My Natural History Read Online Free PDF Page B

of prestige, in search of meaning. I wanted to make my size a serious sporting asset. I wanted to be upsides with Stuart in the sporting arena. So I became a cox. This was a terrible idea: the worst. The Boat Club saw itself as the natural home of the school’s sporting elite. For some time before I joined, I scanned its notice board: not that it meant anything to me, but I loved the sense of self-belief that emanated from it, that sense of corporate identity. I longed to be a part of it. Eventually, I was. And I hated it.
    I was the right size, true, but I had neither the gift of watermanship nor the taste for command. I also felt the cold bitterly. When we stopped for a session of talk fromthe bicycling coach who followed our haphazard progress from the towpath, the boat drifted alarmingly. My instructions for its righting were always panicky and ineffective. I never knew the wise course to steer. On more than one occasion I ran aground. I hit at least a couple of bridges, which is easier to do than you might think, though you have to put your mind to it. I once rammed another eight; another time I sent my boat and its hapless crew careering on a flooding tide into a moored motor-boat. In short, the Boat Club was a torment to me, and I was a torment to the Boat Club. Eventually, and rightly, they asked me to stop.
    My enduring memory is the stink of the river. The Boat Club required my presence on Wednesday afternoons and Saturday mornings: I would arrive at Barnes Bridge Station and all but taste the vile effluence of the water. The stink of the Thames of the 1960s was the stink of a dying river: sweet Thames, run softly till I end my song. The smell was the smell of my failure: my failure to master the arts of coxswainship, my failure at sport, my failure to find anything in life that I cared about. And so I sat on the little wooden shelf at the back of the needle-shaped boat with eight larger boys in a line before me, them grasping the handles of their oars, me holding the wooden toggles attached to the rudder, and off we went, me steering another hellship to God knew where. Lessons and playground football and the riverine stink: and thank God, friendship. I thought then that this was life: all it had tooffer: a succession of one boring thing after another; a process in which you went through the motions, not really caring about what you were doing, in which neither victory nor defeat had any savour. Life had nothing to stir my blood.
    I was standing at the boathouse, looking out at the river, when I saw it. A bird. That itself was enough to make it rare in those days. The river held very few birds, for it contained nothing to eat: the fish had been stunk out. But here was a big, big bird, and it was sitting low on the water, a cigar-shaped body, a bit of a neck (but not like a swan or a goose) and a long, sharp beak. I looked on it with astonishment: it could only be a diver. It was seriously big: that meant it had to be a great northern diver, the very first bird in The Observer’s Book of Birds . I gazed at it in disbelief: there was me, and there was a genuinely rare bird: almost an Accidental.
    As a point of information, I should say here that it wasn’t a great northern diver. I know that now. It was a cormorant, seen from an unfamiliar angle and in an unfamiliar place. But that’s not the point. The point is that I saw this thing of wonder: and I didn’t know what the hell to do about it. I had no one to tell. No one would be interested , no one would care. It was outside the concerns of Emanuel School. Stuart would make a joke, a friendly but mocking one; Ian would make another, sharper, more destructive. So I never mentioned it to any one. I didn’tknow whether to be happy, whether to go home and look it up, whether to forget about it. Well, I didn’t forget about it. The bird, the memory stayed with me. I knew it wasn’t a joke, but I didn’t know what it was, what it meant, how I was supposed to react.