2008 - The Bearded Tit (6 page)

There is something ignominious about being strafed by a small bird when you have your trousers down. But this was the only unpleasant incident, probably for the meadow pipit as well, that took place during my time as an earthwork-compaction supervisor. It was proving to be a most agreeable employment. The weather was improving too. So much so that I decided perhaps I should spend the Friday of my first week at the beach. I had noticed after four days that the number of lorries, scrapers and rollers was virtually the same each day. There were slight variations but they seemed negligible and no one seemed to be in a position to check up. So at 7.55 a.m. on the Friday, I clocked on and got the day’s worksheets, then went off to beach about three miles in the other direction.

A disappointingly misty start to the day but, as always on the coast, the weather cleared to give a fabulous day which I spent on the sand, in the sea or in the pub, stopping periodically to tick the boxes on the worksheets. I cycled back to the site for six o’clock. The day’s earthwork compaction seemed fairly average. Not a great deal different from the previous days, in fact. Almost identical to Tuesday.

‘What the hell’s this?’ said an unexpectedly irate foreman.

‘It’s today’s earthwork-compaction report,’ I replied breezily.

‘There’s been a thick fog in the valley that hasn’t cleared all day. They haven’t done any work down there today.’

Oh dear.

I cannot remember the foreman’s exact words but ‘lazy’, ‘irresponsible’, ‘student’ and ‘clever dick’ were in there somewhere among some choice bits of vernacular. Just recovering from the humiliation of being caught with my trousers down by an irate meadow pipit, I was now sacked from my first ever job. After only five days.

For being a smart-arse.

L
ate September was doing all sorts of late-Septemberish things to the trees. Autumn colours were all the rage again. JJ and I sat in the Orchard Cafe by the Meadows having a full English cream tea, complete with the inevitable side order of wasps.

‘I love this season,’ I said, leaning back on the rickety deckchair and pretending I was comfortable. ‘It’s my favourite time of year.’

‘Last week you said spring was your favourite time of year.’

‘I thought this
was
spring!’

‘It’s late September.’

‘Damn, I must have overslept! No, what I meant was: my favourite time of the year is the time that I’m with you.’

She laughed. ‘Ah, sweet.’

Oh no, she said ‘sweet’. Such a nasty word. Such a dismissive word. Such a sexless word. ‘Sweet’, such a bitter word. Not the compliment you want from someone who is the object of your life-shattering passion. This was about the sixth time I’d met up with JJ. Increasingly I was taking over her lunch-hour and her morning and afternoon coffee-breaks. She had taken over my whole life but I hadn’t broken this terrifying news to her just yet. I was playing it as cool as a pathologically uncool person could. I was feeling more relaxed with her, less submissive and dribbling. I’d even said my first critical thing to her, half joking, of course.

‘That’s a nice bright skirt you’re wearing!’

‘Thank you.’

‘Sorry? I can’t hear you over the colour of your skirt.’

‘Ha ha ha,’ she said. I breathed a huge internal sigh of relief that she understood the feeble joke and was not offended by it. ‘Anyway, it’s a dress, not a skirt.’

‘When I used to wear one, I called it a skirt.’

We hadn’t quite done anything physical yet. Well, I had inadvertently brushed my hand against the side of her left breast when I was reaching over to get a teaspoon. In my mind, I reeled with fear and shame and guilt and embarrassment.
Oh no, I’ve grabbed her breast. In public! Out of the blue I’ve lunged at her and grabbed a dirty great handful!

She either didn’t notice it or thought, quite rightly, it was too insignificant to mention. Oh, and I’d come up with a ruse to get a little more snuggly with her: we’d compared heights.

‘You’re quite tall, aren’t you?’ she’d mentioned.

‘Average, I’d say. Taller than you. But you’re microscopic. I know—stand up and we’ll compare heights.’

We stood up and momentarily we were almost touching each other from head to toe. I could feel her warm breath against my chest.

‘Er, I don’t think you’re supposed to do this face to face. You don’t get such an accurate comparison.’ She turned round with her back to me. It felt very pleasant.

‘I think
you’re
supposed to turn round as well.’

