Halcyon Days cont...

'Fuck You, I Won't Do What You Tell Me'

For previous chapters of The Accidental Coca Lord click here

Chapter 1 continued

I got my first camera for my thirteenth birthday. It was my dad’s old Nikkormat EL – big, silver and clunky. I’d been watching kingfishers from my hide for a year or so by then and desperately wanted to start photographing them. It took me a while to learn the basics of photography, which Dad patiently taught me. My grandfather, a terrifyingly strict man, also spent time going through my camera with me, while telling me off constantly for not understanding what he was saying. He’d run a lab in London in the 1950s and, along with my grandmother Joan, had pioneered dye-transfer retouching – turning black and white images into colour by painting them, a common technique before colour film was invented. I still have an old print of Winston Churchill by Yousuf Karsh, black and white, turned to colour. My grandfather processed the original film. You’ll see the portrait if you pull a £5 note from your pocket.

My Grandmother Joan Piercy was a pioneer of dye-transfer retouching - turning black and white images into colour. This old print had mildew, so she cut old Winston’s head off and stuck it to a piece of cardboard.

Finding film to photograph my kingfishers was my greatest challenge. Back in the 1980s a roll of Kodachrome cost around £7 and I simply didn’t have the ability to raise that kind of money back then. Instead I relied on Dad’s complete lack of presence of mind and stole film from his camera bag. Occasionally he’d realise and bollock me, which meant I then had to resort to stealing money out of his pocket while he was in the shower and buy film that way, pocketing only a pound or two each time so that he didn’t notice. When that didn’t work I’d go to the local chemist, where my parents had an account, and convince the staff to put a roll of Kodachrome on the tab. Mum would go mental every month when the bill came in, of course, but I could weather that and I’m sure underneath she didn’t really mind.

Things changed when I became a teenager. Mum and Dad’s relationship began to unravel. Both had taken on far too much, and Dad was by no means an easy person to live with. As Mum always used to remind me, ‘Marriage is like getting on a plane to the Bahamas and landing in Beirut.’ Our house was fun but exhausting. Us five kids were joined by two severely traumatised foster kids, who had watched their father kill their sister by whipping her to death with a kettle cord. They just fitted in, though, along with the five cats and my seven pet foxes, which lived under the bookcase in the kitchen and pissed off the cats and the neighbours.

As I got older, Dad began to dislike me. Perhaps, as the eldest son, I was a threat. He seemed always to be in a bad mood, angry and exhausted by the long demanding hours at work, and his frustration began to find focus on me. He criticised me constantly for being idle and useless, and would always compare me to people he knew who were failures in life, telling me that’s how I’d turn out if I didn’t work harder. His parents were strict disciplinarians, dour and disapproving. They subscribed to the middle-class culture of judging each other by how well their kids did at school. Dad was terrified of them, particularly his mother, and my failures embarrassed him.

I started missing school in my early teens. I’d leave the house in uniform as usual, then divert before I got there and hop on a bus to the village of Wick, where my river was. I’d change out of my uniform in the back of the bus and spend the day in my hide, taking photos of my kingfishers or exploring the woods by the river. I’d sit quietly and watch the sparrowhawks, figure out where the weasels and foxes lived, root around in the badger setts looking for skulls. I’d climb trees and discover nests of owls, woodpeckers or buzzards. I’d wade the river looking for kingfishers and dipper nests, then sit patiently, hidden in the undergrowth, to watch them coming and going, feeding their chicks or mating.

My early hides were made of whatever I could get my hands on, which was usually not very much.

I’d see people walking their dogs and duck off into the bushes to avoid them. There I’d roll joints or smoke cigarettes, drink the lukewarm tea from my flask or eat the disgusting sandwiches Dad would make us for lunch out of doorstops of brown bread and thick lumps of cheese and butter that he didn’t have time – or the inclination – to spread. I’d look for caterpillars and butterflies; I knew the Latin names of everything, every bird and every beetle. I’d take specimens, and draw details of plants and insects.

I was a kid completely absorbed and happy when I was in the woods by the river. I loved the rush that came from breaking the rules and the feeling I got when I sat back on the bus to head home in the afternoon among the normal people, going about their normal lives. They had not the faintest idea of the things I’d just witnessed, the secret little lives and dramas that had revealed themselves to me. It made me feel special. When I got home like Cinderella, Mum would be waiting for me.

‘Where did you go today?’ she’d ask.

‘To my birds,’ I’d reply.

In the end she began to give up, and all the phone calls and letters from school just became normal.

My brain didn’t see the world properly, apparently. This was confirmed by everyone but Mum, who increasingly fought to defend me. She once attended a meeting with twelve of my school teachers to listen to them complain about me and my attendance. She listened to them berating her boy for a while, until she asked, ‘Do you think it’s acceptable for a teacher in this school to call my son a cretin?’ at which point they all fell silent.

Marijuana wouldn’t melt in my mouth..

I was always told I was stupid by my teachers, I was hit by them and I was constantly in detention. My school reports detailed a troubled and lost child, unable to adapt and progress like my peers. My English teacher even went so far as to start an appraisal of me with the words ‘Charlie is an utterly stupid boy.’ What lessons I did attend were spent staring out of the window, planning kingfisher shots with my camera. Concentrating on schoolwork was a torturous and claustrophobic experience, and my only outlet was being disruptive. I became the class clown. I used humour to amuse myself, to break the boredom. I had an inability to keep my mouth shut, so I’d often taunt my bullies as they kicked the shit out of me or mock the teachers as they lost their temper with me. I saw them as a challenge; the stricter the better.

