Turtle Diary Read Online Free PDF

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 haveto 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