The ducks are stitched on a mottled gray-brown background, and outlined in blue. They have brownish-buff sides, a blue band at the tail end, with some white, cream-white head and breast, short beak and rounded head. Precisely portrayed ducks. And it seems to me that this lady who had lived all her life in rural Maine, amid its wildlife, would not have adorned her kettle-holders with any old made-up duck. These would be some actual duck. So – I must turn to Peterson – A Field Guide to the Birds East of the Rockies.
American Peterson is lavish, compared to our own familiar European Peterson. We have five owls (British, that is – we can’t claim European exotics such as Tengmalm’s owl); they have twelve, and that’s east of the Rockies only. Eleven woodpeckers for heaven’s sake, as against our own mere three. A whole page of what we call “little brown jobs”: Confusing Fall Warblers. You can say that again – they look more like Indistinguishable Fall Warblers to me. And a whole squad of them, when we have only to deal with chiffchaffs and garden warblers and the willow warbler and a few more.
But what about my ducks? There is nothing in Peterson that exactly corresponds, but the harlequin duck is not a bad fit. The harlequin duck has brown sides, glimpses of blue at the tail and is described as a “smallish slaty duck with chestnut sides and odd white patches and spots.” And – aha! – the range is right and the habitat is described as “tumbled mountain streams, rocky coastal waters.” Plenty of rocky coast where Betty was driving. So I choose to think that the kettle-holder ducks are the old lady’s personal take on the harlequin duck. And she worked them in the fine tradition of American folk art, probably just as her own mother and grandmother had done.
I have a copy of American Peterson because for as long as I can remember I have bird-watched, in the most amateur way possible, just if and when an opportunity arose. I have a Field Guide to the Birds of Australia as well, and I sometimes take that up just to browse in wonder among its esoteric offerings: helmeted friarbird, Australian king parrot, flame robin. And to remember the morning a kindly couple of ornithologists in Adelaide took me to a salt-marsh bird sanctuary: pelican, egrets, ibis, storks. And the rosellas in suburban gardens, the flocks of sulphur-crested cockatoos in the bush, the tiny sapphire wren I once saw. Australian bird-watching made our own homely collection seem tame indeed.
So the Maine ducks tap into a lifelong fringe interest, for me. I always notice birds. A small triumph when I have spotted egrets in the Exe Estuary from the train, going to a literary festival. Keeping an eye out for red kites over the Berkshire Downs, driving to Somerset with Josephine. Looking for the pair of jays that sometimes appear in my London square. And, time was, I kept the Official Duck End Bird List beside my desk in Oxfordshire; species seen as I worked there. The rule being that the bird must have been seen as I sat, without getting up. Around thirty, I think, including treecreeper, nuthatch, all three woodpeckers, flycatcher, all the tits. I can’t think how I got any work done.
In Orkney, once, we had the experience of being taken to a sea-bird cliff on Papa Westray by the young woman ornithologist whose summer job was to record the success or failure of the nesting birds – a daily record, with each nest site plotted on transparent paper laid over photographs of the cliff. The populations to be thus assessed, and whether stable or falling. The cliff face was a tenement, its assorted occupants at different levels – fulmars, razorbills, guillemots, kittiwakes . . . And other treats in Orkney, flagship of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds: an outing with Eric Meek, its area manager there, who would indicate a speck on the far side of a loch – “and there’s a female merganser,” pick out a hen harrier amid a distant flock of gulls, stare at something bobbing about invisibly in some reeds – “A phalarope!” The real ornithologist sees with enhanced vision; they speak another language. But the rest of us can potter about on the nursery slopes, finding out.
What is it about birds? The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds’ current membership stands at over one million, topped only by the National Trust. Is it that they are ubiquitous – town or country? That we have been educated by television nature programs? That we recognize the last gasp of the dinosaurs? Perhaps that bird-watching as an activity costs little – unless you insist on some state-of-the-art telescope – can be done almost anywhere, including out of your own window. Garden bird-feeders are national suburban equipment, and apparently make a significant contribution to the survival of some species. Suffice it that many people respond to birds, more than to any other creature. I once stood watching a pair of pied wagtails on a railway platform – you don’t so often find wagtails making a living at a train station. They were largely ignored, and then I noticed a woman intent upon the birds; we exchanged little conspiratorial smiles: “You too!”
