Turtle Diary

4 Neaera H

I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone pick up a box or matches without shaking it. Curious. It takes more time to shake the box than it would to open it straight away but it’s less effort. It’s pleasant to hear a lot of matches rattling in the box, one has a feeling of plenty. No one wants to open a matchbox and find it empty.

I lit a cigarette and looked at the water-beetle parcel. A nice little brown-paper parcel, short and cylindrical with airholes in the top. When I undid the brown paper there was a nice little tin with airholes in the lid. Inside the tin was the beetle on damp moss. It was a female, I could tell by the ridges on the wing covers. No males available, said the invoice taped to the tin. That’s life.

With a pencil I prodded her into the little net I’d bought, then lifted the aquarium cover and put her into the water. She swam right down to the plastic shipwreck and scuttled out of sight inside it.

One of my books quoted a naturalist who’d kept a water-beetle on raw meat for three and a half years. I dropped some raw meat through the feeding hole. The beetle rushed over to it, flung it about a bit, then left it and moored herself to a water plant.

Something will come to me, I thought. Delia Beetle’s Sunken Treasure. No, I used that name for the swallow. Cynthia Beetle, Sally Beetle, Victoria Beetle. Victoria Beetle, Secret Agent. A woman of action. I went out and sat in the square.

There is no statue in our square. When I look at statues I find later that I have usually not paid close attention but I have paid close attention to the statue that is not in our square. I’ve come to think of it as a fountain really. There’s a large stone basin and a little thin bronze girl with her skirt tucked up, paddling in the water. She’s not in the centre of the basin but near the rim. In the centre there’s a little jet of water that shoots up taller than the girl. Sometimes the wind blows drops of water spattering on the girl. When it rains, the water in the basin is spangled with splashes that leap up to meet the rain. The bronze girl gleams in the rain. When the sun shines her shadow moves over the water, over the stone rim, over the paving round the fountain. The bronze girl is always at the centre of the circle of her revolving shadow that marks the time.

In Sloane Square there really is a fountain. With two basins and a proper fountain lady in the upper basin pouring water from a shell, a kneeling bronze physical-education sort of lady, naked but unapproachable. I think of her name as being Daphne. Sometimes an empty Coca-Cola tin, bright and shining, circles her basin like part of a water clock. But that bronze lady and her fountain are cold and heavy compared to the statue and the fountain that are not in our square. There would be beach pebbles in the basin of the bronze-girl fountain.

Having reviewed my customary fountain thoughts I find all at once that I really don’t care about it at all. Let the square be however it is, it doesn’t matter to me any more.

I have only one beach pebble from my childhood, from Caister. I don’t suppose it makes any difference, the others are always there in a way. The books call them pebbles but I always think of them as stones. I have many stones from beaches I’ve visited as a grown-up, one bit of sea-china with a voluptuous fairy with little butterfly wings on it, and several bits of sea-glass. The stones from each place are in separate baskets: St David’s Head, Folkestone, Staunton Sands etc. At Folkestone I gave a talk to teachers and librarians one evening, and in the afternoon of that day I went to the sea front and down steep steps to the narrow pebble beach and the sea.

There was a long row of little beach-huts side by side like garages. It was a rainy day in early spring. A man had his hut opened up, the whole front open like a dolls’ house. He was doing the sort of things men do when they smoke pipes and repair their boats in early spring. Mending something I suppose. There was no boat, his hut was his boat. All the little beach-hut fronts pushed me towards the sea and I jumped down from the wall on to the pebbles that rolled and clicked under me as I walked. I thought: what if there were a stone with my name on it? Then I thought, what if my name were on every stone? Then: the name of every stone is in me. I can’t say the name of every stone but it is in me. There were no birds that I remember that day. The hotels along the front were as high as in childhood and as remote, even when seen close to.

This afternoon I bought a marked-down bird book with plates by John Gould (1804–1881). There’s a handsome picture of two oyster-catchers. ‘At running, diving, and swimming they are unrivalled, while their vigilance is greatly appreciated by the other birds of the shore,’ says the book. The newer bird books have hundreds of posh pictures, the proficiency of the artists is dazzling. But the birds all look as if they’d been done from photographs. Certainly there were no such bird pictures before the camera came into use. Gould’s birds are beautiful but modestly done and he seems to have looked at each one carefully and long. His eagle owl, Bubo bubo, is all ferocity but without malice. Dangling from his beak is a dead rabbit who looks exactly like Peter Rabbit without the blue jacket. Bubo bubo’s dreadful amber eyes say simply, ‘It has fallen to me to do this. It is my lot.’ His fierce woolly owl-babies huddle before him waiting for their dinner.