The Insect Farm (2 page)

Even in those earliest days, though, Roger had his softer side. I remember that we were driving one day to the seaside
in Dad’s car, singing songs and generally having a good time, when there was the sound of a splat on the windscreen as a large flying insect met a dramatic end. Roger suddenly stopped singing.

“What would happen,” he said after a few moments, “if enough cars drove along enough roads and killed enough insects?” He paused. “In the end, would there be any insects left?”

There was silence as my mother tried to formulate her answer.

“I don’t think there is much danger of that, Roger. There are so many fields and hedges and forests where there aren’t any cars,” she said, trying to sound reassuring. “But it is a pity—”

“Yes,” my father interrupted her, “apart from anything else, they make such a bloody mess on the windscreen.” I was ready to burst out laughing, but just in time I saw a look of sadness in Roger’s face which I don’t think I had seen before, and had to make an effort to suppress my amusement.

So yes, even from the earliest days, Roger and I were inseparable. If Roger was a problem, or had a problem, or caused a problem, then none of these problems were mine. All I had was the sort of older brother that everyone would wish for: bigger than me, stronger than me, and who would do anything for me, as indeed I would for him.

It was only a matter of time before some busybody – maybe a doctor or a teacher or a social worker – suggested that it
wasn’t good for me to spend so much time with Roger. It was nice that we were so close, but perhaps I needed some other friends of my own if my development was not to be impaired. No doubt the idea of two kids with restricted development so alarmed our parents that they were thrown into a panic. For several days there were whispered discussions which were said, when I enquired, to be “nothing to do with you”. It turned out that they were everything to do with me, because the upshot was that in the summer holidays of 1959, when I was eight, my parents made me join the local cubs, and I was packed off on the annual camping trip to Torbay.

A more loyal fellow than I would be able to report the distress from missing his older brother and only true friend, every hour and every day, and of pining for the opportunity to make an early return. However such is the promiscuity of youth and the enchanting nature of anything new, that I should admit that for most of my time away I hardly missed Roger at all. The novelty of cooking our own food around campfires, of going on treasure hunts, building rafts and singing songs to the accompaniment of out-of-tune guitars, and all of it way past my usual bedtime, absorbed my small life.

Once we had made the phone call to reassure our parents that we had arrived safely, we were encouraged to contact our homes as seldom as possible, and in my case this involved an occasional brief call on a crackly phone line from the red telephone box in the nearby village. My memories are all overlaid by the smell of damp cloth and canvas. Damp
socks and sleeping bags. Damp grass and plimsolls. If I was missing Roger, I don’t think I sent a message to say so, and if he was missing me – well, the unattractive truth is that I hardly gave it a thought.

Time is distorted in the young mind, and at this vantage point I cannot recall whether I was away for as little as a week or as much as two. Whatever the case, I know that it was not until the end of the holidays, as we were packing up our soggy clothes into sodden bundles and pledging lifelong allegiance to the new friends we had made over burnt sausages and dew-soaked sleeping bags, that my mind returned to my family. Only then, as coaches departed en route to Basildon and Dagenham and other places on the periphery of my tiny universe, did I give any thought at all to what had become of Roger during what seemed to be a long absence. For all this time I had enjoyed constant entertainment and companionship, while he, I had little doubt, would have had few activities provided for him, and few if any friends to play with.

Before leaving for the six-hour bus ride, we were instructed to make one last phone call home to confirm our expected time of arrival. Having reassured my mother that everything was fine and that I was looking forward to seeing her again, I asked:

“How is Roger?”

“Roger?” she said, as though she didn’t know whom I meant. “Oh, Roger’s fine.”

“Has he been missing me?”

“Yes, I suppose so,” she said. It was obviously not something she had thought about. “He hasn’t mentioned it.”

In my self-centred world, for a moment I was hurt not to have been missed, and thought nothing of the fact that I had hardly missed Roger either. “Will he be there?…” I began to say, but she was gone.

