The great advantage over real live creatures that my Three Bears had in common with Walt Disney’s Mickey Mouse, aside from not needing to be fed or produce droppings, was neoteny. Mickey and my ursine family looked only glancingly like a mouse or brown bears, and much more like babies. Not even so much baby mice or baby bears, but human babies. And according to Konrad Lorenz, there are certain qualities of newborn human babies that cause human adults to respond (as a result of hormone surges, he suggests) with affection and therefore bond with them, rather than carelessly leave them lying around the house or cave. These qualities are evolutionarily necessary because, after all, babies are quite hard work.
Infants and toddlers, you will have noticed, are not just smaller than adults, but proportionally different. They have an exceptionally large head in relation to their body, and exceptionally shorter legs and smaller feet, compared to adults, who become the opposite: small heads on a sizeable torso and long legs with relatively large feet. Babies also have a rounded cranium, bulging forehead and high, prominent cheekbones above a diminishing lower face and receding chin, rather than the slanting, lower brows and longer face with jutting jaws of adults. Babies’ and toddlers’ eyes, which hardly grow and so, as it were, are already adult-sized, appear very large in the still expanding face. Think Mickey Mouse without the ears, or your child’s favourite soft toy. Think of that terrible cooing noise people make over strange (and not especially beautiful) infants in their prams, or the fact that the vast majority of us do not shake our babies till their brains turn to butter when they cry so hard that it actually causes us pain in the solar plexus. There may be other reasons why we don’t kill our babies (though, of course, some do) but simply the sight of them goes some way to quelling or at least helping us to control our helpless rage at their helpless rage.
Why human babies look like that is the result of neoteny: the retention of foetal characteristics after they have emerged from the womb. It was an evolutionary master-stroke. Get the babies born before they’re fully developed and two good things result. First, and rather importantly, babies do get born more often, instead of stuck on their way out, and as a bonus less frequently kill their mothers whose small pelvic girdles have not kept pace with the increased brain and therefore cranium size of human primates. (There was a theory that one reason the Neanderthals died out was not their stupidity, but on the contrary their brains, bigger than those of Homo sapiens, which caused far more of them to fail to be born.) Second, being born too soon and retaining foetal characteristics after birth means, quite by happy chance, that human babies remain, of necessity, helpless for much longer than other animal species. They can’t feed themselves or get around on their own, or communicate as the adults (or other infant non-human animals) do, for an exceptionally long time. Parents have to carry their offspring around and attend to its needs, while it watches the world and has nothing to do but eat, develop and learn. The still unsolidified skull of the human infant continues to grow long after it is born. A human brain is only about 25 per cent of its full size at birth, while a monkey is born with 70 per cent of its brain developed. For another six years the child’s brain continues to grow while it lives and experiences in the outside world. What can’t be passed on genetically has until puberty to be learned in the developing brain, from the surrounding culture and from the necessary closeness of one or two parents, their kin and the local community. We must suppose that a few premature infants, with their smaller head size, happened to survive, and those survivors passed on their tendency to early birth and robustness, and their prolonged neediness, which, by the wonderful happenstance that evolution is, enabled the cultural revolution that is human society. The neotenous baby face is the result of the fact that human babies really ought to be in the womb for another ten months. And something about that conformation makes them irresistible (or it signs their extreme helplessness combined with that kin-related tendency to altruism, which gets our hormonal juices going) so that we mostly want to cherish our offspring enough to put up with them for the years and years it takes them to become independent. Neonate chimpanzees are also generally cherished by their kin, but baby chimps stay babies (and cherished) for a far shorter period and progress to adulthood in both ability and appearance very much faster. Neoteny –our slowed-down development – ensures that even as adults we look more like our babies than adult chimps look like their infants. And we emphasise that when we want to influence others to care by often making big eyes and lowering our heads to make ourselves more childlike (think of that look of Princess Diana). We are creatures who are always becoming.
Who knows whether it is really innate (chemical, hard-wired), our bonding with our round-headed, big-eyed babies? Certainly, the combination of features has a virtually physical effect on our responses, but cultural and innate responses long ago mingled inextricably in our species. Whatever makes our juices flow, the process works so well that any creatures, even non-human ones, even stuffed ones, which conform to the neotenous criteria of our babies, get our automatic approval, and conversely, those that don’t have a much harder time from us.
