Pilcrow (17 page)

It occurs to me now that there was a hint of whimsical tenderness in the name that Dad suggested. Consciously or not, he had gone back to his memories of the War. ‘Tail-end Charlie’ was RAF slang for the rear gunner on a plane, the airman with the shortest life expectancy. The sitting duck. It was uncharacteristically good shrewd psychology on Mum’s part that she let Dad, who wasn’t that keen on pets, have a hand in their naming. It made him part of their lives. Who knows? Perhaps Gipsy was named after the Gipsy Moth, his favourite biplane.

I knew quite a lot about budgies by this time, and although I was happy about Charlie’s miraculous survival I was sad to realise he would never be a dad himself. You can’t breed if your own kind rejects you, and it wasn’t clear if Charlie even knew he wasn’t human. All my objections to the business of reproduction melted away in this case. The bond between us tightened as we shared our disadvantages. I became attuned to the faint whirr of his wings and the high
humming
of his heart.

Charlie was a talker, and an excellent one. Since he had been rejected by his own kind, talking to humans was the only sort of
communication
he had. His repertoire included snippets of songs and nursery rhymes. He would be let out of his cage to fly around the room, but when I called ‘Charlie’, he would always come and sit on my finger. He gave me love-nibbles on the lips without ever going so far as to bite. Sometimes he would hop across the pillow and whisper secrets in my ear.

Charlie would have been a fine companion for any child, but he was tailor-made for my needs. He responded to a word, to the merest movement of the lips. No agitation of the bones was required to set him in flight towards me. Charlie responded also to Peter, but if I called to him while he was in flight he would change course and come to me. The summons was answered almost before it was formulated, as in the ideal working of a prayer.

Sometimes I would close my eyes when I called him, for the slightly spooky heightening of sensation, feeling the wind from his wings and the little blurting noises he made as he landed. His feet, which were hard and warm, gave a feeling exactly half-way between tickle and prickle.

It gave me a great feeling of intimacy with creation to feel Charlie’s warm beak rubbing and brushing against me, and to feel the tiny bursts of slightly warmer air puffing out of the slits in his nose. ‘Birds can’t have nostrils,’ said Mum, though. ‘Not even noses really.’ I thought that was unfair. For a while I hated dictionaries for being so killingly exact. When she went out of the room I spoke to Charlie about his non-existent nose, telling him that it’s what you can do inside that counts. As far as I was concerned, there were no nostrils wider or more flarable than Charlie’s.

Charlie was fascinated by Gipsy. There could be no question of restricting Charlie’s movements after all he’d been through, so Mum clipped the dog’s wings instead. Before she opened the cage, Mum would raise her hand and say, ‘
YOU DO!
’ to Gipsy, who instantly froze and stayed motionless. Charlie would land on Gipsy’s head, talk to her and fiddle with her ears. This was great fun for Charlie. Gipsy was furry and silky and she had wonderfully satisfying ears. With humans you could go straight to the hole in the ear and tell your secrets, but with Gipsy you had to burrow and pull up the flap. When Charlie seemed to be climbing bodily into the poor dog’s ear, Mum would step up her vigilance. She would call out a stern warning (‘
CHARLIE
!
’) if she thought he was probing too deeply.

Dad thought all this peace-keeping between the species was
ridiculous
. ‘Let Nature sort it out’ was always his principle. If it had been up to him Charlie would have ended his first mission of exploration as a fluttering snack, since that is generally the way Nature Sorts It Out.

Then one day ‘the girl’ forgot to close the window of my room, and Charlie escaped. I remembered those other blue birds flying off into the doom of the even bluer sky, and I wept. Surely God could not be so nasty as to take away the one thing I really loved and could
actually
play with? My dear friend kept me cheerful and never got sad himself. He was a playmate who weighed so little that he couldn’t hurt me even if he flung his whole ounce-and-a-bit against me. His play could never get rough. I prayed like mad to God at least to look after him. My praying style was crude and I hadn’t yet learned to add ‘If it be Thy will’ to every petition, but just as I was getting to my ‘Amen’ the door opened and in came Mum with Charlie in her hand.

It was a miracle. I had to hear the whole story from Mum. I made her tell me time and time again. How she had watched him landing in a tree, how she had climbed the tree stealthily like a cat. How she had laddered her stockings but didn’t care. How she climbed right up to him until she was ready to pounce, all the time making tiny
tch
…
tch
… noises with her lips. Tell it all again, Mum. From the
beginning
.

Charlie’s disability must have added to his disorientation at being outside. All birds were hostile to him, even other budgies. It had been Mum who had coaxed the orphaned bird out of his egg in the first place, so he was only going home when he chose to land on Mum’s hand. We weren’t keeping him against his will. Ours was the only home where he could thrive. And soon Charlie was chirping and dancing again, making additions to his vocabulary.

The Collie Boy and I had a bit of a barney one day, about the twenty-seventh letter of the alphabet. I memorised the order of the letters to her satisfaction, which was the sort of thing I enjoyed, but then I started asking about the letter that had been left out. I knew there was one more. One more makes twenty-seven. But did it go before the A, or after the Z? Or somewhere in the middle? ‘Nonsense, John,’ said the Collie Boy, ‘there’s no such thing as a twenty-seventh letter. Twenty-six is plenty.’

