Later Mum told me that while I was spending those years in bed she had many times considered gassing us both. The way she talked about it, she was almost apologising for her failure of nerve. She didn’t feel she deserved any credit for resisting suicidal temptation. She still thought it would have been better for us both to be dead. Speak for yourself, Mum! But at least I understood then why she was so fascinated by the gas fire. She wasn’t mesmerised by the grille and the colours of its combustion. She wasn’t looking at the fire at all, nor the colours of its fading. What drew her eyes was the stiff little tap in the pipe that came out of the wall.
Looking back on those years, it isn’t Mum I feel sorry for, even if she was playing with thoughts of suicide, but Dad, so little a part of the household. His projects were so peripheral, apart from his moments of glory lighting rockets on Bonfire Night. The pleasures of the house happened in his absence, even when his belongings made them possible, like the Brummell Tie Press, so that we played in the shadow of his outrage if our games were found out.
One day Mum sat on my bed softly crying, and I tried to find words to reassure her. ‘It’s all right, Mummy,’ I told her. ‘I really don’t mind being ill.’ I even think I was telling the truth.
Net profit of joy
Mum was starved of activities that didn’t centre on me. One thing that kept her sane in those years was breeding budgerigars. From knowing nothing about it she rapidly became something of an expert, even an authority. She got the idea from a magazine, I think. The article promised ‘hours of pleasure for a modest outlay’, which turned out to be no more than the truth. Those birds produced a vast net profit of joy. It must have been wonderful for Mum to find a world in which she excelled, and which she didn’t have to share with anyone else, though she chose to share it with me.
If I’d been consulted I would have preferred a pet anaconda or else some baleful insect. I wanted to create a relationship with a very alien creature. Knowing Dad’s unsentimental love of nature I tried to sell him on the idea of a pet scorpion, but he said gently, ‘I’m afraid even I draw the line somewhere.’
It was probably a minor joy of keeping birds for Mum that Granny feared them. Perhaps it was even a major incentive. Granny said birds were dirty, but really she was afraid of them getting tangled in her hair. She would make sure that Mum checked the cages before she came into a room, and she’d disappear if Mum announced that the birds needed to be let out to stretch their wings. Mum didn’t exactly tyrannise the tyrant, but it was a treat for her to have Granny at her mercy in any way. It was something she never got tired of.
Budgies gave us a lot more to talk about, but they also extended Mum’s world without the drastic step of taking her out of the house. As word got round that Laura Cromer knew what she was doing, budgie people would telephone for budgie advice. It was a wonderful change for her to be giving out support and information, after becoming so knowledgeable in such a remarkably short time. The satisfactions of budgie breeding even took the edge off her life-long need for sympathy. When she did find herself in a waiting room full of strangers, she might go down the new and sunlit path of budgie happiness rather than the muddy pot-holed track of tragic children and their illnesses.
I learned a few things myself, from picking up the conversational crumbs from Mum’s bird table. I learned that if budgies got out of their aviary they almost never got back. They starved because they had never learned to find food for themselves. Being fed by man had stunted their instincts, and so an aviary must have both an inner and an outer door – to act as a sort of air-lock. I remember a weekend of banging and frayed tempers which must have been the time that Mum and Dad built just such an air-lock. The intoxicating smell on Dad’s hands, for which I had no name, can only have been sawdust.
Mum liked the blue birds best. They were the best talkers, and they looked heavenly. Literally heavenly, as blue as the blue of Heaven. ‘What’s more,’ she said, ‘they match your eyes exactly. God has not taken your beautiful blue eyes from you …’ Up to that moment I hadn’t known that there were illnesses which could make your eyes change colour.
Budgies, unlike ladies, really didn’t have ears. Mum showed me by manœuvring one of her birds, gently stroking his feathers and down against the grain until I could see the tiny little hole where the sound went in. The bird in her hand was very good and didn’t mind at all, but I felt sorry for him. I thought that hearing something with a hole instead of a proper ear would be like eating tomato soup with a fork.
On special occasions, if the weather was warm, I would be allowed to spend part of the day in the garden. Dad would carry me out there to enjoy fresh air and warm weather. He settled me comfortably, but then he looked at me with a rather sarcastic expression and said I was lolling there ‘like a pasha’. I thought I’d better not ask what a pasha was. Some sort of slug perhaps. He must have been in a good mood all the same, because he volunteered to play ‘I Spy’, even if there was a catch. All the ‘I Spy’-ing he did was of plants, and since he knew all the Latin names as well as the common ones, I had no chance of guessing them. Dad loved plants and was good at making them grow. If he’d gone to university (if the War hadn’t come along) he’d have studied biology, specialising in botany.
I remember one particular day of lying out in the garden. Mum told me that the sky that day was a special colour, not just blue but azure. The word tasted beautiful in my mouth. I didn’t need a perfect sky to entertain me, though. It was pleasure enough to connect up dim sounds that I heard from my room, particularly when the back door was open in warm weather, with the activities that produced them. The scratchy whisper of a rake from the garden two doors down, the bite and chop of the same man’s hoe.
I don’t know if Mum had been distracted on her last visit to the aviary, but there was a sudden flutter and we saw that two budgies had escaped. They didn’t waste time. Soon they were soaring upward, and it became difficult to pick them out from the sky which so perfectly matched them. It was extraordinary to see their ascent into freedom, and I imagined I could share the exhilaration they felt.
