Stories (71 page)

From all the streets around the park, and from much further afield, came people with bread, biscuits, cake, each with a look of private, smiling pleasure. One woman, who had not the usual few bread slices or stale cake but a carrier bag full of food, confided to me as she stood surrounded by hundreds of pigeons, sparrows, geese, ducks, swans, thrushes, that her children had recently grown up and left home and her husband and herself were sparse eaters. Yet years of cooking for uncritically ravenous teenagers and their friends had got her used to providing and catering. She had found herself ordering much more food than an elderly couple could ever eat; she suppressed urges to create new and wonderful dishes. But she had found the solution. Each time the need gripped her to give a dinner party for twelve, or an informal party for fifty, she filled a bag and took a bus to Regent’s Park where, on the edge of the bird-decorated waters, she went on until her supplies ran out and her need to feed others was done. The birds, having swum or flown along the banks beside her until they were sure she had no more food, turned their attention to the next likely provisioner, or floated and bobbed and circled to the admiration of humans who all around the shores were bound to be exclaiming: Oh, if only I could be a duck on a hot day like this, right in all that cool water—while these same waterfowl might quite reasonably be expected to be muttering: If only I could be a human, with naked skin for the wind to blow on and the water to touch, and not a bird encased in feathers in such a way that nothing but my poor feet can ever feel the air or water…. At any rate, these birds certainly have a fine sense of themselves, their function, their place. Accustomed to seeing them on the water, or tucked into neat shapes drowsing on the grass around the verges, I imagined that that was where they always stayed. But not so, as I discovered one very early morning when I got up at five to have—or so I imagined—the park to myself. There
were five or six people already there, strolling about, talking, or at least acknowledging each other, in the camaraderie of those who feel themselves to be out of the ordinary. Meanwhile, the geese and ducks were all over the grass, and under the trees, where in the day they are never seen. Mother ducks and geese, each surrounded by their blobs of coloured down, were introducing these offspring to the land world, as distinct from the water world they inhabited when the park was busy. Greylag geese stood under the Japanese plums. Black swans were under the hawthorns. A squirrel came to investigate a duckling that was disconsolately alone under an arch of climbing rose. It was not six in the morning, but it seemed as if things had been busy for hours—as probably they had, now the nights were so short, and hardly dark at all from a bird’s point of view, who probably can’t tell the difference between dusk, dawn, or the shimmering dark of a summer’s midnight. While people still slept, or were crawling out of bed, there was the liveliest of intimate occasions in the park, which the birds and animals had more or less to themselves.

The park changed as the gardeners arrived and the people walked through on their way to offices. The waterbirds decided to resume their correct places on the lakes—there is no other way to describe the way they do it, the mother birds calling their broods to them, and returning along the paths to the water’s edge to leave the grass and paths and trees for humans. Again the waters were loaded with ducks and geese plain and coloured, dignified or as glossily extravagant as the dramatically painted and varnished wooden ducks from toy shops. It is exactly in the same way that the front of a theatre full of stage managers, assistants, prompters, directors, empties for a performance as the public come in. There was the land part of the park, with the usual sparrows and pigeons, and there the lakes so crowded it seemed there could not be room for one more bird—yet all the eggs were still not hatched on the islands which now were filled with green, so that the patiently sitting birds could no longer be seen through the binoculars of London’s birdwatchers. And every day, while the earlier-hatched broods became gawky and lumpish attempts after the elegant finish of their parents, freshly hatched birds scattered over the water.

