Read Online My Natural History by Simon Barnes - Free Book Online Page B

to come to terms with an about-face in reality. We had to acknowledge an error in the way we saw the world. We had to accept failure: for hadn’t we all vowed that we would never return to straight society, that we would for ever live our lives by some sort of code that lay between Hermann Hesse and the Grateful Dead? I was caught between certainties. And, still groping for the meaning and understanding that I would have when I was on proper neighbourly terms with the wild world, I seemed to be cut adrift. Words I had howled a million times on stoned nights, words I had sometimes hummed boastfully to myself on solitary walks, words I had taken to myself as a proud affectation, now became uncomfortably packed with relevance. No direction home.
    These days I write for The Times , about sport as well as wildlife. Some of the letters I have received from readers over the years: well, they make me wonder. I mean, the letters from earnest young people all wanting to take up a job in sports journalism, just as I have. What should I do? they ask. How should I prepare for this great step? Youth for them seems to be nothing more than a preparation for a career: education merely a necessary step towards the attainment of a high salary. They send me their terrifyingCVs. They ask me what university course they should take. Should they read journalism? (God no, journalism is for doing, not studying, and besides, do you want to spend three years reading me, or Shakespeare? Work it out for yourself. You should educate yourself for the sake of education , not for the sake of a job.)
    Me, educated, at least up to a point, for the sake of education alone, well, I had a plan. I was not going to rejoin straight society. I was going to take on some salt-of- the-earth dignity-of-labour sort of job and write great works in my spare time. At various times, I worked in a butter factory, as a navvy, and in a cake factory, for strange as it seems, it was easy to get low-grade work in those days. Alas, I swiftly made the discovery that if you take on a full-time manual job, you are too knackered to write anything when you get home. It was also becoming obvious that I couldn’t do anything with any competence except write.
    So I went on the dole and wrote. I began to keep office hours, amazing myself and my visitors by repelling them until the hour of six. I started trying to write for money. At the same time, I began looking for full-time jobs in journalism . Having made this epic decision to rejoin straight society, I had a terrible shock. Straight society was no more keen on being joined than I was on joining it. It took months. I thought it would never happen, but in the end, I got an interview for a job on the Surrey Mirror . I dressedwith horror and care, in a suit unworn since my interview for university, and a tie, a garment I had vowed would never again hang from my neck. Once there, I explained why I had always wanted to be a journalist. I remembered not to say “because I can’t think of anything else”. “What is your fantasy of yourself as a journalist?” I was asked, as if this were a question of remarkable brilliance. I said I wanted to be a war correspondent: it seemed the sort of answer that would please. I got the job: a vista of horrors opened before me.
    In all this, I was supported and encouraged by Ruth. Ruth, tall and kind and lovely. She was going to stick by me. She was going to be a teacher: after a series of great adventures and tremendous travels, she too had decided that straight society was beckoning. The Surrey Mirror told me to start in July; Ruth then managed to get a place in a teacher training college in Streatham, of all places. I made a second trip to Surrey and managed to rent a room in a house. In this manner, we were launched together onto a grown-up world that didn’t really want us. We arrived at the house: I started work the following day. My life sentence was about to begin. I seemed to have nothing left