Chris Packham (2016) Fingers in the Sparkle Jar. A Memoir.

I watched an interview with Chris Packham in Edinburgh, promoting his book, after I’d read almost 400 pages of his memoir. He’s around the same age as me, but looks at least ten years younger. Most of us know him from the telly. For example, Springwatch with around four million viewers.  Packham is erudite about birds and biology and you know you’re listening to an expert.

I read lots of books. But, at first, I couldn’t really find a way into Packham’s memoir. It read like fiction.

‘The Collector. July 1966

“I’m sorry, I haven’t got change of a ladybird,

The ice-cream man had opened the matchbox expecting a sixpence but instead found a six-spotted beatle…”

The story, the narrative is being told from the point of view of the ice-cream man. It has the feeling of a fictional exchange.

I got confused when a lad at school offers a fag from a packet of Players to one of the popular girls with big tits. To me it seemed Packham had gone for it, was trying to chat-her-up and had a clear strategy of the stimulus-response kind.

He’d already blown it with a younger girl in third year of his school. For once, he’d got dressed up, like other boys, and waited outside the school gates, hoping she’d be the one to see him.

This other lad was in the bottom sets at school, which wasn’t Packham, but it seemed to be him, until it becomes clear when he beats up the real Chris Packham, who inhabits the same school and in the same city but on a different planet in which only he and his monomaniacal visions can see and feel and be who he is.  

It was a Dylan Thomas kind of view of truth, more poetic than literal.

Jeferson Tonorio opening in The Dark Side of Skin explains it far better than I could:

‘Sometimes you’d have a thought, and go to live inside it. Push everything away. Build a house that way. Somewhere far. Deep inside yourself.’

That’s what Packham did with his obsessions and possessions. His joy with obtaining the love of his short life, a kestrel. He was dedicated to it to the exclusion of all others. Obsession and possession and monomania.  

Unfalling, the bird stands chopping air, fluttering and then rolling down smooth, slipping and then sliding away to ring a curve across the storm until it pitches at the apex and begins to dance with the wind, its plumes constantly shaken, folding and flicking to steer it still and ... balance broken it tumbles and steadies with a twist of grey - cloud-licked and clean, now measuring the weight of the sky again ...

Packham’s depression and suicide attempt are told from the point of view of the therapist in February 2004 and begins with a simple, ‘what happened?’

‘Depersonalisation’

No inner I. Just he. That disconnect with reality.

"Pure love, immaculate, perfect love, is the thing that is there waiting to destroy you. Because it becomes all of you and when it's gone there is absolutely nothing left…"

And sooner or later, an intense anger. Here are arguably the sparks of Columbine and similar massacres? When there’s nothing there but the anger, then you’ve nothing to lose? You’re already disconnected. Already dead.

 If A Kestrel for a Knave is about how society imprisons us. H is for Hawk is about how grief untethers us, but unhuman life sets us free. Fingers in the Sparkle Jar is about how nature rescues us when we don't fit into common humanity and are considered less so, life unworthy of life.

His was a fragile beauty. Too easily broken. The Sparkle Jar filled with a living kaleidoscope of luminescent sea creatures. Compared with two slightly older lads he saw on the beach, working together to harvest tadpoles as they spewed out of a jetty, hitting them with a hammer and turning them to mush. A metaphor and symbol of the way we treat the living world. Read on.    

Notes.

To see how these styles translate to spoken storytelling, you can watch this recording of Chris Packham at the Edinburgh International Book Festival, where he discusses the emotional mechanics behind writing his lyrical and deeply confessional memoir.