sheltered by the canopy) the heavens opened and my world was full of rain. I’d seen rain before, of course, but now it took on a whole new significance. It danced on the leaf tops, made the forest floor jump and jive, and created enough noise to drown out almost every other sound. It provided a ready source of water for me, creating a small pool from which I could drink, and soaked through my heavy matted hair and ran in urgent streams down my limbs. It felt almost magical: a fierce and cleansing force.
But apart from that marker, I really was losing all sense of time – of the hours and the days and the weeks and how to measure them. What I remember most clearly from that period is the feeling of incredible loneliness, the like of which I never hope to feel again. As the monkeys were the only jungle animals that didn’t scare me, it was perhaps natural that I felt drawn to them. They seemed so like me that I felt a need to try to understand them better.
Doing so didn’t just involve watching them. It involved listening as well. They communicated with one another using a great number of different noises and, starved of human contact (particularly the comfort of human voices), I would sit and listen avidly to these sounds.
I was also starved of the opportunity to speak and somehow communicating through my voice was a powerful and instinctive need. At first I imitated the noises the monkeys made for my own amusement, though probably also for the comfort of hearing the sound of my own voice. But I soon realised that sometimes a monkey – or several monkeys – would respond, as if we were having a conversation. This galvanised me. It felt like I had been taken notice of, finally. So I practised and practised the sounds that they made, always desperate to get a reaction.
It’s impossible to represent monkey-speech using letters, and it’s extremely difficult to reproduce, too. Even with my high-pitched little girl’s voice, there were some sounds I wasn’t physically able to copy. I do, however, remember the first sound I seemed to be able to imitate was one they made often – a warning call. It was a kind of guttural scream – a loud, urgent noise. Which it needed to be – it had to alert the whole troop. And it soon became clear that they made this call often. They were constantly alert, constantly on the lookout, vigilant all the time in case of anything abnormal, and reporting almost anything that moved or entered their territory. They had a particular stance that went with this as well. They’d pull a face – a sort of open–mouthed stare – before they did it and would rise up on their hind legs, almost on tiptoes. Then they’d start by making low sounds, presumably while assessing the level of threat. Then, once they’d identified an intruder and deemed it threatening, they’d move on to screeching, often swinging their heads from side to side. They were no different from children – or any human, really – in that, the scarier the threat was, the louder they’d scream at all the others.
If the danger was immediate, the call would be even higher – a sharp, high-pitched scream, which was usually accompanied by them slapping their hands on the ground. When this happened, the rest of the monkeys would join in, and they’d all scamper up to the safety of the canopy, leaving me (now I’d learned what the calls were about) scared and panicky as I rushed about trying to find a place of safety on the ground.
But I quickly learned that I didn’t always need to be frightened. Perhaps because I was such a small child myself, I soon picked up on the fact that the little ones in the family would make the ‘immediate danger’ call just for the fun of it, and that the adults seemed to know when to ignore them. That too was a comfort in those early days.
Less comforting would have been to know that I would be there so long that I would have time to learn the meaning of almost every monkey sound. If I had known that then, perhaps I would have died of despair. But thankfully I didn’t. Every day dawned with at least a thread of hope to cling to, and, fragile as it was, that was enough to keep me going.
*
After my first night-time brush with what I’d thought might be a snake, I was terrified of encountering another. But my fear very quickly abated. Snakes were actually among the most timid of the jungle creatures. They liked to do what they did without anyone noticing them. Though I had always been afraid of them, thinking they wanted nothing more than to bite me, I soon realised they didn’t even like to be seen. Most of them had markings that made them blend into the background – looking like the leaf litter on the forest floor, or the bark of the trees – and they seemed altogether more scared than I was. The smallest noise would send them anxiously slithering away for cover, and, watching the monkeys, I learned to whistle whenever I saw one, which would invariably send them on their way.
Timid too, were the spiders, which were almost all huge and hairy. If I’d seen one in my bedroom at home I would have been sobbing in terror, but in the jungle they were so different – so sweet and so shy. I found them fascinating and would watch them for ages, wanting to reach out and stroke their lovely silky legs. I’d watch how they’d scuttle into little hidey holes if you dared to come near them, then look out at you, their little black button eyes peeking out, as if pleading ‘Please, please don’t hurt me!’ It wasn’t long before I thought them really cute. I still do.
Not that they were completely defenceless. Within a very short period of time I learned that it was silly to tease them. I would sit for ages watching them go about their business, just as any small child with time on their hands would do. If you watched for long enough, you could begin to learn which spider lived where, and I soon got to know the location of all their little ‘houses’.
They were very private, of course, and there were periods when they’d all be inside and nothing much would be happening. So after a time, anxious for action, I would get myself a stick and try to tease up the little ‘lids’ that formed the entrances. Understandably, this made them very cross. They’d come bustling out to see who was interfering with their front door, and I noticed they’d often stop and shake their furry bodies, much like a wet dog would do. One day I also noticed that after just such an episode of irritation, the spider in question, having shaken itself, seemed to have a little cloud of something rising from its body.
It wasn’t water. It took the form of tiny particles that looked like dust and I soon realised this must have been the source of the painful stinging and itching that I suffered afterwards.
Not all the lessons I learned in those early days were about the world around me – some were about me, and the day-to-day business of taking care of myself. I was a little girl of not quite five. I was used to being looked after. Used to my mummy helping me to dress and undress, to wash myself, clean my teeth and brush my hair.
All these daily rituals were now gone. My pretty cotton dress was ripped and filthy, and within days I had no choice but to discard my white knickers, as the elastic around the waist had snapped and they kept falling down. And though not being made to wash or having a comb forced through my hair was no hardship, going to the toilet and cleaning myself afterwards became something quite distressing.
Again, I watched the monkeys for clues about what to do. They would go to the toilet whenever and wherever they felt the need. If they were high above me in the canopy, their poo would simply rain down onto the forest floor, or have its progress halted by the undergrowth. On one occasion I saw a dollop of it land on a fat, tufty fungus, which immediately responded by puffing out a big spore cloud, as if to let me know it was fed up.
If the monkeys were on the ground themselves, they would bury what they’d done by covering it with earth or moss and leaves. They would also, I noticed – but by no means that regularly – clean themselves by sitting on their bottoms on a grassy area and sliding themselves along the ground. Alternatively they’d rub their backsides against a moss-covered tree trunk. That done, they would simply finish the job by contorting themselves and licking themselves clean.
This last part was obviously a physical impossibility for me, but I was desperate to feel clean and not smelly. On the first few occasions
