COLIN PACKHAM
Chris introduces his greatest hero – a humble, loving father who instilled an unfailing drive to never give up.
Iremember a series of Sunday mornings collecting food for my lizards. I remember sitting on the collapsed carcass of a Dutched elm, watching him peel back the bark and scrabble to squeeze spiders into a jam jar. Shirt, no tie – it was Sunday after all – but still with that trademark sense of purpose, of focus, of a job worth doing… and doing well.
My pause was brief – I didn’t want to be caught slacking. I never feared his frowns, nor feared him, but I knew if I didn’t strive to succeed, to fumble more ‘bugs’ into my jar, then when they were measured I’d be found wanting. (He still got twice as many spiders as me.)
The wasteland we scoured was in Woodmill Lane. He knew its history, having grown up within spitting distance; it had been a brickworks and a sandpit. He remembered seeing snakes swimming in a pool there when he’d been my age in the 1940s. Now it was a bramble patch, a sun-baked bowl necklaced by the fallen trunks of the roadside giants that I had seen reeling with winter rooks as we’d trudged up that hill when I first started school.
I longed for the riches of his ‘snake-world’, not knowing that within 10 years I’d be fighting, and losing, my first conservation battle to save this scrap of wasteland from ‘development’. They called it ‘Badgers Wood Place’ in pure spite of the setts they destroyed to build it.
For him, knowledge was paramount. Knowing things, and knowing how those things connected, made a greater sense in time or space, in history or geography, in maths and physics, in BTUs or horsepower. He was an engineer – he understood how things worked, about electricity, energy and the machines that made or used them – but he also understood the relevance of every war, battle and vainglorious last stand. Now, though, he had a new challenge: to embrace z zoology. So we went to the librar library every Saturday, the only differ difference being that he expected m me to teach him, and tell hi him about the dinosaurs, the amoebae, the birds, the mice, the tadpoles we dredged from ponds each spring. He was, he said, the ‘ ‘gillie’ – he bought a deer deerstalker hat and carried a self-cut stick on our expeditions. H He found most o of the nests, the foo footprints, his keen eye eyes fixed on the specks in the sky that I had to turn into birds.
And I tried hard, and harder and then harder still to know all these things. But there was no end, when we exhausted the old brickfields we walked further, then drove, then drove further, out to the New Forest, the heaths, the downs, the rivers, streams and lakes where new life led to new questions and needed new answers.
Together we built the foundations of a new knowledge, still spattered with Agincourt, Waterloo, HMS Victory and Spitfires, but coloured by ecology, ethnology, physiology and anatomy. His machines were matched by my wildlife. So when we almost stopped talking because the Sex Pistols and The Clash were shouting louder than either of us could, when things got strained, hectic and dysfunctional, we still had a vestige of common ground… what we didn’t know. We still trudged with jars and nets, him with the deerstalker, me with slightly better binoculars; we still read and told each other new things. We still do.
The recent photo opposite was taken on a Sunday. I knew he wouldn’t be wearing a tie so I am. It’s not revenge, it’s an ultimate homage, because of all the heroes I’ve worshiped here… there can be only one. My Dad.
NOW, THOUGH, HE HAD A NEW CHALLENGE: TO EMBRACE ZOOLOGY.”