Jane Goodall, page 7
Rusty would often stay at The Birches, sometimes all day long, returning to the San Remo Hotel perhaps for a quick dinner in the evenings and then coming back to the big house and garden and staying until bedtime. He learned tricks quickly, responding to affection as his main reward—both the usual tricks, such as “die for the king,” and the unusual ones, such as jumping through a hoop and climbing a ladder. He played games, was pushed around in a wheelbarrow, found an object hidden while he was blindfolded, ran through an obstacle course in the garden. And he loved wearing clothes; V.J. would sometimes put him in pajamas and push him around town in an old pram. And yet the dog hated being laughed at. If someone found him too amusing, he would quit the game immediately and walk away, dragging the clothes along behind.
So Rusty learned a lot from the girl who lived across the way from the hotel, but she also learned from him, as she later wrote, “so much about animal behavior, lessons I have remembered all my life.” She learned that a dog can think about absent objects. With Rusty at her side, V.J. would throw a ball from an upstairs window into the garden. He would watch where it landed, then turn around, bark until she opened the door to the room, scramble downstairs, bark until someone opened the door to the outside, and go into the garden and find the ball instantly. Rusty was also “the only dog I have ever known who seemed to have a sense of justice.” If he did something clearly bad that made the girl appropriately angry or irritated, he would humbly seek forgiveness, rolling onto his back with a submissive grin. But if she became angry or irritated unreasonably, in ways not fully consistent with her usual behavior, he would become visibly upset. For instance, V.J. taught him how to shut a door on command, but one time, when his paws were very muddy, Rusty shut the door without being told to, thereby making a muddy mess. The dog may have felt that V.J.’s quick response—“Bad dog!”—was unfairly inconsistent. He stared at her for a few moments and then walked over to face the wall, nose almost touching it, and refused to move. Only gradually did he respond to her abject apologies.
This child of the trees was a dreamy child, an expansive fantasizer, and she soon harnessed her mind to the wings of language, spoken and written. She started her formal education when she was six years old, in 1940, attending a small school in Bournemouth known as St. Christopher’s. Her first teacher was Phyllis Hillbrook, a family friend who came to The Birches for a weekly game of bridge and was called Aunt Phylly.
V.J. was too active and inspired to enjoy the indoor disciplines of any school perfectly, but she adored her teacher. Within a few months, though, Vanne became concerned about Aunt Phylly’s reports that the girl was not advancing normally, did not seem to be learning her letters and words as the other students were, was still not moving past the cat-sat-on-the-mat level of competence. But Vanne’s growing worries about those reports turned to astonishment when she observed her daughter’s behavior at home. One evening after V.J. had gone to bed, Vanne stood “with absolute amazement” outside the open door of her bedroom. “She was reading away as fast as she could read.” So Vanne went in and said, “You can read after all!”
“Yes, I could read a long time ago.”
“Why on earth have you pretended?”
“You see, if I could read, I would have to leave Auntie Phylly’s class. And I’m never going to leave her class, ever.”
Vanne laughed. “When you’re twelve, you’ll still be reading ‘D-O-G spells cat’?”
But the girl was, as she admitted many years later, “not at all keen on going to school. I dreamed about nature, animals, and the magic of far-off places. Our house was filled with book-shelves and the books spilled out onto the floor. When it was wet and cold, I would curl up in the chair by the fire and lose myself in other worlds.” Before she could read, she listened to her mother reading such children’s classics as At the Back of the North Wind, the Peter Rabbit series, The Secret Garden, The Wind in the Willows—and also Stella Mead’s The Land of Never-Grow-Up (a Christmas present in 1937), Agnes Giberne’s Among the Stars: Or, Wonderful Things in the Sky (from Olly in 1940), and passages from Harold Wheeler’s The Miracle of Life (which Danny acquired with cereal coupons and presented as a gift in 1939). The latter volume, a rather encyclopedic collection of experts’ essays on biology for young readers, proved to be one of her greatest treasures, and V.J. returned to it again and again as she grew older—always intrigued by the frontispiece illustration of a white-jacketed scientist squinting into a microscope.
