unfathomable twist of chemistry these tiny molecules – now blue-green algae or bacteria-like organisms – discovered how to replicate each other (asexual reproduction) and nourish themselves by grazing on the others around them. Some stole a march – did better than the rest. Competition was born. It was probably competition that forced some of them to abandon chemosynthesis (munching other molecules for energy), and turn to sunlight – photosynthesis – instead. That was the really smart move. Now we had single-cell organisms pumping out free atmospheric oxygen – so far absent from our story – and the beginnings of a balanced ecosystem. One lot of primitive organisms was capable of synthesising organic food from inorganic materials and providing the oxygen for the rest, which hungrily consumed it and emitted carbon dioxide for the first lot to feed on – the very beginning of the cycle of interdependence of all living things, of which we are an essential part.
So there you have it – the progenitors of the plant kingdom busy feeding the progenitors of the animal kingdom. Let Darwin have his say and before you can mutter ‘deoxyribonucleic acid’ you have asexual and sexual reproduction operating side by side, both primed with variant mutations (thanks to radiation from the sun) and all replicating and out-competing themselves as fast as they can. Suddenly there are sharks and whales in oceans brimming with plankton, iguanas clambering over rocks, mountains wrapping themselves in jungle, kiwis not bothering to fly, dung beetles rolling globes of their own, albatrosses circumnavigating the oceans of the world and Red Indians chasing buffalo over cliffs. Here we all are, from the amoeba to Einstein, munching each other in glorious sunlight for all we are worth. God, meanwhile, whoever he may be and wherever he lives and moves and has his being, and whether he engineered the whole thing or not, has somehow been left in the shade.
The grass I am lying on is heading in two directions at once. The pallid stalks of winter are going to ground. The forces of decay are already breaking them down, microbes are jostling for their sugars, bacteria are ravenously ingesting, saprophytic mould and slime fungi are pitching in with the slow, mechanical infiltration of their fibres. In a few weeks the old mat will be gone, no longer distinguishable as grass, just a mushy, khaki mulch rapidly decomposing its way to becoming soil, loaded with humic microbes, providing nutrients for its own roots. The new shoots of photosynthesis are heading up, worshipping the sun, dizzy with light and carbon dioxide.
A shadow crosses my closed eyes. For the briefest flicker something has passed between me and the sun. I am instantly awake. I know I’m no longer alone. My eyes ease open, feeling the drag of my irises urgently and involuntarily stopping down. Squinting, I glance to the right and left. The sky above me is enamelled with brilliance, but the chaffinches are no longer singing. Even the busy wren has stilled her trill. Slowly I pull up onto one elbow.
Twenty yards to my left a line of electricity distribution poles crosses a field. My eye is drawn to the apex of the nearest pole. There, shining in newly burnished copper, is a kestrel. He is small, smaller than a pigeon and neat with it in a dressy way, but he gleams with all the presence of a prince. I can feel him. My skin tingles. His shadow snapped me out of my daydream and now his aura is hauling me in on a rope. For once he hasn’t seen me. Normally you can’t fool birds of prey. Their eyesight is so fierce, so finely tuned, so instantly absorbent to every twitch of life that our feeble efforts at concealment are a worthless gesture.
I raise my binoculars and scour the profile of his blunt little face. He is brand new under a hood of blue slate. His primaries are blades of black, crossed behind his back like a schoolmaster’s hands. The grey tail is long and dipped in black ink, except at the very tip, where a crescent of copper shines through. The nares are a golden glimmer crowning the arc of the neat, downward-tucked bill; yellow rings encircle dark orbs as round and glossy as puddles on a moonlit night. They dominate his brain. Behind those limpid lenses a continuous interrogation simmers and seethes.
He hasn’t seen me because he is intent, staring down. Something below him in the grass close to the foot of the pole has tracked its image up through the sunlight into the glowing sponges of his retinas. He is drinking it in; motionless – no, stiller than that, he is frozen. It’s as though a sculpture in polished slate and copper has been placed on the top of the pole. So intense is his concentration that for the moment I am safe; I can shift my awkward position and lean back against the rain-laundered bark of a birch.
Anxious for her own future, a hen chaffinch decides to brave the vivid statue that has invaded their sunlight. She flutters out to mob the kestrel, uttering a broken little cry edged with hysteria and adopting a quite un-finch-like flight, hesitant and dithery in a way that impresses no one; certainly not the kestrel. He doesn’t flinch. His gaze is as fixed as his stance. He ignores the chaffinch, not even bothering to acknowledge her presence. She dances twice around the pole, gives up and returns to the birches. The day is silent again.
Only later will I properly comprehend the emergent mini-drama that is being enacted here. For now all I see is a kestrel perched on a pole. My thoughts return to the sun. It has been at work for several hours, streaming photons my way. The ground is drying, the leaves unbuttoning their tulip wraps and motorways of chloroplasts are flooding in to work. I am forced to acknowledge (reluctantly) that only some of that solar radiation is for me. Happy though I am with my slice, I know that others are stirring too. The great tits and chaffinches have raised their song, breasts swelling, syrinxes oscillating, hurling it out, choiring the day with spontaneous, sun-charged exultation. Beside me the delicate petals of wood sorrel are lifting; their shamrock leaves are widening to soak in the soft confetti of sunlight that sprinkles the woodland floor.
There is a solemn explosion of life everywhere I look. Chemical reactions are raising their game. Protoplasm is busier than it’s been for months. Decay is smouldering underground. Insect pupae are squirming inside their leathery wraps. Egg cases are splitting. Sap is ascending the birch stems to match the call for water and minerals from high above. Every opening leaf needs the hydraulic turbidity of filled cells to stiffen and grow. Columns of liquid power are answering a call to arms. Trance-like, the kestrel stares. With the patience of a gravestone he stares into the grass.
Somewhere underground, in some secret cranny of its own, a reptile blinks and stirs – stirred by some cryptic alchemy of electro-chemical sentience. Waking from long sleep it feels the surge of the warming earth around it. Its dreams had been of pure sun. There was nothing blind about this instinct. For all heliotropic reptiles that have to raise their body temperature to get going, the sun is an imperative, an irresistible call. They have no choice. To feed, to grow, to mate, they have to find the sun. Such is the lot of the slow worm.
Normally the slow worm (actually a legless lizard) doesn’t bask in open sunlight as crocodiles and many lizards and snakes do; it prefers to absorb heat from stones. Beneath a sheet of old corrugated iron is a perfect place to heat up quickly and in safety – a quick warm for a slow worm. I have found dozens in such places – have even laid sheets down for that very purpose. Boy-naturalists indulge strange pursuits. You come back later and take a peek. You lift the sheet. Suddenly exposed to the light, slow worms look put out and urinate to make the point. And they are slow; they can’t hurry off, are easy to catch. You learn quickly it’s important to let them urinate before you put them in your pocket. Reptile urine has the rancid odour of over-stewed cabbages. As a boy I smelled permanently of school kitchens.
But this is May and the sun is high. There are no corrugated iron sheets available, nor, apparently, suitable stones. Slowly our worm-lizard ventures out into full sun. This ponderous legless lizard, who feeds mostly on small slugs, is stiff and slow. In the hand it has none of the taut, muscular flexibility of a grass snake or an adder or those almost prehensile, broad underbelly scales that zip snakes along so efficiently. Stiffly the slow worm levers his silvery inches between stems and stones using friction and the extended ‘S’ of his long body to slither forward.