I have never seen a harlequin duck, and I don’t expect I ever shall. But somewhere there is one foraging on a rocky coast, tenuously linked to the kettle-holders in my kitchen.
The blue lias ammonites
Fossils. Two little curled shapes, an inch across, that hang in the gray ocean of a sea-smoothed flat pebble of blue lias, itself just larger than an opened hand. I picked it up on the beach at Charmouth, in Dorset, long ago. I have other ammonites – exquisite polished sections, but bought from the fossil shop at Lyme Regis, which is not nearly as satisfying as the one you found yourself. They amaze me, these small creatures that expired together once, in just such proximity, I suppose, so many million years ago, and remain thus, propped on my bookshelf.
Between one hundred and ninety-five and two hundred million years ago, since the blue lias is late Triassic and early Jurassic, the seam of rock that runs down across the country from Yorkshire to the south coast at Dorset, taking in north Somerset and parts of south Wales. Ammonites are marine invertebrates, and, quite apart from their own immense antiquity, their very name races back through time, owed to Pliny, who called these fossils “horns of Ammon” because their spiral shape resembled tightly coiled rams’ horns, associated with the Egyptian god Ammon. It is like the night sky being named for Greek mythology – Andromeda, Cassiopeia, Aquarius, Orion, Pegasus – the physical world demanding a much deeper reference than our own small slice of time.
Ammonites lived in open water, for the most part, cruising in ancient seas, myriads of them, falling on their death to the sea floor where they were gradually buried in the accumulating sediment. The ammonoids show rapid evolution; species evolve and become extinct at faster rates than other groups, making them useful index fossils, used to date the sedimentary rock in which they are found. Our own Jurassic ammonites seldom exceed nine inches in diameter – my two are mere babies at an inch. But there was a German monster over six feet across and others in North America at four feet, while the Portland stone here can offer a two-foot species.
Ammonite taxonomy is vast – there were masses of them, evolving, becoming extinct. Because of where they were and when, my two in their little slab of blue lias must be some kind of asteroceras or promicroceras, but it is impossible to tell which, or what they were within their genus – Asteroceras confusum (is that a joke?), Asteroceras stellare, Promicroceras pyritosum – goodness knows.
Paleontology is awe-inspiring, sobering. Deep time. It puts you in your place – a mere flicker of life in the scheme of things. I take note of that whenever I walk on one of the north Somerset beaches. The blue lias surfaces here, lifting out of the Bristol Channel – the gray and pink pebbles at Watchet, the cliffs seamed with equally gray and pink alabaster. My aunt Rachel used the alabaster for sculpting, foraging for chunks at the foot of the cliffs after winter storms. It was tiresome material to sculpt – too soft, too liable to crumble under her tools – but we have two of her successes, a long, gray, rather primeval-looking fish, a relative of the coelacanth, I’d say. And a little maquette, a Henry Moore figurine. I’ve often picked up ammonites at Watchet, both embedded in a stone or as an isolated snail shape. Belemnites, too, those pointed tubular for
ms. In fact, I think it was on Watchet beach that the deep past first signaled, when I was ammonite-hunting as a teenager.
Ammonites and a paleontologist have surfaced in fiction, for me – an instance of the way in which the things that alert the mind then insert themselves into what gets written. Shape it, indeed. Watchet beach and its ammonites somehow prompted a novel in which the central figure is a paleontologist, whose career trajectory begins when as a child he heaves up a lump of blue lias at Watchet, and sees something intriguing upon it. I don’t think I would have made much of a paleontologist myself – I don’t have a sufficiently scientific turn of mind; he is a surrogate, perhaps. And, for a novelist, it is the accumulation of all these matters grabbing the attention over the years that will direct the sort of stories that get told, the kind of people who will inhabit them. Every aspect of time, for me, from the deep time of the ammonites through the historian’s attempt to analyze the past, to the bewildering operation of memory.
