Russell Hoban - Turtle Diary

I got out of the van. The rain had stopped. I stood by the van, leant my forehead against the cool wet metal. The crab reflectors in the road looked at me or not as cars went past or didn’t. In the pocket of my mac was the Caister two-stone. It must have been there from the last time I wore the mac, I hadn’t put it there today.

The sky was clearing, a full moon appeared in a ragged opening in the clouds. There’d be a spring tide then, would it be in or out? I felt as if I knew about tides, felt as if I remembered them.

‘I’ve never told you that Polperro is the place where I was born,’ I said to Neaera.

‘Good God,’ she said. ‘But when you were a child surely it wasn’t how it is now?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘We left when I was a year old and I’ve never been back since. My mother never talked about it much. Why’d you choose it?’

‘It was real once but it isn’t any more,’ said Neaera. ‘It’s souvenirs and cream teas and a box with a slot for money to preserve the character of the old Cornish fishing village. The turtles may be headed for extinction but they’re real, they work. When we put them in the sea they’ll do real turtle work.’

‘We can’t magic the whole world with three turtles,’ I said.

‘We’d need more?’ said Neaera. ‘Would a dozen do it?’ We both laughed.

My mother never had said much about Polperro. She had no stories of the pilchard fishery, the huers signalling from the shore to the seine boats and that sort of thing. She was born in Calstock where her father worked at an arsenic factory until he died of it. In those days the only protection they had was lint to cover the nostrils and a handkerchief over that. My mother remembered the trees all grey and blighted near the works and the way it smelled on foggy days. She was living at home and teaching in a school but when her father died she left Calstock. Her two younger brothers were working by then, her mother had died earlier. She came to Polperro because she liked the sound of the name and she wanted to be near the sea. She used to remember the jackdaws walking on the quay among the gulls and the fishermen, how they looked as if they might speak.

She became a waitress at a tea-shop. She used to say that was the year she gave up school-teaching, Methodism and arsenic all at once. She met my father soon after and in two years she was a widow living in London with a year-old son. She bought a tobacconist-newsagent business in Fulham and then she used to get books out of the library and read about Cornwall. She liked legends and folklore. I remember her telling me about the spirit of Tregeagle who howled when the hounds of the Devil were after him and was finally sent away to weave ropes of sand by the edge of the sea. I remember how she used to say that part: ‘Forever weaving ropes of sand that crumbled in his hands and the wind blew them away.’

When I think of her seeing the jackdaws walking on the quay I seem to see them with her eyes and I can see the rest of the scene as well, the grey sky over the sea and the headlands, the white-and-black-and-grey gulls with yellow beaks and yellow staring eyes, the fisherman solid and heavy in the grey light with scales and barrows, the boats rocking at their moorings or standing on their legs. I never see it sunny, always grey. I’ve never told anyone about my mother’s jackdaws. My three uncles are dead, I have cousins in Cornwall I’ve never looked up. The house in Fulham where we lived over the shop until my mother died was close to where I live now but it’s been pulled down, there’s a block of flats there now. The road where my father went over the cliff was on the other side of Polperro, we’d not be seeing it this trip.

Near Glastonbury there was a self-service petrol station open. I put a pound note into the machine and the tank took 96p worth. 4p worth of petrol left for whoever might come along next.

The van hummed along swallowing up the little crab-shaped reflectors with their little crab eyes. The moon disappeared, reappeared as broken clouds hurried past. Oh yes, I thought, feeling something good just round the corner of my mind: just be all the way in it and you’re all right. Just let go of everything like a falling star. The far-away ones, when you see their light it’s already happened millions of years ago. This too, my brief light, maybe it had flashed across the darkness long long ago. Not my light, just a light. Now I was the one to be it, to flash across the darkness with it. Somebody else’s turn next. Nothing to be selfish about, be it while it’s you and then let go. The van rushed ahead but I let my mind be where it was.

At two o’clock in the morning near Exeter William topped up the tank again. I was glad there weren’t more petrol stations open. He seemed to want to arrive at Polperro with a full tank, as if he had information that all the petrol stations on the road back would disappear by morning.

At a quarter to three we had more sandwiches and coffee about twenty miles from Plymouth. We’d done two hundred miles by then, only about fifty to go. I wondered if he’d stop for petrol between here and Polperro. The road was quiet, there were long intervals between cars, I listened to the turtles breathing. Ahead of us in the lay-by a big articulated lorry was resting like a tired monster. The crabs in the road marched on inscrutably towards London. What would they say when they got there?

We went on through Plymouth, wakeful through the sleeping streets. We crossed the Tamar Bridge at half past three under bluish lights that seemed quite outside of time, like the yellow ones earlier. Lear’s words about the silent-roaring ocean had got into my head and I felt myself filled with silent roaring. It may in fact have been snoring although if it was, William was too tactful to say so. I dozed off and woke up as we came down the hill into Polperro. The sky had cleared completely and there was bright moonlight over everything.

BEYOND THIS POINT ONLY EXEMPTED VEHICLES PERMITTED 9 A.M.-6 P.M., said the sign. We went beyond this point down the main street, past the model village in its model sleep, past the dark and silent cream teas and souvenirs, turned into the street that led to Jonathan Couch’s house and parked on the little bridge in front of it. We could have turned into the very narrow street that went the remaining two hundred yards or so to the outer harbour but William drew the line at that, he didn’t want to risk scratching the van or waking anybody up with the noise of our manoeuvres. As it was we kept expecting lights to go on, windows to fly up and policemen to appear.

We’d neither of us bothered to find out about the tide in advance. Whether it was in or out we’d launch the turtles. But I think we both felt the same: if the tide was in the ocean was with us and our venture would prosper, if it was out it meant that things were no different from the way they always were, just a lot of damned bother and aggravation. Then I stopped caring about signs and omens and whether it would go well or badly. Our part in the rhythm of things was to put the turtles in the sea and however it went would be the way it went. Getting stuck in the mud or drowning or breaking a leg or being had up by the police might or might not be part of it. I stopped caring about people waking up, I felt relaxed and invulnerable.

We rounded the corner, went down the street. The boats in the inner harbour were all afloat. ‘It’s in,’ we both said at the same time. The wind hit us in the face, we heard the crashing of the waves as we half ran round the next corner and up the incline to the outer harbour. The low-tide beach was gone, under the full moon the tide was surging wildly against the breakwater, spray was flying and the sea was breaking halfway up the steps. And the wind, the wind, the full-moon spring-tide turtle wind.