My problem was obvious to me. I had shit to do and school was getting in the way. The stack of old National Geographic magazines that lined the shelf of my grandparent’s drawing room fascinated me. I hadn’t read a single word of any of them, but I had gone through every last one, looking at the pictures, and I was completely captivated by them, especially an article on kingfishers from a 1976 issue. From that early age, I knew what I was going to do. I was going to become a photographer for National Geographic, my first article was going to be on kingfishers, and all the world could go to hell in the face of that pursuit. My absolute conviction in this plan and my single-minded focus on this obsession meant I had no place in school. It was just getting in the way of my dream, as well as making me an angry and frustrated young man. I was dealing with too much – burdened with trauma and guilt, criticism and bullying, while being driven by obsession and a desperate need to escape.

One day, when I’d taken quite enough, I exploded in anger. I kicked my teacher’s desk to pieces, got sent to the headmaster’s office and just walked out of the school gates. And I never went back. I was just fifteen.

I started work on David Attenborough’s landmark series The Trials of Life when I was sixteen. It was my first paid job. I lived just down the road from the BBC’s famous Natural History Unit. John Sparks, a slightly daunting but warm man, was head of the Unit back then and my school friend Andrew’s mum Ginny was his PA. So I got a meeting with him. I attended, clutching a briefcase, in an oversized suit, and showed him my kingfisher pictures, which he loved, because he was a kingfisher nut too. Word obviously trickled around the building about the kingfisher-whispering boy, because my phone rang a few days later and a young researcher called Alastair Fothergill asked if I could help a cameraman get a difficult shot of a kingfisher diving. They agreed to pay me £30 per day. Alastair went on to become perhaps the greatest pioneer in the industry, conceiving shows such as Planet Earth and The Blue Planet.

I was assigned to help Rod Clarke, one of the BBC Natural History Unit’s specialist macro cameramen. Rod was a shy and sensible man, and his personality suited his job, which tended towards complicated, studio-based wildlife shoots, involving lights and macro lenses – precise and measured. Our task was to film kingfishers in slow motion catching elvers (baby eels) underwater. It was a complex task, made especially tricky by the fact that kingfishers don’t eat elvers. So, in true BBC style, we faked the whole fucking thing.

The kingfishers were wild, but we were on my river, so I knew how to get them working for us. We set up in a location I’d chosen along the banks, and I soon got the birds used to diving from a high perch we’d erected. They caught minnows I’d placed in a washing-up bowl – kingfishers will always take a free meal – and once they were comfortable doing that, we replaced the washing-up bowl with a small glass tank. The birds took to that straightaway and so finally we started trying to feed them elvers instead of minnows. It all seemed so simple. Except, as I mentioned, elvers don’t feature on a kingfisher’s menu.

So we’d sit in the hide and watch with frustration as the birds stared blankly down into the tank with a complete lack of interest, before flying off to look for a meal elsewhere. As the sequence was based on the perils the young eels faced on their migration, kingfishers being one of the perils, we had to make it look like they were a potential meal – never let the truth get in the way of a good story. Rod had the idea to put fish in the tank, then a layer of cling film (saran wrap), then more water and then the elvers. That way the kingfisher could dive for a fish by busting through the clingfilm but before it did, we’d have a shot, looking up from below, of a kingfisher flying down through a small shoal of elvers.

Every day for a week or so, Rod would sit in the hide and wait for a bird. When a bird arrived and dived, he’d film it, and then he’d call me and I’d appear out of the woods behind the river. We’d spend the next fifteen or twenty minutes catching more fish and resetting the camera and the clingfilm, which the bird had pierced. I was eager and keen to help, and Rod was always impressed with my ability to get the kingfishers to do exactly what we wanted, but I was also exhausted. I’d lost my virginity the night before we started filming and had been up every night since. So Rod’s call for me in the woods would often go unnoticed, because I’d be asleep on some log somewhere. This drove him nuts, as he’d be forced to come and find me, frustrated and shouting.

Along with a few shots of the bird watching the elvers from its perch – close-ups, mid shots, to make up the sequence – we managed to get the job done in a week. I was allowed into the transfer suit a few weeks later to watch the film we’d shot being projected for the first time on a screen. We’d nailed it. From below the tank the camera looked directly upwards through the water to a blue sky. The minnows and elvers swam around unaware in front of the lens. And then from behind, the form of a kingfisher appeared in super slow motion, getting bigger and bigger as it bore down upon the fish. When it hit the water, the whole frame exploded with bubbles, scattering the fish and elvers. The bird’s sharp beak pierced the invisible clingfilm and with absolutely perfect calculation grabbed a fish from right by the lens. The action would have lasted less than a second in real time. Our footage slowed it considerably, revealing something beautiful and special; a little secret that, before then, the normal passage of time had kept hidden.

Seeing it broadcast, narrated by the deific voice of David Attenborough, and feeling that I’d helped create it, inspired a new career direction. It would be twenty-two years before my kingfisher article finally graced the pages of National Geographic magazine. I had an entire career as a wildlife filmmaker to get out the way before that.

In the next instalment of The Accidental Coca Lord, I go to Shetland to photograph otters underwater and end up just getting stoned.