But rocks and fossils never seem like putative material, at the time – they are just something that has made the mind sit up and pay attention. I wish I had paid attention more systematically – done some rock-watching in the way that I have bird-watched, and checked what I was looking at. The blue lias is all that I can recognize, and Devon’s red sandstone, and Oxfordshire’s oolitic limestone, which built two of the houses in which I have lived. The regrets of old age are polarized: you wish you had not done certain things – behaved thus, responded like that – and you wish you had seized more of the day, been greedier, packed more in. I wish I had packed in more rocks – on foot, legging it, learning what it was I walked over, looked at. Walking was a central pleasure, time was – Offa’s Dyke, when the going was good, Wenlock Edge, a bit of the Pennine Way. I looked up, and around – birds, wildflowers – but didn’t focus on down, on the deep time over which one was walking.
The naming of things. I have always needed that, where the physical world is concerned; much poring over bird books and my forty-year-old copy of Keble Martin’s The Concise British Flora in Colour. It annoys me that I can’t identify my blue lias ammonites; just “some kind of asteroceras or promicroceras” won’t do. The world and its life are the abiding delight and fascination, and to savor them to the full you want to have things labeled, named, classified; a tree is not just a tree, it is a particular tree, or you are only enjoying it as an agreeable sight. I can understand exactly what drove Linnaeus, despite being myself quite unscientific. Taxonomy is crucial, essential – the majestic discipline that marshals the natural world, so that everyone can know what is what and what it is not. Perhaps this urge for identification began for me in the nursery in Egypt (it never did get known as the schoolroom) when Lucy and I did Natural History on Wednesday mornings out of Arabella Buckley’s Eyes and No Eyes, that late-nineteenth-century guide to the flora and fauna of the English pond and stream: caddis fly larva, water boatman, dragonfly. And, indeed, out of Bentham and Hooker, the standard wildflower manual; we searched the fringes of the sugar-cane fields for scarlet pimpernel, shepherd’s purse, vetch.
The Jerusalem Bible
It is New Testament only, quite small – about nine inches by five – and it is bound with exquisitely inlaid mother-of-pearl, making it feel heavy, chunky. This must be real mother-of-pearl. If it were a tourist offering of today, I would propose plastic imitation, but plastic was not around in 1942, so it must be the real thing, ripped probably from the floor of the Red Sea, and this is therefore an environmentally reprehensible Bible. But environmental concern was not much around either in 1942.
Lucy bought it for me at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, and has written in it: Penelope Low from Nanny. It was late summer 1942, when Rommel’s army in Libya had advanced to within a hundred miles of the Egyptian border, and British families were advised to leave the country. My mother had opted for Palestine, as opposed to Cape Town, the alternative; my father stayed at his job with an Egyptian bank. This would be only a temporary interruption to the status quo, seems to have been the assumption, we would soon be going home – as was indeed the case, but the bland optimism now seems strange: it looks today as though Egypt could very well have fallen to the German advance, and must have done so at the time to anyone facing the facts.
The title page of the Jerusalem Bible says, at the foot: “The American Colony Stores, Jerusalem, Palestine.” I am sure that this means simply that it was produced for this outlet, which presumably then supplied some bookstall at the Holy Sepulchre, because I am certain that Lucy’s purchase took place there. More on the American colony in a moment; for now, we are in the crowded, incense-reeking interior of the church, and somewhere in a crevice of memory that day lingers, this carefully considered purchase – which would have been quite expensive, and I was grateful, and proud of this new treasure – and Lucy’s prickly response to this place: its clamor, its rituals, the smells and bells, the mass of people. She had good reason; Lucy was paid-up Church of England, and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre was everything but that. This was a long way from the measured sobriety of Cairo’s Anglican Cathedral. The Church of the Holy Sepulchre is – was – the headquarters of the Greek Orthodox Patriarch, and control of the building is shared between several churches – Roman Catholic, Eastern and Oriental Orthodoxies. Anglican and Protestant Christians have no permanent presence. Lucy was feeling herself to be on alien territory, and was probably bothered about this because she was quite devout, and this after all was the site of Golgotha, where the Crucifixion took place, and where Christ was buried. Perhaps the purchase of the Bible was a small defiant statement: we too are Christians.
