Slimy tale as old as humans
Story of the week was on page two of the paper. It’s a story of archetype. It tells of our place in the world as a species. It tells of men, and it tells of women, of our deepest fears and our oldest truths. It’s the story of Barnaby and the Giant Worm. (And if that title reminds you of Roald Dahl it’s because his stories were rooted in the primitive. Which is why kids like to read him, boys especially.)
One day after school 9-year-old Barnaby Domigan went exploring. Instead of hunching over the iPhone I hope he hasn’t got, he plunged into the stream at the bottom of his garden in the Christchurch suburb of Burnside. He got muddy, as boys should, but he also got lucky. He found an earthworm more than a metre long. That’s almost as long as he is tall.
Barnaby thought the worm was, and I quote, wonderful. His mother thought the worm was, and I quote, the stuff of nightmare.
And on the instant we’re back in the Bible, back in prehistory, back in the collective subconscious.
Boys, by and large, like worms. They’re such a remote life form. They move without limbs. They survive being cut in half. They can be stretched till they snap, tortured without guilt. And they have uses, the first of which is fishing. (Oh the ingenuity of the self-styled primate, to impale the invertebrate worm to capture the vertebrate fish. There’s raw reality. There’s the thing itself.)
As a kid I fished with tiger worms from the compost heap and earthworms from the flower bed, but best of all with lob worms. On dewy mornings these could be found lying in the grass, but they kept the tip of their tail in the burrow and if you pulled on them, they’d cling on till they broke. The trick was to apply steady pressure until eventually they weakened and yielded themselves whole to the bait box. (No, no need to thank me. Life’s wisdom is for sharing.)
The other use of worms was girl-scaring. Just revealing a palmful of tiger worms was enough to start a stampede. And as for dropping a lob worm down the back of a dress, well, life knew few more dramatic pleasures. (It has become conventional to disavow the cruelties of youth, but what’s done is done. And besides, I’d grown out of all that long before I finished university.)
What girls saw in a handful of worms was what caused Barnaby’s mumto speak of the stuff of nightmare. She may have spoken lightly, but the words came from deep.
Worms are older than us by countless millennia. They are pre-backbone, pre-dinosaur, pre-just-about-everything. And they will be postjust-about-everything too. We sense that in our bones. Blind, spineless, innumerable, they’ll get us in the end. As they say on Ilkley Moor, ‘‘Then t’worms’ll come and eat thee up.’’
Even before we die, they are at us. They are parasitic. They’ll take any route into our soft insides, where they take up residence to feast and breed.
The word worm is as old as speech. It can be traced back to a long-extinct proto-Germanic language. And it didn’t mean just worm. It meant serpent. It meant dragon. It meant anything crawling and limbless. The beast that St George slew was a worm. The beast that beguiled Eve was a worm. The beast that burst from the woman’s chest in Alien was a worm. The worm has a long association with evil.
The hunting male rejoices in them. The nurturing female shudders at them. Barnaby and his mumare the old old story. And all in a Christchurch garden.