by Alex Monroe
And we’ll tie it into the song, but add our own twist. Five gold rings obviously, and the pear – can’t wait to do that . . . and I’ve had an idea for the second day, you know, the turtle doves . . .
I think everyone is resigned to the fact that there’s no escape from this, so we’re off.
It’s late in October so there’s no time to waste. First of all, there’s the song to think about, ‘The Twelve Days of Christmas’. I’d heard that every line of it symbolises something religious, though I’m a bit hazy about the details. Apparently it was a secret way to teach Catholic children their catechism during the years of oppression. The three French hens supposedly represent Faith, Hope and Charity. My thoughts wander as I do a little research. If I ever keep chickens again, that’s what I’ll call them, I decide, Faith, Hope and Charity, imagining my own French hens scratching around for worms. But before I’ve had a chance to speculate about the swans a-swimming, I discover that the religious interpretation turns out to be a twentieth-century fabrication, without a shred of evidence. But since my faith is in nature, I’m not too worried about that. It just gives me free rein and a bit more scope for reinvention.
I’m reminded of my own symbols of Christmas, images from my childhood. An impudent blue-tit pecking through the foil of our milk bottles on the doorstep, chickens racing towards an arc of grain as it lands in the snow, the whirr and wobble of a partridge in flight. I’m not going to change the second day, though. This is the piece I’m most looking forward to making: Two Turtle Doves. It’s something I keep coming back to in different forms, over and over again. And I know exactly why. There’s a fleeting image from the past, which has never quite left me.
There’s a brick bridge in Snape, crossing the river Alde where it narrows. Skinny and shivering, I stood there at dusk by my parents’ car with my older brother. It wasn’t raining, I don’t think, but it was cold. My shorts were hand-me-downs from an older sister and I wore a rather itchy speckled brown jumper and a grey cotton anorak. On my feet were the faded blue sailing pumps that I loved because they were proper sailor’s shoes.
We began to lower the old canvas canoe into the muddy water. The boat was gunship-grey. In fact, everything was beginning to look rather grey by this time: the cold Suffolk evening sky leached colour from the landscape. Grey to start with, like the canoe, the water and the mud are unchanged.
It’ll be super, darling. What an adventure! You have the maps and look, here’s a torch. (A flash of hope as my brother tested it.) We’ll be in Cob House waiting for you, of course. Just find the island and you’ll find the house. Up the path from the jetty on the north shore. We’ll keep some supper for you. Goodbye, goodbye!
Even the red Ford Escort looked grey now. Only the headlights glowed yellow through the reeds, then swung away. The crunch of tyres on gravel drowned final farewells. We could just make out our younger brother squashed into the boot, while the older sisters waved from the back seat, sitting cosy. Then the car pulled over the little bridge and disappeared.
It was hardly the first time our mother had forced us into what she called fun. As usual, there was no getting out of it. This time my family was on its way to a large house outside Aldeburgh. There I would be deposited with a splendid old dear whom Peggy-Ann had met on the train from Liverpool Street (a consequence of travelling posh class). She was called Letty Gifford and it turned out that she had a friend called Ethel Sunderland-Taylor who lived in an equally huge house right on the river and that they’d both welcome some company for the summer. I was a sickly child and the air would do me good, apparently. Quite what was so different about the air in this part of Suffolk as opposed to that breathed at The Old Parsonage remains unclear.
So plans were made and delivery of the boy arranged. Inspiration struck Peggy-Ann en route. The family canoe was already strapped to the roof rack of our battered estate car. What fun! The older boys can go by boat! (My sisters were somehow immune from the scheme, while my younger brother seemed a babe in arms compared with me at ten and twelve-year-old Roddy.)
The three brothers: me, Tom and Roddy, circa 1974.
The fact that it was almost dark and threatening to be a thoroughly horrible evening didn’t sway her in the slightest. It was jolly well going to be fun.
Nobody protested. It was partly because resistance was useless. But also because there was something ultimately convincing about our mother’s enthusiasm. Who wants to miss out on the possibility of a Great Adventure, however terrifying in prospect? So Roddy and I were duly unloaded at Snape Bridge, along with a map and a canoe, and we were left to make our own way to Cob House.
