The Ravenmaster

by Christopher Skaife

  As I read I thought of all the people who gave their lives so that we might enjoy the freedoms we have today. To read 180 names and their regiments takes some time. But to read the names and regiments of all 888,246 British and Commonwealth soldiers who were killed in the First World War would take weeks.

  * * *

  “They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old: / Age shall not weary them, nor the years contemn. / At the going down of the sun and in the morning / We will remember them.” I read aloud Laurence Binyon’s poem of remembrance, and during the Last Post, I had to fight back the tears. “Stand down soldier, your duty is done.” And I turned and made my way back through the poppies.

  Without a doubt, it was the one of the proudest moments of my life, to take part in such a profound act of remembrance.

  And I’m glad that I got to share it with Merlina.

  One fine sunny morning, as the volunteers were working in shifts placing the poppies around the moat, Merlina decided to fly out of the Tower to find out what all the fuss was about.

  “Chris, I think Merlina’s been spotted outside of the Tower near the ticket office,” came a message from the radio.

  “Roger, last caller, I’ll go and take a look,” I replied.

  We get a fair few reports of our ravens sighted outside the Tower, normally by members of Historic Royal Palaces staff on their way to work or leaving at the end of the day, and from concerned and conscientious members of the public, aware of the legend that the kingdom will fall should the ravens ever leave the Tower. Luckily most of the calls are false alarms: the ravens turn out to be crows.

  But on this occasion the report was absolutely correct. Merlina had indeed left the Tower and had been spotted by a vigilant member of the public. If she ever leaves the safety of her territory on Tower Green—normally because she’s being threatened by one of the more dominant ravens—I’ll usually find her perched on a fence along the Tower Wharf, watching the boats going up and down the Thames. The Wharf was of course at one time used as the quayside to load stores and munitions in and out of the Tower, and as the riverside entrance for the highest-ranking dignitaries and visitors, and indeed for those poor souls being brought by river from trial at the Guildhall or the Palace of Westminster to Traitors’ Gate, to imprisonment or execution. Nowadays it’s just a very pleasant walkway along a cobbled path, and a great place to get a coffee and a photo of Tower Bridge.

  Today, though, Merlina was not on the Wharf. She’d gone straight to see the poppies of Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red. I made my way toward the front entrance, past the Middle Tower and the long line of visitors showing their tickets and getting their bags checked before entry to the Tower grounds. I walked up the small incline of Tower Hill, a route that many an unfortunate prisoner would have been taken on their short journey from the Tower to the public execution site.

  It’s not hard to spot a wayward raven outside the Tower: they tend to attract a bit of a crowd, with cameras and phones furiously clicking and a great hubbub, everyone wondering how and why such an extraordinarily large black bird is sitting innocently on some bench or fence preening itself, or snacking on crisps from a bin. So I just followed the crowds and soon found Merlina. She’d positioned herself on an old iron fence overlooking the moat, cronking loudly at the volunteers who were busy placing the poppies down below.

  To catch and capture a raven in full view of the public is a tricky business and to be avoided if at all possible, since it requires not only a cool head and steady nerves but quite a bit of luck. My first piece of advice to anyone finding themselves in such a predicament would be to stay cool and to pretend you have total control of the situation, which you most certainly do not. Like it or not, you’re about to become a star on YouTube. If you are a small round middle-aged man dressed in a wide-brimmed bonnet, wearing a royal blue and scarlet dress—it’s called a tabard, people, for goodness sake!—and you’re going to attempt to catch a raven, I can pretty much guarantee that you’re about to be photographed, videoed, and live-streamed on every social media platform imaginable. Prepare yourself: you’re going to go viral.

  My second piece of advice would be to make your way slowly—SLOWLY!—and casually toward the offending raven. Do not attempt to move or scatter the crowd—they make the perfect cover for your approach. As you steadily navigate your way through, remember to reassure everyone that you know what you’re doing.

