Russell Hoban - Turtle Diary

She spends a good deal of her time hanging head-down with her bottom just breaking the surface of the water. That’s the end she breathes through, where her spiracles are. Might she have a periscope? Victoria Beetle, Submariner. When she dives she takes a shining bubble of air with her under her wing-covers. If I took the lid off the tank and opened the window she might fly away but it would be a long trip to the nearest pond. I sometimes think of her as waiting patiently but I doubt that she really experiences what people call waiting and if she doesn’t then she has no need of patience.

Victoria Beetle’s Summer Holiday. Bugger that. Sunken Treasure is better. What would a beetle treasure be? I’ll try catching some flies for her. Maybe a moth will turn up, she’d like that. But the treasure in the story should be jewels or money.

It was a lazy summer afternoon,

and Victoria Beetle was enjoying a quiet cup of tea

when she heard a knock at the door.

She looked out of the window

and saw Big Sam Bumblebee the gang boss.

‘If he thinks he can try on that

protection lark with me he’d betterthinkagain,’

said Victoria, and she picked up the poker.

Victoria Beetle or Victoria Water-Beetle? The hyphenated name sounds better. How would Snugg & Sharpe feel about gangsters? After all they’re part of modern life even at schools nowadays, according to the newspapers. Big Sam knows where the lolly is but he needs Victoria’s help because it’s at the bottom of the pond. Dropped there by Jimson Crow perhaps, whilst making a getaway. He’s always stealing things. He was flying over the pond with Detective Owl hot on his trail.

I wanted to see an oyster-catcher so I went to the Zoo, not feeling at all good about it. The Zoo is a prison for animals who have been sentenced without trial and I feel guilty because I do nothing about it. But there it was, I wanted to see an oyster-catcher and I was no better than the people who’d caged oyster-catchers for me to see. And I myself have caged a water-beetle. On the other hand perhaps some of the birds and animals don’t feel the Zoo to be a prison. Maybe they’ve been corrupted by it.

At the Waders Aviary a little sandpiper who would never have allowed me to come that close in real life perched on a sign a foot away from me and stared. He knew that he was safe because the wire mesh of the cage was between us. He has lost his innocence. He appeared to have lost a leg as well, and for a long time stood steadfastly on the one very slender remaining member whilst looking at me through half-closed eyes. Having kept me there for nearly half an hour he revealed a second leg that matched the other perfectly, then flew down to the sand and entertained a lady sandpiper with an elegant little dance that seemed done less for the lady than for the thing itself. He made his legs even longer and thinner than they were, drew himself up quite tall in his small way, spread his wings, wound himself up and produced a noise like a tiny paddle-wheel boat whilst flapping his wings stiffly and with formal regularity. At the same time he executed some very subtle steps almost absent-mindedly, with the air of one who could be blindingly nimble if he let himself go. The lady watched attentively. At a certain point, as if by mutual agreement that the proprieties had been observed, he stopped dancing, she stopped watching. They went their separate ways like two people at a cocktail party.

Oyster-catchers were what I’d come to see and there were two or three of them mooching about but there was something wrong that made the seeing of them flat and uneventful. I’d never been that close to them before, part of their character had been that they were always seen from a distance on the open mudflats with a wide and low horizon far away. These oyster-catchers were so accessible as to be unobservable. One of them wound himself up as the sandpiper had done and released quite an urgent kleep kleep kleep. The sound independently hurried off round the pool and the bird hurried after it like a cat or a child working up interest in a toy. When the sound stopped the oyster-catcher abandoned it and began to potter about with some rather old-looking mussels.

There were all sorts of waders in the Waders Aviary, not all of whom would ordinarily have been seen in the same place I think. The sign showed pictures of a redshank, guillemot, razorbill, eider duck, oyster-catcher, ruff, kittiwake, white-breasted waterhen, rufous laughing thrush, curlew, laysan duck and hooded merganser. They had their concrete pool to wade in, they had reeds and bushes and a strip of sand. The Zoological Society had pieced together a habitat that was like the little naif towns one sometimes sees in model railway layouts. The elements of it were thing for thing a rough approximation of reality but the scale wasn’t right and the parts of it didn’t fit together in a realistic way.

The birds were all quite good-natured and reasonable about it, they seemed more grown-up than the Zoo management, as if they’d been caught and caged not because they weren’t clever enough to avoid it but because they simply didn’t think in terms of nets and cages, those were things for cunning children. So here they all were, interned for none of them knew how long. They made the best of it better than people would have done, I think, and all of them appeared to get on rather neatly together. The sandpipers, the curlews and the redshanks, all pure Bewick, seemed to draw serenity from the sheer detail of their markings. A ruff was bathing with its ruff spread out as large as possible. It looked of the film world and as if it might call everyone ‘Darling’.

I felt dissatisfied, as one does when morally strong preconceptions have to be questioned. The birds were not silent prisoners wasting away like Dr Manette in the Bastille nor were they beating pitiful wings against the wire mesh of their captivity. Their understanding of the whole thing seemed deeper and simpler than mine. Of course it may be that they’re going decadent. I’ve seen a film in which Dr Lorenz pointed out the difference between two colonies of cattle egrets, one free and one caged. The free ones, who had to provide for themselves, were monogamous and energetic and kept their numbers within ecologically reasonable limits. The captive egrets were promiscuous, idle, overbreeding and presumably going to hell fast.

I passed the gibbons who seemed at the same time active and reflective, of more mature understanding than the party of French girls who stood before the cage shouting, ‘ Allez, allez !’ at their aerial artistry. I avoided the lions, the rhinoceroses and the elephants, walked along with my head down, not wanting to see anything and not wanting to go home. I fetched up at the Aquarium as it began to rain, and went inside.

Aquaria have always been interesting to me as sources of illumination, the fish are secondary. Madame Beetle’s tank with its sunken wreck, water plants, pebbles and one bit of sea-china is very pretty when lit in the evening. Madame Beetle is more active than she was at first, submarining elegantly, her red fringed hind legs going like perfectly coordinated oars. I like the sound of the pump and filter too, it’s better than the ticking of a clock.

When I was a child I had a fishless aquarium. My father set it up for me with gravel and plants and pebbles before he’d got the fish and I asked him to leave it as it was for a while. The pump kept up a charming burble, the green-gold light was wondrous when the room was dark. I put in a china mermaid and a tin horseman who maintained a relationship like that of the figures on Keats’s Grecian urn except that the horseman grew rusty. Eventually fish were pressed upon me and they seemed an intrusion, I gave them to a friend. All that aquarium wanted was the sound of the pump, the gently waving plants, the mysterious pebbles and the silent horseman forever galloping to the mermaid smiling in the green-gold light. I used to sit and look at them for hours. The mermaid and the horseman were from my father. I have them in a box somewhere, I’m not yet ready to take them out and look at them again.