The journey back from Torbay seemed to take for ever, and was only punctuated from time to time by some half-hearted attempts at singing the songs which had sounded so melodious when sung around the campfire.

After the hilarity of making faces and V-signs at passing motorists wore off, some of us went to sleep and others retreated into our own thoughts. Eventually, any feeling of guilt I experienced at not having communicated with the brother from whom I had been all but inseparable, gradually gave way to anxiety to see him; an anxiety that grew as the miles passed by and the thatches and hedges of rural England merged into suburbs. Though I hadn’t missed him at the time, I now missed him awfully in retrospect, so that by the time the bus neared the gates of the school where we were due to be met by our families, I found myself craning my neck to catch an early glimpse of Roger among the gathering.

“Where’s Roger?” I asked. The look on my mother’s face was enough to tell me that the more diplomatic thing would have been to express joy at seeing her.

“Oh, Roger’s at home. He said he’d see you when you got there,” she said.

I was disappointed. “Didn’t he want to come to meet me?”

“I don’t know,” said my dad. “He was preoccupied.”

“What with?”

It was clear that my parents didn’t want to talk about Roger. They were eager to know how their younger son had fared during his first extended stay away from them. But at that age you don’t care about the stuff that has happened already; that was great, but it’s in the past, and what’s the point of going over it with someone else who wasn’t there? So I didn’t tell my parents that I had had a great time but had missed them both. I didn’t mention how much I had missed my mother’s cooking and a goodnight cuddle. Now that I think about it, I don’t think I ever got round to telling my parents properly that I appreciated them, or that I knew what they had done for me. By now all of my attention was focused on Roger, on seeing him again and finding out what he had been doing. How had he coped without me?

Our family home was a small terraced house in Croydon, south-east London, though if anyone had describe it as “terraced” within earshot of my mother she would instantly have put them right. She preferred the expression “one of three” which meant that we had a semi on one side of us and a semi on the other side of us – leaving our house most accurately described as “terraced”, but not to my mother. The house was one of those between-the-wars mock something or other, with fake timbers embedded in
pebble-dash, which characterized the southern suburbs of London and no doubt many other towns and cities.

“Where’s Roger?” I said again as we got out of the car and he was nowhere to be seen. I thought that if he couldn’t come to meet the coach, he might at least have been waiting at the window, but there was no sign of my older brother, no twitch of the nets to indicate his presence. When I burst through the front door in late August of 1959, it took me all of forty seconds to put my head into every room in the house, and to reach the conclusion that Roger wasn’t in any of them.

“Where’s Roger?”

Considering that the purpose of my banishment to summer camp had been to loosen my ties with my older brother, my mother and father now seemed to take pleasure in my enthusiasm to see him again. Which parent of siblings would not take pride in such closeness?

“I guess he’s in the shed,” said my mother. “That’s where he spends most of his time lately.”

There was a tiny garden at the back of the house laid to lawn with a few ornamental flower beds carved into the soil and filled with specimen roses, the names of which were written in black magic marker on yellow labels affixed like a dog collar to the stems. Beyond the boundary fence there was a garage which was designed to accommodate just one car, but was filled to the rafters with my dad’s tools, offcuts of timber and some garden equipment. Next to that again was a large wooden shed which had been allocated to Roger
and me for use as a den. Over the years the shed had doubled as a cave (in our Batman and Robin phase), as a stable (in our Wyatt Earp phase) and as a spaceship (in our Dan Dare phase).

“What’s he doing?” It had never occurred to me that Roger could effectively occupy himself without me. I was thinking of all our games together – most of which involved an inseparable pair. “How can he be spending time in the shed when I’m not around?”

Roger had his back to me when I yanked open the shed door and threw myself in. Just beyond him I could see what looked like a pane of glass, all smeared and dirty, with a bank of soil behind it. The atmosphere smelt of the damp and dank of wet earth, the smell you associate with nightmares of being buried alive.

“What’s that?” I asked him.

“Oh, hi, Jonathan,” he said, more or less as he would have done if I’d popped back to the house five minutes ago for a glass of orange squash. “It’s my insect farm.”