Once the car was out of sight, there were no lights visible on the estuary. In fact, there was no sign of human life anywhere to be seen. We listened to the wind.
Better set off then, we resolved. Roddy in front, me behind.
It was simple enough at first, although the water was not as flat and calm as it had seemed from up on the bridge. But at least the river stayed narrow here, with tall reeds on either side, and there was still a little daylight. The thickness of the reeds both softened and amplified the wind and the high tide was falling, which made paddling easy. At our backs, the half-ruined buildings of the old Maltings were outlined against the lighter western sky. Away from Snape then, we paddled east, along a narrow channel heading towards Iken Cliffs.
Soon the river widened. A string of reed islands formed a large lagoon to the south, but we deliberately stuck to the channel close to the northern shore. Although a short cut across the lagoon looked the quicker route, there was little deep water there, even for a canoe, and we knew that to go aground on a falling tide would lead to difficulties. Concealed posts could hole the canvas and sink us in no time. The channel should be easy to navigate, though, clearly marked by the spindly sticks called withies, faithfully maintained by the old harbourmaster at Iken. We also knew that we could make the most of the ebbing tide only if we stayed in the deep water where the current flowed fastest. We were definitely not duffers, I silently reminded myself. We wouldn’t drown.
We stopped chatting, and gave ourselves over to the sound of dipping paddles and the wind in the reed beds.
This was proper wilderness. Not another person for miles, not even a house or farm. Just the grey river, and the big grey sky. After half a mile or so the river turned south to meander through another swaying reed archipelago, towards the anchorage on Cliff Reach. The wind was coming from the north, chilly, and what a sailor calls fair, so the canoe glided along at quite a pace, wind and tide working together. Roddy and I settled into a rhythm with our paddles. Dip, pull, lift. There was some comfort in the regular sloshing of water beneath the canvas.
Dip, pull, lift.
Dip, pull, lift.
Sensing the isolation, I began to worry a little about the approaching darkness. I looked at my elder brother’s back and felt a little braver.
How long now, Rod? Are we nearly there?
I don’t fucking know, all right. I haven’t got a fucking clue where we are, but we sure as shit aren’t near Aldeburgh yet.
He answered without stopping paddling. Roddy was pissed off and cold and clearly wondering why the hell he hadn’t refused to do this. He turned and looked at me over his shoulder, fixing me in the eye with a glare. We put up our paddles briefly and for a moment we were left floating in stillness. Then the background rhythm of gusts in the reeds reasserted itself. Again Roddy looked right into my eyes, but this time he grinned.
We’ll be OK. Come on, don’t you worry. Won’t be too long, I don’t reckon.
And he hit a splash with his paddle and we both laughed. I splashed him back, but only lightly because I liked this levity and I didn’t want a thump.
Dip, pull, lift.
Dip, pull, lift.
Another mile into our journey, and I had never felt so cold and tired in my life. Whatever excitement had been there to begin with was long gone. No matter how much we tried to keep dry, it was quite i
mpossible. In a canoe it’s always wet. There’s the puddle of muddy water sloshing around inside the boat – probably a small leak. Feet and bum get soaked first. Then, as you paddle, salt water dribbles down your forearm and into your sleeves, stinging your skin. The water was choppy, which made us wetter. From time to time Roddy caught a crab, missing the peak of a wave and scooping his paddle down into its trough so it was whipped backwards, the lack of resistance taking him by surprise. The resulting splash often hit me square in the face. More water ran down my neck, soaking my collar. As we reached open water the waves grew bigger than the little canoe, breaking over the bow and sending a spray over both of us.
The tide fell to expose expanses of flat grey mud, where waders gathered on the shores and in the reeds and called to one another. East coast estuaries have their own sound. It’s strange and eerie. As we ploughed on into the gathering darkness, the calls of the peewit and the dunlin and the noises of a hundred other hidden birds and creatures combined with the water and the mud and the wind and the reeds to send a shiver through me.