And it must have caught the eye. It is handsome – on the front a Greek cross, set in a circle within a diamond of mother-of-pearl inlay, further small inlay slabs all around, forming a nest of rectangles, the whole thing iridescent – a shimmer of blues, pinks, greens, pearly whites. Mother-of-pearl; nacre.
Nacre is the inner shell layer of some mollusks, long valued as a decorative material – all those billions of pearl buttons, for starters. I have a butter knife with a mother-of-pearl handle; many such were manufactured during the last two and three centuries, no doubt. But nowadays the species supplying this industry are endangered, and plundering the oceans in the service of buttons and knives is frowned on. That shop in Covent Garden that used to have baskets stacked high with giant shells and nacre mollusks has long since closed down.
So, thus, that morning in 1942, and the Bible that remembers the Church of the Holy Sepulchre (and, at one remove, the vibrant life at the bottom of the Red Sea). We were there as tourists, and must have seen its sights, but of those I remember nothing. I was nine.
Hadrian built a temple on the site, originally – the temple of Aphrodite – which was demolished by the Emperor Constantine in around 325 when he had required his mother, Helena, to build churches on all the sites associated with the life of Christ. Helena is said to have discovered the True Cross during her excavations, though it is not clear whether it was under her auspices that it eventually got broken up into relics that would provide churches everywhere with enough fragments to marshal a whole army of crosses. The medieval relics marketing industry is fascinating: ideally, a splinter of the True Cross, or a Holy Thorn, failing that, hair or toenail of a saint, even a more substantial chunk of bone. Christ is of course the problem, there never having been an available corpse; but never mind, that can be got round, with a bit of ingenuity: a phial containing the breath of Christ. A religious tourist trade that has diminished today to Bibles and postcards.
Constantine’s edifice was built as two connected churches, most of which were destroyed in 1009 by the Fatimid caliph, though in a later deal between the Fatimids and the Byzantine Empire some rebuilding was allowed and a mosque reopened in Constantinople. Then came the Crusades; the objective of every Crusader was to pray in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Jerusalem was taken, and throughout the Crusader p
eriod there was much rebuilding and excavation of the church and its site, until the city fell to Saladin in 1184, though a treaty allowed Christian pilgrims to enter the church. Effectively, the site was a battleground for centuries, the building itself rising and falling, knocked down, restored, revived, neglected, fought over. And, it appears, this tradition survives with occasional brawls between the contemporary occupants; in 2002 the Ethiopian contingent objected to a Coptic monk having moved his chair from an agreed spot – eleven people were hospitalized after the resulting commotion.
Representatives of all these sects would have been there on that morning in 1942 – Greek Orthodox in full fig, monks and priests and a herd of tourists that would have included plenty of those displaced by the war, like ourselves. Soldiers everywhere, and RAF and ATS and WAAF; we were connoisseurs of categories and uniforms – some Aussies over there, and those are New Zealanders, and he’s Free French. Jerusalem would have been a favorite leave destination.
Lucy and I were living in some style. We were at Government House, by invitation of the British High Commissioner’s wife, because before Lucy took me on she had looked after their children. And thus it was, there, that I saw General de Gaulle in his dressing-gown, but that too is another story. My mother had not been invited to Government House, and was staying more modestly at the American Colony Hotel, which I remember as having a lovely courtyard with orange trees, resident tortoises, and amazing ice cream. It was the hotel of choice for the discriminating: charming, cheap, more select than the cosmopolitan and pricey King David, and with an interesting background.