We’ll call it the Coral Island, after one of the earliest and favourite books my parents gave me. I can’t now remember how old I was, maybe five or six…Maybe it was for my birthday, as books appeared then or at Christmas. I would look at the beautiful coloured cover illustration of the fabled island of the R M Ballantyne story, and possibly that island in a tropical ocean was as real to me as my family and the everyday world around me. It was a key event in my life, both that book and the few others I read at the time.
Because without knowing what fiction or the novel or storytelling are, they became my real inner life, maybe more real to me and more important than anything else. Maybe it was the magical doorway into a happier world, an escape not only from what was unpleasant and hard in the everyday world, but an escape from myself. Sense of self shifted as I felt myself present on that hot sandy island amid those marvellous landscapes and characters…. So at maybe five years old the wonderful illustrations that formed the larger part of the very earliest books my parents were so kind as to give me, and then progressively as the written word became my portal to the life of the mind and the imagination, the simple childish stories that I fed on, all of this primed me so that at secondary school much later, when the teacher first read aloud from Shakespeare or especially Wordsworth’s short lyric poems, my mind was like dried and bleached driftwood on the shore, ready to ignite and flare into life.
“My heart leaps up when I behold a rainbow in the sky”, the teacher recited, and the words struck home and I knew exactly what that man who wrote it meant, though I would only experience that same sense in nature consciously many years later. For me, as for the young poet, all in childhood was felt, experienced, almost unconsciously, without the words, but with great feeling. Words therefore, and conscious thought, carried and developed ideas, and were a marvellous code and gateway to worlds and experiences unknown to me.They became more important than the everyday world, they were more real to me, better and truer realities.
Writers and poets were the most important people in the world, with magical powers of creation, and they knew things ordinary people either didn’t, or weren’t prepared to talk about. And by this great detour through my life, I reach my childhood dream island, but now a reality I’m newly visiting. In fact, it’s a lie. It’s not a coral island, it’s an island that has coral reefs, a different thing. I’m in a house in a clearing of a rubber forest, small farm fields, and steep jungle clad mountain sides. A Great Egret or two are regulars in the farmer’s field next door, as the cattle are there. And first thing of a morning a probable white-tailed Sea Eagle on high, crossing the island’s only mountain. And all morning a beautiful Emerald Moth has attached itself to the bright white house wall across from me on the veranda. Its beauty serves the purpose of disguise,to blend among green leaves and avoid predators. It’s definitely not hiding right now. I walked up the hill on the dried red clay track and through the woods to the house.
I heard the bird-like noise first, and then recalled that sound…. a small Macaquemonkey up above in the trees. And it was looking down at me. I’m told that earlier they’d had to be chased off the veranda of the bungalow we were staying at. They will take away any object, food or otherwise, and have a wrecking effect on plants in garden or farm.Suddenly a huge explosion …. the farmer is shooting to frighten and drive them away. Sunset is six-fifteen pm or thereabouts all year round. Walk to the beach and you may see a glorious setting sun out west on the Andaman Sea and its dramatic scattered islands. The horizon is flooded by a river of red light; expressionist shots of cloud serve as highlight effects. And the ocean glitters brightly just before the sudden dark and onset of night… heat suffused hush stills time. All light and colour have ceased.
Colourless jungle forest on the once green mountainside…. Then a huge churring sound of cicadas and grasshoppers, always at dusk as they seem to chorus the setting sun and oncoming night… their romantic song swells and fades into night… Evening on a veranda…chilled beer. One massive downpour for a half hour…. it’d been threatening for a while…the dry earth will drink what it can…soon you’d see it so dry it might never have rained…desert-like. A huge array of stars appears in the jet-black sky…even I learn to recognise the Orion Nebula, changing position momently as on earth we turn again, racing to the next day.
I walked the forest path then the steep stepped descending path through thick jungle and I’m on an ideal beach. Smooth sand revealed by the tide, a calm and clear sea ready for the swimmer. A beautiful sunny morning already beyond hot, but a welcome breeze to shoreward freshens the humid air. I enjoyed my swim. Then two Thai men arecasting small nets from the beach, and around me a glittering dark shadow on the water. I was in a vast shoal of small fish, translucent green and two or three inches long… I was in a clear bubble they left around me, leaving me be, as they flashed bright in breaking the surface. A sight to see…when a shoal becomes too dense, fish are flung into the air and briefly fly.
Walking shoreward within feet of the water’s edge, suddenly gliding below me a large beautiful shining fish, a shimmer of red at its centre, slowly moving along, fragmenting the liquid. Maybe a Snapper or Grouper, ten inches or so long. Seen before only bronzing on the barbecue, succulent flesh cooked and flaked… Sunflowers are blooming… the seeds start quickly here…a patch of Van Gogh colour and light …A beautiful morning second coffee on the veranda. Look above the mountain for sea eagles’ shapes… The Kingfisher was on his perch on the tall dead tree in the neighbour’s field where cows are kept. The young farmer will lead parents and calf a few yards to a different grazing patch of forest by the track A Great Egret watches over them…nightfall.