On an arm of the lake where a bridge crossed over, a waterhen
was sitting in full view of everybody. The water is very shallow there. A couple of yards from shore, the waterhens had made a nest in the water of piled dead sticks. But not all the sticks were dead. One had rooted and was in leaf, a little green flag above the black-and-white shape of the moorhen who sat a few feet from the bridge. There she crouched, looking at the people who looked at her. All day and half the night, when the park was open to the public, they stopped to observe her. They did more than look. On the twiggy mattress that extended all around her were bits of food thrown by admirers. But these offerings caused the poor moorhens much trouble, because particularly the sparrows, sometimes thrushes and blackbirds, even ducks and other non-related moorhens, came to poke about in the twigs for food. The moorhen—male or female, it seemed they took it in turns to sit—had to keep rising in a hissing clatter of annoyance, to frighten them off. Or the mate who was swimming about to fetch morsels of food for the sitting bird came fussing up to warn off trespassers, but still the sparrows kept darting in to grab what they could, and fly off. Even the big swans came circling, so that the little moorhens looked like miniatures beside the white giants. Much worse than bread was thrown. All the lake under and around the bridge became laden with cans, bits of paper and plastic, and this debris lay bobbing or sagging on water which already, after only a few days of the powerful new summer, was beginning to smell. Now the summer was really here, and the park crowded, grass and paths were always littered, and the water smelled worse every day. Particularly where the moorhens were. That sitting of moorhen eggs must have been the most public in moorhen history. Yet they had chosen the site, had built the nest. And they went on with their work of warming the eggs, till it was done. Admirers loitered on the bridge through the last days, to shield the birds from possible vandals, and to prevent cans being aimed at the birds themselves, and also to catch, if possible, the moment when a moorhen chick took to the water. I am sure there were those who did see this, for the attention was assiduous. I missed it, but one hot afternoon when the bridge was more than usually crowded, I saw a minute dark-coloured chick floating near the nest, with a parent energetically foraging near it for bits of food. The sitting bird lifted itself off the twig mattress to stretch her muscles in a great yawn of
wing, and there was a glimpse of white under her: an unhatched egg, and some shell. There was another chick there too, disinclined to join its sibling on the water. The swimming parent fetched slimy morsels for the one on the nest. He, or she, took the fragments and pushed them into the chick’s gape. The swimming chick was crammed by the swimming parent. It looked as if the swimming bird was trying to make the waterborne chick venture further from the nest. It kept heading off, in the energetic purposeful way of moorhens, and swinging around to see if the little chick had followed. But the chick had scrambled back to the nest, and disappeared under the sitting bird. The swimming bird went off quite a distance, and got onto the bank by itself. On the bridge was a threesome, a tall pretty girl with a young man on either side. They had been watching the moorhens. She said: “Oh, I know, he’s gone off to see his mistress, and she is going to have to feed her babies herself.” “How do you know?” asked one young man. The other laughed, very irritated. He walked off. The girl followed him, looking anxious. The young man who had said, “How do you know?” followed them both, hurrying.

All afternoon, the birds took turns on the nest, one swimming and fetching food for the other, and from time to time a chick climbed down off the great logs of the timber platform he had been hatched on, and bobbed and rocked on the waves. Meanwhile, all the surface of the lake around the nest was full of every kind of swimming bird, adult, half-grown, and just hatched. In such a throng, that one minute moorchick was an item, precious only to the guardian parents.

Moorhens are strict-looking tailored black-and-white birds among the fanciful ducks, the black swans with their red sealing-wax bills. They have a look of modest purpose, of duty, of restraint. And then one comes up out of the water to join birds crowding for thrown bread, and the exposed feet are a shock, being large, whitey-green, scaly, reptilian, as if they had belonged to half-bird half-lizard ancestors, and have descended unaltered down the chains of evolution while the birds modified above water into the handy, tidy moorhen shape—a land shape, it is easy to think. Yet the moorhen is more waterbird than any duck or goose. If you stand feeding a crowd of birds, and there are gulls there, they will swoop in and past, having caught bits of bread from the air as if these were leaping fish—the
gulls will get everything, if you aren’t taking care of the others. A tall goose will stand delicately taking pieces from your fingers, like a well-mannered person, then turn to slash savagely another competing goose with its beak: after the gulls, the geese provide for themselves best. The ducks, apparently clumsy and waddling, are quick to snatch bits when the geese miss. But to try and feed the moorhens—for which, sentimentally, I have a fancy—is harder than to feed shyer deer in a zoo when the big ones have decided they are going to get what is going. First, the moorhens have to get up on the bank on those clumsy waterfeet. And then their movements are slower than the other birds; the moorhens are poking about after the bits when the others have swallowed them and are already crowding in for more. Yet, in the water, there is nothing quicker and neater.

