Russell Hoban - Turtle Diary

I used to want to find someone to listen to Chopin with. Now I don’t even like to hear Chopin. Nor Scarlatti. Nor the Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven quartets. Not even Bach. I haven’t listened to the B Minor Mass for more than a year. The idea of music has seemed totally foreign to me for some time now. I can’t think any more why anyone would want to bother with sounds in that way. I can stand on the platform in the Underground and listen to the wincing of the rails as the train comes in, listen to the rumble as it goes. I can listen abstractly to the football players on the common, trains going by, aeroplanes overhead. Raw sound I don’t mind but music has nothing to do with me any more. And it’s not as if I can meditate or anything like that. It’s just that plain sounds and silence are all I want to hear.

On my Friday half-day I went to the Zoo again. One of the keepers in the Aquarium came out of a PRIVATE door and I asked him about the turtles. The big ones have been there twenty or thirty years, he said. I asked him if it was possible to look at the tank from the other side. Yes, he said, and took me into PRIVATE.

One had to go up a few steps and climb through a hole in the wall, then there were planks across the back of the tank. It was brightly lit, had a backstage feeling. The turtles looked different seen from above.

‘That’s not the colour they’d be in natural light,’ the keeper said. ‘Their colour fades here.’

‘Would it be a big job moving them out of here?’ I said.

‘We do it sometimes when we clean the tank,’ he said. ‘Put them in the filters. Bit awkward getting them through the hole, you have to mind their jaws. But it’s not too difficult.’

‘Suppose,’ I said, ‘some sort of turtle freak decided to steal the turtles and put them back in the ocean. What would he need for the job?’

‘You’re talking about me,’ he said. ‘That’s what I’ve wanted to do. I’ve told them we ought to let the big ones go, replace them with little ones. We go fishing off Southampton for specimens two or three times a year, and I’ve said why don’t we take the big turtles along and put them into the Channel. Apart from wanting them to go free I’m tired of cleaning up after them. But they don’t want to know, they’re not interested in the turtles here.’

‘Wouldn’t transport be a problem?’ I said. ‘Don’t they have to be kept from drying out? And isn’t the Channel too cold for them?’

‘Funny,’ he said. ‘You’re the second this week that’s asked me about turtle transport. A lady was chatting to me about the turtles the other day. Sometimes no one asks about them for six months at a stretch. Drying out’s no problem on a trip as short as from here to Southampton. Put them on wet sacks, they’d even be all right without anything for that distance. I don’t think the water’d bother them. Cold water makes them a little sluggish but I think they’d backtrack up the North Atlantic Current till they hit the Canary Current or the Gulf Stream. I bet they’d be in home waters in three months.’

‘The lady,’ I said, ‘was she rather arty-intellectual looking? Husky voice?’

‘That’s the one,’ he said. ‘Friend of yours?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘Then there isn’t all that much to it, is there? Just a matter of hiring a van and taking along a trolley or something. But the place must be guarded at night?’ I wondered when he’d start looking at me hard and ask me about the questions I was asking.

‘Securicor,’ he said. ‘But they make their rounds on a regular schedule. That’s no problem.’

Was he inviting me to have a go at it? I liked the look of him, he seemed a right sort of man. Suddenly it all seemed hugely possible, I began to go trembly. ‘It’s been nice talking to you,’ I said, and got his name and telephone number. George Fairbairn. He’s the Head Keeper. It seemed almost too much to think about at the moment, almost as if it were thrusting itself upon me. And what had she in mind for the turtles? Probably the same sort of lark or at least the same sort of fantasy. Funny, two minds full of turtle thoughts.

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 .