In one of his wonderful essays, the biologist Stephen Jay Gould traced Mickey Mouse’s canny fifty-year reverse journey into neoteny. The original Mouse of the cartoon Steamboat Willie in 1928 is a very different-looking creature from the one that appeared in his final seven-minute film, The Simple Things, in 1953. The physical changes are tracked also by a change of character, from quite wild, and even unpleasant, ‘a rambunctious, even slightly sadistic fellow’, to the much blander and inoffensive creature that Christopher Finch, in his history of the Mouse, describes as ‘… virtually a national symbol, and as such he was expected to behave properly at all times’.1 Mickey’s physical features kept pace with his altered behaviour and he became progressively more desirably juvenile, as Gould describes:
To give him the shorter and pudgier legs of youth, they lowered his pants line and covered his spindly legs with a baggy outfit. (His arms and legs also thickened substantially and acquired joints for a floppier appearance.) His head grew relatively larger and its features more youthful … Mickey’s eye has grown in two modes: first, by a major, discontinuous evolutionary shift as the entire eye of ancestral Mickey became the pupil of his descendants, and second, by gradual increase thereafter … Mickey’s improvement in cranial bulging followed an interesting path since his evolution has always been constrained by the unaltered convention of representing his head as a circle with appended ears and an oblong snout. The circle’s form could not be altered to provide a bulging cranium directly. Instead, Mickey’s ears moved back, increasing the distance between nose and ears, and giving him a rounded, rather than a sloping forehead.
Gould explains his biologist’s interest in Mickey Mouse’s reverse development:
National symbols are not altered capriciously and market researchers (for the doll industry in particular) have spent a good deal of time and practical effort learning what features appeal to people as cute and friendly. Biologists also have spent a great deal of time studying a similar subject in a wide range of animals.2
When we give soft, cuddly toy animals with short legs, big eyes and rounded heads to our babies, we are training them, or reinforcing a natural tendency, to feel comfort and tenderness at baby-like features, even if concealed in other forms. We give them a metonymy of themselves, showing them how lovable they are, also training them in how to find their own babies lovable, and that the whole damn thing of being here is about reproducing the species, which includes caring for what is smaller and more vulnerable than you. Of course, we put it differently to ourselves, being also the products of socialisation.
Perhaps, also, we are reinforcing our own tenderness for our babies by doubling them with soft toys. Perhaps the plush teddies and bunnies might even be more like aides memoire for us than for the little ones. While we melt over neotenised features, infants recognise individual characteristics in a face rather than the whole gestalt. Until they begin to focus more efficiently, two circles on the same latitude of a larger oval with a single circle beneath will do to get their attention while they are so young they hardly exist. Ducks and geese do it too, and will follow two large spots on a stick to the ends of the earth (or failing that, Konrad Lorenz). We fix on what we must follow for our survival, and evolution seems to bet that what we do fix on initially will be the form of an adult face. Nevertheless, we present newborns with simplified but still elaborate faces in soft comforting fabrics that are both human and animal. The animals invariably look more like human babies in their essence than they do their real animal models, but as a by-product of our gifts of cuddly neotenous animals to babies, the animals (as well as the humans they represent) themselves become loved. The heart-melting alien E.T. (huge eyes, round head, small legs) belongs to another planet only by convention. The whole story could have been redone using a stray puppy or a baby brother. It remains an essential lesson in human love and loss.
The unfair corollary of neoteny is that the less like an infant human an animal is, the less likely it is to be loved. It’s hard to represent an insect as an infant human. It has been tried and Jiminy Cricket, the variety of movie bees and Woody Allen’s Antz testify to some success. The problem is that the real creatures being represented have very few of the cartoons’ massaged characteristics. You could, but probably wouldn’t, give a plush cricket or ant to a newborn to welcome her into the world. Desmond Morris connected his 1950s TV programme Zoo Time with his later book, The Naked Ape, by giving in it the results of an animal popularity poll he had done for the TV programme. In terms of types of animals, 97.14 per cent of all children gave a mammal as their top favourite animal while birds swooped down to 1.6 per cent, reptiles 1 per cent, invertebrates 0.1 per cent and amphibians (in spite of Jeremy Fisher) 0.5 per cent. The ‘top ten animal loves’ were: 1. Chimpanzee; 2. Monkey; 3. Horse; 4. Bushbaby; 5. Panda; 6. Bear; 7. Elephant; 8. Lion; 9. Dog; 10. Giraffe. I assume that meerkats would these days rate very highly. But it wouldn’t alter the general trend that the animals with more anthropomorphic characteristics were the most popular:
1. They all have hair, rather than feathers or scales. 2. They have rounded outlines (chimpanzee, monkey, bushbaby, panda, bear, elephant). 3. They have flat faces (chimpanzee, monkey, bushbaby, bear, panda, lion). 4. They have facial expressions (chimpanzee, monkey, horse, lion, dog). 5. They can ‘manipulate’ small objects (chimpanzee, monkey, bushbaby, panda, elephant). 6. Their postures are in some way or at some times, rather vertical (chimpanzee, monkey, bushbaby, panda, bear, giraffe).
The more of these points a species can score, the higher up on the top ten list it comes.3
The insanely popular meerkat scores on all points.
