My Natural History (5 page)

Ralph was on his feet, uttering a strange and fearful cry, one that chilled me as I turned to look at him: and there was a snake flying through the air: slim, slight, a couple of feet long, patterned unmistakably in black and white. “Christ! Oh Christ!”

“It’s all right,” I told him. “It was a grass snake. You were never in danger.”

We sat for a while as Ralph thought this through. “You know, I wasn’t frightened at all,” he said eventually. “I only jumped up and shouted because I thought that was what you were supposed to do. I didn’t really want it to go. I was rather disappointed. It felt beautiful. It crawled over my arm; I could feel it in such detail. It was… rather voluptuous, really.” I didn’t tell him it was an adder till the following day. Didn’t want to upset him in his exalted state. Plenty of people drop acid and imagine that there are poisonous snakes crawling all over them: with Ralph the poisonous snakes were real. Talk about being at one with the earth.

Ralph went to live in the West Country. He has been a
teacher, worked on a sheep-ranch in Wyoming, he has done research on vernacular buildings, he has worked in recycling, he has completed a doctorate (
The Politics of Local Food
) and is currently working for the Devon Wildlife Trust. He has, in short, spent his life doing what he planned to do at school: working against the grain of society in order to make the world a better place. He was best man at my wedding, and is a friend to this day. I owe more to him than practically anyone else on the planet. We are united not only by our shared adolescence, but also by our love of the wild. This is something that we both learned over the course of years, but then I think we knew all along, even at the beginning, in Ted’s garden and along the dizzy cliffs, that life wasn’t really worth living without it.

6. Blackcap

Sylvia atricapilla

R
oom Six was the heart of it. Room Six had the view over the garden. Room Six was the place where we greeted the dawn and its songsters. Room Six was the place where the time that we wasted passed so very slowly. Ian Dury sang about the great trio – or should that be quartet? – of life’s essentials, but looking back, I can see now that I never really cared for drugs or rock or roll. I just
pretended
to. I convinced myself that lying down on my back with a head full of Paki black listening to Emerson, Lake and Palmer was a meaningful experience. Remarkable what you can do when you put your – to use the term loosely – mind to it.

Room Six was in Burwalls. Burwalls Hall of Residence was in many ways an awful place. It was part of Bristol
University, but it pretended that it was part of Oxford University. It had formal dinners, occasions on which we were served unpleasant food while wearing academic gowns: no doubt a quintessential Oxfordian experience. Some of the girls who served the food were pretty, which was good, but someone said grace in Latin before we ate, which wasn’t. It betrayed a too-flagrant wish that we were all in another place and were all other people.

But the Burwalls garden was a thing of wonder. It had mature trees and well-organised shrubs, formal beds,
brutally
pruned roses and a perfect lawn that rolled down from the main building in a series of steps, like
agricultural
terraces tilled through countless ages. It had an air of timeless devotion: as if gardens and the men to look after them were a prescriptive right of humankind. It was
located
just on the far side of Clifton Suspension Bridge; we crossed the bridge several times daily: we were on
first-name
terms with the wild gorge and its stern cliffs and with the River Avon far below. We had always before us the dramatic shape of the landscape: and we had a garden to walk through, gowned or ungowned as occasion
dictated
.

There were six of us in Room Six, at least to start with. Room Six was at the summit of the main building, which represented admirably the High Victorian Streaky Bacon School of Architecture. Room Six was tall, and had three lengthy sash windows, one of which led to a balcony on
which three people could, with difficulty, stand. It was a good place to stand, because it overlooked the garden: the trees and shrubs falling away athletically.

Simon’s really into nature, Brian told me, meaning not me but another. This Simon – sometimes referred to by Outsiders as Simon Heavy – was the lord of Room Six. “I wish I could get into nature like him,” Brian said. And indeed, I had seen Simon, standing on the balcony of Room Six, favouring the garden with his solemn gaze, pale red hair about his shoulders and a Players Number Six in the hand that rested on the stone edge of the balcony. Gazing at nature: getting or being into it. To him was given the best room in the hall, to him was given the coolest room-mate, the aggressive, stocky, drug-gobbling Dave. Why was Simon Heavy in Room Six with Dave, while Simon Light was down in the Cottage annexe with an economist from Leicester called Mick? Life, it seemed, had its favourites. Why did Brian not take other people aside and tell them that Simon – no, not him, the other one, the one from the Garden annexe – was heavily into nature? And come to that, why wasn’t I?

