The Owl Who Liked Sitting on Caesar (22 page)

Mumble quickly took to this change in the interior décor, and thereafter she would roost happily on the general’s sculpted poll for hours at a time. I thought this gave the room rather a classy, Edgar Allan Poe-ish look, and luckily Germanicus scrubbed clean easily. For when she wanted a view of the sunset, I gave her a large ceramic barrel to perch on in the middle of the west windowsill, well away from the crown-of-thorns. This, too, seemed to suit her, and thereafter she divided most of her living-room time between the door top, Germanicus and her barrel.

* * *

By the time we had been together for a couple of years, Mumble and I had long settled into a generally relaxed and companionable routine.

When I got home at night she heard my key in the door, and I would hear a long, liquid warbling from the balcony. By the time I got out there she was always inside her hutch, with her head shoved in a corner, whooping away for several minutes before emerging on to her doorstep perch. When she had finished her waking-up routine and I went inside the cage, she would sometimes come to my shoulder to greet me (and when she pecked my moustache on chilly nights her beak smelt a little like cold, wet beach-stones – there was no foul carnivore’s breath, like a dog’s). On other evenings she would jump directly from her doorstep to the open basket in a single accurate hop, avoiding the other perch in her path. When I got home after leaving her free around the flat she would
come flying straight to my shoulder, sometimes warbling or crooning. Since she was by nature a solitary creature, and entirely accustomed to being alone for most of her life, this was not just a sign that she was pleased to have company – she recognized me and treated me differently from other people. Since her second summer she had reacted to others with unfailing hostility, and if she was free to do so she attacked them; so, her greeting was specifically for me.

When it was the other way round, she hardly ever tried to evade my touch. When she was perched on Germanicus and I walked close by, I sometimes could not resist gently stroking her head, or bending to nuzzle her between the eyes or on her downy front. Sometimes she accepted these caresses complacently; sometimes she would squeak softly, shifting her feet and giving me a very gentle and half-hearted peck on the nose; but she never made to claw at me, or to fly off.

In fact, she never, ever attacked me with her talons, even when struggling angrily not to be put in her basket for transfer to the balcony cage when I had to leave for work in the morning before she had decided she was ready. On these occasions I sometimes had to lift her off five or six different perches in succession. The correct way to pick up a bird is to run your hand up the back of its legs, and it will naturally step up backwards on to it. If I was determined to dislodge Mumble from a position where this was not possible, and ran my hand up the front edge of a perch and under her forward-projecting claws, she regarded it as a gross breach of good manners, but it did work – for a
moment she was too busy regaining her balance to do a mid-air take-off. She might be pretty furious by the time I finally grabbed her; she would chitter with rage and peck at my hand, but only gently, and she never used her claws on me. This seemed to me to be remarkably
measured
behaviour, and surprising.

(The only time she ever drew my blood was entirely my own fault. I stood up carelessly in her path just as she was flying one of her fast, silent evening runs down the length of the flat, and although she jinked in mid-air to avoid me a trailing claw opened up an inch of my cheekbone like a razor blade.)

On the other hand, she often sought my touch deliberately, and not just by flying to my shoulder. When she was there, she sometimes ducked her head down and preened the side of my beard, making her little machine-gunning noise with her beak. On one memorable occasion when I had left the night-cage door open after feeding her, intending to leave her free during the night, she suddenly appeared on my shoulder with a tangle of partly eaten chick in her beak. She repeatedly leaned around my face, unquestionably trying to reach my mouth and feed me. When I avoided these deeply touching but unwelcome attempts, she tried a couple of times to stuff the slimy gobbet into my ear instead.

Her demands for preening sessions had grown less frequent since her first year, but they still happened every few days. When she was in the mood, once or twice during an evening she would walk across the floor to my armchair
and climb on to my lap. When she was settled she craned her head upwards, cheeping quietly with her eyes closed, until I dropped my face and nuzzled her. When I did this she twisted and pushed her head against my nose, like a cat. The fact that she still did this regularly gave me as much pleasure as it seemed to give her.