These were the preferences of all children between four and fourteen. When split by age, Morris found that smaller children prefer bigger animals and older children smaller ones, and he suggests that the younger children saw their favourite creatures as ‘adult-substitutes’ while the older ones chose ‘child-substitutes’. The key word is substitute. For children, animals stand for something, and it seems that the more they stand for humans, the better they like it, though the horse is a horse of a different colour and is a special phase that preadolescent girls pass or fail to pass through.
Increasingly, as children age towards and into adulthood, some animals will be called ‘cute’, ‘sweet’, ‘adorable’. All words we use about small children. Playfulness (or what appears to us to be playfulness) is an important factor in finding animals adorable. Penguins, though they aren’t mammals, happen to look, to us, as if they are small, hampered versions of humans, trying very hard to maintain their dignity. When they give up their awkward-looking waddling across impossible terrain and bellyflop on to the ice to slide down an incline, we laugh, not just at the simple ergonomics of the act, but at the childlike freedom they suddenly seem to allow themselves. We admire animals that maintain what we would see as their dignity (lions, for example), but we adore animals that appear to lose their dignity (an orang-utan, so sombre, suddenly putting a handful of straw on her head), just as we adore those childlike dyspraxic comics who are always falling flat on their face but get back up again and carry on, just as we adore small children toddling recklessly about and suddenly collapsing on unready legs, but getting themselves upright again and continuing their progress. The chimpanzees’ tea party, only banned from the daily schedule at the London Zoo in 1972 (while the Brooke Bond chimps were still mugging their way through TV advertisements in 2002), had everything adults and children want from animals. They literally aped human behaviour, but did it playfully, and waywardly, actually because they were doing something that had no meaning to them. The main thing for the audience was that they had enjoyed the ‘cute’, as in imitative, antics, and it seemed as if the chimps had fun too. Which perhaps they did, enjoying the attention, the relief from their cage in the open air on a patch of grass by the children’s swings; just like home but without the bars. And what is more moving and funny than a cat who fails to make a manoeuvre, missing the table she was leaping on to, falling back to the floor, and then immediately wandering casually off, gazing out of the window, carelessly washing a back leg: me, jump? No, you misunderstood, I’ve been making plans to kill that bird out there, and I’m far too busy with the washing to be jumping. These days, instead of laughing, I suppress it, and quickly look away as if I hadn’t seen, to save Bunty’s wounded pride.
What amphibian or arachnid could compete? Well, even they have their uses, because we humans have a use for everything.
Until November 2006, every autumn loomed dark and most terribly in my life. For as long as I can remember, I began to worry around midsummer, and by late August I would be filled with dread. I never thought of my arachnophobia in the same way as I did my conviction that I was infested by insects. There were obviously some similarities, but terror and delusion are curiously different, even if neither are good to live with. My terror of spiders, on me, near me, in the same room, house, garden, planet and universe, ensured that the autumnal mating urge which causes arachnids to wander into our habitations – confused by some sudden, indefinable but compelling ache in the forefront of their small but made-up minds – in search of a nice warm dark corner to nest (I couldn’t bear to think beyond that), ushered in my personal annual festival of anxiety and horror. Not that I felt secure during the other ten months of the year. My ex, having been my ex for some years and grown tired of still being called out in the middle of the night to deal with a spider, gave me a blowtorch, which I used with desperate abandon. It was a professional version of the hairspray-and-lighter technique, more or less likely to have resulted in my charred remains (and those of the daughter, the cats and the occasional lover, none of whom counted for much beside my fear) being found in the smoking ruins. But death was never a worse alternative to being in the same room as a spider. I suppose that sounds like a writer’s hyperbole, but I’m writing with all the accuracy I can muster. If you are not an arachnophobe nothing will convince you of that, but I discovered in the early summer of 2006 that there are some who recognise the simple truth of what I say.
An irrational fear of spiders is common. Roughly 35 per cent of women and 18 per cent of men in the UK have it, though not all of them have it so badly that it is called clinical. Just as clinical depression is different from being a bit down, so clinical arachnophobia is different from a slight shudder of the kind you get when the spider you are cupping delicately in your hand as you take it out to the garden tickles your palm. It’s only thanks to the Zoological Society of London that I can even write that sentence and even now I have to breathe calmly and regularly as I do. To anyone who isn’t a member of an Iron John chapter, confronting a crippling fear when you don’t absolutely have to is a violation of common sense, and in addition and speaking personally, joining anything, but particularly anything with a stupid name, goes against every grain in my body. Which is the only reason I can think of as to why I had waited and suffered (and caused those around me to suffer) until I was fifty-eight before signing up for the Friendly Spider Programme offered by the entomology department of the ZSL. The title of the programme made me (as a lifelong arachnophobe) cross: tell me, if you must, that spiders are not wholly devoted to terrorising me, but don’t suggest they’re friendly – I didn’t want them around, whatever they really feel about me. Being liked was never on its own a satisfactory basis for taking a lover. I saw no reason why it should be any different with spiders.
