2008 - The Bearded Tit (7 page)

I was alone with the heavens. Alone but for a bird. A very special bird. A bird that is not of this world. It descends from heaven to nest and then disappears again into the void. A skylark. A skylark singing without pause for what seemed like hours. A small, nondescript brown bird had flown high enough to be invisible to the naked eye and poured out its music. Oh, yes, and that word. That’s when I thought of that word I couldn’t remember. Something-esthaenia. Mixing up the senses.

I imagined each note of the skylark’s song was a droplet of sunlight, and the music was sprinkling down on me in a glittering shower from the bird’s tower of song. Each trill and phrase of the melody was a handful of gleaming rose-petals, tossed out in the upper atmosphere by the hands of a beautiful angel; they fluttered down leaving a misty trail of perfume, drenching me in scented light and music.

And the collective noun for skylarks?

An exultation. Perfect.

Peerless king of the summer sky. What a bird!

What a day. What a memory. Oh, yes…and I suppose I should say…What a joint!

M
y studies, if that is not too august or misleading a term for my university days, were increasingly following JJ’s timetable. At 10.15 a.m. I’d stop what I was doing, usually sleeping, down tools, so to speak, and go round to Blackwaters and join JJ for her coffee-break. Same for the 4 a.m. break, though I was generally out of bed by this time. One o’clock meant meeting for a pub lunch. Back in those blissful, carefree, pre-health-and-safety days, lunchtime drinking was quite normal. People were eyed with suspicion if they didn’t return to their desks with the faint volatile whiff of a swift pint, at least.

One such lunchtime, the weather was still mild enough to find me and JJ outside at the back of the pub. The beer garden, I believe, is the correct term for the expanse of concrete between the bins and the karzies. From the kitchen the obscenities of the cooks wafted over to us on a wave of chip-fumes. This pub garden at least had a plant. A straggly creeper was unconvincingly climbing up a trellis in an attempt to get over the wall into the street and leg it.

‘Let’s sit here under the honeysuckle,’ I said. I’d learned this much in my few short years: girls seemed to be impressed by blokes who know about flowers.

‘It’s a wisteria,’ said JJ.

‘Oh, don’t tell me you know all the names of plants as well?’

‘No, just a few. But if I see something I like, a bird or plant or tree, I like to know what it is.’

‘I always thought that a plant was a plant, a flower was a flower and a tree was tree.’

‘You can recognize birds and know their names.’

‘Yeah, but that’s accidental. I drew them—I copied them out of a book.’

‘But you enjoy knowing their names, don’t you?’

I wasn’t sure I understood this question.

‘Well, if I didn’t know their names and I saw a nicely coloured bird, a great tit, say, I’d probably say, ‘Hey, that’s a nicely coloured bird. How pretty!’’

‘What about that girl serving in the café yesterday?’

I vaguely remembered the pretty, dark-haired girl who struggled engagingly with her English as she took our order.

‘Yeah, what about her?’

‘What was her name?’

‘I’ve no idea. What a strange question.’

‘Giancarla. She was called Giancarla.’

‘How the hell do you know that?’

‘She was wearing a badge with
Giancarla
on it.’

Mmm. Giancarla. That’s a nice name. As I thought about it, the image of the girl in my mind became clearer. Yes, it suits her, I thought. Slinky, slim, sexy Giancarla. Yes, that’s nice.

‘You see, until now she was just the waitress. Now you know her name. It changes things, doesn’t it? It changes your relationship with her. If we saw lots of birds on a bird table feeding and I said, ‘Look at that pretty bird,’ what would you say?’

‘Is it Giancarla?’

‘Come on!’

‘Er…I’d probably say, ‘‘Which pretty bird?’’

‘Exactly. But if I said, ‘Look at that greenfinch,’ you’d look at the greenfinch.’

‘S’pose. But surely that’s because it’s the name for that bird and if we both know it we can use it to communicate. To be precise.’

‘Yes, but the big point is that we both know it. We share a word. We have a shared experience of the greenfinch.’

I would rather have talked about potential shared experiences that didn’t involve greenfinches but I admired her wisdom. And the more I thought about it, the more important it seemed. We share our planet with all sorts of animals, some of them human, and plants, some of them human, and up till that moment I hadn’t really looked at any of them. The world is a big place, and the more you know about it, the smaller it gets.