  Merlina was clearly having a lovely day out and certainly did not want to be caught and returned to Tower Green. One more piece of advice: Don’t think for one minute that you’re just going to be able to walk up to your raven and sweep her off her talons by looking lovingly into her dark-brown beady eyes, and gather her up in your big strong arms and take her back home. This is not how raven rescue works. You need to be cunning. You need to be stealthy. You need to be quick. You need to pretend you’re not interested, that you just happen to be in the vicinity and then, with the speed of a striking cobra, you need to grab her when she least expects it. And that is how to catch a miscreant raven, ladies and gentlemen!

  I caught and held tight to Merlina and I could hear the people in the crowd murmuring, some in approval, some in disapproval, some expressing sheer disbelief. As I returned with Merlina to Tower Green, I didn’t have it in me to scold her for escaping—in fact, I was glad she’d seen the poppies. Like us, she’d have had plenty of ancestors who spent their days on battlefields, so at a time of remembrance it seemed appropriate that she was there—all part of the circle of life.

  22

  MY MISTRESS’ EYES ARE RAVEN BLACK

  Since I’m an old soldier, I suppose you’d expect me to be happier talking about war than love. And here at the Tower we certainly have plenty of war stories to tell, tales of death and derring-do, and tales of tragedy. The three soldiers from the Black Watch shot at dawn on Tower Green in 1743, accused of being ringleaders in a mutiny. The rioting mobs of peasants who laid siege to the Tower during the Peasants’ Revolt in 1381. Fifteen direct hits on the Tower from high explosives during the Second World War, with twenty-three people killed.

  But the history of the Tower is in fact as much about love as it is about war: Anne Boleyn and Catherine Howard accused of adultery and beheaded; the Princess, later Queen Elizabeth and the great love of her life Robert Dudley both imprisoned here at the same time; Katherine Grey incarcerated for her secret marriage to Edward Seymour.

  I’ve never been much of a ladies’ man myself. I had a few girlfriends when I was still at school, but once I was in the army, it was different. I was really concentrating on my job and my career and had no intention of getting married. Until, that is, I met the woman who would become my wife—and it was love at first sight. Like anything else, sometimes love just comes along and hits you out of nowhere. It’s the same for the ravens.

  Ravens have long been known to be monogamous and to stick with a partner for life, though my observations would suggest that when one of a raven pair dies the surviving partner often takes up with another raven almost immediately. Most of the Tower ravens form strong bonds and attachments with one another. They pair up either as partners or as friends, male to male and female to female, for protection and companionship. Our raven pairs hang around together during the day, they sleep close together, and they continually chat to each other and preen one another. They might even attack other pairs, and they certainly hunt in pairs. Merlina—as always—being the exception.

  For many years Merlina used to allow another female raven named Hugine to hang around with her. They weren’t partners—they weren’t preening each other in the way male and female ravens do—but Merlina seemed to enjoy or least tolerate Hugine’s company, chatting with her and occasionally sharing food with her. Merlina seemed to be saying, “Look, I don’t want you too close, but I don’t mind if you happen to be around.” Sadly, Hugine died suddenly in 2016, cause unknown, though it was likely something she’d picked up to eat that didn’t agree with her. F
or the Ravenmaster, this proved a great challenge. Immediately after the death of Hugine, Merlina protected the body: she wouldn’t let anyone go near it to pick it up and remove it. She paced around the area, constantly returning to peck at Hugine’s face, as if trying to wake her. It was heartbreaking to watch. In the days and weeks that followed she would often leave her home territory around Tower Green, which is most unlike her, and would turn her back to the public and even to me if I approached. She began to slouch and drop her head down low, as if in mourning or despair. In the end, I had to intervene because she’d stopped eating. I put her in the new enclosure with the other ravens in an attempt to break her depressive cycle and to keep her occupied. It took a few weeks of me spending lots of time with her, but finally she recovered and went back to her usual activities on Tower Green. I’d read about ravens mourning, but to see it for myself was quite extraordinary.

  * * *

  Almost as extraordinary, in fact, as the time Munin fell in love with a monkey.