I noticed an advertisement for the programme on the Zoo’s website, when I was looking for something else, and I remembered that, actually, I already knew about it. I had read about it somewhere and paid no attention. Why, in 2006, I finally decided to check out this cutely named possibility – it cost about £150; unbelievably cheap for a life-changing event, if it turned out to have any merit – I have no idea. I suppose everything eventually has its limit. There were seventeen other people on the four-hour course at ZSL headquarters across the road from the Zoo, and none of them could say what had tipped the scales and decided them at last to try and deal with their arachnophobia. Every one of them had lived miserably with the problem for as long as they could remember. Cowardice, I suppose. We all knew, without allowing ourselves to think about it in detail, that the Friendly Spider Programme must involve spiders. It was enough to blank out the possibility of investigating it, until at last we, or more likely someone we were close to could stand our terror no longer.
The group was a range of ages and social classes, and from all over the country. The only obvious thing we had in common (aside from our horror of spiders and of what might be going to happen that afternoon) was that we were all women. This, we were assured by John, the psychologist in charge, was very unusual, unprecedented actually. He showed his acumen by suggesting it had something to do with it being June 2006 and therefore bang in the middle of the World Cup. It occurs to me that this might also explain why I decided to deal with my fear that summer: between another afternoon of football mania and confronting my spider phobia, the latter might just have been the lesser of two evils – chewing my own leg off was a similarly attractive option.
We sat centred in the two front rows of the ZSL lecture theatre. The woman on my immediate right was crying steadily. She’d been led gently to her seat by one of the volunteers who had come in to make tea, smile in a reassuring manner and act as support during the later part of the afternoon. Eighteen fearful people secreted enough anxiety and reluctance into the air to make breathing in feel dangerous. Dave, the Head Keeper of Invertebrates at the Zoo, and John, psychologist and hypnotherapist, spoke to us in turn about fear, theirs (the spiders’, not Dave’s and John’s) and ours. Dave offered us spider behaviour; John dealt with human behaviour. First, however, we were to pair off and share our feelings and experiences of spiders with the person sitting on our right. Third on the list of things I really don’t like, after spiders and football, is sharing. I was mortified at having been suckered into a self-help group, after the considerable trouble I have taken in my life to avoid them. Sharing does the same visceral thing to me that happens when your mother pushes you forward at a party to sing a song. Nor did I need to be told that spiders didn’t want to go near me as much as I didn’t want them to. If I could reason the problem away, I wouldn’t be here. If being part of a suffering group was the answer to my – someone used the word – issue, then I was lost. Just fucking hypnotise me and make me feel better, was all I asked.
The urgent need to run for my life lost out – just – to the even more powerful conditioning against being rude to strangers or making a scene, which so often gets well-mannered people who don’t want to make a fuss robbed, raped and murdered, as well as singing through gritted teeth at children’s parties. So I shared without hope. The voice of the weeping woman next to me trembled with emotion, and gulping back her tears she told me that she actually passes out if she sees a … she couldn’t say the word. I dug deep and shared that while watching CSI Las Vegas I had to close my eyes during every scene set in Grissom’s office because he had a huge … in a glass case behind his desk. I might have mentioned the nights I’d sat bolt upright in the dead centre of the bed because an unreachable spider was in the room, or about the wellington boots I kept beside the bed (one boot upside down inside the other for obvious arachnid reasons) for night-time search-and-destroy missions. Then we shared group-wise what we had shared in pairs.
None of us would walk into a room without scanning it minutely, or having it checked by someone else, though of course trusting someone else to be as thorough as you would be was impossible, so no one ever believed any room was really spider-free. Dark cupboards and the bottom of wardrobes, under sofas, behind doors, even pools of shadow were forbidden territory. Attics and cellars, out of the question. We tried very hard only to travel to cold and inhospitable parts of the world where no arachnids could follow, our only consolation being an easy moral superiority about luxury non-eco holidays in impoverished hotspots teeming with eight-legged life. I once wrote a novel set in a rainforest (called Rainforest) based entirely on textbooks and three trips to the Kew Gardens tropical houses. We all saw spiders much more often than anyone else we knew, always the first to spot them because we were always alert, intensely on the lookout. It turned out not to be just my paranoid theory that I summoned up spiders through the power of thought, that the dust in the corners of rooms conglomerated into the living beasts, actually given existence by the strength of my fear and apprehension. I was working towards a grand theory that maybe God, before the creation, was possessed of a neurotic fear of the idea of people and that was how we came about. No wonder we keep getting swatted. Dust to dust. I’d spend hours and hours at night trying (as fruitlessly as any intelligent portion of me knew it must be) not to think about or visualise spiders in case I made them come to me. Which, of course, they did; and where there was one spider, I knew there was always another that I hadn’t spotted, somewhere, somewhere … I had a special stone (as well as the blowtorch), heavy, large and flat, on the bedside table that enabled me when desperate to deal with spiders from a great height. Arachnophobia was the only sympathy I had with the columnist Bernard Levin, who devised a fine solution to the ancient problem of disposing of spiders in the washbasin: an old-fashioned soda-siphon. Taps are too close, and you have to touch them to turn them on. There has to be a critical distance between your being and the thing that disposes of the spider: preferably air, or a pressurised stream of water. Something directly connected, however long, to your hand will not do. But where can you get a working soda-siphon these days?