“What’s an insect farm?”

He hesitated, as I might have hesitated if someone had asked me what the moon is. As though the answer is obvious, but you want to find the right words which don’t imply you think the person asking the question is an idiot.

“It’s a place where you keep insects so that you study them.” Roger still had not turned to look at me.

“What kinds of insects?”

“Well you can keep any kinds of insects you like. All you have to do is to create the right conditions for them to live in. These are ants.” Roger stood back to allow me a better view through the gloom at the installation in front of him. It looked like an aquarium that you might use for tropical fish, except that the panes of glass were only an inch or so apart at the width. “Come closer and have a look.”

I did, and on the edge of my vision I caught a glimpse of Roger in the half-darkness. It had been only a week or two, but something about him seemed older. Or if not older, then perhaps more mature or in command. That was probably the first time I noticed a little bit of downy fluff in front of his ears and across his top lip. Roger was fourteen and entering puberty, but at the time I didn’t know what puberty was, and was much more interested in examining whatever had preoccupied him so thoroughly that he hadn’t had the chance to miss his younger brother and only real friend. Still, the only thing I could make out was a mass of what looked like soil, squished up against the glass.

“Closer still.”

It was not until my face was a few inches away and my eyes began to adjust to the gloom that I could identify anything other than the sludge. Gradually I began to focus, and I could make out tiny avenues carved into the soil, little thoroughfares in which I detected the shapes of tiny creatures. Dozens and dozens of them slowly materialized, scuttling backwards and forwards, tripping and clambering over each
other, apparently oblivious to anything other than whatever was their task at hand.

“Amazing,” I said, and it was true. Obviously I wanted to be nice to Roger about his new preoccupation, but I genuinely did think it was amazing. “What are they doing?”

“Look even closer and you’ll see.” Roger handed me a magnifying glass.

“How come Dad let you play with this?” The magnifying glass had belonged to our grandfather, who had died a decade ago. It was understood that it now belonged to Roger and me, but we hadn’t been allowed to keep it among our stuff because Dad said it was too expensive to be used as a toy. I remember feeling a sting of resentment that Roger had been allowed to use it without me being there.

“I’m not playing with it,” Roger said. It was a distinction which carried a lot of importance at that age. “I’m using it to study the ants. It’s what it was meant for.”

I already knew that the magnifying glass wasn’t meant for melting toy soldiers with the focused beam of the sun, as Roger and I had been doing when we were first allowed to try it out. I took it from him and drew it backwards and forwards, Sherlock Holmes style, attempting to focus on the glass frame.

“Keep watching carefully,” he said, “and you’ll be able to see what they’re doing.”

Chapter Two

As the years went by, and my older brother and I passed through our childhood and into adolescence, Roger’s preoccupation with his beloved insect farm expanded and grew, just as did my interest in music, fashion and, of course, girls.

I always think it’s implausible when characters in police dramas seem to know where they were on the night when the crime was committed, but I can remember vividly and in detail the occasion when I first met Harriet. It was in the end of the autumn term between my first and second year in the sixth form, and I recall it for two reasons – one was, of course, that first sight of her. The other was that it was the evening of the farewell concert by the band Cream.

A ramshackle group of us had arranged to go to the concert, and I was there with Angela, who was my girlfriend of the moment. Angela was fabulous, or certainly I thought so at the time. Long straight brown hair, as thin as a rake, with tiny, scarcely budding breasts, and those dark shadows below her eyes which we associated with late nights and soft drugs, and which later came to be toughened up by fashion and labelled “heroin chic”. Angela knew the right places to buy the right clothes, was always on the crest of whatever was the latest wave, and somehow managed to be wherever it was “at”.

Harriet was also with a boyfriend on that night, although she told me later that they were just mates and were not sleeping together. I took some comfort from that, until I realized that this did not mean that they were not having sex. To Harriet, sleeping with someone would have involved a whole level of intimacy that merely having sex would not have come near, but all that represented a dimension of her that it was way in my future to learn about.