
univalve
.” I thought then that there must be a kind of shell I didn’t know about. There wasn’t, of course; the bogus correction was just a way of humiliating me on my chosen subject.

Now there were times at Sunnyhill when I was accepted by this group or that group, but these periods never lasted long. There were many playtimes when my first priority was to escape from Peter Miller. About eight years later, I met him again. By this time I was dressed in full
protohippy
regalia: long hair, flared trousers, no doubt beads as well. Peter Miller was a skinhead, dressed in the
then-modish
parody of working-man’s clothes: hair so short he was more or less bald, braces holding his trousers a considerable distance above an enormous pair of Doc Marten boots. We were on opposite sides of Valley Road, within a hundred yards of Sunnyhill. “You’re Simon Barnes!” he shouted. I turned and penetrated the disguise of age and sectarian affiliation. He was unmistakably my former tormentor. “Peter Miller!” I think I had a notion of a road-crossing, a handshake, maybe a half-embrace: an agreement that a lot of water had flowed under a lot of bridges, that across time and social class and different 60s orientations, we would make some kind of rapport.
Peter Miller shouted: “Cunt!”

My second priority at playtime was to avoid everybody else. So I would go out into the wild world. And I became a bat-spotter, crawling through a fantastic cave system to find these strange and incomprehensible (to all save me) little mammals. My cave was in fact a tree, a sycamore that spread generously over the asphalt of the playground. I gazed up into its limestone branches, spotting bat after bat, unaware that you mostly find them in species-specific roosts. Ah, there was a pipistrelle, of course. And surely that was a noctule bat. And that one with the glorious little face and the absurd ears was a long-eared bat. And here was a lesser, and alongside, my favourite, a greater
horseshoe
bat: sublimely, quite beautifully ugly. Who in the school, who in the world save me, knew that its facial decoration was a noseleaf, and that its function was to amplify ultrasonic calls?