by Alex Horne
21 June
With the tournament grinding on and even my interest, for perhaps the first time, waning, I broke up the month with a trip down to Chichester. Every year about sixty pairs of peregrine falcons, in Duncton’s opinion the most majestic of Britain’s birds of prey, take up residence in some of Britain’s most imposing buildings, taking the place of cliffs as the birds have moved inland. From the heights of the enormous funnels of Tate Modern in London, Peterborough’s power station, or the cathedrals in Derby and Lincoln, these raptors have been thrilling city residents in increasing numbers over the last thirty years.
Just twelve miles south of Midhurst, Chichester Cathedral has been home to a pair of the birds since 2002. Over the last four years they’d produced at least twenty-three young, and as part of his volunteership, Duncton has manned an RSPB tent pointing telescopes at the birds on their turrets each breeding season.
This was the first time I had seen Duncton in full RSPB mode. In fact, when I emerged from the cathedral’s quaint coffee shop to see him clad, SWAT-team-like, in a fine RSPB flak jacket, siastically chatting to innocent members of the public, it was the first time I’d ever seen him in any sort of uniform. It was an impressive sight. The birds wheeling around the spires above may have incited gasps from the gathering crowd below, but I was mostly proud of my dad.
There were five RSPB volunteers on duty that afternoon, mostly bearded, obviously, and all energetic, knowledgeable and funny. Initially I was standoffish, slightly embarrassed even, but their bonhomie was infectious and I gradually relaxed.
Their role was to make visitors to the cathedral aware that there were peregrine falcons about, in effect playing the part of big arrows labelled ‘Look! Big Birds!’ pointing up to the nest in the southeast turret and their larder6 in the southwest turret. But they were also there to provide the equipment with which people could see just how impressive the birds were. As well as top notch binoculars and telescopes, this equipment included a yard-long wooden stick, the same length as the falcons’ wingspan, which the volunteers wielded with panache while fielding questions. This answering service was where Duncton really excelled. Like an expert compère, he put people at ease with his assured banter.
‘So, how long do they live then?’ asked one curious visitor.
‘Oh about eleven to twelve years on average,’ replied Duncton, firing out statistics from his big stick like an ornithological machine-gun.
‘A bit like a dog then.’
‘Yes,’ said Duncton, quick as a flash, ‘it’s a dog’s life.’
Duncton may well have laughed loudest, but everyone was definitely amused by the joke.
The highlight was when a middle-aged couple proudly announced that they were called Mr and Mrs Twitcher. All Duncton really had to do was pass on this information to anyone else who arrived, but in doing so he managed to make everyone chuckle. It was the way he told them.
Late in the day, one of the birds was spotted bringing some food back to the nest. ‘It’s a she,’ said Duncton. Two of the people standing next to him thought he’d said, ‘It’s a sheep.’ They laughed, because by now Duncton was well established as the joker. Recovering well, Duncton suggested that it was actually a baby, a darker joke, but still popular.
I stayed over in Midhurst that evening. Mum had dug out my last Panini Sticker Album from 1986, and as I leafed longingly through the pages, twenty-year-old memories flooded back. It was alarming to realise how little my life had changed over the last two decades – if anything, my stickers this year were stuck in with even more childlike care.
Duncton and I had planned to go out looking for some bizarre nocturnal birds called nightjars that evening, but they would have to wait. We drank too much wine toasting the falcons at dinner and Duncton couldn’t drive. Besides, Holland were playing Argentina, so we bonded over the TV instead.
25 June
I watched England’s first game in the knockout round on my own. It wasn’t a great spectacle. Beckham eventually sent England through with a trademark free kick, but by the end of the game I was quiet rather than jubilant, thoughtful, not triumphant. The thing that was perplexing me, apart from England’s mysterious lack of passion, was why Mat had stayed with birdwatching, while I hadn’t. Was he more like Duncton than me? Was it something to do with their relationship, or more to do with Mat himself? Mat, of course, was in Africa and unable to answer such questions, so instead I turned to Duncton.