  In 2010 the Tower installed more than a dozen animal sculptures by the artist Kendra Haste, to celebrate the history of the Royal Menagerie. The creatures are made of galvanized wire and represent the various animals that the Tower has been home to over the past six hundred years: there are lions, a full-size polar bear, an elephant’s head, and a troop of baboons who sit up on the walls, guarding the exit of the Jewel House.

  “Chris, have you seen up there?” asked the Jewel House Warden one day, pointing toward the roof of the Brick Tower. “I think one of your ravens has taken a fancy to one of our monkeys.”

  “Oh no,” I sighed.

  Munin’s then partner had recently disappeared, and in her grief, Munin seemed to have fixated on the monkey. She stayed on the roof of the Brick Tower, sitting next to the inanimate monkey for a full three days and nights before finally flying down and playing hide-and-seek with former Ravenmaster Rocky Stones and me, his clueless assistant. For hours we hunted for Munin, high and low, in every dark recess of the Tower, before catching up with her merrily hopping across the floodlit moat. We immediately placed her under close arrest, mostly to protect her from the other ravens who might have sensed her weakness after the loss of her partner and attempted to exert dominance over her, but also, quite frankly, for being such a nuisance!

  Of course, as soon as we released her, she simply went straight back to the damned monkey. For the next few months she would fly and climb up one of the service ladders every single day in order get alongside it and croak away in a deep and meaningful one-way conversation. She would also delicately tap the monkey with her beak, as if to say “Hey! I’m here. Come on, talk to me, I’m lonely.” I often wondered what she must have thought when the monkey failed to answer. Again and again we would climb up the Tower and encourage her to find another partner among the other ravens, but it made no difference. Every day she would return to the monkey. It was an obsession.

  Eventually she just grew tired of talking to the silent metal monkey and life returned to normal. But if you ever visit the Tower, take the time to make your way around to the North Wall and stop just before you enter the Brick Tower. Pause and look up and you’ll see the metal monkey—and you might ponder for a moment the mysteries of love and loss.

  23

  BIRDS AND BOOKS

  When I’m not busy wrangling actual ravens, I like to catch up on a bit of essential “raven admin” and meet with any journalists, photographers, artists, writers, and film crews interested in the birds. Sound glamorous? Think again. Ravens are a law unto themselves—and they’re not here for our entertainment.

  I recall filming a sequence one balmy evening on Tower Green for a documentary called Natural Curiosities with the great Sir David Attenborough. Sir David was doing a small piece on tool use among corvids. I remember he was sitting on a bench and the director asked if a raven could sit next to him during the sequence. As so often, I had to explain that the ravens at the Tower are in no way tame or indeed biddable, but we did our best. We tried to tempt a raven down. And we tried again. And again. And again. But alas, no raven would come into the shot and sit on the bench next to Sir David.

  So several weeks later, the poor chap and the film crew had to return to do it all over. This time we just about managed to get Sir David in a shot with one of the birds—and my great claim to fame is that I’m in the shot too. The director said I was by far the best silent Yeoman Warder extra they’d ever worked with.

  “More has probably been written about the raven than about any other bird,” according to the great Bernd Heinrich, in Ravens in Winter—and judging by the number of journalists and writers we have in, he may be right. I’m certainly conscious, as I chronicle my own experiences, that I am merely adding to a vast library of books about birds. There are books about hawks, there are books about snow geese, books about kestrels; you’ve got Gerard Manley Hopkins’s windhover, you’ve got W. B. Yeats’s wild swans at Coole, Wallace Stevens’s blackbird, John Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale”—writers seem to be able to identify with cuckoos, owls, parrots, swans, albatrosses, you name it.

  Birds clearly function as important symbols in our lives. I don’t want to sound too much like a psychoanalyst here, but maybe in writing about our birds here at the Tower I’m subconsciously making the ravens into the image of me, and me into the image of them. It happens to all of us: we think we’re describing the world when in fact we’re describing ourselves.