At Iken Cliff we stuck to the southerly shore and it was here, in the failing light, that I first saw the vast blasted oak looming up from the bank. It stood alone in the reeds, black and solid against the huge Suffolk sky. Two birds, doves by the look of them, were sitting in the tree, almost, but not quite silhouettes.
One dove, the larger of the two, sat slightly taller. Was this the male? His head was up as if on guard, and he perched proud on the bare branch. His mate had fluffed up big and cosy and she was settled so low on the branch you couldn’t see her feet. In for the night, snug and determined against the cold. The pair of birds weren’t touching, but Mr Dove was turned towards Mrs Dove, and their beaks nearly met. There was a tenderness about him. He seemed to be sheltering her.
As I watched them, it struck me that we shared something with those birds, the two of us, my brother and me. Pausing in my paddling, I gazed at the doves, absorbing every detail. The sky, the old blasted oak, the changes in the spaces between the two birds as we glided by. And now they were behind me, and I twisted my neck to keep them in sight. It felt like leaving friends, but I thought of supper, and knew we couldn’t stop.
The canoe glided on.
We came through Iken. The chart calls this bit Troublesome Reach, upper and lower. Troublesome it might be by sail, but in a canoe it was easy to navigate. Soon the squat tower of Iken Church came looming up through the gloom, jutting out on its peninsula.
Hard a-starboard, lads!
And we turned north into a squall.
The river was close to a mile across here and the water was sluicing eastward at speed, thoroughly choppy and angry. A tussle of wind against tide. We were soon utterly drenched. Roddy’s fury at the elements was vocal and loud. But still at the back of the canoe, soaking and cold and certainly very scared, I felt a curious sense of detachment. It was like watching myself in a film. A disaster movie, even. Here we were, cast adrift on a vengeful sea, facing death and destruction. But that didn’t matter. Nothing could really go wrong with my brother there to look after me. And anyway, I didn’t have to go on watching this scary film if I didn’t want to. I could just drift back to the two doves I’d seen, and huddle up with them. All it took was a little effort of the imagination and I could be cosy as anything, wrapped in a feather blanket, up in my blasted old oak.
The channel itself is visible only at low water. Just a few yards wide, it twists and turns incomprehensibly through a vast expanse of mud flats. You wouldn’t see it at all at high water if it weren’t for the withies, and these are hard to spot in the best of lights. In the dark, we had lost the channel completely. Turning the canoe east again, we ploughed on for another hour or two into an empty blackness where sky invisibly met water.
Church Reach. Bagnold’s Reach. Long Reach. Past Ham Creek which leads up to Little Japan with its sandy beach and old ruined cottage. Then Collier’s Reach and Blackthorn – we were there! We’d travelled a good six miles down the river and now there was a new sound gusting against the wind. The two of us boys shouting and laughing at the top of our voices.
Fuck you! You fucking bastards!
And we roared with laughter.
SHIT! FUCK! BOLLOCKS!
There was a light on the northern shore. Tiny Cob Island had appeared.
BOLLOCKS–ARSES–FUCK!
A roar of laughter and we splashed one another with the paddles, giddy with the freedom of knowing we couldn’t be heard. We weren’t sure if we were cursing the grown-ups or the river. Either would have been appropriate. A final salute of two fingers in the air and we headed in towards the shore. The dilapidated jetty was where it should have been but the tide had gone out so far that we felt the canoe brush the bottom and had to hop out, shoes in hand. The mud squelched wonderfully between my toes. Solid, if not dry, land.
We slithered the boat across to the jetty and tied her up. The shell-spiked mud turned to clumps of grassy reeds and then into gravelly sand. I stood on the shore, and grinned at my brother. We had made it.
Cob House was set much higher and some way off, though in the darkness we had no way of knowing that. Barefoot, we walked tentatively on the stony path leading up from the river through the long garden, relishing the softness of the damp grass once we were through the wooden gate.
We hadn’t been forgotten completely. Someone had left an outside light on. Otherwise this huge pink house, curving round its garden, was utterly still and dark. No reception party. Certainly no supper.