‘But people know more birds than they realize,’ she went on. ‘Ask anybody how many birds they can name and you’ll be surprised. They will be surprised.’

I couldn’t resist putting this to the test.

‘Excuse me, do you know the names of any birds?’ I asked a man in paint-spattered overalls who was caressing a pint on the next table. After his initial wariness and the obvious pun, he said, ‘Pigeon; that’s it. Oh, and seagull.’ After a little thought he came up with sparrow, robin, cuckoo, eagle, blackbird, goose, duck, swan, swallow, vulture, starling, wren, blue tit, chicken and ostrich. Not a bad list. Seventeen. And he did surprise himself. In fact, his turned out to be the best list of five customers till a middle-aged lady with half-moon spectacles sat near by.

‘As a matter of interest, can you tell us what bird names you can think of?’

After a smile and a ‘What a very bizarre question!’ she said, ‘A warbler? Does that count?’

‘Of course,’ said JJ. ‘Warbler’s good. There are quite a few of them actually.’

‘Yes, let’s think,’ said the lady. ‘There’s sedge warbler, reed, Arctic, barred, Orphean, Sardinian, Dartford, Cetti’s, olive-tree, olivaceous, icterine, melodious, great reed, river, grasshopper, aquatic…’

Eighty-three birds later we let the visiting professor of ornithology get on with her small sherry in peace.

F
rom the edges of Hertfordshire and Essex, two insignificant streams, the Rhee and the Granta respectively, join together just to the south-west of the city of Cambridge to form the Cam. The river then runs in a north-easterly direction through the city centre out into the fens joining the Great Ouse south of Ely.

Now, that last sentence doesn’t feel quite right. Ah yes, it’s the word ‘runs’. By no stretch of the imagination does the Cam ‘run’. It’s as near to stagnant as a moving piece of water can be. The Cam sleepwalks. It snakes lethargically through the village of Grantchester, it idles through a meandering green corridor of willows, it gently laps the edges of a few verses of a Rupert Brooke poem, it glides haughtily past the backs of the colleges and the perpendicular Gothic magnificence of King’s Chapel, it ambles glassily on, under the railway arch, under the strident A14 viaduct and wearily lets the Great Ouse carry it off to the North Sea.

That’s the Cam.

No white-water rafting here, lads.

But along its length you can occasionally see something extraordinary. Sometimes you see it and shake your head and say, with a sigh, Wow!’ Sometimes you just have to tap the glass with the back of a knife and say, ‘Ladies and gendemen, please be upstanding and give a big, warm round of applause for…
Alcedo atthis
!’

I can vividly recall the first time I saw it.
Everybody
can vividly recall the first time they see it. I was walking JJ to work along a short stretch of the frosty banks of the Cam one November morning and we saw a darkish bird flying close to the water. Not very special-looking. It was starling-sized. I thought perhaps it was a starling.

‘I think it’s a starling,’ said JJ.

‘Mmm, it was darkish. And it was starling-sized. So you never know!’ A moment later: ‘There it is again.’

It flew back in the other direction and perched downstream, somewhere round a bend in the river. As we rounded this bend it meant that the slanting early sun was now behind us. The bird was perched close by. Our approach frightened it and made it fly away from us. An electric-blue flash darted low above the surface of the brown water. An unreal turquoise brilliance. Unmistakable. Spectacular. Unique…I had seen my first kingfisher!

JJ’s first kingfisher, too.

A special moment shared.

As a child I had drawn a kingfisher many times with coloured pencils. It was a delight to draw. Blue, green, turquoise above, bright orange below. A clear white patch on the side of the neck. Its head tightly barred blue and green. And a long stabby bill. It was almost too exotic to be an English bird. And yet until the sun catches it, you may not even notice it’s there. I’ve heard that some idiots have mistaken it for a starling.

It perches near the water, or hovers above it, before its stiletto dive into the water to catch small fish, amphibians and insects.

Slowed-down film reveals that just before it hits the water, it moves its head from side to side to allow each of its eyes a view of the prey so it can work out how much the refraction of the water has apparently altered the position of its target.

And you can’t say it’s not well named. ‘Kingfisher’. Though the name would not be my automatic choice for an Indian lager, you have to say that any association with this creature adds class.

The Germans call it
Eisvogel
, the ‘ice bird’, which I love.