We also all knew that spiders are malevolent. Spiders and the awareness of malevolence inhabit an identical area of my brain. Scan it and see. Silent scuttling movement, legs rising above a dark central body (yes, we’re coming to that), uncanny watchful stillness. They know me and they hate me, whatever irrelevant truths Dave might tell us about them being frightened of us. He explained that they only come towards us in order to get under the sofa we’re sitting on because it’s a safe, dark space away from the horror of the noisy, strobing light of the TV. Natural history versus blind terror has only one victor. The finest and truest moment of the group confessional came when a women spoke up in a clear, in no way self-mocking voice: ‘What I hate about spiders is that they won’t stay still and let you kill them.’ It was a perfect expression of the rationality of our irrational fear.
John, the hypnotherapist, gave a brief talk about the symptoms and causes of phobia in general. Sweating, palpitations, paralysis, fainting. The evolutionary hypothesis didn’t do much for me: there are those who believe it was fear of spiders that made my very own particular ancestors more fit to pass on their genes so that they could eventually produce me. Ah, yes, the days when arachnosauruses ruled the earth, and australopithecines competed with hominid-eating spiders for a food niche. Luckily my forebears, from whom I have inherited no terror at all of snakes, didn’t get bitten by a cobra or crushed by a python. In my rational mind, I’m quite sure there were far greater dangers to survival than even the most poisonous spiders (it seems that no one has died from a spider-bite in Australia, that hotbed of really dangerous spiders, since 1985); and in my irrational being, a dangerous spider is no more terrifying to me than a mild-as-milk variety which, more importantly, is just as scary as the man-eaters. A young acquaintance of mine had a phobia of that well-known evolutionary threat: supermarket labels on fruit.
Psychoanalysis has a take. (So you are frightened of a black body surrounded by hairy legs coming at you? You find it a threat? What could such a thing represent? No, really? You don’t mean my mother’s vagina as I was coming down the birth canal? Well, thank you, I feel better now.) But I was getting on, and hadn’t got the years to spare for their talking cure. And there is a practical but dull psychological theory that phobias are caught by young children from fearful mothers (them, again) or traumatic encounters. Spiders, I think, were the least of my mother’s worries, and my most traumatic youthful encounters were with two-legged rather than eight-legged beings (though I admit that does rather take us back to psychoanalysis, above).
I had remarkably little interest in the nature of my phobia; I wanted only for it to go away. Just hypnotise me, John, all this talk is getting me nowhere. Finally, to my relief, he took us into another room to do the deed. We lay on the floor of a meeting room while he talked us through a relaxation sequence, a body scan no different from what you might do at the end of a yoga session. Then we were instructed to descend ten mental steps, find a nice place to be when we reached the bottom, and then to relax even more deeply. Not a problem, can do, nicely relaxed, and so? Now he was going to address our ‘subcon-sciousnesses’ directly, John told us, and did so by assuring us repeatedly: ‘Spiders are safe,’ throwing in for free the handy suggestion that daddy-long-legs were nothing to worry about either.
He had warned us that we might think nothing was happening. He was right. Apparently, the ability to be sceptical is not impaired by deep relaxation. Certainly, my ‘subconscious’ didn’t let on to me that it had heard a thing. Well, it wouldn’t, would it? I sneered in a relaxed manner to myself. It’s a powerfully difficult task to convince a person who isn’t entirely sure they have a conscious, let alone a subconscious, that you are getting through to it. And in any case, it wasn’t the safety or otherwise of spiders I worried about, it was their existence. After twenty minutes he reversed the relaxation and we had a nice cup of tea. Then we were taken across the road to the Invertebrate House at the Zoo, where it turned out that the tea-making volunteers had been searching the flower-beds for the sizeable garden spiders that now waited for us in small plastic aquaria on four tables.
