It is a fast-moving river. James has watched a leaf, blown onto the surface of the water, drift downstream and disappear around the bend before he has counted to thirty, the leaf moving at roughly one foot per second. The current is swifter in the spring, when the river is deep, the flex of the water more powerful.
At first, James thinks that he will make a study of the river, that it would be good to attach himself to a purpose while a prisoner in the camp. He doesn’t want to dig useless tunnels, is not much interested in gardening or sport, prefers not to lie around in his bunk like Harry Stevens, waiting for the war to end. The men in the camp do not need him to teach them grammar school science, the only worthwhile skill he has on offer. The prison camp is filled with highly educated officers. In his bunkhouse alone, there are fourteen men who have been to either Oxford or Cambridge.
But the trouble with the river is that James has no real access to it. He can stand near the wire and watch the little bit of it that flows past the camp, but he cannot wade through it, examine the banks in detail, plunge his hand into the current to feel the temperature and pull of the water. He can visit it, but he will never know it. As a study, it will ultimately be inadequate and disappointing.
It is a warm spring day in 1940 when he thinks this, standing as close to the wire as he dares, feeling the breeze on his skin and watching it move the branches of the trees on the opposite shore.
It is in this exact moment that he hears the song of the bird and all his thoughts are silenced.
The beginning of something is easy to recall because it signals a change in direction. James Hunter came down to the river, which was one side of his prison, and he saw the redstarts on the stone wall, and the beauty of their song and the splash of red on their tails made him decide to study them for the length of time he was to be kept in the camp.
THE BIRDS were singing down by the river. Two redstarts on a grey stone wall. One was singing more beautifully and more often than its fellow, and James wondered then if some birds were simply better singers than others, and if this constant song was a rejoicing in their abilities.
The song of the redstart begins as a melody and ends in dissonance, as though the song itself comes undone in the process of singing it, finishing up with all the right notes presented in the completely wrong order.
James had no paper down by the river. He made no notes. He carried the memory of the song back up the hill to his small wooden desk in the bunkhouse, but when he sat down to write what he had heard, the words unravelled like the song of the bird, and he was left with nothing.
He returned to the river the next day. The male birds were still there, still singing and trying to attract a female. James realized that if he meant to watch them with purpose, he would need to document them. He would need to bring a notebook and pencil with him to the river and find a place to sit under a tree, as near to the wire as he could without drawing the attention of the guards.
IN HIS room in the bunkhouse, James has secured a top bunk near the only window. None of the other men had wanted this spot because the window is drafty, but James doesn’t mind suffering the cold in exchange for the opportunity to watch the changing sky and weather, or to feel the sun on his face in the afternoon because the window faces west.
The men in his flight crew have been allocated to different bunkhouses and different camps, and as they were never his friends, James doesn’t miss them or seek them out. The seven other men in his room are nice enough fellows. They pool their Red Cross parcels so the food will stretch further, and they share books and jokes, but the only one of them to whom James is remotely close is the man who occupies the bottom bunk, Harry Stevens.
The second morning he observes the redstarts, James charges back up the slope to his room to get a notebook and pencil so he can begin documenting the birds. When he bursts through the door, Harry Stevens is lying on his bunk, reading a book. Stevens uses his books as a screen to avoid talking to his cabin mates, a trait that James understands, being often overwhelmed himself by constant human interaction. But sometimes he is disappointed when Harry chooses to use his book as a screen against him as well.
“There are redstarts by the river.” James scrambles up the ladder to his bunk, where he keeps writing materials on a small shelf near his pillow.
“Red what?” Harry peers over the top of his novel.
“Birds. Two males. They’re trying to attract females. I might get a breeding pair.” James grabs a notebook and two pencils from the shelf. “I’m going to make a study of the redstarts. It will keep me busy here, and with luck, I can turn it into a book after the war.”
“Best of British, then.” Harry has already lost interest in James’s pursuit. He turns a page of his novel. “Make sure you pull the door tight on your way out.”
The deprivations of the Oflag make men’s true natures rise to the surface fairly quickly, and what James had initially liked about Harry Stevens—his aloofness and polite reluctance at having too much to do with his fellow prisoners—has to be respected in every instance, even in circumstances where James would have preferred Harry to act a little more out of character.
THE BETTER singer of the male redstarts entices a female to join him, and it is not long before they start to build a nest together.
In the spring, when most of James’s observations are taken, the days carry both promise and heartache. Often he shivers down by the river, and the birds huddle inside their feathered coats. On the days when it is sunny, they bask in the warmth together.
James had seen redstarts in Britain, but never a nesting pair. And back in that other life, which seems to fade more with each passing day, he didn’t have much time to watch the world. He was too busy moving through it.
From his position near the fence, James can observe the redstarts building their nest in the stone wall across the river. They are about thirty feet away from him, near enough that he can make out most of the details of their courtship and nest building. He would love a pair of spyglasses, to observe their activity more closely, but spyglasses, for obvious reasons, are not permitted in camp.