But perhaps her very favorite reading from those early years was the Doctor Dolittle books, written by Hugh Lofting. The original of the series, The Story of Doctor Dolittle, she borrowed from the local library in November 1942. “I read it all the way through,” she later wrote. “Then I read it through again. I had never before loved a book so much. I read it a third time before it had to go back—I finished it under the bedclothes with a flashlight after Mum had turned off the light.” Danny gave the book to her that Christmas.
From the first, the fantasy of Doctor Dolittle powerfully expressed this child’s ecstatic identification with animals and nature. The good physician kept an entire houseful of pets. “Besides the goldfish in the pond at the bottom of his garden, he had rabbits in the pantry, white mice in his piano, a squirrel in the linen closet, and a hedgehog in the cellar. He had a cow with a calf too and an old lame horse—twenty-five years of age—and chickens and pigeons and two lambs and many other animals. But his favourite pets were Dab-Dab, the duck; Jip, the dog; Gub-Gub the baby pig; Polynesia, the parrot; and the owl, Too-Too.” Doctor Dolittle loved animals so intensely that finally Polynesia taught him to speak and understand animal language, a skill that in turn enabled him to succeed as a veterinarian. As soon as the animals realized that he was conversant in their language, they would simply explain what the trouble was, and he would treat them. Doctor Dolittle’s reputation as a great empathic veterinarian eventually led him to Africa, where the monkeys had all started dying from a horrible illness. He was too poor to buy tickets to Africa, but a sailor finally lent him a boat, on which he sailed with his friends (crocodile, monkey, parrot, duck, pig, owl, and a white mouse stowaway) for six long weeks over the waves until at last they crashed into Africa.
Eventually V.J. read the entire series. She also loved to read about the adventures of Mowgli in Kipling’s The Jungle Book. And soon she graduated to the longer, denser adventure series written by Edgar Rice Burroughs and starring Tarzan of the Apes, the lost son of English aristocrats raised in the African “jungle” by an ape mother. V.J. loved to read by the fire in cold, wet weather. And in warmer, drier weather, she would often take a rug, a blanket, snacks, and a favorite book up to the top branches of Beech. “I think I went through all the Tarzan books thirty feet or so above the ground,” she later recalled. “I was madly in love with the Lord of the Jungle, terribly jealous of his Jane.”
That all her fictional idols were male was not a matter of her own sexual identity but a reflection of the paucity of good adventure fantasies featuring girls and women. (“I dreamed I was a man, you see,” she once told me. “All my dreams, I was a man. In my dreams I did male things. That doesn’t stop you being feminine.”) Like Doctor Dolittle, Tarzan lived in a special intimacy with nature and animals, and daydreaming about Tarzan’s life with the apes of the forests led directly to the young girl’s determination to go to Africa. It was a romantic, fantastic vision—but soon enough everyone in the family, as well as Sally and Sue Cary, had come to consider it as an established fact that V.J. would someday leave them to go to the forests of Africa. Sue remembers, “She always said that was what she wanted to do, so we always fully believed her.”
The Doctor Dolittle and Tarzan series were books of her childhood. By the time she was sixteen and seventeen, she had moved on to Agatha Christie’s whodunits, Jeffrey Farnol’s romantic bestsellers, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Mark Twain’s The Prince and the Pauper, W. H. Hudson’s Green Mansions, Shakespeare’s plays, and so on. But even at that age she periodically returned to the visions of her earlier years. Among the 129 books she read in 1951, according to a master list at the back of her diary for that year, were seven Tarzans and all ten of the Doctor Dolittle books she still kept in her bookcase.
She also began reading poetry—Rubert Brooke, Walter de la Mare, Alfred Noyes, Wilfred Owen, and Francis Thompson, as well as Browning, Keats, Milton, Shakespeare, and Shelley. Many of those luminaries were her “squidgy poets,” as she used to say, whose bumpy or squidgy-feeling leather-bound volumes she discovered in the basement of Arturo’s used-book shop in the Westbourne Arcade, halfway between school and home.