Well, as invited, I did put my hand into one of the containers and touch the back leg of a big, black spider. I followed it with my finger as it ran in the direction I pointed. I did put my whole hand in, palm up, and let a volunteer chase the spider across my open palm. I did put a clear plastic cup over the smallish black creature after it had been deliberately released from the perspex tank to scurry freely around the table, then slid a card under the cup and walked around the room holding it. And after all that, I stroked one of the incredibly soft, hairy legs of Frieda, the four-inch red tarantula, brought out specially for the occasion from her quiet life behind glass. Then I held her in my cupped hands, though her stillness suggested that she was rendered as catatonic by human contact as I usually was by a spider encounter. I held her long enough to have my photograph taken, and have the picture of us both still, me looking as surprised at what I’m doing in the photo as I do whenever I see it stuck on the noticeboard in the hall.
I did all those things not with terror, but a kind of awed amazement. Only one person of the eighteen couldn’t bring herself to go anywhere near the spider containers, and it wasn’t the woman who had sat next to me sobbing. The rest of us were elated and astonished by what we found ourselves capable of doing. Everyone was hesitant at first, but most people went back for more, several times, to re-experience our new remarkable freedom from fear. The woman who had sat next to me in tears walked up to me with her cupped spider. ‘Look,’ she said in the first flush of the new her.
Mixed feelings don’t come any more entangled than when, after a lifetime of terror, someone says spiders are safe at you half a dozen times, and three months, a year, even four years later you discover yourself gazing empathetically at a handbag-sized arachnid Sisyphusing in the bath. Since that afternoon autumn has arrived annually, as it does, and I cup-and-card spiders out into the garden, stand and watch them web-weaving between the wheelie bins, and dashing across the open space in the living room between two dark corners, with intense interest, and have no sense at all that they are my enemy. I am suffused with remorse at the numbers I have caused to be killed, and I live contentedly with a spider who has taken up residence in a corner of the kitchen window. I’m not positively in love with them, but I can live with them on the same planet. And yet, although life has become altogether lighter and much less fearful, for which I am profoundly grateful, I have the strangest sense of loss. A person who is not afraid of spiders is almost a definition of someone who is not me. So it is uncanny (in a properly Freudian sense of the word) to observe myself being without that fear. Without that very particular and special relation to the most extreme Other I could imagine (apart from, and similarly to, my invisible infesting creatures). Some way in which I knew myself and perhaps was known, has vanished from my understanding of myself, from my sense of who I am. It is still slightly frightening not being frightened of spiders. And then I wonder, why not get hypnotised out of all my anxieties and nervous habits, make everything awkward and resistant go away, so that I could become … well, nothing is the alarming image I have. I can’t picture what would be left after I had chipped off the difficulties. I really don’t believe there is a solid nugget of the person-that-is-really-me underneath it all – the difficulties and such are fragments of the fragmented thing we choose to call the person. And what if the difficulties, as the analysts of whom I am only partly contemptuous would say, were merely the armouring, the screens, that kept the really bad stuff at bay? Now, without my arachnophobia, I worry what dark, repressed beast is about to return to consciousness and make my life really unbearable? The Beast. You know? How useful animals are to us, even if we hate and fear them.
A psychiatrist friend almost saved me from the spiral of horror I found myself about to plughole down. Over dinner, listening to my miraculous tale of new-found spider freedom and boldness, she looks distinctly unimpressed. She explained that simple (as in specific) phobias are the easiest of conditions to cure. Complex social phobias (fear of other people or going out into situations where other people will be) are of a different and far more intractable nature. The feeling I describe to her of having been given permission not to be afraid of spiders was exactly that, she said. What happened to me at the London Zoo is similar to a hysterical conversion. Phobias of spiders, snakes, flying, even labels on fruit, she says, are the closest condition that there is to normal if such a thing as normal existed. Any kind of behavioural or suggestion treatment is likely to work rapidly with a willing patient. ‘In psychodynamic terms,’ she explained, ‘phobias are the fears that the mind can afford to express directly and therefore they don’t lie deep in the unconscious.’ Animals, as well as our own man-made ‘others’, are perfectly available for helping us fear something that isn’t exactly what we really fear. Especially the small, dark, scuttling creatures, as remote as dinosaurs from our lovable furry mammalian friends. Even our unconsciousnesses have a use for animals who aren’t us, to help us avoid thinking directly about ourselves.
Being an insect does not, as such, preclude being loved. There are just a few who escape our hatred and the darker, primeval side of our unconscious. It doesn’t take much, however, to switch them over. Ladybirds were the benign insect for as long as I can remember. Though red with black spots is a natural signal warning predators of poison and danger should they try and eat the otherwise defenceless creature, ladybirds are so bright and cheerful that whole editions of children’s books were named after them. There is a children’s clothing firm called Ladybird. Nursery items are dotted with jolly spotted red-and-black creatures. When, as a child, I picked one up (never anything to be fearful or disgusted about ladybirds) I recited the necessary rhyme:
Ladybird, Ladybird, fly away home
Your house is on fire and your children are gone.