Simon and Dave actually lived in Room Six. They soon became accustomed to visits from the rest of us. We would troop up each evening after the unpleasant meal, and we talked and smoked cigarettes and listened to unpleasant records and drank instant coffee, shards of dried milk spinning on the surface of the liquid: me and Brian and
Jim and Tony in there with Dave and Simon. We smoked dope when we had any and established a dominance
hierarchy
, with one Simon at the top and the other on the
bottom
. Still, at least it was the right hierarchy. And the important thing to do was to smoke dope, which proved that we were superior to everyone else.

Strange to recall how important that was. It was not a matter of pleasure. It was a stern duty. We smoked to make the world a better place. We were all just about to rebuild the world with beauty and peace replacing aggression and ambition. Was that really such a terrible idea? Was it really so risible, to spend one’s youth not looking to enjoy oneself but to try and improve the lot of humankind?

No doubt it was. All I can say was that it didn’t seem so. Straight society was finished: the new society we were building was what mattered. Pass the joint, turn the LP over. Yes, what was it Joni said? We’ve got to get
ourselves
back to the garden. We all agreed with that. Growing up is supposed to be about the loss of innocence: our growing up was an attempt to find innocence. We believed that dope was the key; actually, at least for me, the key was as obvious as the garden all around us. Reaching keys is always a hard thing, as Alice had already shown me. Instead, we told each other that dope held the answers, and would suggest that what the Burwalls principal, or the housekeeper, or my tutor, or the president of the United States needed above all was a really good stiff joint. Then,
presumably, they would see sense, declare peace, turn off their minds, relax and float downstream. This really wasn’t the pursuit of pleasure: this stuff was the answer to every difficult thing the world had ever thrown up. The idea that everything – absolutely everything – was better when you were stoned was a core belief. When you were stoned, everything had a higher meaning: everything was more real: everything was more beautiful.

Simon failed to last the first term. He was kicked out of Burwalls after the cleaners discovered him enjoying a back-to-the-garden moment in Room Six with a girl called Miriam. Somehow, Tony and Dave managed to get
themselves
thrown out as well. By the time the second term began, Simon and Tony had a flat on the far side of Clifton, while Dave had joined a wild and anarchic establishment just the other side of the Suspension Bridge, a place I was to join myself a few months further on.

That left the rump of the Room Six Six marooned, leaderless and uncool in Burwalls. Brian was lightning swift, establishing a claim to Room Six and bringing Jim in with him. I was still, then, bottom of the hierarchy, but I was morally a part of that room. Each evening as supper ended we repaired to its heights. I would sit cross-legged on one or other of the beds, an album sleeve across my lap, and commence the ritual magic of the Rizlas and the shredded Number Six and the rolled cardboard and, of course, the hash itself. We were seeking something: but
also, Jim and I were perhaps trying to recapture
something
.

Jim and I had shared a night in Room Six with Dave and Tony in the first couple of weeks. Dave and Tony were “doing acid”, which was far beyond my ambitions at the time; Jim and I were there as supporters, disc jockeys, joint-rollers, good-vibes bringers. At a certain stage, it was decided that since it was so late, the only thing to do was to stay up and see the dawn. This was, of course, a Cosmic Experience. That’s what the times were about: a search for experiences with meaning and beauty, moments about which there was a touch of eternity. Jim and I would sometimes smoke a joint on the Suspension Bridge, gazing at the gorge’s immensities… failing to understand that for me, at least, the answers, and for that matter, all the
interesting
questions, were to be found, not in the confusions of the drug but in the certainties of the gorge and the
wildness
of nature all around it. I see now that I was entirely taken up with the wrong kind of grass. And so, joint smoked, we would drop the roach over the edge and watch it tumble down and down and down, red ember winking at us as it fell, like the indicator on a car’s headlights. No left turn unstoned, we said to each other, and giggled.

That’s the only thing I miss about dope-smoking. Ah, the helpless laughter, the real, unending, weeping
laughter
, all dignity gone, when you beg for it to stop because your belly aches so, and you and your companions are
united by something beyond mere hilarity. Was it the laughter of Mozart that we read about in
Steppenwolf
? Was it the laughter of the spheres? Jim once said: “I know some very noisy sheep,” and we laughed for a couple of hours. Could anything be better, be richer than that? And was this laughter the gift of dope, or the gift of youth? Either way, I will never know it again: times when it seemed that God was in his heaven and smoking joints alongside us. All on the same side. And all into nature.