She was scribbling letters and words and organizing them into sentences by 1941. She may have written her first story, “The Silly Giraffe” (concerning the tribulations of a gullible giraffe with a gargantuan gullet, a neck so long it reached to the moon), as early as 1941. And by February 16, 1942, she was literate enough to scrawl in pencil her first letter home, composed during a visit to Danny Nutt at the Manor Mouse:
Darling Mummy
the day befor yestoday Mr and Misis Spens broght a big dog called Jacky who is going to live here untill Uncle Micel come back. I dont know how to spell that word. Yestoday Danny Nutt gave me two china dogs and I call them Trouble and Terry. Jublee has got a new dress. I have got a birds nest and a catepiler in a box of calaig leaves. Now I will drow a pictuer of him.
Today I found a ded rook he died of cold. I hop you can read this letter. I had a bold egg for my tea, new bread and real butter. When I went to tea Gremlin came and he stad all night till Gras came with the tea. Mouse sends you her love and a lik. Kincin is giving you his best bone. Jacky and Trouble send you a lik and the Hen’s send you a cluck. Eevry body sends you there love.
with lots and lots of love from
V.J.
After she left her first school, St. Christopher’s, in the fall of 1943, the child entered a Parents’ National Educational Union (or PNEU) school in West Bournemouth, where, according to her first teacher’s report on December 21, 1943, “V.J. has applied herself to the new work. Her progress has been very satisfactory.”
Her progress continued to be very satisfactory, although an evaluation in the summer of 1944 faulted her otherwise “very good” English essays for being, alas, much “too long” for a little girl of ten years. But she wrote long, and she wrote often, pouring out her thoughts and feelings and the minutiae of her life in letters, diaries, special journals, stories, and poems. In her letters, as she got older, she occasionally experimented with an ironic, high-romantic style; and once, after accidentally jabbing her finger with the nib of her pen, she experimented with the drama of writing in her own blood. She wrote poems, some of them light (such as “Blue Bottom,” an ode to a mandrill), some adolescent (as in the one beginning with “A mangled heap of rotting flesh”), and others more interesting and serious. One of her childhood fantasies, she later admitted, was to become England’s poet laureate.
Soon after the war began, Sally and Sue regularly went to stay at The Birches during holidays and summers. They became “just part of the family,” as Judy recalls. V.J. would invite them to visit, and everyone else would agree. As the invitation was expressed in a November 1945 letter to Sally, “You must, must, must, must, must, must, must, must, must, must, MUST, come and stay with us this hols. My Ma has written to your Ma to ask if you can, so do write and tell me that you can.”
Sometimes Sally and Sue appeared with both their parents, more often with just their mother, but later on the two girls typically came on their own. Their father, Byron, would put them on a train and give a half-crown to the train guard, and then the two girls would ride in great excitement to Bournemouth, leaning out the open windows and letting the train’s smoke and grit blow into their faces and eyes. When they arrived, Jane and Judy would be running along the platform to greet them. “It always seemed so sort of free and happy at The Birches,” Sally once told me. “We would laugh and have jokes and do funny things. Everything we did seemed to turn out well. It completely changed my childhood, I should think, to be able to go there and be so free.”
For at least two summers, in 1942 and 1944, the four girls spent a few weeks together at the beach. The long beach at Bournemouth was off-limits and barricaded against a Nazi invasion, but Vanne discovered a smaller, more obscure beach farther up the coast, at Studland (near Swanage), which was not blocked off. She was able to rent a small cottage for herself, V.J., and Judy, while Daphne and her two daughters took a room in a small hotel nearby. The four friends thus could play together all day: bathing in the ocean, collecting seashells, flowers, and blackberries, spying on farm animals, and so on. V.J.’s 1942 diary describes some of those idyllic days at Studland, including the time the girls visited some pigs and sheep:
July 28. We whent on the bech in the morning and I had my first swim on Sally’s rubber-ring then we whent home to lunch then we whent on the beach. But on the way we brout a ruber ring and had my first liy on my back with my leg’s kicking it was luvly we came home earlier than Sally and Soue and after tea we whent to the animal field to see them. First of all we hunted for the horse for we had got a carot each for him but we could not find him so we gave them to the pigs. I gave mine to a black one and Judy gave hers to a pink one after that the pigs began to sniff at us then we whent to see the herds. We were walking along when we saw a hen in the road and anuther flew oper the fence and mummy had to pick them up and put them back. Just then the pig’s came out of the barbed wire and went along the road till they came to an empty I don’t now what . . . [and] when they discuved it was empty they went back through the barbed wire all but one and he ran off down the road becose because he could not find the hole in the barbed wire but just then a lady came and chased him to the gate and pushed him in then I put my hand over the sheep fence and touched one then just as we wher going home we saw a lady peding the sheep and I stroked one and it felt lovly.