Oh, of course. We stood back to back and came to the anticli-mactic conclusion that I was taller than her. And not only that, she was shorter than me. I think that was the sum of comparative height data that could be extracted from the experiment but I had touched her and that, funnily enough, had done nothing to diminish the unutterable utterness of my utter desire for her.

Her hand was resting on the table very close to my hand. I took a risk. I moved my hand on top of hers. A chaffinch arrived at the next table and started clearing up the crumbs. She moved her hand from under mine and pointed at the bird.

‘Hey, that’s very tame for a chaffinch!’

‘Yes,’ I agreed. Bloody chaffinch.

‘Go on then. What is it? Chaffinch?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I thought you’d learnt them.’

She was talking about scientific names for birds—how off-putting! And I
had
made a serious stab at learning them but they definitely weren’t uppermost in my mind at this point.

‘Er…oh. Yes, it’s got ‘celebrity’’ or something in it. Er,
Celebs
something.
Coelebs fringilla
.’

’

‘Actually it’s
Fringilla coelebs
.’

Well, it had its back to me.’

Once the commonest bird in Britain and still up there with the frontrunners, certainly still one of the most abundant birds in Europe, and an early winner for newcomers to birdwatching. You’ll see a chaffinch every day. Yes, you will. They perch openly and are less timid than most birds. And they have marvellous plumage. The adult male has a blue-grey head, pink breast, brown back, an olive-green rump and two unmissable bright white wing bars on dark brown to black wings.

The long loud song, once you learn to recognize it, will seem to be the only thing you ever hear in spring as the male tirelessly attempts to attract a female. The song starts as a slow chirrup, speeding up and getting louder and ending with a long, loud fading note. Some twitchers find it reminiscent of a fast bowler, lumbering up to the crease, getting faster then climaxing with the long pitch of the ball. A better birder than I has transcribed the song as ‘chip chip chip chiri chiri chiri cheep tcheweeeoooo’. That may be quite accurate, but all I can say is that I’ve never succeeded in attracting a female chaffinch by singing it. The female chaffinch is, incidentally, a rather dull, buffy-brown version of the male, retaining the striking black and white of the wings.
Fringilla coelebs
means ‘bachelor finch’.
Coelebsor
more often
caelebsis
the root of the English word ‘celibate’. Yet, inexplicably, you invariably see chaffinches in pairs. Mr and Mrs Chaffinch always look like an advert for marital stability. Has some Victorian scientist cocked up here?

‘Give me another one.’ I’d run out of physical proximity manoeuvres. It was time to show off my revision.

‘Starling.’

She was being kind to me.

‘
Sturnus vulgaris…
which is, let’s face it, Latin for ‘common starling’.’

‘Robin.’

‘
Erithacus rubecula
. That’s the first one you taught me. Here’s one for you.
Eritkacus fidus?

‘Er…No idea. Don’t know what
fidus
is.’

‘‘
Fidus
is dependable and loyal.’

‘Still don’t know.’

‘Reliant Robin.’

‘Oh I see. I didn’t realize the game had veered off down a puerile side road.’ She laughed affectionately and put her hand on mine.

Did you hear that? She put her hand on mine!

‘
Anas platyrhyncbos
?’ she asked.

‘Well, I think
Anas
is a duck, so I’ll plump for mallard.’

‘Spot on.’

I thought for a moment. ‘How about this?
Anas lavatorius?

‘Toilet duck.’ She pulled a long-suffering parent face in my direction. ‘Oh, I think I’ve just found your level now. What’s thrush?’

‘
Candida albicans
.’

She laughed and put her hand over her mouth with mock modesty. She was giggling and relaxed now. I think she likes me.

I finished with
Aquila slapheadii
(bald eagle) and she had to go back to work.

I was helpless. This girl is the best, I thought.

The absolute tops.

Or, to use the scientific binomial, the
Testiculi canis
.

W
ord-watching, as opposed to birdwatching I suppose, has been my constant, passive, background hobby. The bird world is a fertile breeding ground for strange technical and non-technical terms.

‘Dihedral’ is a great one. This is the angle formed by two meeting or intersecting planes. You might wonder what that has to do with birds. Well, it is what the experts use to describe the shallow ‘V with which some larger birds of prey glide or soar. Marsh harriers have a beautifully clear ‘dihedral’.

