Born Naked Read Free

chastened Helen returned to variations on the theme of oatmeal porridge.
    Angus’s bees did well at first, producing quantities of good clover and buckwheat honey, but since the market was flooded, the crop could not be sold and we had to consume much of it ourselves. I was weaned on soda biscuits soaked in milk and lavishly sweetened with honey—a dish I still find delectable.
    Bees loomed large in my early years. When Angus rattled off in Henry of a summer morning to work his hives in the apple orchard of the Ketcheson farm on York Road, he would often take Helen and me along. Helen would sit under a tree and read. To keep me from crawling into trouble, she would place me in an empty super 1 set on the grass nearby. This was the scene of my earliest recollection.
    I see, in my mind’s eye, a large and strikingly marked honey bee standing on an anthill near where I sit. This bee is resolutely and briskly directing the ant traffic away from me, much as a policeman might direct members of an unruly crowd away from some important personage.
    I have since been told by expert apiarists that such behaviour by a bee would be “atypical,” which is a polite way of saying my memory lies. Nonsense. I know I was taken under the protection of the bees, and the proof is that I have never been stung by one, not then or ever. Wasps and hornets, yes. Bees, no. I believe I was adopted into their tribe, and ever since I have been as kindly disposed to them as they to me.
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    ANGUS HAD A mania for naming things, even when they already had perfectly good names. As a freshman mining engineer at Queen’s he had re-christened himself Squib. In mining terminology, a squib was a small but potent charge used to detonate a major explosion and this may well have been how he viewed himself.
    He was not satisfied with my name either. I had been christened Farley in memory of Helen’s beloved younger brother killed in a fall from a cliff, but before I was three months old Angus had begun calling me Bunje after some character he had encountered in a novel by, I think, H. G. Wells. When my mother tearfully remonstrated with him, he airily replied that Bunje was merely my “working title” to be used until I could make up my own mind what I wanted to be called.
    Because it was so forbidding, Angus initially named our decaying home The Fortress. Later he changed it to Bingen.
    Bingen, as 1 would learn much later in life, is a pleasant little town located on the river Rhine. It is dominated by an old, square fortalice called the Mouse Tower, wherein Hatto II , erstwhile Bishop of Mainz, was punished because he taunted the poor, who were begging at his palace gates, by calling them rats and mice who would eat up all his corn.
    An enormous plague of real rats and mice thereupon descended on Mainz and so terrified Bishop Hatto that he fled from the city and took refuge in the tower at Bingen. However, the rats and mice swarmed into the river, swam across it and, gnawing and tearing their way through walls and windows, cracks, and crevices, reached the inner chamber housing the terrified Hatto and ate him alive.
    The myriads of rats, mice, bats, and other creatures which made free with our rambling ruin were friendly fellow inhabitants. Their presence may even have helped give rise to the sense of fraternity with other animals which has so powerfully influenced my life. Certainly they were no cause for apprehension.
    Bears were a different matter.
    One night during our final winter at Bingen, my bedroom was visited by an enormous bear. I woke to find him standing upright by the window. He was wearing a checked tweed cap with matching visor and staring about him as if in surprise and even confusion. He did not seem inimical but I was nevertheless too startled to move a muscle. It was not until he began to shuffle towards the door that I let out a yell which, in my father’s words, “brought your mother and me up all