Dawn duly came, as we thought it might, but it was a miracle nonetheless. We looked out across the October garden and the lemon sun gave it a light. Dave retreated from the balcony to put “Here Comes the Sun” on the stereo and we smoked a joint, the last, contemplating the miracle, and if there were tears in Jim’s eyes, no doubt there were in mine. The plants of the garden – the garden we had to get back to – were growing before us, while the smoke of burning botanic substances – our proposed route to this garden – was in our lungs, and its virtues or its vices were fizzing in our heads. We were young and foolish and still growing as the garden grew before us.

Jim and Brian and I attempted to keep the Room Six thing going. We weren’t as cool as the departed trio, but we did our best. Me, I felt that Jim rather let the side down in the matter of Rudi’s dope. Rudi had got The Fear and lent Jim a biggish lump of dope so that the Pigs wouldn’t get him. We were smoking our way through this very
acceptable loan when Jim saw a Pig in the very corridors of Burwalls. Jim at once got The Fear himself, and ran up the stairs three at a time to Room Six, where Brian and I were enjoying yet another sampling of Rudi’s dope. Jim seized the plastic bag that contained it, opened the window and whirled the bag around his head like the young David with his sling. In this manner, he hurled five quids’ worth of perfectly decent Moroccan into the trees. Brian and I failed to find it despite a lengthy search. It turned out that the Pig in question was there to investigate the question of a stolen bicycle.

But I was soon off exploring thrilling possibilities beyond Burwalls: penetrating into Clifton, visiting Simon, Dave and Tony, and meeting thrilling girls: Miriam, and especially her best friend Lesley. Brian met a darkly pretty girl called Janet, and was at once utterly taken up. But all the same, there was some sort of default mechanism in place, one that threw the three of us together in Room Six on a regular basis.

Getting into nature. Sometimes, that meant nothing more than listening to Pink Floyd in a darkened
smoke-filled
room. The Incredible String Band pleased me far more: I still maintain that the sitar is an underrated rock instrument. In some ways, cultivating a love of nature was a search for maturity, for no one is less aware of the wild world around him than a teenager, who would turn down an hour at the most beautiful place on the planet for ten
minutes in the bus shelter with his mates. In another way, we were striving for something beyond the ordinary, beyond the obvious: for the world undiscovered by Straight Society. And, in a curious way, there was a time when everything in Room Six was perfect, when we seemed to have found what we were looking for. Or at least, to be on the brink of finding it.

In my memory this enchanted period lasted an entire summer, but that can’t be right. Perhaps it was just a few days, between the exams and the long, long vacation. It seemed to stretch on, though, for night after night: a series of ancient revels, sacred rites as spring turned to summer, and we three were up there in Room Six stoned again (we had acquired some of the light, almost champagne-like grass full of cheerfully exploding seeds), the stereo (Brian’s, 30 quid from Boots) doing its stuff and the talk and the noise-filled silence and the laughter. And with it, the sense, ridiculously futile but utterly compelling, that we were on our way to reaching something beyond
ourselves
: that we were part of a great global phenomenon, a move towards a better way to live, and a better way of understanding the world. And time and again we would open the curtains and peer though the smoke at the
spreading
light, and then raise the giant sash windows and bring in the deafening sound of song: “Oh God! It’s the fucking tweeties again!” We compared the din unfavourably with Captain Beefheart playing the sax, but we stood on the
balcony and listened to it anyway and hid the roaches away from prying eyes when all was done.

It was the garden that made these times idyllic, or at least it seemed to have done so in my memory: the
lovingly
mown sward, or series of swards, the grand trees, their inseparable songsters. What were they? It seems astonishing that I couldn’t pick out a single one of them in those days. Today, drunk or sober, I could name every bird that sang there. What would we have been listening to? Well, blue tit and great tit and chaffinch and wren and robin and dunnock and blackbird and song thrush; that’s for certain, along with house sparrow and wood pigeon and greenfinch. Maybe a crow or two. Nuthatch, I’ll bet, and mistle thrush. Woodpeckers, green and great spotted, certainly, and maybe lesser as well. And the migrant
warblers
: there’d surely have been chiffchaffs and garden warblers. And certainly there’d have been blackcap: that rich, bubbling song, fruity and fluty, a great favourite of mine. But in those days all I heard was the music of the spheres, or the soundtrack of the cosmos, and if it was good, it wasn’t enough. I needed more precision: perhaps we all did. But at the time, a love, unspecific and directed in the manner of a scatter-gun, seemed enough.