During the course of another epic phone call, after we’d briefly dismissed the England performance, he told me how he’d started to get into birds. Most of the stories that first trickled and then poured down the line were brand new to me. I said very little, but scribbled notes frantically. I was surprised he’d never told me this before. But then I suppose I’d never asked.
‘Well, my first memory of birdwatching,’ he began, ‘and I remember this quite clearly, was sitting in an apple tree in the garden and looking at a blackbird. I must have been about seven years old …’
That’s about as sweet an image of my now grey, grizzled, bearded dad as I’ve ever had: a young boy, in the mid 1950s so presumably in black and white and shorts, sitting in a tree and becoming fascinated by a blackbird. I’d had a similar moment myself, perched on my sofa, watching my blackbird devour a worm in January this year, but that didn’t perhaps evoke such innocence.
Duncton was still reminiscing.
‘And I remember the first bird I came in close contact with. We had a museum at our school and someone had brought in an injured lapwing. I remember being struck by its fabulous colours …’
Again, this was a charming if slightly bizarre picture. A museum in a school, to which people brought wounded waterbirds? I didn’t remember any such establishment at my school. But then again, we did have a ‘museum’ at home. It was just a set of shelves in the playroom, crammed full of the things we’d found on walks or holidays – shells, fossils, the odd animal skull – but to us, it was the ‘museum’, inspired, perhaps, by Duncton’s schooldays.
‘… then when I was eleven or twelve I discovered the British Junior Naturalist Association and went up to Yorkshire for this week-long summer natural history course and I remember they said if you like birds you must come back for the winter course. That would be pure birds. Well, that was that. In January I went straight back to some sort of youth education centre in a village called Hutton Buscel. We were taken to all the great birdwatching sites. It was really tough, we were whisked off first thing in the morning and had to walk around all day. I remember it being dark at seven in the morning but we saw everything. And there were kids from all over the country …’
I began to see how his enthusiasm for birds had stayed constant for more than half a century.
‘I also went to a conference by the Junior Bird Recorders Club at their lodge in Sandy, absolutely fantastic. There were individual bedrooms, meals in a lovely dining room, the most fantastic bird feeders I’d ever seen. They were the predecessors of the YOC. You were in the YOC weren’t you?’
Yes, I was still part of the conversation, and yes, I was a member of the Young Ornithologists Club.7 We all were. It didn’t mean much more to me than a shiny badge, but I could see now how significant our membership must have been for Duncton. He told me he’d organised all these early birdwatching exploits on his own, and was justifiably proud of himself.
The Junior Bird Recorders Club Conference in Sandy in the 1960s. A young Duncton is the last lad on the left.
‘Soon after that I started going to Sevenoaks and met Jeffery Harrison. Going up to Fair Isle was the natural progression. I think I’d met Mum when I went up the first time – that was in the early seventies. And that’s a great memory. I remember arriving there the first time by boat – the ferry was still the Good Shepherd then of course …’
Of course, Duncton.
‘… and all those seabirds were wheeling around. That’s the best way to approach. I’ll never forget that. I took Mum there
, then kept going back, eventually with Mat of course. It’s funny, I remember one of the wardens saying to Mat that he should come back without his dad for a young person’s course – just like all those years before. And Mat did – he went back with his friend William the next year. And I think he volunteered as a warden at Loch Garten like I did too. We both must have done that when we were about nineteen, keeping egg collectors away from the osprey nests. They’re one of the biggest success stories, ospreys. Of course they’d become extinct in Britain but came back in the sixties …’
I had to interrupt him. I could see how both his and Mat’s passion for birdwatching had snowballed. But mine had never even started to roll. What about Duncton’s own brother, Johnny? And his chicken-keeping sister Polly?
‘No, Johnny and Polly didn’t go on any of these trips. They both went on sailing courses with Grandpa. Although of course now Johnny’s getting into birdwatching – a bit like you. You can get into it late. Unlike sailing. You know we all went on a sailing trip recently? I couldn’t do it at all! They assumed I’d been with them on those trips when we were kids, but I’d always been off birdwatching so I displayed a complete and utter lack of any nautical understanding!’