That long public sitting succeeded, at last, in adding only one moorchick to the park’s population. One afternoon there were two parents and two chicks, busy with each other and their nest among the crowds of birds; next afternoon there were two moorhens and one bobbing dark fluffball.

But the nest was there, with bits of bread still stuck in the twigs. And there it stayed all summer, and all autumn, and although the green fell off, or was pecked off the sentinel twig, nest and twig are there now, in winter—so perhaps in the coming spring the same or another pair of moorhens will bring up another family, in spite of the staring ill-mannered people and their ill-judged offerings, and their cans and their plastic and their smell. But the twig platform will certainly have to be refurnished, for as soon as the moorhen family had left it, it was found most convenient by the other fowl to sit on, and play around; and the twig that had rooted and stood up was a good perch for water-venturing sparrows. There never were so many sparrows as last year: you could mark the season’s increase in population by the contrast between the young birds’ tight shape and shiny fresh-painted look, and their duller shabbier parents. Where did they all hatch? Apart from those of the waterbirds, and a shallow fibre nest that was exposed when autumn came and stripped the chestnut avenue, woven on twigs not much higher above the path than a tall man’s head, so that the sitting bird in its completely concealing clump of leaves must have been inches above the walking people—apart
from these, I saw no nests save one on the ground, among bluebells and geraniums and clumps of hosta. The bird was sleekly brown, and watching me, not over-anxiously, as I watched it from the path a yard or so away. She sat with her warm eggs pressed to her spread claws by her breast, and saw possible enemies pass and repass all day, for the days it took her to get the chicks out into the light. Yet, like the moorhen, she had chosen that exposed place to sit, near a path, just behind the Open Air Theatre. Perhaps, like the foxes that are coming in from the country, which hunts and poisons and traps them, to the suburbs, where they live off town refuse, some birds are coming to terms with us, our noise, and our mess, in ways we don’t yet see. Perhaps they even like us? And not only people—a few yards from the sitting brown bird was a place where somebody was putting out food for stray cats. There were saucers of old and new food, and milk, and water, bits of sandwich and biscuit, under the damask roses all the summer, and the cats came to this food, and did not attack the sitting bird—who, perhaps, used this food when the cats were not there? It is possible that she put up with the amplified voices and music from the theatre because of its restaurant, not more than a few seconds’ flight away, just the right distance for a quick crumb-gathering before the eggs had time to chill. There must have been many other nests in that thick little wood where the theatre is, and many birds calling that patch of the park theirs. Certainly each year’s production of Midsummer Night’s Dream, good, bad, or indifferent, offers marvellous moments that are not in the stage directions, when an owl hoots for Oberon, or swallows swoop over Titania’s and Bottom’s heads, or, while a moon stands up over the trees, making the stage seem small and insignificant, starlings loop and swirl past on their last flight before roosting. And all the time, while plays are being rehearsed and acted, the birds are building, sitting, feeding their young, and the fact that they choose this, the noisiest part of the park, surely says something about the way they view us. Or don’t see us, don’t regard us at all, except in association with food scraps? There’s nothing odder than what is ignored, not seen, not noticed. Perhaps those moorhens chose that spot, the most public there is, because the water is the right depth there, and nothing else mattered; and they
were not aware of their audience on the bridge except as a noisy frieze which emitted lumps of food and other objects.

