Turtle Diary

12 Neaera H

Children in the sunlight and the green shade of the square. They seem shaped of light, of silver air or green shade, changing substance as they move from one to the other. Their little shouts and cries are like coloured dots that make a picture of noise but looked at closely the dots are coloured silence. High-legged and quick the children wade in twos and threes through light and shade like shore birds.

What I do is not as good as what an oyster-catcher does. Writing and illustrating books for children is not as good as walking orange-eyed, orange-billed in the distance on the river, on the beaches of the ocean, finding shellfish. And of course they fly as well which must be worth a good deal. Oyster-catchers fit into the world, their time fits. I don’t know how long they live. Herring gulls can live as long as twenty-eight years. The eyes of herring gulls are utterly pitiless, have no pity even for the bird they’re part of. They seem not to be bird eyes but ocean eyes, yellow eyes of the ocean looking out of the bodies of birds.

The man in the bookshop who knew about Carr, his eyes too seemed other than of himself, seemed not to be seeing things on his behalf. It was as if he found himself always in strange houses looking out of the windows of rooms in which nothing was his. A tall hopeless-looking man with an attentive face and an air of fragile precision like a folding rule made of ivory. There was something in my memory: The Man in the Zoo, the David Garnett novella about the man who had himself locked up in a cage and exhibitedt as Homo sapiens. Not that he seems part of such a story but the idea of him has something of hapless patience in it.

George Fairbairn, the Head Keeper at the Aquarium, seemed quite willing to tell me anything I wanted to know about the turtles. I have the feeling that if I told him what’s in my mind he might even help me do it and of course that frightens me.

I can’t possibly do it alone. I’d need someone to handle the turtles and drive the van, I can’t do any part of it really except pay the expenses. There’d be the long drive to Cornwall, it would be night-time. I’d put them into the ocean at Polperro. The mystery of the turtles and their secret navigation is a magical reality, juice of life in a world gone dry. When I think of the turtles going into the ocean I think of it happening in that place that so badly needs new reality.

The ends of things are always present in their beginnings. T. S. Eliot has of course noted that. But it seems to me that the ends are actually visible in the faces of the people with whom one begins something. There is always an early face that will be forgotten and will be seen again. Sometimes one simply sees the death that will come too soon, as I did with Geoffrey long before the afternoon with the kestrel. But there’s something else, some aspect of the person that is always seen early and will inevitably be seen again no matter how the seeing changes in between. The man who looks a rotter at first and then is seen to be charming will look a rotter again, that can be depended on. The scared person will look scared again, the lost one lost. That man at the bookshop has been seen as hopeless-looking long ago by someone, by himself as well, and his face has returned to that look. My face does not look back at me now when I look into the mirror. That too is a return.

More and more I’m aware that the permutations are not unlimited. Only a certain number of things can happen and whatever can happen will happen. The differences in scale and costume do not alter the event. Oedipus went to Thebes, Peter Rabbit into Mr McGregor’s garden, but the story is essentially the same: life points only towards the terror. Beatrix Potter left it to John Gould to show us Peter dangling from the beak of Bubo bubo.

The turtle in Lear’s Yonghy-Bonghy-Bò looks like a hawksbill in the drawing. The man at the bookshop has not got a tiny body nor does his head grow too large but there is a good deal of Yonghy-Bonghy-Bo in him.

Through the silent-roaring ocean

Did the turtle swiftly go;

Holding fast upon his shell

Rode the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bo.

With a sad primeval motion

Towards the sunset isles of Boshen …

Madame Beetle is shaped somewhat like a sea turtle, especially in profile. Seen from above she’s more elongated, less shield-shaped. Her motion is primeval but not sad. Today I cleaned the tank and the filter and she’s been patrolling her domain with renewed interest, repeatedly going up and down one side that was green with algae and is now clear. I wonder if she’s looking at her reflection. ‘Domain,’ I said as if she were free and not the prisoner of my flagging invention. The shipwreck looks quite good now, a little furry and spotty, its foretop lost in green curling fronds. All of the plants are putting out new growth.

Very naval Madame Beetle looks, as neat and boaty as a model at the Science Museum. Her underside is tan with regular transverse black lines as neat as the planking one sees in models. A Victorian one-man submarine perhaps, or a little armoured galley. Up and down the sides she goes then once round the tank rowing her smooth and undulating course. Beyond her little ocean I see rooftops and the sky.

I was on the South Bank one day by the Royal Festival Hall. It was a sunny day with a bright blue sky. I was looking up at a train crossing the Hungerford Bridge. Through the train I could see the sky successively framed by each window as the carriages passed. Each window moving quickly forward and away held briefly a rectangle of blue. The windows passing, the blue remained.