Since V.J. was the oldest of this quartet—Sally was more than fourteen months younger, Sue and Judy some four years younger—she became the leader and instigator, the one with the most passionate conviction about what to do and how to do it. “Mostly,” recalls Judy, “I was quite happy to trot along and do what I was told. She was bossy, yes, but she did have good ideas and she did organize fun things. Occasionally I’d say, ‘No,’ and then she was very puzzled.”
V.J., in fact, was full of positive energy. “She’d be up before breakfast, long before anybody else,” Vanne once told me. “Down into the garden checking a spider’s web or checking a beetle, checking anything.” And she was typically very focused. “Everything she did,” Sally remembers, “she went at it wholeheartedly. And everything was fun. Polishing the brass: normally that’s a job that everybody hated doing. The heart would sink. But when we were doing it with her, it was all good fun, and we all enjoyed it. And the brass would be polished. And she’d say, ‘Isn’t that super?’ Everything looked so lovely and sparkling.”
No one could afford a bicycle, and so the girls had footraces around the block, rode the bus a lot (and surreptitiously turned the handle of the destination scroll), and went for long walks every day. In very hot weather they might take their shirts off, and V.J. would spray everyone with cold water from the hose. When they got tired of that, they could change into dry clothes, hide in the branches of a tree next to the hedge, and hose down unsuspecting people walking along the street. Rain and gloomy skies sent them into the hut or inside the house to the playroom, where they might all write or scribble in their diaries. They played marbles and assembled jigsaw puzzles. They chatted and planned. In the middle of the room was a table covered with a cloth big enough to hang down almost to the floor, and in the evening they sometimes turned off the lights and played bears underneath the table. Sometimes they made the whole house dark and then rushed around and tried to scare people. Other times they hauled a big mattress down to the bottom of the main stairs and jumped on it endlessly. They telephoned a man named Smelly, who afterward managed to trace the call. And they practiced and performed plays, usually ones that V.J. made up, such as Handsome Prince Peter and Princess Charming and The Farmer and the Pink Pig (with Sue dressed up in pink underwear to play the part of the pig).
Probably in the spring of 1946, twelve-year-old V.J. organized a nature club called the Alligator Club. Each member was required to take an animal name. V.J., as founder and leader, named herself after a beautiful butterfly, the Red Admiral. Sally, next in age, decided she would be Puffin. Sue chose Ladybird, and Judy, the youngest, became Trout. (In later years, the Alligator Club membership occasionally expanded to include Sally and Sue’s little brother, Robert, who, possibly as a penalty for being much younger and a boy, was christened Cobra.) When club business necessitated a walk somewhere, the four members would assemble in order of rank and seniority, with Red Admiral at the head and Puffin, Ladybird, and Trout bringing up the tail, thereby forming an eight-legged ambulating alligator.
A clearing under pine trees near the bottom of the garden became the Alligator Camp, where the girls constructed a fire circle, dragged in some logs to sit on, collected firewood from the cliffs, and stored all their camping essentials (ceramic mugs, tins of cocoa and tea, and a spoon) inside an old trunk. And when Sue and Sally came to The Birches, the club would organize a secret midnight feast. During the day the Alligators hid bits of food from the kitchen, and then at night they gathered their food together and crept out into the garden, dancing around in great whispering excitement and then quieting down to listen to a mysterious rustling of leaves, quarter-hour chimes from the old church clock, and the soft low hooting of the brown owl deep in the murk of the next-door willow. They then cooked up their feast in a camper’s pot (“billy can”) over a small fire and tried to build an actual campfire.
