Only the Animals Read online

Not many people know this, but Leonard used a pet name for Virginia in private, learned from her siblings: Goat. Virginia’s nickname for her sister was Dolphin, and Virginia’s close friends were secretly delighted on receiving an animal moniker from her, for it was the ultimate sign of approval. Virginia had, as a girl, tended a small menagerie of her own that contained a mouse, a marmoset and a squirrel. Her very first published piece of writing was an obituary she wrote for the family’s beloved dog, and when I arrived in her life she was working intermittently on a biography of the dog Flush, a cocker spaniel owned by the nineteenth-century poetess Elizabeth Barrett. Flush had kept Elizabeth company through her years of being an invalid and accompanied her to Italy when she eloped with Robert Browning.

  Virginia liked to try out pieces from the book about Flush on me, for we quickly became close. She sensed that I didn’t like it when the tone veered towards the ironic, tongue-in-cheek style that humans seem to adopt automatically when writing from the perspective of an animal. It was a cheeky book, certainly, provocative even – it fit with her desire at the time to play with the conventions of traditional biography – but that didn’t mean it couldn’t also be moving. Virginia had some daddy issues, but similar to Alexandra’s, hers were of the best possible kind (the inspirational, the aspirational), for her father had edited the Dictionary of National Biography and he and her beautiful arty mother had always been surrounded by authors and artists. And now Virginia and Leonard were surrounded by their own most interesting contemporaries, painters and poets, and Virginia was on fire with curiosity and creativity.

  I was most impressed by the passages in Flush: A Biography in which Virginia attempted to understand at a sensory level what it might be like for a dog to experience the world through smell. This was probably due to my own similar hierarchy of senses, with smell right at the top. She wrote the sights of Florence like no writer ever has or ever will, by imagining how they might smell to Flush the dog:

  He slept in this hot patch of sun – how sun made the stone reek! he sought that tunnel of shade – how acid shade made the stone smell! He devoured whole bunches of ripe grapes largely because of their purple smell; he chewed and spat out whatever tough relic of goat or macaroni the Italian housewife had thrown from the balcony – goat and macaroni were raucous smells, crimson smells. He followed the swooning sweetness of incense into the violet intricacies of dark cathedrals; and, sniffing, tried to lap the gold on the window-stained tomb.

  When the book was published, a few years after I arrived in London, she took me with her on her little round of public and private readings and talks. She would start off by mentioning two Russian authors she admired, the usual duo of Gogol and Tolstoy, but then she’d lighten the serious atmosphere that settled on the room when she mentioned those venerable names by asking what these two men might have in common, other than being Russian authors of proximate generations. Both of them, she would say, dared to imagine themselves into the mind of an animal; both could at one stage find no way to say what they wanted to say except by making that animal speak for them. Then she would tell the anecdote about me, her Russian tortoise – sent to her by Tolstoy’s daughter, who had in fact recently escaped from Russia with her husband to settle in America – and how she often found herself wondering what stories I could tell about Tolstoy (she wasn’t aware he had died before I’d joined the family). Her audience would laugh, and the scene would be set very nicely for her to read out a passage from Flush: A Biography without it seeming completely ridiculous; in her clever way, she had cleared a little space for herself in history, aligned herself with the greats in taking this risk. And with a glance at me – a kind of tribute, I’d like to think – she would read out my favourite paragraph of the whole book, a moment that does justice to both the poet Elizabeth and her dog Flush by showing them as equals in their inability ever to fully understand each other: not so different then, from a biographer trying to get into the skin of her subject.

  As they gazed at each other each felt: Here am I – and then each felt: But how different! Hers was the pale worn face of an invalid, cut off from air, light, freedom. His was the warm ruddy face of a young animal; instinct with health and energy. Broken asunder, yet made in the same mould, could it be that each completed what was dormant in the other? She might have been – all that; and he – But no. Between them lay the widest gulf that can separate one being from another. She spoke. He was dumb. She was woman; he was dog. Thus closely united, thus immensely divided, they gazed at each other.