Mum was naturally very upset, and I tried to reassure her. I found it very hard to believe that those glorious soaring birds would not survive. I couldn’t disregard the hard logic with which Mum had described their fate, but I was somehow convinced that this was a special case. It wasn’t even that I selfishly wanted them to return. I just felt that in this one case the birds would be discovered, captured and cared for all over again. The moment was so happy for them. It just couldn’t be death they were escaping into.
The blue cere
When her birds started to nest in their boxes, Mum was transported. Our small world was greatly enlarged when she officially became a Breeder. She loved all her feathered babies, and yet blues would always be her favourites, being the best talkers. They made the best pets and the best friends – females had a tendency to deliver painful nips. Mum loved to talk about the ‘blue cere’, a phrase I instinctively loved myself without knowing what it was. It sounded such a wonderfully grown-up word. Mum couldn’t wait for the Blue Cere to come, and nor could I. All I knew was that it would be a great day for our budgies when the Blue Cere arrived. Their lives would be changed in some way I couldn’t imagine. I visualised the Blue Cere as a sort of springtime Father Christmas, wearing blue rather than red.
Mum had a deep connection with her birds and even with their eggs. She could tell the signs that meant a clutch was about to hatch. She would become very keyed up. The excitement even rubbed off on Dad, who would pop in to tell me the news every time a hatching was taking place. Hatching wasn’t always a happy event. One day I could hear that an argument had started between them, even if I could only hear snatches of it:
‘No, I’m not going to chuck it out! How can you even suggest it?’
‘If it can’t get out of its egg, the bird will never be a good breeder, and most likely …’
‘I don’t care, Dennis – for me that is murd
er.’
‘You’re far too sensitive, m’dear! Quite ridiculous …’
‘And don’t tell me about your blasted kittens. Just don’t!’
During his childhood Dad had become used to drowning unwanted kittens in buckets of water. ‘Nothing to it, m’dear. Just do it the moment they’re born, though, or then you’ll get attached to them and you’ll never be able to do it …’
The argument I overheard had been about one particular egg. The bird inside had managed to crack the shell, but had been too exhausted to get any further. It had lost its fight to be born. It was very scrawny and weak, and it had been rejected by the mother. How would it find its way back to life after that? Dad insisted nature knew best about survival, and from what I saw of the condition of the bird it was easy to feel he had a point. Newborn budgies aren’t exactly pretty at the best of times. They’re scraggy little pink things, but this one was positively unsightly.
Mum paid no attention. The baby had rights, and if it had been rejected by its mother, then she would take the mother’s place. Dad pleaded for her to be sensible, warning that her attempts to hand-feed the runty chick with special food were doomed anyway. It would all end in tears (one of his favourite phrases). She dismissed his arguments, making out that she wasn’t really going to any trouble. Since she so often got up in the night for me anyway, what was another little creature to care for?
And then the little bird failed to die, even began slyly to thrive. Little by little it grew, until there was no doubt that it had turned the corner. It loved Mum, and chirped in its little rasping voice whenever she came near. Never was imprinting more richly deserved. The baby bird had been rejected not only by its mother but by the other birds in the aviary, so it became my companion by default. The little bird had nobody, and so the little bird had me. ‘Is it a boy bird or a girl bird?’ I asked Mum.
‘I don’t know.’
This was rich. This was marvellous. Much as I wanted to know the answer to my question, I was vastly tickled by Mum’s inability to decide the issue. Sorting creatures into the right categories was so much her special subject. She had cleared up my confusion over nurses not being ladies, and she had tactfully led Miss Collins away from the goaty group to which I had assigned her, returning her to the rightful sheepish company. And now she had been stumped by a little bundle of chirping fluff!
Mum explained that you couldn’t tell the gender of a budgie until later. That’s where the blue cere comes in. The cere is the soft, waxy swelling at the base of the upper beak, which develops as the bird grows to maturity. Blue for a boy, tan or brown for a girl. Of course I couldn’t wait that long. I wanted to give the bird a name, and I wanted to call it ‘him’ until the case was proved the other way.
‘I really don’t mind if it’s a girl, Mum,’ I said, ‘I’ll love him anyway. Him or her. Even if it’s a girl and it pecks. But can it be a boy for now?’ Mum must have thought it likely that our bird was a boy, because he bobbed his head in the way that is characteristic of males. If he was female he would have been quieter, but bossy. So we assigned maleness to him for the time being, ‘on approval’, as it always said in the Ellisdons catalogue.
Dad made out that he was indifferent to the bird’s existence, but he was the one who came up with the name that stuck. The bird became Charlie. Then it was only a question of waiting for the blue cere to confirm or invalidate our assignment of gender. The change happens at between eight months and a year old, but Mum was looking long before that. Dad said, ‘You’re being ridiculous, no one can tell so early,’ but Mum said she knew what to look for. She had an eye for such things, and said she didn’t care what the books said. When the blue cere appeared, it was visible only to Mum at first. Then it became as plain as the beak on his face. There was no doubt about it. Charlie was still a boy and still Charlie.
Tail-end Charlie
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 li
ke 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 twenty-seventh letter
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.’
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