The redstart nest is constructed with twigs and roots as its foundation. To this is added an insulating layer of dead grasses, feathers, wool scraps, animal hair, blanket threads, string, paper, moss, and what looks to be part of a bandage made of cotton wool. The birds make use of what is on offer to them, which means they avail themselves of the prisoner’s scraps, the evidence of life in the Oflag forming the foundation of their little home.
James watches the building of the nest for eleven straight hours, interrupted only once for roll call, and in those eleven hours the female redstart brings building materials to her nest a full 239 times.
The time it takes to build a nest and lay eggs varies from couple to couple, and much depends on the weather, as no bird likes to use wet materials to build a nest and so will wait out rain and inclemency. The redstart pair that James is watching is lucky in that it’s dry for their nest building and so it takes them only four days to complete the task.
James doesn’t know what observations will matter later, when he looks through his notes, so he writes everything down. In between the notations on the redstarts’ activity, he writes larger questions about the birds’ behaviour—questions he thinks about when he lies in his bunk at the end of the day.
Are some birds more strong-willed than their fellows? Do they push forward in times when other birds would wait? What is the greater imperative, I wonder, in all enterprises—desire or circumstance?
What is particular to the species in terms of the redstarts’ behaviour, and what is a matter of individual temperament? Is it reasonable for this pair to represent all redstarts, when perhaps the necessity of being themselves is of more relevance than the fact that they are redstarts?
BEFORE LONG, James’s vigil by the river is judged suspicious, and he is marched off between two guards to the Kommandant’s office.
James has not been inside t
he German quarters before, and he is surprised to find them as barren as the bunkhouses. There is the same rudimentary wooden furniture scattered through the room. No rugs. No decorations on the walls. The walls themselves, being stone, make the Kommandant’s office seem colder, and the lack of personal effects makes it appear a good deal grimmer than James’s own room in bunkhouse 11.
The Kommandant rises from behind his desk when the prisoner is ushered into his office. He extends his hand and James shakes it solemnly, as though they were being introduced at a cocktail party.
“Please sit down,” the Kommandant says. His English is very good, carries no trace of an accent.
James sits on the rickety wooden chair that faces the desk. He wonders if the Germans also have to periodically saw pieces off their furniture to feed the stove during the winter months.
The Kommandant is older than James by more than ten years; he’s also plumper, with a receding hairline and pale-grey eyes. His brow is furrowed with lines, worry that has existed since before this war.
“You have been seen loitering by the river,” he says. “Are you perhaps thinking of escaping?”
James is impressed with the word “loitering.” This man has not learned English on the job, making simple translations from ordinary German words into ordinary English ones. The Kommandant has clearly come to this job already equipped with English.
“I’m not escaping,” says James. “I’m watching the birds.”
“Der Vogel?” The Kommandant seems surprised. Whatever lie he was expecting, this is not it.
“Redstarts.” James produces his notebook from a jacket pocket. He hands it across the desk. “There is a breeding pair down by the river.”
The Kommandant carefully turns the pages of the notebook, peering at James’s cramped handwriting and his tiny pencil sketches.
“You are very thorough.”
“I mean to make a proper study.”
The Kommandant hands the notebook back across the desk to his prisoner.
“I will allow it, then,” he says. “But only because you are making a proper study.” He smiles, and James can’t tell if he is mocking him or not.
“Thank you,” he says, tucking the notebook back inside his jacket.
The guard opens the office door for him, and James steps out onto the wooden porch and then down onto the earth of the yard, still puzzling over the tone of the Kommandant’s remark.
THERE’S A tunnel underway this spring, a big one, started in bunkhouse 14, which is near the centre of the camp, farther from the wire than the bunkhouses where other tunnels have been started. The tunnellers are hoping that this will throw the Germans off the scent, that it won’t occur to them to be suspicious of one of the middle bunkhouses. The extra fifty feet they have to dig seems worth it if they are successful in fooling the guards.
One of the tunnellers is in James Hunter’s room in bunkhouse 11. His name is Davis and he is known as the Modeller because he is making a scale model of the village where he used to live out of bits of wood, tin, and cardboard. Sometimes he solicits the Artist to help him decorate the facades of the tiny buildings. He keeps the finished pieces in a box under his bunk, but occasionally he’ll display the village on the table in the middle of an afternoon, when most of the men are outside playing football or bashing the circuit.
“He moves the models around a lot,” Harry said to James once. “As if he can’t quite remember where the buildings actually go, even though he remembers what they look like.”
All their activity is about not forgetting, thinks James, listening to the Modeller hum as he waits for the tinpot teakettle to boil. No one knows how long the war will last, and none of the men want to lose themselves in the process. By constructing the house they used to live in or lecturing on the subjects they once taught, they are able to hold on to the memory of the men they used to be. The unspoken hope for all of them is that when the war does end, they will be able to step back into those lives and continue on as though they’d never had to leave, and as though nothing of any consequence had happened to them in the war.
