The Underground trains are above ground where the District Line passes the common. On the right the tracks disappear behind a wall, on the left they converge towards Parsons Green and Putney Bridge. I watch the trains a lot. There are six lights on the front of each train, two vertical rows of three, and the pattern in which some are lit and some are dark tells the destination. For Special trains all six are lit. Three on the left and the bottom one on the right say Upminster, and so forth. There’s a little sign as well that says where they’re going. By watching with binoculars I’ve learnt most of the light code, I still don’t know all of the signals. I rather like seeing the lights pass in the dark and thinking: Tower Hill or whatever. Sometimes I look at the empty tracks with my binoculars. The solid grey iron is peculiarly pleasing to the eye, the coloured lights almost taste red and green in the mouth. I used to go birdwatching with the binoculars. Sometimes I hear an owl on the common.
Weekends are dicey. Saturdays aren’t too bad, there’s the shop to go to or errands to do and lots of people on the street, football crowds in the afternoon. Sundays are dangerous, the quiet waits in ambush. Close the museums and there’s no telling what might happen.
Saturday afternoon I did not go to the Zoo, I went to the National Maritime Museum at Greenwich to look at Port Liberty.
8 Neaera H
There is a connection between my turtle thoughts and my Polperro thoughts but I’m not sure I can find it. Polperro is mentioned in the guide-books as one of the prettiest fishing villages on the Cornish coast. I’d never seen it until last spring when I was visiting friends in Devon. We drove along many narrow roads winding between hedgerows, crossed the Tamar Bridge into Cornwall, passed through Looe and arrived at a car-park. Near it was a whitewashed inn on which was mounted a mill wheel smartly painted black and slowly revolving. I don’t remember seeing any stream to turn the wheel, I have the impression that a little gush of water had been piped in for that purpose.
One of the principal industries in Polperro is parking cars. We parked, then joined many people walking slowly through the narrow streets eating ice-cream, leading, pushing and carrying infants and scowling at such cars as had not parked. There were many postcards, many sea-urchins, many pottery things and shiny coppery things for sale, many Cream Teas. There was a model village, the entrance to which was through an orange-lit souvenir shop with music. We passed through the souvenirs, the orange light and the music as under a waterfall, paid 10p and came out into what must have been the garden once and was now the model village.
There was organ music, very reduced and scant-sounding, playing ‘Abide with Me’. I guessed it was coming from the model church and I was right. The model village was Polperro itself, as could be observed by looking over a low wall towards the real street. There one saw a full-size sign that said GARNER and next to it the Claremont Hotel, then looking down saw the miniature GARNER and the Claremont Hotel, lumpish and simplified in the model.
The model houses and shops, thick and awry, had an air of stolid outrage. It was as if the anima of each place, private and indwelling, had been nagged into standing naked in the little streets before the deformed buildings. As if someone had said, ‘We need the money, you must help.’ The very boats in the model harbour, oafish and out of scale in the still water, cursed almost aloud, denied any connection whatever with real boats, fishing and the sea, tried by dissociating themselves to make amends to the poor household gods of the port.
A large orange tiger cat settled comfortably on one of the model roofs and a black-and-white cat picked its way through the streets as if looking out for model sinners on a model Day of Judgement. There were pence and halfpence on the bottom of the model harbour. People do that everywhere in fountains I know. Is it possible that they made wishes here when they threw in their coins?
We emerged, went on past Cream Teas and sea-urchins to the full-size harbour, a small one sheltered by a breakwater. The fishing boats were few, there was one called Ocean Gift. A young woman with a Polaroid camera repeatedly photographed her bald baby who had the face of a mature publican, showing him the picture each time. Gulls with cruel yellow eyes paced the quay. A jackdaw perched on the sea wall, neat, detached, seeming full of critical comment but saying nothing. There was a sign at the harbour which I copied:
POLPERRO HARBOUR
Polperro is the best example
of the
small Cornish fishing ports
and the Harbour Trustees
are anxious to retain
its character without resorting
to commercialization
The cost of maintenance
far exceeds the income
WILL YOU PLEASE HELP?
There was a box with a slot. A few feet away were a souvenir stand and a shop full of pottery things and coppery things and sea-urchin lamps with light bulbs in them shining through the sea-urchins. I put no money in the box. Polperro seemed to me like a street-walker asking for money to maintain her virginity.
The tide hadn’t come all the way in and there was a patch of dry stony beach on the seaward side of the wall. I went down the steps and walked there. The beach offered little more than broken glass and contraceptives. At least there was some vitality left here, I thought. I contented myself with two stones and three lumps of glass and a bit of china worn smooth. As we left the harbour I saw a boat lying on the mud. It was full of loose planks and had a hole in its side. Someone had lettered SHIT on it with a paintbrush.
Would it be just as well for Polperro to break up its boats and pave its harbour for a car-park? But of course without the harbour and the token boats no one would come to park there. If the turtles were set free, where is there for them to go really? To what can they navigate? They swim hundreds of miles to the beaches of their breeding grounds. The hundred eggs the female lays each time are just barely enough to ensure the race against wild dogs and predatory birds on the beaches, sharks in the water. I’ve read in Carr that wild dogs from far away travel to the beaches to wait for the arrival of the turtles. Still the hundred eggs would be enough, but nothing ensures the turtles against the manufacturers of turtle soup. Three-hundred-pound turtles navigate the ocean and come ashore to be slaughtered for the five pounds of cartilage that gets sold to the soup-makers. They’re torn open and mutilated, left belly-up and dead or dying on the beach.
Is my wanting to set the Zoo turtles free a kind of Polperrization, a trying to pretend that something is when it isn’t? Would they have to swim with signs and slotted boxes begging for protection and support? There’s rubbish in the oceans now far from any land, Coca-Cola tins perhaps circling among the icebergs. If turtles have memories the beaches the old ones remember are not what they would find now. Perhaps the only decent thing would be a monster Turtlearium charging a proper admission, with turtle rides 10p and YOUR PHOTO WITH A SEA TURTLE 50p. Something has got to be whole in some way but my mind isn’t strong enough to work it out. Carr’s turtle station at Tortuguero in Costa Rica sounds a lovely place in his book. It sounds the sort of place where at night if you looked through the palm trees there’d always be lights on and coffee and people with clip-boards. Tortuguero. The name sounds like hot sun, blue water, white surf.
Often in the evenings Madame Beetle hangs head-down in the water cleaning her legs with great diligence like a woman really looking after herself. She seems to have settled in quite nicely, has a good appetite. She attacks the raw meat vigorously when I drop it in, then hangs head-down holding it in her front legs while her mandibles are busy with it. I don’t know whether any of the meat actually disappears, there’s always a good deal of it about that goes white and filmy after a while, but she must get something out of it because she’s still alive. I remove the old bits from the tank with a skewer. When I first took the cover off to do that I thought Madame Beetle might fly away but she simply retired inside the shipwreck until I’d finished.