I knew the feeling.
Grandpa, Duncton’s dad, was called Trader. Well, his first name was really John but I guess he set the precedent for shopping around for a more interesting name.
‘… needless to say, Trader was interested in all aspects of natural history. He enjoyed looking at birds from boats. That’s another early bird memory, sailing on the Suffolk coast at the age of about ten. I remember watching the avocets breeding on Havergate Island. They’re a big success story too. The symbol of the RSPB of course. And the Isle of Sheppey, that’s where he kept his boat …’
And that’s where I’d seen my osprey with David the month before. I was following in his footsteps, even if, like Johnny, I was doing so a few years later than Mat.
‘… my parents gave me my first binoculars in 1962, when I got a scholarship to Westminster, a great pair of 7 x 50s. I’ve still got them somewhere. They did encourage me. But Trader was always into his sailing and, of course, his rocks. I remember he had this little collection of precious stones at home. They were fascinating. Not as fascinating as birds but interesting. He had this one long stone that you could bend for some reason. I don’t know what it was but if you tensed it carefully it would curve in the middle. One day I bent it so much it snapped. But he didn’t say a word. I think I might have glued it back together!’
Trader, Grandpa, was a mineralogist. When I started writing this I was procrastinating on the internet and found a book on Amazon that he’d written, called Towards the Twenty-first Century. A Discussion Organized Jointly for the Royal Society and the Mineralogical Society by J E T Horne and Sir Kingsley Dunham. At reasonably great expense I bought it, couldn’t understand a word of it, but did draw some inspiration from the solid fact of its publication.
He would have been ninety in November 2008, a few weeks after Duncton’s sixtieth and my thirtieth, but he died in 1999. His funeral was on my twenty-first birthday. His obituary in The Times mentioned that he’d been one of the first men to examine moon dust brought back from the first landing in 1969. I’d never known that either. But then I suppose I’d never asked.
1 When I say ‘always’, what I really mean is, ‘ever since people started saying Chip (my then blond little brother) looked like the blond former Liverpool player and current Liverpool assistant manager Sammy Lee (I don’t remember watching him helping Liverpool win their fourth European Cup in 1984 but I do remember him performing the role of “super sub” in the following season) and definitely before they did the double in 1985–6’. Like one’s first kiss, the moment one picks one’s football team is unpredictable but precious.
2 A magazine the Hornes have always subscribed to. First issue: 1923.
3 The first year of Mum’s membership she read out a birthday card from a ‘Mr Hodie’. ‘Who is this Mr Hodie?’ she cried. It was Glen Hoddle. The four male members of the family found this very funny.
4 By ‘real tennis’ I don’t mean that some people play fake tennis. ‘Real tennis’ is the original version of all racquet sports and was first played in twelfth-century France. The best thing about it is that every player gets a world ranking. Duncton is the 7,342nd best real tennis player in the world.
5 Sticker 570: the Tunisian goalkeeper Ali Boumnijel. Aged forty, he was the oldest player at the tournament.
6 Always thinking ahead, peregrine falcons often harvest more snipe and woodcocks than they can eat in one go and store them in their homemade fridges for a later feast.
7 It’s now called the ‘Wildlife Explorers Club’, a change of name that I don’t support. I liked being a young ‘ornithologist’. For a while, at least, I was at the top of the birdwatching tree. Sure, exploring is fun, but being an ornithologist sounded much more important.
CHAPTER 7
Penalties
‘Slowly, day-by-day, I was finding the game less and less amusing. In fact, I was beginning to understand that it was not a game at all.’
– Adrian M Riley
Alex:
139 species
Duncton:
206 species
1 July
I KICKED OFF the second half of my year trailing Duncton by sixty-eight species. This deficit seemed to me so massive, so insurmountable, that I forgot about the respectable total of 139 species I had managed to find and took to shaking my head wearily when anyone enquired how my birdwatching challenge was going. ‘Don’t ask,’ I’d reply grimly.