Certainly, it wasn’t cheerful, but it was concerned and caring. They wandered about for a minute or so tickling your finger and then they opened their wing casing and flew away.
In the past year, however, my lifelong amiability towards ladybirds has evaporated. A new breed has appeared. Harlequin ladybirds, originally from Japan, arrived in Britain in 2004. America imported them as pest control, but the trouble is that once they’ve eaten the aphids – for which gardeners welcome old-fashioned ladybirds – they start to eat their own kind, good ladybirds, each other, actually anything. They bite animals and people in the hope of lunch. Now they’ve moved into our houses, where it’s nice and warm in the winter for their hibernation.
‘They destroy wallpaper, curtains and carpets if they’re not found,’ says Matt Shardlow of Buglife. ‘And they poo a sticky black substance everywhere.’ Majerus says their reflex blood, the gooey yellow stuff that seeps out of their joints, is the main problem. ‘It smells foul, tastes foul, and stains anything.’
The journalist Annalisa Barbieri has first-hand experience of harlequins in her Suffolk home, and is frustrated that they appear impossible to get rid of. ‘We have had swarms of them,’ she says. ‘They fly all over the house and settle in huge clusters in the corners of window frames. They also fly at you, and they bite, but you know you can’t squash them because they release their orange blood everywhere.’ Barbieri was quite excited when she first spotted some ladybirds, as she had been trying to hatch some in her organic garden for her young daughter to watch. By the time she realised they were harlequins there were already huge numbers of them clustering around the windows on the outside of her house, and coming in through fissures in the wooden frames. ‘I actually started to get quite paranoid that someone had put a biblical curse on me,’ she admits. ‘It was so bad last Sunday I was thinking that I don’t want to live here any more if it gets any worse. But I don’t think it will, because winter is coming.’4
They arrived in Cambridge a few years ago and reached my study and The Poet’s teaching room in his college. They ‘call’ to each other at a distance with pheromones they deposit on windows and gather together in orgiastic groups. If you swat them they exude an awful smell. They seem unkillable; the only way I know of getting rid of them is to gather them up in lavatory paper, carefully, so as not to squash them and make them smell, and then scrunch the paper around them and flush it while you’re actually holding it in the water. If you just flush it, the ladybirds escape and can live for days swimming around in the toilet bowl. The Poet is about to buy a mini-vacuum cleaner and suck up the hundreds he finds on his ceiling, but then, what do you do with a vacuum cleaner full of live ladybirds? I get emails from him from work entitled: My Ladybird Hell, telling me how many he has battled with today. After three seasons of harlequins, there is not a shred of affection left in me for the generic ladybird. They aren’t spiders, stuck inside my head, hating me, nor parasites, living in me. They are pests for whom I have no pity. A whole lifetime of loving ladybirds (and of being pleased that there was at least one insect species I was fond of) has disappeared (with difficulty) down the toilet. Yet, though we call them pests and cannibals and a plague, what are they doing but making a living in the way everything does? What they’re doing is making their living by inconveniencing us. Perhaps I hate them so much because they’ve betrayed me. Ladybirds that bite and eat their own and cluster inside my house are not the cute little bugs I learned to love, and I’m really angry with them.
What we like much better are animals that we can rely on to stay the way they’re supposed to be. But we don’t just love or hate animals for our emotional satisfaction, we also use them to benefit us in practical ways. Animals can look after us and be our carers – if we choose to make them so. Dogs, ponies, monkeys and parrots are all used by humans to assist them when there is a need. Animals are bred and trained to make up for faculties that their owners lack, not as with hunting dogs, bred to use their remarkable (to us) sense of smell to find out prey for their owners to shoot and then to fetch, but as carers, where other human beings would be too expensive or unavailable. They offer people who are hampered in their lives the chance of independence. At primary school we assiduously collected silver and gold milk-bottle tops which mysteriously were exchanged for the training of ‘blind dogs’. The process was never explained, but it had a quality of the transmutation of base metals into gold. As a result of their accumulation, a Labrador or an Alsatian was trained from puppyhood to be the eyes, so they said, of someone whose was born without or who had lost their sight. It was an unambiguously good thing. It never crossed my mind to think it could be otherwise, and on children’s television we were always being shown how extraordinarily caring the animals were, how they looked after their master or mistress with such devotion, and in return received and deserved the love and gratitude of not just their owners but all of us. The devoted dog, that is, devoted to humans, is a commonplace. Except for working dogs, that is what dogs are for. But not only can they love you, they can, when it is necessary, actually look after you. They’ll help you cross the road and lead you safely to the shops. They can protect you from all manner of potential harm. They are called, now, ‘seeing-eye’ dogs.
