Barnes - My Natural History The Animal Kingdom and How It Shaped Me

T he animal kingdom came to my rescue. It always has done. I suspect it always will. It rescued me at Sunnyhill Primary School, it rescued me in my adolescence , it has rescued me over and over again throughout my adult life. The first, and perhaps the greatest rescue came when the animals rescued me from Mrs Watson, and at the same time, from Peter Miller, Raymond Stapleton and Philip Cunningham. It was the animals that rescued me from all the weariness and misery that Sunnyhill Primary School was able to provide. It was the animals that gave me hope. Animals have also given me sadness, profound distress, even despair: what do you expect? Love is always more complicated than you bargained for.

But first, to Mrs Watson and Sunnyhill. She was the headmistress. She was brutal, sadistic and mocking, and she hated me with all the delight of a nature rich in the talent for loathing. Not that I was alone. Among the many others she hated was Peter Miller, which should have made for a bond between us, but it didnt. If anything, it made him more eager for my chastisement. What Mrs Watson liked were well-behaved girls who sat at the front of the class; Susan Knight and Zoe Wright (for the latter of whom I had a small passion) basked in her favour. She also liked cheerful, manly little lads, boys who were neither dunces nor swots, good at football, loud, and popular: people like Peter Renvoize and Robert Faulkner. She didnt care for disruptive pupils from the meaner streets of Streatham; she cared even less for pupils with even the mildest pretensions to a more exotic background. Peter Miller and I represented two extreme forms of her disapproval .

Perhaps you think that I am making Mrs Watson too much of an ogre: that I am too eager to dramatise my run-of -the-mill childhood troubles. Believe me, Mrs Watson would be a remarkable figure now: perhaps she was even then. She consistently mocked a girl who wore a hearing aid. She was brutal to Michael Coleman, who failed to live up to her ideals of manliness. He attended Nancy Robinson School of Dance in Streatham High Road, the only boy from Sunnyhill to do so. He preferred to spend playtime gossiping with the girls: Go out and play football with the boys! Mrs Watson would bellow. He became a principal dancer with the Royal Ballet.

Sunnyhill Schools catchment area was, in those days, mostly the domain of the least pretentious kind of middle class (a category that did not include my lot, of course) with a good sprinkling of working class, in days when such distinctions were reasonably clear, at least to grown-ups. There was one black boy in our class; he was universally popular. Even Mrs Watson tolerated him. My class had 45 pupils. Mrs Holland was our class teacher; she followed Mrs Watsons tastes but lacked her single-minded approach to the extortion of pain and misery.

Again, dont think I exaggerate. I remember an occasion when Peter Miller incurred Mrs Watsons displeasure, as he did on a regular basis, this time by running about on the tops of the desks. He was summoned to her room: he emerged with half a dozen weals across his calves. I remember the shock of seeing them: he had been beaten with genuine savagery. He was perhaps nine at the time, and seemed genuinely indifferent to it all. Perhaps he was used to far worse things. All the same, the stuff Mrs Watson got up to every week would be a newspaper scandal and a sacking offence today.

For her, humiliation was not a whim but an addiction. I remember the time Mr Gray denied her. I could sense the danger even then. He stood up to her at Assembly, in front of the whole school, in a manner Ill never forget; after all, it was me, among others, he was standing up for. It was his painful duty to report on an away match played by the school chess team, of which I was a member. The dozen of us were called to our feet before the whole school while Mr Gray delivered his match report. This was no pleasure. I had been beaten in three moves: the sequence known as Fools Mate. I wasnt alone: the same horrible fate befell three or four of us. Mr Gray explained that the team had been soundly beaten: but that it was all his fault. He should have taught us Fools Mate and how to guard against it. Mrs Watsons response was characteristic: Oh, show us the fools! she demanded, with great heartiness.

No, I wont do that, Mr Gray said. I think they all feel bad enough already. I could have kissed him. I certainly recognised a man of both courage and principle. He left soon after that. Mrs Watson was furious at this act of defiance: but then she was always furious: I am exceedingly angry, she would boast, most days, when she led Assembly. If she had an aim as a teacher beyond humiliation, it was teaching the recorder. She had a passionate belief that every child should play the damn things; it was the sole route to salvation. In sporadic pursuit of this principle , she would sometimes invade a classroom, interrupt a lesson and force everyone to start blowing. The problem here is that she was a dreadful teacher. I never understood what she was on about, and nor did many others: we were rendered deaf and blind through terror. But I was the one who incurred her wrath that day, and it was dreadful. Even now, as a grown-up, though I love early music, especially when played on period instruments, I still prefer a flute to a recorder.

It was a recorder lesson that won me promotion from considerable dislike to pure hatred, though I think promotion was always coming. The problem was that I didnt fit in. Nor did my two sisters. We werent a proper Streatham family, we had no roots there, we only landed there because we had been evicted by the Church of England. They needed our flat in Pimlico for their own purposes, and chucked out parents and three children between three and seven with a months notice. Streatham saved us, but it wasnt our place. It wasnt that we were rich. But my father had worked in the theatre and then in television; my mother was a writer and lecturer. So when it came to assimilation, I didnt have much going for me. I was hopeless at sport, undersized, from the wrong social class, and was rather too prone to seek refuge in tears.

When she came into the class with a box of recorders, I knew no good could come from it. We were each issued with one of these things instruments of torture rather than music and were shown how to play a sequence of notes. I was at the back of the class, couldnt hear, couldnt understand, so I faked it earnestly. But then came the time of judgement: each pupil was required to play the notes as a solo. Zo Wright and Susan Knight performed perfectly, because they already did the recorder. But soon, far too soon, it was my turn. I hadnt the remotest clue what to do. Under the terrifying eyes of Mrs Watson, I broke down. Tears overwhelmed me: tears of confusion and embarrassment and humiliation. Bad tactic. It led to a long lecture on the recorder, on failure, and the way to deal with failure. Having raised tears, Mrs Watson was eager to keep them flowing. She liked to spin things out. Eventually she concluded : what I should have said was Sorry, I cant manage it. Bobby Hawkes was the next one asked to play: Sorry, I cant manage it, he said. It was a betrayal. Or it felt like one: I cant really blame him for saving his own skin. So on around the class we went: one or two brave pupils essaying a few notes, most uttering the magic formula while, now apparently the sole failure, I sobbed harder and harder. This led to more and many hard words. At last the lesson ended. My humiliation was over.