* * *

In later years, after we had moved to Sussex, I noted a very definite correlation between Mumble’s demands for my preening and the summer moulting season. Yet puzzlingly, when looking back through my notebooks I find no clear mention in the years 1979–81 of any noticeable moult. I know that I found numbers of fluffy body feathers and some small quill feathers lying around the balcony cage at times, but there is no note of her losing primary or secondary flight feathers. I cannot imagine that I would have missed this, nor the very clingy mood that accompanied the process in later years.

The textbooks say that owls have a partial moult of body feathers and some wing coverts in their post-juvenile phase. They then change all their tail and some flight feathers for the first time in their second summer, after having fledged their first clutch of nestlings. (It seems unlikely that the act of raising a brood should be the trigger for the moulting process. Even if Mumble’s single state delayed its first onset, from 1982 – her fourth year – her moult was both heavy and reliably annual. I have since read that owls in captivity often don’t moult properly until
they are at least two years old.) Tawnies don’t lose all their flight feathers each year, but only about one-third of them, so a bird doesn’t acquire full adult plumage until its third autumn. Consequently, a mature bird’s wings may show feathers from three different years, and experts can sometimes tell these apart by small differences in pattern and fading.

* * *

Early in 1981, I began to notice that Mumble was getting rather less agile and energetic than in the past. Her usual daily rhythm had always been essentially that of a cat – that is, she spent about twenty hours dozing, an hour or two on self-maintenance, and two or three hours in alert activity and exercise. Now she seemed to be getting even more lackadaisical, and I wondered uneasily if she might have some health problem. (I had never had to try to find a vet in South London who understood owls, for which I was grateful. Having decided from the first that I would never tether her legs, it would have been a hilariously difficult and probably bloody task for a third party to handle her for examination.)

A simpler reason for her new languor suggested itself one night when I was ready to feed her and put her to bed. She had been sitting on her barrel on the end windowsill, at the full length of the flat from the kitchen cage, when I got out her chick and whistled for her. She did not appear instantly, so I wandered to the kitchen door to look down the living room. She was still on the windowsill when I
whistled again. She took off, flew halfway down the room – and then stopped to sit on the back of a chair. I may have imagined it, but her body language suggested that she might actually be wheezing …

All became instantly clear. The reason that this owl was now lurching through the air for a pathetic few feet instead of flying like the Red Baron was that this owl was getting shamefully fat. Birds of prey operate best if they are permanently aware of a small corner inside them that could still do with filling, even after they have swallowed the last beakful and mopped up the gravy. Unlike a falconer with a working bird, who must weigh it daily to calculate the optimum level of slight hunger for efficient hunting, I had hardly ever bothered to persuade Mumble to sit on the kitchen scales, and even when I did she wriggled too much for more than an approximate reading.

She had become a feathered gourmande, and had been living too soft for too long. Obesity is a problem that is never, ever encountered by raptors in a state of nature. Mumble had been designed as a superlatively effective night-fighter; now, thanks to my soppy indulgence in the matter of an extra chick pretty much whenever she demanded one, she would soon require the take-off run of an overloaded 747 on a tropical mountain airstrip. It occurred to me that if we kept up this regime she might soon give up flying altogether and become the first-ever wholly and shamefully pedestrian Tawny Owl. Since I was doubtful of my ability to persuade her of the virtues of muesli and jogging, the only solution was a strict diet; for
at least the rest of the summer Mumble was going back to two chicks per day, maximum.

* * *

One muggy Friday evening in the spring of 1981, I got off a crowded commuter train from Victoria Station at about 7.30pm and began the nightly ten-minute walk down the main street to my block of flats. I walked automatically, with my mind miles away somewhere inside my head. I was tired, and grubby; it had been one of those city days when you can positively feel the sweaty grime building up inside your shirt collar. I had no plans for the evening, and my general mood could be summed up as
bluuuh
.