‘Shall I draw it for you, Miss Collins?’ I offered politely. ‘I know exactly what it looks like. I just don’t know what it’s called.’

I suppose I was a faintly alarming child from the word go, in terms of curiosity and oblique obsession. Illness had intensified my mental life without feeding it. And I had always been the sort of child who looks troubled – as his mother notices – during tellings of ‘Goldilocks’. Always at the same point in the story. Something
puzzles
him about the details.

Then he tells her what he wants. They must do an experiment. He wants her to go into the kitchen and fill vessels of different sizes from the hot-water tap. He is trying to reproduce experimentally the
conditions
of the Bears’ interrupted breakfast. Fairyland is in breach of the laws of physics. This offends him. It doesn’t make sense. Baby Bear’s bowl is the one which must by rights lose its heat the fastest. If any of the helpings of porridge is to be ‘just right’, not too hot and not too cold, then it can only be Mummy Bear’s. Why has the story gone wrong?

On the day of our alphabet quarrel Miss Collins humoured me at first, by bringing the little blackboard in range and handing me a piece of chalk, so that I could draw the twenty-seventh letter, but her expression was not indulgent. Perhaps she thought I was being cheeky. I did what I could with the chalk, to reproduce a letter shape that I had only seen in print – and only as a capital. Collie Boy hardly glanced at my drawing before saying, ‘There’s no such letter, John. Perhaps you’ll allow me to know best. The English alphabet has twenty-six letters in it. No more and no fewer.’

‘I can show you in a book if you’d like, Miss Collins.’

‘What nonsense you’re talking, John. Who is the teacher here, may I ask, me or you?’ Somehow my eagerness to learn registered with her as pathological. She was a particular character type, the teacher who doesn’t much care for responsive pupils, part of the strange group which includes the librarian who prefers the books to stay on the shelves and the bus driver who would much rather not pick up
passengers
.

‘It’s in the Ellisdons catalogue, Miss Collins.’ My Bible. ‘I know the page number by heart. If you pass it to me, please Miss, I can show you.’

‘Very well, John. You have one minute to find this wonderful
letter
that no one else has ever heard of. But be warned, I don’t take kindly to cheekiness, from whatever quarter it comes.’

The passage I was looking for concerned a subject dear to my heart, indoor fireworks, and there it was: the pride of the box, miniature
volcano
which at the end of its display gives birth to a snake from its cone.
Mount Ætna
. Containing a letter which was neither
A
nor
E
but a glorious hybrid, a marriage or mutation. I was hoping for a creation myth from Miss Collins like the one she had for baby ‘i’, explaining how
A
and
E
came to be so lovingly interlaced.

In fact I’m sure that Ellisdons only went in for this bit of
typographical
fancy-work in an attempt to raise the general tone, just as it described a remarkably wide variety of toys and devices as ‘
educational
’.

Miss Collins was flustered for a good long moment. Then she said firmly, ‘That’s not a letter at all, John. That’s just a way of writing things down, quite different.’ She must have felt she was on weak ground here, since what she had said described letters precisely. They’re just ways of writing things down. ‘What I mean to say is it’s old-fashioned. We don’t write like that any more. It’s correct to write Mount Etna, E-T-N-A.’ I wasn’t in the slightest bit convinced, and I have to say that I took the whole thing rather personally. Miss Collins should never have tried to make a liar out of the Ellisdons catalogue.

In fact I had a funny sort of love-hate relationship with spelling. At that stage I could have gone either way, towards pedantry or
indifference
. I remember how silly I thought some of the spelling rules were. Why did we need rules anyway? I verry much wonted to rite things owt the way they sownded, and then evrywun wood no wot wee wer torking abowt.

Still, I applied myself to the task of learning the rules, despite a few despairing moments. The spelling of ‘meringue’ was so impossibly distant from the sound of
merang
that I thought it just wasn’t fair. And there were more exceptions than rules, which offended my sense of things. Why wasn’t the curved returning stick which aborigines threw, as featured in the Ellisdons catalogue, called a boo-meringue? Once again Miss Collins couldn’t give me a satisfactory answer.

A year or two after I started to be ill, someone had the idea of
fixing
a mirror to the end of my bed, a swivel mirror adjusted to an angle that let me look out of the window. At last I could see the birds that squabbled on the window-sill in the early morning. They were blue tits and not wrens at all. I wish I had been able to observe them more closely, since this was the time that blue tits were making a
remarkable
breakthrough. There’s a word for this: a saltation, a sudden
evolutionary
leap within a species. Not an exultation of larks but a saltation of tits. Admittedly the word is usually applied to
appearance
, whereas the breakthrough was one of behaviour, as birds adapted to the human environment.