  What I really don’t like, though, is the one-dimensional representation of ravens. The English writer Edmund Spenser—who was born and brought up near Tower Hill, as it happens—has a long, long, long poem, The Faerie Queene, in which ravens are described as “The hateful messengers of heavy things, / Of death and dolour telling sad tidings,” which in my opinion just about sums up the whole of English literature’s rather limited appreciation of the raven. (Could Spenser have seen ravens at the Tower? Professors of medieval and Renaissance literature, do let me know.) You get ravens aplenty in Shakespeare, of course, but again he tends to use them as omens of death, dying, and doom. In Macbeth, Lady Macbeth says, “The raven himself is hoarse / That croaks the fatal entrance of Duncan / Under my battlements.” In Julius Caesar, when Cassius imagines his defeat he imagines “ravens, crows, and kites” that “Fly o’er our heads and downward look on us, / As we were sickly prey.” Et cetera et cetera.

  There are exceptions, thank goodness, to this one-dimensional take. The Irish writer Seán O’Casey comes closer to the truth about ravens and about corvids in general, in his book The Green Crow, when he writes that “Corvie is a gay chap for all his inky cloak.” Quite right, Mr. O’Casey.

  Some writers are genuine corvid enthusiasts. I’ve hosted a fair few of them in the Tower during my time here, all of them researching ravens for one reason or another, and I’ve always been amazed by their knowledge of and fascination with the birds. George R. R. Martin is one such writer. When I showed him around the Tower, he was keen to spend as much time with the ravens as possible, though all resemblances between our birds and the ravens in Game of Thrones, I should say, are entirely coincidental. In particular, since visitors to the Tower often ask, our birds do not have three eyes, and no, I’ve never seen one who does. And no, they do not deliver messages.

  Lots of writers have kept corvids as pets and companions. Lord Byron kept a tame crow, I believe, though in fairness he also kept dogs, monkeys, peacocks, hens, an eagle, and a bear. The poet John Clare kept a raven, as did the American writer Truman Capote, whose raven was called Lola. Capote wrote about Lola in some detail in an essay first published in 1965, claiming that she used to cache various items in his bookcase behind The Complete Jane Austen, including a “purloined denture […] the long-lost keys to my car […] a mass of paper money […] old letters, my best cuff links, rubber bands, yards of string” and “the first page of a short story I’d stopped writing because I couldn’t find the first page.” This all sounds rather unlikely to me, since our ravens
in the Tower mostly tend to cache mice and bits of rat, but Mr. Capote was clearly a highly literary man with a highly literary raven. Either that, or he was making it up.

  But it was of course the London writer, Charles Dickens, who kept the most famous ravens of all. Dickens mentions the Tower quite a few times in his novels. The Quilps in The Old Curiosity Shop live on Tower Hill. David Copperfield brings Peggotty to the Tower for a tour. And in Great Expectations Pip and Herbert row Magwitch past the Tower on their ill-fated trip down the Thames. I’ll confess that this is where my wider knowledge of the work of Dickens ends—though when it comes to ravens, I can categorically state that he knew his birds.

  The story of Dickens’s ravens is well-known. In January 1841 the great man wrote to a friend about the new novel that he was working on. His big idea, Dickens wrote, was to have his main character “always in company with a pet raven, who is immeasurably more knowing than himself. To this end I have been studying my bird, and think I could make a very queer character of him.” And a very queer character he makes of him indeed in Barnaby Rudge, his fifth novel, which is set during the anti-Catholic Gordon Riots of 1780, and in which the eponymous hero has a raven named Grip who accompanies him everywhere he goes. (Here at the Tower our Gripps have always had an extra “p” for reasons not entirely clear, though I suspect a clerical error.)

  I may have a rather partial view, but to my mind Dickens counts as a genius not because of his prolific output, nor because of his famous public performances and his great public works, but because he gets every detail about ravens correct! He describes Grip’s voice as being “so hoarse and distant, that it seemed to come through his thick feathers rather than out of his mouth,” which is exactly where a raven’s voice seems to come from. And the way he describes Grip’s walk—well, that’s the way our Gripp walks today! How did Dickens get it so right when so many other writers seem to get it so wrong, or simply see the ravens as symbols?