  Many times during my happy years with Virginia, I was grateful for the good fortune of having arrived on her doorstep and nobody else’s, for this was London in the 1930s and the pet tortoise craze was in full swing. Virginia followed the travesties of the tortoise trade as they were reported in the papers: millions of us imported each year from North Africa, arriving with broken limbs and shells from being packed into crates one on top of the other; a thousand dead spur-thighed tortoises discovered in baskets on the Barking foreshore. Hardly any that survived the journey made it through their first winter in Britain. Outside schools you could buy a baby tortoise and a goldfish for sixpence, and if they both died – as was likely – you could buy another pair the next week. In any local pub, you could find pet tortoises being forced to race across the billiard tables, and given a puddle of beer to drink at the end. At the other extreme, a live tortoise forgotten by a wealthy passenger on a Paris–London flight was discovered wrapped in pink cotton wool, with emeralds and rubies cruelly encrusted in its shell.

  But in Bloomsbury, during those years before the next war started, I was treated not as a mere pet, but as the worthy subject of great art and poetry. Tortoiseshell objects – hair combs, calling card boxes, the rare snuffbox – were banned in my presence, Virginia made sure of it. Tributes of poems were welcomed. More than one guest greeted me with D. H. Lawrence’s words about my species:

  On he goes, the little one,

  Bud of the universe,

  Pediment of life.

  And all that time I lived with her, I watched Virginia write, as the little dog Flush had watched Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s fingers forever crossing a white page with a straight stick, longing to blacken the paper with his paws.

  This lovely literary life with Virginia and the Bloomsbury Set was upended by the London Blitz. I mean this quite literally. One moment I was sunning myself in the Woolfs’ drawing room, the next I was buried in the rubble of their home after a bomb hit it while they were out. I felt very calm for the first day I spent hidden away in my shell in the darkness of the ruins. I thought about the card that the Woolfs had pinned to their gatepost, offering sanctuary to any animals and their owners left without a home after a raid, and the card pinned next to it stating that a tortoise lived in this home and would most likely be found in the drawing room in the event of a bomb hitting the house, so the rescue squad would know where to look. Virginia had taken a great interest in the training of the bomb-raid rescue-squad dogs, and I thought about them for a while, imagined them working away above me in that purposeful canine manner, knowing that a creature – me – was alive and waiting to be rescued from beneath the layers of debris. I knew Virginia would be desperate for them to dig me out, that she would haunt the site of her home until I was found, from the moment the all-clear had sounded until the next siren began to wail.

  Somehow in the bomb’s violence, the parrot that lived next door had ended up near me under the rubble, alive in its cage, saying over and over, ‘This is my night out! This is my night out! This is my night out!’ until it died. I began to feel weaker. I recalled that Virginia had told Leonard the morning before about the Nazis burning Swastikas into the backs of tortoises. Tolstoy’s words on my back ached a little, but I couldn’t tell if it was from residual pain or fresh shell trauma.

  What else did I think about while I was trapped beneath the rubble of the Woolfs’ London home, waiting for a mongrel rescue dog named Beauty to dig me out? I thought
of Virginia feeding me flower petals according to her mood and the emotional association that flower had accumulated over centuries: narcissus with egoism, dandelion with feelings of expansiveness, wormwood with bitterness, columbine with sadness, snapdragon with desire, water lily with indifference, and rose – of course – rose with love. I thought of her sitting with a copy of the French author Bataille’s new book open on her lap, reading his anti-sentimentalist essay ‘The Language of Flowers’: ‘For flowers do not age honestly like leaves, which lose nothing of their beauty, even after they have died; flowers wither like old and overly made-up dowagers, and they die ridiculously on stems that seemed to carry them to the clouds … love smells like death.’

  Love smells like death, that’s what I thought while I was buried in the rubble. I said my farewells to Virginia then, mourned losing her and mourned her loss of me. When she drowned herself five months later in the River Ouse, I did not mourn again. She left a note for Leonard, a love note that I’d watched her compose before she began to gather up stones from the garden of their country home in Rodmell, stones to put in her coat pockets.

