Read Online Turtle Diary by Russell Hoban - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Russell Hoban
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childhood is the one I call my Caister two-stone. It’s an amalgam of two different kinds of material, half grey and half brown.
My father took me to the Caister Lifeboat Station once. There was no boathouse like the one that’s there now, the boat, the
Charles Burton,
was on skeets on the sand. It had saved seven lives that year. One of the vessels the Caister men had helped was the
Corn Rig
of Buckie. ‘Rendered assistance’ was the expression used. ‘We rendered assistance to the
Corn Rig
of Buckie,’ said the brown-faced man my father was talking to. It had a gallant sound like a line in a narrative poem. My father said to me afterwards that Caister men never turn back. ‘They may die, they may drown, but they never turn back,’ he said wonderingly and shook his head. His words and the words of the other man have stayed together in my mind:
We rendered assistance to the
Corn Rig
of Buckie,
We may die, we may drown, but we never turn back.
As if to reprove the Caister men for their obstinate courage the Royal National Lifeboat Institution took away their boat and shut down the station several years ago, economizing the service. The Caister men of course got themselves another boat and carry on unofficially. The stone is on my desk and I handle it often.
This preoccupation with the turtles, this project that insists onforming itself in my mind, wants to be seen in its proper light. I have got to try to understand it a little better. Not perhaps entirely, I’m not given to examining too closely the actions that really matter. I can deliberate long over a dinner-party invitation, considering carefully every aspect of the occasion and what it will cost me in time and equilibrium but when the venture is crucial I simply trust to luck and plunge into the dark. And even now at the age of forty-three I still can’t say whether I’ve been lucky or unlucky. Sometimes it looks one way and sometimes the other.
On reflection I really don’t want to understand it better. It may be silly and wrong and useless, it may be anything at all but it seems to be a thing that I have to do before I can do whatever comes after it. That it seems to involve other people is inevitable, everything does in one way or another.
I went to the bookshop. The man and I said hello to each other and I went to the Natural History section where I turned the pages of books without looking at them. My heart was pounding somewhat and I found myself mentally rehearsing what I would say. I always do that, I can’t help it. Even when I go to the Post Office I say in my mind before I reach the window, ‘Twenty stamps at 3p, please.’ Then I say it aloud at the window. ‘I wonder if you too are thinking about the turtles?’ I would say. Or ‘Perhaps we had better discuss the turtles?’ I cursed him for not being man enough to speak up and broach the subject when it loomed so large and visible between us.
I became aware that he was standing near me emanating silence and in my mind I cursed him again. ‘The turtles …’ I blurted out.
‘The turtles …’ he mumbled at the same time. We both laughed.
‘It’s almost lunch-time,’ he said. ‘Perhaps we could talk about it then. Can you wait a few minutes?’
I nodded and went to the Poetry section, opened A. E. Housman at random and read:
The world is round, so travellers tell,
And straight though reach the track,
Trudge on, trudge on, ‘twill all be well,
The way will guide one back.
But ere the circle homeward hies
Far, far must it remove:
White in the moon the long road lies
That leads me from my love.
It was James Haylett of Caister who first said that Caister men never turn back. He was a lifeboatman for fifty-nine years, and at the age of seventy-eight he went into the surf and pulled out his son-in-law and one of his grandsons from under the lifeboat
Beauchamp
the night it capsized in November, 1901. At the inquiry it was suggested that the
Beauchamp,
which had gone to the
My father took me to the Caister Lifeboat Station once. There was no boathouse like the one that’s there now, the boat, the
Charles Burton,
was on skeets on the sand. It had saved seven lives that year. One of the vessels the Caister men had helped was the
Corn Rig
of Buckie. ‘Rendered assistance’ was the expression used. ‘We rendered assistance to the
Corn Rig
of Buckie,’ said the brown-faced man my father was talking to. It had a gallant sound like a line in a narrative poem. My father said to me afterwards that Caister men never turn back. ‘They may die, they may drown, but they never turn back,’ he said wonderingly and shook his head. His words and the words of the other man have stayed together in my mind:
We rendered assistance to the
Corn Rig
of Buckie,
We may die, we may drown, but we never turn back.
As if to reprove the Caister men for their obstinate courage the Royal National Lifeboat Institution took away their boat and shut down the station several years ago, economizing the service. The Caister men of course got themselves another boat and carry on unofficially. The stone is on my desk and I handle it often.
This preoccupation with the turtles, this project that insists onforming itself in my mind, wants to be seen in its proper light. I have got to try to understand it a little better. Not perhaps entirely, I’m not given to examining too closely the actions that really matter. I can deliberate long over a dinner-party invitation, considering carefully every aspect of the occasion and what it will cost me in time and equilibrium but when the venture is crucial I simply trust to luck and plunge into the dark. And even now at the age of forty-three I still can’t say whether I’ve been lucky or unlucky. Sometimes it looks one way and sometimes the other.
On reflection I really don’t want to understand it better. It may be silly and wrong and useless, it may be anything at all but it seems to be a thing that I have to do before I can do whatever comes after it. That it seems to involve other people is inevitable, everything does in one way or another.
I went to the bookshop. The man and I said hello to each other and I went to the Natural History section where I turned the pages of books without looking at them. My heart was pounding somewhat and I found myself mentally rehearsing what I would say. I always do that, I can’t help it. Even when I go to the Post Office I say in my mind before I reach the window, ‘Twenty stamps at 3p, please.’ Then I say it aloud at the window. ‘I wonder if you too are thinking about the turtles?’ I would say. Or ‘Perhaps we had better discuss the turtles?’ I cursed him for not being man enough to speak up and broach the subject when it loomed so large and visible between us.
I became aware that he was standing near me emanating silence and in my mind I cursed him again. ‘The turtles …’ I blurted out.
‘The turtles …’ he mumbled at the same time. We both laughed.
‘It’s almost lunch-time,’ he said. ‘Perhaps we could talk about it then. Can you wait a few minutes?’
I nodded and went to the Poetry section, opened A. E. Housman at random and read:
The world is round, so travellers tell,
And straight though reach the track,
Trudge on, trudge on, ‘twill all be well,
The way will guide one back.
But ere the circle homeward hies
Far, far must it remove:
White in the moon the long road lies
That leads me from my love.
It was James Haylett of Caister who first said that Caister men never turn back. He was a lifeboatman for fifty-nine years, and at the age of seventy-eight he went into the surf and pulled out his son-in-law and one of his grandsons from under the lifeboat
Beauchamp
the night it capsized in November, 1901. At the inquiry it was suggested that the
Beauchamp,
which had gone to the
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