The Greeks call it
Alkyona
. Now, you must have heard of
Halcyon Days
. It is a play by Steven Dietz or an album by pianist Bruce Hornsby or a song by the band Whisky Priests. And, of course, a composition by the Baroque composer Henry Purcell. So what are these halcyon days, then, that have so inspired writers, composers and artists? What are these days of the kingfisher? Days of joy, prosperity and tranquillity. Usually calm before a storm. And, of course, being a Greek name means
halcyon
has an ancient and weird story attached to it.

And it goes like this. Once upon a time there was a magic bird that could calm the seas and allay tempests. This bird carried the soul of a beautiful girl called Alcyone. Alcyone was the daughter of Aeolus, ruler of the wind. She was married to Ceyx, the King of Thessaly. One day, Ceyx was shipwrecked in a storm and drowned. In her grief Alcyone threw herself into the ocean. But she didn’t drown—instead she was carried to her husband by her father, the wind-king, who calmed the waters so his grandchildren could be born free from danger.

And if that’s not a true story, I don’t know what is!

So this bird, the halcyon, legendarily lays its eggs directly on to the sea and charms the winds and waves to be calm during its nesting season, the fourteen days before the winter solstice.

Halcyon
ultimately derives from the Greek word
hals
, which means ‘salt’, or by extension ‘sea’—remember in chemistry ‘the halogens’, the salt-makers? Alcyone herself probably was not a kingfisher, though. She was clearly an ocean-going bird: maybe an ‘auk’; ah yes, ‘auk’ (Latin
alca
) from the word
alcyone
.

Wonderful stuff!

Thank you very much, ladies and gentlemen, let’s hear it for the kingfisher!

(HUGE APPLAUSE)

…And an old boatman, on the river Test in Hampshire, once told me this: ‘If you see a kingfisher, you know it’s going to be a special day…but if you’ve seen a kingfisher, it already is a special day.’

And I was with JJ, so it was already a special day for me anyway.

‘T
he dove is a symbol of the soul and the Holy Spirit. It signifies purity, constancy and peace. Doves mate for life. They are devoted. Why else would the turtle dove become a symbol of eternal love?’ I paused nervously. Dr Fletcher was glaring at me, unimpressed. As Senior Tutor of the college he represented considerable authority. My Catholic schooling had left me unfashionably deferential to, and frightened of, authority figures. Third-years and graduates were sneering about any authority within the college. My friend Mick, a graduate physiology student, was deeply scathing about the dons.

‘They’re big fish in microscopic ponds, Rory, they can’t harm you. This isn’t the real world. Academics live in an unreal, cloistered world. They’re living out a perpetual adolescence, obsessed with in-fighting and petty rivalries. Undergraduates larking about don’t interest them in the slightest. They’re more concerned with who gets to sit next to the master at High Table. You should spit on that pillock Fletcher.’

He was probably right, but that pillock Fletcher was making me decidedly uncomfortable as I rambled on about doves. ‘‘So turtles pair that never mean to part.’ Florizel to Perdita.
The Winter’s Tale
, sir.’

No reaction.

‘You know. Shakespeare, sir.’

‘I know who wrote
The Winter’s Tale
, McGrath.’

‘Sorry, sir, with you being an engineer and all that, I—’

‘We’re not all illiterate morons in the Faculty of Engineering, you know,’ he snapped, adding, with a private sneer, ‘Though there are a quite a few, it has to be said.’

I went on. ‘In heraldry, the dove, interestingly enough—’

Fletcher cut in. ‘No, not interestingly enough. Quite dull, in fact. Now, listen, the Christian Union in the college—’

Kramer interrupted. ‘Before you go any further, Mr Fletcher—’

‘It’s doctor.’

‘Sorry, Mr Doctor,’ Kramer replied, obviously thinking that chutzpah might be the best weapon against the academic. ‘The dove is deeply relevant in any matter of Christianity. The dove is the Holy Ghost. Do you know how many times the dove is mentioned in the Bible?’

‘No, Kramer.’

‘Tell him, Rory.’

‘Er…loads,’ I stammered, then I remembered a quote. ‘‘And Noah sent forth a dove from him to see if the waters were abated.’ That’s Genesis.’

‘Side one, track four,’ added Kramer.

Dr Fletcher stood up and stared out of the window for a few moments, then suddenly spun round and barked, ‘Kramer and McGrath!’ This theatrical gesture was clearly calculated to make us jump. And, sadly, we both did.