  Tortoises All the Way Down

  In Virginia’s will, she asked that I be given to Eric Arthur Blair, who had published his account of living as a tramp in London and Paris (a book Virginia much admired) under the pen name of George Orwell to avoid embarrassing his respectable family. She had heard he tended a small menagerie on his family’s farm in Wallington, and she hoped I might be welcomed there, safe from the city bombs.

  I don’t have much to say about my time with George Orwell. I didn’t like him, and he didn’t like me. His menagerie consisted of a rooster called Henry Ford and a poodle named Marx and the two were usually locked in attempted mortal combat. I kept a low profile. During the war, his wife was away in London working in the Censorship Office, but George had been declared unfit for service due to injuries he sustained while fighting in the Spanish Civil War a few years earlier. He was principled, no doubt about it – deeply so, in fact, and one of the first to uncover and understand the evils of fascism – but that didn’t make him good company.

  I try now to take some pride in the fact that I observed George working on his masterpiece, Animal Farm: A Fairy Story, but in truth during that time I was depressed and not at all interested in what he was writing. I’ve heard he didn’t bother to put a tortoise in the book – not even a totalitarian tortoise! – which says much about his feelings towards me. Mainly what I remember of the war and my time with George is the surprisingly delicate smell of potato blossoms. George became obsessive about planting and tending his potato patches on the farm, doing his part ‘digging’ for the war effort, helped by a handful of exhausted Women’s Land Army girls who worked harder than any humans I’ve ever encountered, trying to keep the farms in the area productive in the absence of men, not stopping from five in the morning until midnight. The joke about the Land Girls was that even the cows could see how tired they were, and would jump up and down while being milked to make it easier for them. At one stage, George joined the Home Guard to train up younger men in the region, but he mishandled a mortar and quite severely wounded two of his trainees. After this he focused mainly on his potatoes and his writing, only to be told by most publishers that they couldn’t publish his animal fairy story because the Soviets were an important ally, and anybody could see that the book was a not so thinly veiled critique of the rise of Stalinism in the Soviet Union.

  Owning a pet tortoise seemed to strike George as a quasi-aristocratic thing to do, which he disliked, but one day after the war ended, soon after his animal fairy tale was published by a brave publisher and his poor wife had died, he must have thought it would be invigoratingly ironic to take me along on one of his tramping expeditions to London, perhaps because of Tolstoy’s words on my back. His tramping book, Down and Out in Paris and London, had been published many years before, the same year as Virginia’s Flush: A Biography, but George still got the urge to go slumming quite regularly, and since his wife’s death he had been a little unhinged. George always called himself Burton when he was in his tramp disguise. Burton had slummed around the poorer areas of England for years, sleeping in lodging houses, spending time out on the road and in the East End, working on hop farms in Kent, washing himself on the beach, deliberately trying to get arrested for being drunk so that he could write about spending Christmas in prison.

  So on this particular day, Burton – dressed in his tramp uniform of oversized unwashed clothes, and already coughing with the tuberculosis that would kill him, a believable hacking tramp’s cough – tucked me under his arm and took me to a public lecture on astronomy being given by the famous philosopher Bertrand Russell. Burton deliberately took a seat near the front, which had the effect of clearing the first two rows because of his carefully curated tramp odour. I sat on the seat beside him, embarrassed, until Mr Russell started his lecture and I fell into fascination with what he was describing: the moon orbiting the earth, our lowly earth in an orbit around the sun, and that sun itself spinning in its own orbit around the centre of the Milky Way galaxy. Smaller orbits nesting in bigger orbits nesting in enormous ones. It made my head ache with pleasure to think of it.

  At the end of the lecture, during the time for questions, Burton the tramp stood and swayed a bit, as if he were drunk. The audience went stiff and quiet, and Mr Russell looked as if he were bracing himself for unpleasantness.

  ‘None of this is true,’ Burton said loudly. ‘The four corners of the earth are held up by pillars on the shell of a massive tortoise!’

  Mr Russell, long-suffering philosopher that he was, had clearly heard this claim before. He decided to engage rather than ignore Burton. ‘Dare I ask what the tortoise is balancing on?’