‘Supercilium’ is a must. It is the Latin for eyebrow, but any bird book will be quick to describe a bird’s pale or dark supercil-ium. The yellow-browed warbler has a peach of a supercilium: yellow, of course.

‘Speculum’ is a metal device beloved of doctors and, I suppose, anyone else who wants to inspect a bodily orifice. It can also be a small mirror or reflector. In the avian world it is usually a bright, lustrous mark on the wings. You need go no further than the commonest duck of all, the mallard, to find a fab speculum: a flash of purply-blue on its wing.

‘Dander’, as in ‘get your dander up’, means feathers ‘ruffled in anger, warning or fear’. It is connected to the word ‘dandruff but generally used for animals; the scaly, scurfy skin caught in fur and hair. Horses produce a lot of it apparently.

And then there are expressions that you only
ever
come across in descriptions of birds in field guides. ‘Rufous trousers’ is a beauty; sounding vaguely like a thirties’ jazz saxophonist, it is the reddish plumage near the rump and legs of some birds. The hobby will do nicely for this. And another great phrase, sounding like someone you might like to welcome to the stage to join Rufous Trousers and his band: Buffy Underparts. I won’t detain you with the birds whose underparts could be said to be buffy; the list is long.

‘Frantling’ is the mating call of a peacock. It is a word I’ve somehow managed to do without for most of my life, but now I use it as often as I can.

‘Was that a frantling, darling?’

‘No, it was the phone.’

‘Oh, I thought the peacocks were at it again!’

But one of my favourite words, which is not from the world of birds but is one I will always associate with birds, is a word I’m afraid I cannot remember.

I’ve got a feeling it ends with something like ‘—asthaenia’ or ‘—esthenia’. Anyway, it’s one of those Greek medical words you only ever hear on
University Challenge
and which no one knows. Paxman reads the definition out with a sneering ‘tut’ as if it’s a word he’s known since he was three. It means, roughly, a psychological dysfunction that causes the sufferer to confuse the senses. So, basically, you hear things you should see and see things you should hear. You taste or smell sound or colour. Any reader who’s got very stoned, lain in the back garden on a sunny day with headphones on and listened to Tangerine Dream will know what I mean.

I always remember that word, which, as I say, I can’t actually remember, when I see or hear a skylark. Especially somewhere in the flatlands of the Cambridgeshire-Norfolk border. It’s a favourite place of mine. The first time I was there is unforgettable. I still find the memory unsettling.

It was a soaking day in February. The dark-white light of rainy sky and black earth made it hard to look out of the train window. I went back to the crossword. I was travelling from Peterborough to Cambridge, via Ely. The railway line arcs to the east then to the south and then to the west, bisecting the flattest land in Britain with a sodden semi-circle. This is a drowning land, a sinking land. The landscape is scarred with the history of man’s efforts to keep it from the sea. The twenty-foot drain. A disturbingly dead-straight channel nearly twenty feet wide and nearly twenty miles long. Ditches and canals intersect at unnatural right angles, glaring perpendiculars in the dark peaty soil. At the beginning of the journey the twelfth-century Norman bulk of Peterborough Cathedral recedes into the drizzle; at the end of the journey the ghostly galleon of Ely Cathedral looms towards you out of the drizzle. In between, an impossibly low horizon makes it a land of sky. It feels like a journey through the Dark Ages, a journey on the edge of the known world.

Somewhere in the middle, I looked up from the paper and out of the window. It was a shock. I held my breath. The train was out at sea. Water joined the white sky in a continuous sheet of glass.

I looked again. For a second I was frightened.

No, wait.

There’s a tree out there in the ocean.

Another one.

A hedge. The land had drowned. These are the Ouse Washes. The Great Ouse river regularly floods the surrounding land, which is so flat it disappears. To the uninitiated, it is a profoundly disturbing landscape. But it makes a great piece of natural wetland, which brings in the birds and the watchers all year round.

That was my first time in those wetlands. The next time was on a hot summer’s day.

It’s different.

So, so different.

Another-planet different.

I was in a huge meadow near Welney in Cambridgeshire. I felt as if there was nothing between me and the sun. Not even Mercury and Venus. The scorched earth gave no shelter. There was just the sweltering sky. I lay down on the grass. The intensity of blue weighing down on me.