Unfortunately, lots of people did ask on 1 July, the day of England’s quarter-final reckoning. With Germany and Italy safely through, it was our turn to try to book a place in the semis, against either Brazil or France. Now that the final and World Cup glory were just two games away, the pendulum of the nation’s affections had swung back towards the centre and a few more people were thinking that England might just sneak it after all, even if we were playing awful football. So I joined about fifty of my friends in a pub not far from Kensal Green to watch their tussle with Portugal.
‘Tussle’ was about the right word for it. ‘Scrap’, ‘scuffle’ and ‘ugly clash’ would also be fine. There wasn’t a lot of the balletic football that the compilers of highlights must hope for. There were no goals and very little ‘goal mouth action’. Seeking some other form of entertainment, quite a few people asked me why I was spending so much time birdwatching rather than watching the game. A few told me about a bird of prey they’d seen or an unusual bird they’d had in their garden (‘Probably a jay,’ I said). Two people said to me, ‘I’ve got a question: are birds animals?’1
Over in Germany, Wayne Rooney got sent off. Cristiano Ronaldo acknowledged his part in the dismissal with a cheeky wink. Man Utd’s best two players were responsible for what then looked like England’s downfall. ‘How could they?’ I shouted.
But England didn’t roll over. Oh no. Instead, they managed to grind out a dull 0–0 in normal time, before gritting their collective teeth and shutting up shop throughout extra time too, dragging the game into a penalty shoot-out.
‘Well, we’ve had it now,’ sighed the pub as one, remembering games against Germany in 19902 and 1996, Argentina in 1998 and indeed Portugal in 2004.
‘No, we’ll win this one, I can feel it!’ I countered, remembering games against AC Milan in 2005 and West Ham in 2006.
I was wrong. We lost 3–1 in a pathetic shoot-out. Gerrard and Carragher both missed their kicks. Liverpool’s best two players were responsible for what actually was England’s downfall. ‘How could they?’ I whispered.
5 July
Of course I couldn’t stop watching the football just yet. Even without England it was an all-European final four. How could I take my eyes off Italy’s stunning last-minute extra time win over hosts Germany, or France’s narrow defeat of Portugal and a justly booed Ronaldo?
<
br /> Without England the tournament burst back into life. The football seemed better, more important and much more entertaining. In the first semi-final, Italy’s two late goals were greeted with so much jubilation from the flat above that it seeped through into our sitting room below. Zinedine Zidane was man of the match in the second, setting up Henry’s winner and somehow booking his and France’s place in the final. I watched both games with close footballing friends instead of everyone who happened to be in the pub, and remembered why I loved football.
9 July
For once, the final wasn’t an anticlimax. Again I watched it with the friends I talk, play and watch football with throughout the rest of the year. It’s all very well for the England team to unite the country during a big tournament, but standing up for two hours, with a rubbish view of the fuzzy screen, too scared to disagree with the general mood of a football-obsessed crowd isn’t nearly as much fun as poring over a big game with your best mates.
It was, of course, Zinedine Zidane’s final. He opened the scoring after just seven minutes with a penalty that rattled in off the cross bar. That’s how you take them. Materazzi equalized from a corner twelve minutes later. The game fizzed, France looked dominant, but the game went into extra time.
Then something extraordinary happened. I’m struggling to think of a birdwatching equivalent. Materazzi said something naughty to Zidane. Zidane head-butted him in the chest. Zidane was sent off. Materazzi went on to take one of the penalties that gave Italy their first World Cup triumph in twenty-four years. For us, this made the 2006 World Cup a cracker. Sure, it was a violent moment, a shameful conclusion to Zidane’s career and an unpleasant end to the tournament, but we knew right away that we would all remember it. This would go in our collective World Cup memory bank, alongside Maradona’s hand ball and young Michael Owen’s wonder goal. This was breathtaking.