The park holds dozens of self-contained dramas, human and animal, in the space of an eye-sweep. On a Sunday afternoon in July, when the drought had held and held, and the bushes under the tree-cover were wilting because what showers that had fallen were not heavy enough to penetrate the thick leaf-layers, the park was full, and coach-loads of people from everywhere were visiting the zoo. There were queues at the zoo gates hundreds of yards long, and inside the zoo it was like a fair. There is a path down the west side of the zoo. It is tree-shaded. A bank rises sharply to the fields used for football and cricket. Being summer, and Sunday, it was cricket time, and four separate games were in progress, each with its circle of reserve players, friends, wives, children, and casual watchers. This world, the world of Sunday cricket, was absolutely self-absorbed, and each game ignored the other three. On the slopes under the trees were lovers, twined two by two. At the end where the Mappin Terraces are, four young people lay asleep. They were tourists, and looked German, or perhaps Scandinavian. They all four had long hair. The two girls had long dresses, the young men fringed leather. They owned four rucksacks and four guitars. Most likely they had been up talking, singing and dancing all night, or perhaps had not the money to pay for a night’s sleep. Now they slept in each other’s arms all day without moving. Quite possibly they never knew that cricket was being so devotedly played so close, and that while they slept the zoo filled and emptied again. From the slope where they were, you can see nicely into the children’s zoo, and across the elephants’ house. You can see, too, the goats and bears of the terraces. Some people who had given up the effort of getting into the zoo sat on the slopes near the four sleepers, talking a lot, not trying to be quiet, and they watched the elephants showing off, poor beasts, in return for their little house and the trench-enclosed space they have to live in. A woman arrived with a plastic bag and sat on a bench, with her back to the lovers and the sleeping young people, and fed sparrows and pigeons, frowning with the concentration of the effort needed to let the poor sparrows (who were so small) get as much food as the (unfairly) large pigeons. And a little girl in
the children’s zoo clutched at a donkey no higher than she was, and cried out: “It’s getting wet, oh the donkey’s getting wet.” True enough, here came a small sample of the long-awaited rain. Not much. A brief sparkling drench. No one stopped doing anything. The cricketers played on. The woman frowned and fussed over the unfairness of nature. The lovers loved. The four sleeping young people did not so much as turn over, but a passing youth tiptoed up and covered the guitars with the girls’ long skirts. And the little girl wept because of the poor donkey who was getting wet and apparently liking it, for it was kicking and heehawing. Where was her mamma? Where, her papa? She was alone with her donkey and her grief. And the rain pelted down and stopped, having done no good and no harm to anything. It was weeks before some real rain arrived and saved the brown scuffing grass; weeks before that moment of high summer which has nothing to do with gardener’s calendar, or even the length of the days, shortening fast again, again the same number of hours as in the long-forgotten no-spring. But it is a moment whose quality is over-lushness, heaviness, fullness, plenty. All the trees are crammed and blowsy with leaf. They sag and loll and drag. The willows trail too long in the water, and then they look as if someone has gone around each one in a boat with shears, chopping the fronds to just such a length, like human hair trimmed around a pudding basin. The ducks and geese, who have been delicately, languidly, nibbling bits of leaf, and floating in and out through the trailing green curtains, now tread water and strive upwards on their wings to nip off bits of leaf. Perhaps it is the birds who have eaten the low branches away to an exact height all around? There are so many of them now, the chicks all having grown up, that everywhere you look are herds of geese, flocks of ducks, the big swans, moorhens. Surely the park can’t possibly sustain so many? What will happen to them all? Will they be allotted to other less bird-populated parks, each bird conditioned from chickhood to regard every human being in sight as a moving bread fountain? Meanwhile, the rowing boats and the sailing boats have to manoeuvre through crowds of waterfowl, the sparrows are in flocks, the roses teem and mass, everything is at the full of its provision, its lushness. The hub of the park now is not the chestnut avenue, and the so English herbaceous border, but the long Italianate walk that
has the fountain and the tall poplars at one end, the formal black-and-gold gates the other, the roses lining it all the way. A summer avenue, asking for deep blue skies and heat, just as the chestnut avenue, and the hawthorns, the plums, cherries and currants are for spring, or for autumn.