The New Year came in like a thief in the night—noiselessly; no bells, no syrens, no songs by order of the Government. Nothing could have been more appropriate than a burglarious entry like this—seeing what the year has come to filch from us all in the next 12 months.
impossible angle of 45°. Then I read a book on trapping, and tried to catch Hares. Then I read Sir John Lubbock’s Ants, Bees and Wasps, and constructed an observation Ants’ nest (though the Ants escaped).
In looking back to these days, I am chiefly struck by my extraordinary ignorance of the common objects of the countryside, for although we lived in the far west country, the house, without a garden, was in the middle of the town, and all my seniors were as ignorant as I. Nature Study in the schools did not then exist, I had no benevolent paterfamilias to take me by the hand and point out the common British Birds; for my father’s only interest was in politics. I can remember coming home once all agog with a wonderful Bird I had seen—like a tiny Magpie, I said. No one could tell me that it was, of course, only a little Pied Wagtail.
The absence of sympathy or of congenial companionship, however, had absolutely no effect in damping my ardour. As I grew older my egg-collecting companions fell away, some took up the law, or tailoring, or clerking, some entered the Church, while I became yearly more engrossed. In my childhood my enthusiasm lay like a watch-spring, coiled up and hidden inside me, until that Thrush’s nest and eggs seized hold of it by the end and pulled it out by degrees in a long silver ribbon. I kept live Bats in our upstairs little-used drawing-room, and Newts and Frogs in pans in the backyard. My mother tolerated these things because I had sufficiently impressed her with the importance to science of the observations which I was making and about to publish. Those on Bats indeed were thought fit to be included in a standard work—Barrett-Hamilton’s Mammals of Great Britain and Ireland. The published articles served to bring me into correspondence with other naturalists, and I shall never forget my excitement on receiving for the first time a letter of appreciation. It was from the author of several natural history books, to
“W. N. P. Barbellion, E.S.Q.,
Naturalist,
Downstable.”
and illustrated with a delightful sketch of Ring Plovers feeding on the saltings. This letter was carefully pasted into my diary, where it still remains.
After all, it is perhaps unfair to say that I had no kindred spirit with me in my investigations. Martha, the servant girl who had been with us for 30 years, loved animals of all sorts and—what was strange in a country girl—she had no fear of handling even such things as Newts and Frogs. My Batrachia often used to escape from their pans in the yard into Martha’s kitchen, and, not a bit scandalised, she would sometimes catch one marching across the rug or squeezing underneath a cupboard. “Lor’!” would be her comment as she picked the vagrant up and took it back to its aquarium, “can’t ’em travel?” Martha had an eye for character in animals. In the long dynasty of cats we possessed one at length who by association of opposite ideas we called Marmaduke because he ought to have been called Jan Stewer. “A chuff old feller, ’idden ’ee?” Martha used to ask me with pride and love in her eyes. “He purrs in broad Devon,” I used to answer. Marmaduke need only wave the tip of his tail to indicate to her his imperative desire to promenade. Martha knew if no one else did that every spring “Pore ’Duke,” underneath his fur, used to come out in spots. “ ’Tiz jus’ like a cheel ’e gets a bit spotty as the warm weather cums along.” Starlings on the washhouse roof, regularly fed with scraps, were ever her wonder and delight. “Don’ ’em let it down, I zay?” In later years, when I was occupied in the top attic, making dissections of various animals that I collected, she would sometimes leave her scrubbing and cleaning in the room below to thrust her head up the attic stairs and enquire, “ ’Ow be ’ee gettin’ on then?” Her unfeigned interest in my anatomical researches gave me real pleasure, and I took delight in arousing her wonder by pointing out and explaining the brain of a Pigeon or the nervous system of a Dogfish, or a Frog’s heart taken out and still beating in the dissecting dish. She, in reply, would add reflections upon her own experiences in preparing meat for dinner—anecdotes about the “maw” of an old Fowl, or the great “pipe” of a Goose. Then, suddenly scurrying downstairs, she would say, “I must be off or I shall be all be’ind like the cow’s tail.” Now the dignified interest of the average educated man would have chilled me.
By the way, years later, when he was a miner in S. Wales, that historic errand-boy displayed his consciousness of the important role he once played by sending me on a postcard congratulations on my success in the B.M. appointment. It touched me to think he had not forgotten after years of separation.
1917
I am over 6 feet high and as thin as a skeleton; every bone in my body, even the neck vertebrae, creak at odd intervals when I move. So that I am not only a skeleton but a badly articulated one to boot. If to this is coupled the fact of the creeping paralysis, you have the complete horror. Even as I sit and write, millions of bacteria are gnawing away my precious spinal cord, and if you put your ear to my back the sound of the gnawing I dare say could be heard. The other day a
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