Country life
Fishy story
Leanda de Lisle
My teddy-bear left me when I went to boarding school at ten. I don't know where he went or what happened to him but I still miss him sometimes. If I'm in a toy store I'll look to see if they have one with the same deep, soft, mousy-brown fur I remember seeing for the first time in the hall of my parents' house, when I was about two years old. However, it seems he was unique and I can't blame my children for rejecting his inferior relations. My eldest son loves a stuffed parrot, the youngest is passionate about a crab and the middle one prefers to sleep alone, or he did up until now.
The last treat of the half-term holiday was a visit to Sea Life in Birmingham. As some of you may remember, my youngest son loves fish. It dates from toddlerhood when his favourite fictional character was a penguin called Pingu. I was rather keen on Pingu myself, as he was a great deal more amusing than Spot the humourless dog, or Thomas the incredibly dreary tank engine, but Dominic loved Pingu so much he want- ed to become a penguin. My multi-talented mother-in-law had to make him a penguin suit for Christmas and he insisted on eating fresh fish whenever possible. Even now, when his desire to be a penguin has faded, his interest in fish persists.
Sea Life is Dominic's idea of heaven. Huge tanks are filled with every kind of British fish. You can walk through a re- creation of the River Severn, trapped behind glass, and there are rock pools just like the ones we saw in Scotland. Well, per- haps not just like them, as the fish, the anemones and the crabs were all twice the size of anything we'd seen in the wild. A tank full of more normal-sized brown trout reminded the boys of their fishing expedi- tions on the lochs in Sutherland, and there was a new experience waiting for them at a gigantic pool full of sting-rays. Invited to wave their hands over the water, the boys were startled to find these strange crea- tures poking their noses out of the water to sniff their hands.
Down in the basement there was a touch of Madame Tussaud's. The wreck of the Titanic may have been short on corpses but as a kind of watery chamber of horrors it did well. Young sharks swam around a tun- nel of glass and we found ourselves swaying slightly as if to the rhythm of the currents on the ocean bed. It was a touch of genius, but interestingly the children's favourite areas remained those where they had seen creatures from our own waters. Nothing could beat the exotic appearance of an enormous purple lobster or the memory of eating a fish they had caught themselves. The pity was that the only fish for sale in the restaurant were deep-fried in batter.
It's notable that these zoos for underwa- ter life have proliferated just as those for land-living animals have become less popu- lar. As the example of a coarse-fishing MP spearheading attempts to ban hunting with hounds goes to show, people generally identify more closely with creatures that have fur than those that don't. Further- more, there are no package tours to the bottom of the sea or even the Severn, and the creatures that live there seem as strange as giraffes did to the early Victori- ans. Living, as this family does, as far away from the sea as it is possible to be on this island, Sea Life certainly made a big impression on us. '
My eldest son was happy to leave armed with nothing fishier than some chocolate coins, but Dominic had to have a fluffy tur- tle as a new friend for his crab and Chris- tian was seduced by a gigantic lobster in Purple velvet. At night its claw is clutched in his hand, its spidery legs flop over his pil- low, its tail rests near his mouth. The night- mares he used to be prone to stopped a few months ago. I hope they won't begin again when he's introduced to lobster thermidor.
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