James leans over the edge of his bunk. The Modeller has his back to James, is sitting at the table working on assembling one of his miniature buildings. From his perspective, James can’t tell what the building is going to be, but he can see from the hunch of Davis’s body over his work how much attention he is paying to what he is doing.
When James had asked the Modeller why he was involved in digging the tunnel, Davis had just said, “I want to go home.”
The effort that Ian Davis is taking in reconstructing, from memory, each stone of his childhood is touching, but James wonders if casting all one’s attentions towards home is really the right approach to being a prisoner.
“It’s coming along,” he says. But Davis, intent on his task, doesn’t reply, or doesn’t hear him.
The roofs of the miniature buildings make James think that’s how they would look to a bird flying over the real village.
Or an aeroplane.
He had joined the air force because James wanted the height and distance of the plane in relation to the ground. “So I don’t have to see the people I’m killing,” he had said to his sister, Enid, when she asked him why he’d chosen the RAF. “So I don’t have to know that I’ve killed them.”
AFTER THE nest is built, the clutch of eggs is laid. James can’t tell how many eggs there are, but he can see that the base of the nest is covered in a light-blue colour, so there are probably as many as half a dozen.
When the chicks are born, their gullets are a bright orange. If the nest was dark or in the hollow of a tree, the adult redstarts would be able to see the bright throats of their babies and know where to place the food they have brought back to them.
The arrival of the chicks cheers James. He likes listening to their tiny cries, seeing the splash of orange in their open mouths. It excites him to think that he’ll be there when they fledge. He doesn’t mind counting the number of times the adult birds return to the nest with food, or watching them catch insects in the air above the river. He is attached to the progress of the redstart family and is eager for it to be successful. Most baby birds don’t survive into adulthood. There are countless predators waiting to snatch them from the nest or grab them from the ground after their first wobbly flight.
A few days after the chicks are born, James leaves his post at the river to attend the evening roll call. As is his habit now, he first returns to his bunkhouse room to put the notebook and pencil away on the shelf by his pillow. He’s a bit late coming back from the river; most of the men are out in the yard already, and even Stevens is gone from his bunk. James hurriedly climbs the ladder, placing his notebook and pencil on the shelf, and just as he’s about to climb back down, he sees an object on his pillow. It’s a book, wrapped carefully in brown paper. James pulls off the paper and sees a guidebook to the birds of Germany. The page with the entry on the redstart has a piece of paper placed there as a bookmark. Written on the paper, in neat script, are the words “To help you with your proper study of the birds.”
“YORKSHIRE PUDDING,” says Harry, “dripping with gravy. Fresh green beans from my father’s allotment. Apple Charlotte to finish.”
“Omelette,” says James. “Mushroom and cheese, with a stack of toast and butter.”
“Remember how good butter used to taste?” says Harry. “A little cool from being in the larder. Pale and creamy. Just the right amount of salt.”
“A pint of ale,” says James.
“Two pints of ale.”
“A ham sandwich, with mustard and butter.”
“We’re back to butter again.” Harry flicks his cigarette onto the earth at his feet. “Let’s switch to people. Who do you miss the most?”
They’re walking the circuit just before evening roll call. It’s a warm spring evening. James is convinced he can smell apple blossoms on the breeze that wafts over the camp. As they pass the office, the door opens and the Komman
dant steps out onto his wooden porch. He looks right at James and smiles.
“Who is it?” says Harry.
“What?”
“Who do you miss?”
James breaks eye contact with the Kommandant as he and Harry walk past the porch.
“My wife,” he says.
“What’s her name?”
“Rose.”
“And is she?”
“Is she what?”
“As lovely as a rose?”
“I suppose so.” James looks over his shoulder. The Kommandant is still standing on the wooden porch. In exactly fourteen minutes they will pass in front of him again. Will he smile a second time, or will he be gone?
“You don’t sound very convinced.”
“It’s private. How I feel about my wife is private.”
Harry snorts with laughter, slaps James on the shoulder. “Have you not noticed where you are?” he says. “There’s nothing here that’s private, old chum.”
The prisoners obsess about their women back home. They talk about them endlessly, carry their letters around—sniffing at them to inhale the fading perfume that might still linger on the page. The Artist is kept busy drawing life-size portraits of wives and girlfriends from photographs. The portraits are tacked up on the walls beside the men’s bunks.
The men who don’t have wives or girlfriends talk about missing their dogs or the countryside where they grew up. All of them have something back home to fixate on while they are locked away in the camp.
James thinks about his wife as often as any man, but where the others are public with their feelings, he prefers to keep his to himself. His marriage is his business, he thinks. By keeping his feelings private, he keeps them active. The men who talk and talk about their wives are spending those feelings here, and when they get back to England, they might find that nothing of that emotion is left and their wives are now strangers to them.
Evening Chorus (9780544352971) Page 2