Hey! At least they’ve put a tent up.
I wormed into the sleeping bag beside my brother and drifted unstoppably into sleep. The canvas rustled softly. The cry of a few last remaining waders carried on the wind, and the pull of the tide sucked the river out over grey mud, out towards the sea.
Next morning I woke at dawn. I lay on my back listening to the coo-cooing of the pigeons, before untying the tent flaps to get look at them, sleeping bag dragging like a maggot behind me. Not two pigeons, but two doves. Of course. Their call is slightly higher, more reedy and sing-song. Coo-cooo coo. Two of them were sitting up high in the branches of a living oak tree, half-hidden in the green leaves. Side by side. Kneeling in my sleeping bag, I cupped my hands into a box shape, thumbs bent in front, and put my lips to my knuckles to blow out my dove whistle – a variation of my owl call. Coo-cooo coo! And a fist hit me right in the stomach.
Debbie in Titmouse on the river Deben near Woodbridge in the early 1960s.
Shut up and go back to sleep will you?
Eventually I did. But the doves stayed in my mind.
It’s dark outside now and the rain is heavier. My new sketchbook lies open in front of me and I haven’t drawn a thing. An older one is open at a page I drew twenty-five years ago. Two birds – not as clear as I’d like – are scratching about for food. A note underneath reads Quails V&A 1986.
What I’m after now is half there already, in my mind’s eye. It’s winter, the birds are on a branch and it’s bloody freezing. A cold wind blows from the north. One dove is settled in for the night, puffed up, neck drawn in and huddled low, nice and snug. The other is standing slightly more alert, keeping an eye out for her. They don’t touch, but there is definitely something between them: a relationship of trust and affection, and that’s what I’m trying to capture. It’s there in these quails, too.
I push back my chair and search the bookcase, gathering together a pile of dog-eared bird books: A Field Guide to the Birds of Britain, All the Birds of the Air and Thorburn’s Birds. Old friends. I used to save up my pocket money and order these from catalogues. I covered them in clear plastic to protect them from the rain and wrote my name on the inside cover, carefully and always in full: Alexander John Monroe, The Old Parsonage. Tel. Woolverstone 380. Now I smile at my childish handwriting and the unforgettable phone number.
Spreading everything around me on my desk in the studio, I begin to draw the scene. Some come out OK, I think. I can draw
a dove as easy as pie and I’m happy with the way I get them to puff up against the cold. But this isn’t something I can describe properly in line alone. I need to go into the workshop and start making.
I know I need to narrow my choice down to a single pair of birds. Starting afresh a day later, I redraw my favourite sketches in profile. I scan and resize them on a sheet of A4, starting big and gradually reducing them in size to tiny specks. The two doves I like best are about 11mm long. I cut them out and stick these minute drawings onto a sheet of silver, 3.5mm thick, turn to look for my piercing saw and suddenly realise I’m starving. I nip back into the office and find a packet of liquorice allsorts. Stuffing my mouth with three of them, I turn round to see a beautifully dressed woman coming towards me. Just as I try to say hello a half-chewed allsort escapes and falls down my front. She’s a buyer from an uptown boutique and I think I’ve made a bad impression. Black-toothed liquorice excuses made, I retreat back to the workshop.
Looking at it again, I know I’m not quite there yet. So I tidy my bench and it strikes me that what I really need is a cup of tea. But the buyer’s still in the way so I can’t go and make one. I’ll have to start cutting out after all. New saw blades. I need new saw blades. I go and look in the drawer for some 4.0s. I usually use a very thin 6.0 but this is a particularly thick bit of silver so I need a thicker 4.0. None in the drawer. I’m not using a bloody 3.0 so I settle for a new pack of 5.0s.
The smell of hot light bulbs and wood begins to rise. With silver as solid as this, I turn the job, not the blade, gently curving round the breast and up to the neck and the beak. As I cut, the blade nicks at the wooden support pin and a little sawdust mingles with the silver. The radio plays Sham 69.
Hersham boys, Hersham boys, laced-up boots and corduroys . . .