It was a straight walk, punctuated only by crossing the ends of various sidestreets where they joined the London road. I was halfway through my journey when my autopilot tripped off, and I noticed something unusual. It was early on the first evening of a warm weekend, in the last big urban centre on this edge of South London – yet there didn’t seem to be much traffic passing, or many people on the pavements. As I crossed one of the sidestreets, I automatically glanced right to check for cars coming and saw a group of youths hanging around just back from the street junction. There were about eight of them; they weren’t doing anything, just smoking, drinking from beer cans and talking quietly, standing in a tight knot. They seemed to be waiting for something to happen. I kept walking, and a couple of hundred yards further on, across the street in the mouth of another sideroad, I saw a police van parked, with
half a dozen officers also standing around expectantly. On any weekend the town-centre pubs and the dancehall-cum-nightclub next door to my block were always lively, but this seemed different – what did all these people know that I didn’t, on this oppressive Friday evening? I went straight up to my flat, and stayed there.

During an evening that was punctuated by the sounds of shouting and sirens I did a bit of thinking about my life. I lived in the sky, but when I came down to ground level it was into an environment of dirty concrete, diesel fumes and crowded pavements. I travelled to work in cattle-truck comfort, arriving among more concrete, thicker fumes and even tighter crowds. True, I passed my days surrounded by all the attractions of one of the world’s great cities – but most of those days were spent shut up in an office. When I slogged home again it was only to take refuge from the same old ugliness, stink and noise, and although office and flat were not many miles apart as the crow flies the journey door-to-door usually took an hour and a half. Not for the first time, I asked myself if I really wanted to do this for the next thirty years. Over the weekend, I came to a conclusion: like Huck Finn, it was time for me to ‘light out for the Territory’.

* * *

Selling my flat would be no problem; the housing market was buoyant, and the easy access to central London would be a positive attraction for somebody less jaded than I was. But where should I look for a new home? I had been born
and brought up in a pleasant enough village outside a boring commuter town in Surrey, but since my parents died I had had no further ties in that direction. On the other hand, there were good train connections between London and the Sussex coastal towns, and I had always loved the South Downs country. (A phrase from a thriller novel had always stuck in my memory as particularly apposite: the villain had been described as leering at a damsel in distress ‘like a Norman looking at Sussex’.) Most of the towns along the coast had the reputation of being waiting rooms for Heaven, but Brighton was always lively – ‘London-on-Sea’. It was also halfway between the homes of my brother in Kent and my sister in Hampshire, an easy ninety minutes’ drive to the east and west respectively. I took a map, stuck a compass point in Brighton and drew a ten-mile circle around it; then I hit the estate agents.

You know how these things always go. Every Saturday noon for the next couple of months I drove off southwards with the passenger seat covered with estate agents’ paperwork and a schedule of viewing appointments; and every Sunday evening I drove home again with the floor-well full of torn-up paper, in a mood of seething frustration. Predictably, at exactly the point when I had become despondently convinced that there was no single house in Sussex that I could both afford and bear the thought of living in, I found it. It was described on the last page of that weekend’s sheaf of extravagant lies; it was a bog-standard three-bedroom semi built in the early 1960s, and it sounded nothing special. But it would only mean a
detour of ten miles on my way back to London, so after a mental toss-up I decided I might as well give it a drive-by glance.

As I navigated the last few miles I began to feel a faint stirring of interest. I found that this address would be within forty minutes’ drive of my old friends the Hook family. The ancient town nearby seemed charming, with a half-ruined Norman castle at the top of a steep, busy hill down to a river bridge. The village itself looked as if it was a working community rather than a dormitory – I had to overtake a tractor with a laden trailer as I drove past a pub facing the cricket green. There was another pub right at the end of the lane I was looking for, and when I turned up this I found myself driving between field hedges as well as stretches of housing. The house for sale was almost at the far end, just before fields took over entirely.