  ‘Ah, good question, verrry good,’ Burton slurred purposefully. ‘But it’s tortoises all the way down.’

  ‘Yes, that’s what I feared,’ Mr Russell said with a sigh, and dismissed the audience.

  I wanted to disappear with shame. But it was thanks to Burton taking me along to hear those words about nested orbits that I first began to dream of seeing space.

  I ran away from Burton/George soon after that tramping episode, and did some long years of slumming myself, taking odd gigs and owners here and there to stay alive. For about ten years, I lived at a wildlife park in Wiltshire where the staff painted numbers on the shells of the resident tortoises. On Saturday mornings, the numbers of the first three tortoises that lumbered out of our shelter were recorded and used for the staff’s weekly bet on the horses, but apparently the famed oracular powers of tortoises leave much to be desired, for not once did any of the selected horses win. The staff didn’t paint a number on me because of my shell engraving, from which they wrongly assumed that my last owner had been one of the new breed of free-loving hippies who also loved many things, and all people. The food there was pretty decent and the other tortoises were tolerable, and I laid a few eggs, which kept me busy until the hatchlings left. But all along I knew I had another destiny waiting for me.

  One day I heard the staff at the wildlife park discussing the Cold War – a term I was familiar with, for good old George had coined it years before. Then the staff members started talking about the space race between the Soviets and the Americans: a race to put a human being on the moon, to prove once and for all which country was superior (and along the way to get as many spy satellites into orbit as possible). This was a contest of epic proportions, ancient in scope, really, for the spoils of victory were hugely symbolic and the humiliation for the loser was public and absolute. And who were the first proxy astronauts for each nation, while they frantically tried to make space travel safe for humans? Fruit flies and monkeys, dogs and frogs, mice and rabbits, rats and cats. And a guinea pig – most true to its name, used as a guinea pig.

  I knew immediately I had to present myself to the Americans or the Soviets – I didn’t care which – whoever would be prepared to put me in a rocket and fly me into space!
With this in mind, I slowly made my way back to London and headed for the only place I thought I might find both, or at least some communists: the theatre district. Once there, I was adopted by a young British playwright named Tom Stoppard, who was working away at a play where the main character, a philosopher, accidentally kills his pet tortoise by stepping heavily on him. And all along, the philosopher’s wife is watching, on television, two British astronauts land on the moon and fight about who will get the single space left on their crashed capsule to get back to earth. I interpreted this as a sign I was on the right track. Tom wasn’t sure how he wanted the audience to react to the death of the tortoise – big gasps as the mechanical tortoise broke apart, or guffaws? It was still a rather confusing play at that point, not yet ready for an audience.

  Tom had recognised the words on my back as being among Tolstoy’s last, and he took me with him to parties to show me off. At these gatherings, I tried to ingratiate myself with anybody wearing a black turtleneck, as previous experience had shown this often meant they were either American or communist, or both. One of Tom’s friends noticed this, and also noticed the intensity with which I listened to Tom experimenting aloud with his fake television scenes of men on the moon for his play-in-progress, and he did me a great favour. He asked another friend, a London-based communist about to leave on a guided tour of the USSR, to take me with him and present me to the Soviet Space Program as a gift to break the ice (Tolstoy’s words on my back would either help or hinder my chances, they weren’t quite sure which). Tom’s friend thought the Soviets had a better chance of getting a man on the moon – and in the interim, a tortoise – than the Americans; the Soviets had, after all, won the first heat of the race by putting Yuri Gagarin into orbit around the earth in the early spring of 1961.

  Deedle Dum Dum

  The ploy worked. The Soviets were sending animals into space like there was no tomorrow (which, for the animals, there mostly wasn’t), desperate to finalise their research on the viability of manned space flight and the effects on living creatures of prolonged weightlessness and radiation from the Van Allen belts, and get a man on the moon before the Americans. They’d heard rumours that the Americans had sent a bunch of black mice into space and the cosmic rays had turned them grey; this would be undesirable in humans.