It was like one of Æsop’s fables, which I enjoyed being read so much. ‘The Fox and the Grapes’. ‘The Ass and the Grasshoppers’. I didn’t know at the time that the name could be spelled using the rare Siamese-twin vowel I loved so much, which would have been useful corroborative evidence in the case of Ellisdons
v
. Collins.

In Æsop’s version it would have gone like this. ‘Here’s one you’ll like,’ Dad would say. ‘“The Tits and the Robins”.’

It would have to be Dad telling me the story because Mum had no real interest in natural history. Dad, though, was a good observer and loved the Latin names of things.

‘Once there were some tits and some robins living near a village. The tits (
Parus cæruleus
) lived as couples when they raised their chicks, but when that was done they spent the summer in groups of eight to ten, flitting from garden to garden. The robins (
Erithacus rubecula
) stayed where they were, fiercely defending their territory. The tits chattered about everying and nothing, while the robins kept
themselves
to themselves. The tits thought the robins were stand-offish and the robins thought the tits were suburban.

‘Both groups of birds, the tits and the robins, drank milk from the top of milk bottles, where it was really cream. This was years ago, John, when milk bottles didn’t have tops at all. The cream was much richer than anything nature provided for the birds’ tummies. Not all of them could digest it, but it was such a potential advantage for the birds to exploit this resource that natural selection favoured those who could.

‘You see, John, birds are really nothing more than little æroplanes. And here was an unlimited supply of aviation fuel.

‘Then one day the birds found that they couldn’t get at the cream. There was a hard shiny film sealing off the rich treat they liked so much. It dazzled them and frightened them too. Nature is hard, John, and human beings are unsympathetic. They wanted all the cream for themselves. They didn’t want to share it with any of the birds, not with the blue tits and not with the robins either.

‘Those were hard times for the birds, both
P. cæruleus
and
E.
rubecula
. Winter cost them dear. They hadn’t forgotten how to feed
themselves
, but they were close to starving without the rich food in those bottles. Not all of them lived to see the spring.

‘They were resourceful and clever birds, both species equally. They kept returning to the milk bottles with the shiny tops. By summer they weren’t afraid of them any more, but they were no nearer to
getting
the cream again.

‘But it is in the nature of birds to peck, and to be fascinated with their own reflection. It turned out that the shiny bottle-top was not only a mirror but a drum, returning a fascinating echo. Every now and then a tit or a robin pecking at the surface would make a tear in the
silver
foil. After that, with the cream so near and smelling so sweet, it was an easy matter to enlarge the tear and get at the creamy treasure.

‘The difference was what happened after such a happy accident. The tits, spending their time as a group, chattered and spread the knowledge amongst themselves. Soon they all knew how to get at the cream. They called out to their neighbours, “Peck at the shiny place – soon your beak will be full of cream!”

‘But when a robin happened on the cream he kept the knowledge to himself. And when other robins heard the tits calling they sang back, “Keep your distance! Clear off! Come no closer! You’re no robin, but if you don’t clear off I’ll give you a red breast you won’t forget in a hurry!”

‘And that is why all tits and very few robins know how to get at the cream they all like so much. The tits keep the secret alive by
spreading
it far and wide, but the robins lose the secret by keeping it to themselves.

‘And the moral of the story is:
Never be too proud to listen to gossip
.’ Not something that Dad would have come up with in a thousand
lifetimes
, but I can’t help that. A fable needs a moral. It was one thing I particularly liked about Æsop’s fables, that the morals were so
explicitly
pointed. I was at the age for that.

I myself was experiencing something like a saltation in reverse. The mobility of my joints was so impaired by this stage that I could hardly even lay claim, for practical purposes, to an opposable thumb. Garden birds were making breakthroughs, but I was backsliding.

Thanks to the mirror I could watch Mum going shopping down the lane, and I could watch for her to come back. Bathford was a steep street, and we were at the top. I could see all the way down. The address was actually 5 Westwoods, Bathford. The street sloped so steeply down from where we were that I thought that ‘ford’ must mean a very high place. It was only much later that I learned there was a connection with water.

The mirror was a comfort in some ways, a reprieve even, but in another it only made me more anxious, as I waited for Mum to come back with her shopping basket full. I worried about her. I was afraid that she wouldn’t come back, not because she would run away but because she would be run over. She always seemed to be looking at the ground as she trudged off. She wasn’t paying attention.

For a boy deprived of childish company the wireless was a handy stand-by, either when Mum had to go out or when there was a
programme
we could listen to together. There was one programme which was specially for us, called
Listen with Mother
. The lady always asked, ‘Are you sitting comfortably?’ which was very well-brought-up of her, but to start with I didn’t know how to answer. I knew that it was always wrong to tell a lie, but it was sometimes rude to tell the truth. I was neither sitting nor comfortable. I lay there squirming in a cleft stick of manners and morals while the lady waited for my answer. It was always a bad moment. Then she took pity on my embarrassment and said, ‘Then I’ll begin.’

Later Mum explained that the lady couldn’t hear me and I could say anything I wanted to as an answer to her question. So I would shout out, ‘No! I’m lying down and it hurts!’ and sometimes Mum would even join in with the mockery of dear Daphne Oxenford.