Many people’s lives are greatly improved by animals trained to help them. One man uses a parrot to help him with his bipolar disorder. Jim Eggers carries Sadie the parrot around at all times in a backpack fitted to hold her cage. When she senses, from his manner and his voice, that her owner is on the verge of a psychotic episode, Sadie the parrot talks him down saying, ‘It’s OK, Jim. Calm down, Jim. You’re all right, Jim. I’m here, Jim.’ He used to say that to himself, and she started copying him. Eggers trained her to calm him down.
He learned that psychiatric service animals help their owners cope with things like medication side effects. Eggers takes heavy doses of antipsychotics that leave him in a fog most of the day. So he trained Sadie to alert him with a loud ringing noise if someone calls, or to yell ‘WHO’S THERE?’ when anyone knocks on the door. If the fire alarm goes off, Sadie goes off. If Eggers leaves the faucet running, Sadie makes sounds like a waterfall until he turns it off.5
There are capuchin monkeys who help quadriplegics eat and drink, macaques that alert their epileptic owners to an upcoming seizure, even miniature horses, instead of dogs, that lead the blind and partially sighted. It is assumed that we have a perfect right to breed and train animals to assist human beings. Well, we do have the right – because we can. But unless an animal flatly refuses to be trained, which I imagine must happen sometimes but rarely, they don’t have the opportunity of refusing. In America, they are known as ‘service animals’. They do serve their humans. Dogs and other animals are devoted because we have made them so, by breeding for devotion and juvenile characteristics, and we use animals’ sharpened senses and relative intelligence to our advantage in all sorts of ways: assistance, herding, finding and chasing other animals, racing, sending messages, guarding our houses, sniffing out and arresting drug dealers and other criminals. Humans are the great opportunists of the planet – if we see a tendency in an animals we will breed it up and train it for our use. Then we talk about devotion, a man’s best friend, and companionship.
In 1968 I was in Ward 6 of the Maudsley Psychiatric Hospital with nine other people. In the bed next to me was Joan, a woman in her late twenties. She was a solidly built woman who wore home-made cardigans. She, like me, was in hospital diagnosed with ‘clinical depression’. She spent most of her time sitting on the edge of her bed, her feet on the floor, her hands in her lap. She smiled and talked with you if you went up to her and joined her on the bed. Otherwise, she sat quietly unless she was shooed into the day room, where she sat in exactly the same way on a chair. When she was twelve or so, living in Wales, some boys she’d been playing with at a nearby disused quarry threw lime into her face, and she had been going blind since then. She was now almost completely sightless. She saw shadows against light, so that she could make out your shape if you stood in front of the window; she could even sometimes recognise who you were from the size and stance. It was only a matter of time before she lost that, too, and the world went completely black. Of all the people in our ward, Joan seemed to have a real reason for being depressed. One of the things about depression is that you feel you shouldn’t be – that things aren’t so bad and that you are in some way guilty for feeling bad. Joan on the other hand would, as she often said, have been crazy not to be depressed. It wasn’t that she had given up. She had learned to read Braille, when she went out she used a white stick, and if she needed something, she called out and asked someone to help her. She lived at home with her mother in Wales, but her depression had overtaken her and she was not inclined to be very active. She wanted to go home, but the doctors wouldn’t discharge her. They said that in order to prove she was not depressed she had to agree to have the seeing-eye dog that the local RNIB had available for her. The proof of her depression was not so much that she spent a lot of time sitting on her bed, not wanting to risk being a blind person in a sighted world, but that she refused the solution to the problem. Only a mentally ill person could refuse what anyone would be grateful for if they were blind: the help and companionship of a dog. It would help her get out of the house, let her be independent in the house and be a friend to her, so that she wasn’t totally dependent on her mother. Joan was adamant that she wasn’t going to have a dog. Her stubbornness on the matter was positively rock-solid. Craggy. She flatly refused. Obviously self-destructive.
Actually Joan was happy to explain to anyone who asked her why she didn’t want a dog. She had never liked dogs, but now there was something else, as well: she didn’t want one. She was blind. Wasn’t that enough? Did she have to be responsible for a dog, too? It had never occurred to me that having a dog wouldn’t be a wholly good thing for a blind person. It had never occurred to me that looking after a dog, feeding it, having to go out for walks, worrying if it was ill, going to the vet, the difficulty of having it sicken and die – dogs not living all that long – and then having to be trained to another dog, was a responsibility a person, blind or otherwise, might not want. Somehow, the doctors seemed to be saying that her ‘illness’ was her lack of gratitude in being offered something she, when you stopped to think about it, had a perfect right not to want. ‘Why have I got to have a dog I don’t want, just because I’m blind?’ she’d say. And it was a question. She didn’t want to look after an animal, however useful it might be. She also wanted the right to say no. But it was unthinkable that anyone wouldn’t want the care and unconditional attention of a devoted helper animal.