Vesper Flights

by Helen Macdonald

  Swan upping is a progress in the old-fashioned sense, a journey upriver that claims the right not only to own swans but to own their meanings, the meanings of the river, the meanings of Englishness. You move through a landscape thick with narratives handed to you by others, and what you read from the banks as you pass is part of what you choose to believe about your nation and who you are. You might see only Dunkirk boats and lines in the air carved by ghostly Spitfires. You might see leisurely eighteenth-century landscapes in the loose herd of cattle standing in the river. But you might see there, too, the ghosts of forgotten farmworkers, or feel fellowship with a woman eating sandwiches from a plastic packet on a bench or with a gaggle of youngsters smoking pot around a barbecue. Lying in the boat as we hastened towards a new group of swans, I thought of how we choose to see only the things that speak to us of the way we are told the world should be, and then felt a small burst of shame and the breaking of my fever-dream.

  Staggering off the boat at Marlow at the end of the day, I thought of Reilly’s rapt face as he held the swan, the genial conviviality of the uppers, the sun-splashed slipway at Cookham and then Stanley Spencer again. Not the painting this time, but the story of a trip he made to Beijing in 1954 as part of a cultural delegation. Towards the end of the tour, Zhou Enlai, the Chinese premier, gave a long speech about how much Chinese people loved China and then asked for a response. It was a politically perilous moment. No one knew what to say. ‘There was a silence,’ the cultural historian Patrick Wright, who wrote a book on the subject, Passport to Peking, told me. ‘And then Spencer got up, much to everyone’s absolute horror, and said: “The Chinese are a home-loving people, well, so are the English. Have you heard about, have you ever heard of Cookham? Have you ever been to Cookham?”’

  It was a stunningly successful gambit and sparked an animated conversation with Zhou. Spencer told him that the people of Cookham are the same as people everywhere: they want to get on with their lives, get on with their neighbours and, as Wright put it, not be bombed. ‘I feel at home in China,’ Spencer said, ‘because I feel that Cookham is somewhere near.’ He is often mocked for his parochialism, his attendance to small things, but, as Wright maintains, his vision was ultimately one in which ‘through the small, through the located, you enter a more universal domain of human experience’.

  Heritage traditions like swan upping have clear conceptual value for nationalists; they promote a sense of seamless historical continuity that works to erase differences between past and present, burnishing an illusion of unchanging Englishness. But remembering the story of Spencer in China made me wonder if swan upping could offer us something other than these exclusionist dreams of a sacrosanct Englishness deep-rooted in an imagined past. For besides the pageantry, what I had watched that day was a beautiful display of expert animal handling and river knowledge. Skiffs crewed by men who know how to row, how to navigate complicated waters, how to catch swans, how to corral them, how to deal with a bird the size of a dog with a flexible neck and wings that can break ribs.

  These are craft knowledges, ones learned by apprenticeship, not from books, and universal in the very nature of their specificity. Like Spencer’s Cookham villagers in China, they are global by virtue of being local and cannot easily be fitted to simple stories of race and nationality, of us and them. Later that evening, watching a full moon rise through air thick with the scent of lime blossom, I thought of how there are always counter-narratives, hidden voices, lost lives, other ways of being, and how it is possible to see a different, more inclusive England in the most recondite of traditions. And I cherished the thought that grand historical and political narratives might falter, just slightly, in the face of skilful interactions with things that are not us. Small things. Swans, rivers, boats, currents, knotted loops of braided cotton string.

  Nestboxes

  I ordered them on the internet; they arrived in two cardboard boxes packed with brown paper. Four rough brown bowls with truncated backs and tops fitted tight against right-angled plywood boards. Made from a mixture of concrete and wood fibre, each has a scoop cut out of the front. When they’re fitted under the eaves of my new house, I’m hoping those scoops will be the point of entry for pairs of house martins, those delicate, orca-coloured migrant birds whose arrival is one of the milestones of north Palaearctic springs. They can build their own nests, of course, made of a thousand or so beakfuls of mud collected from local puddles and pond-edges and carefully pushed together, one by one, to dry. Last year’s drought made their nest building difficult, and with catastrophic declines in their flying-insect food, their populations have been nosediving year on year. I bought these nestboxes to help birds in trouble. But only partly.

  In India a few years ago I stayed in a hotel room that also held a pair of nesting laughing doves. The hotel was fine about it: the housekeeper put fresh newspaper on the floor each morning to catch the mess. They’d squeeze inside through a gap above the AC unit and fly to their nest with pattering wingbeats, and at night I’d watch their eyes blink closed as they fell asleep. It would have been less delightful if I’d been fearful or allergic to birds, but there seemed a grace and generosity to that quiet sharing of space which swelled my heart out of all proportion to the presence of birds in the room. It brought home to me how fiercely in Britain we are ridding our human spaces of everything that isn’t us. None of us wants rats and cockroaches, but what of swifts? They need holes in eaves and under roof tiles to nest, and we’re increasingly blocking them up. Sparrows like ivy-covered walls and thickets of bushes, but they’re messy and no longer fashionable in gardens. And while it’s illegal to destroy active birds’ nests, developers have started netting trees and hedges to stop them from nesting at all. The recent furore about netted trees is testament that for now, at least, we still balk at extending our zone of control outside of our gardens to things so obviously not ours.

  On the web, you’ll find martin nestboxes in the category of ‘specialist’ boxes, along with those for treecreepers, owls, swifts, dippers, grey wagtails and ducks. The kinds you can buy in any garden centre or hardware shop are far simpler: boxes with a round hole in the front for great tits and blue tits, and those with a half-open front for robins. These were the kind we put up in my childhood garden. We did it for the pleasure of having familiar birds raise a family in a home we’d supplied. I remember the curious thrill of seeing a prospecting great tit drop into the darkness of the box hung on the side of my house. It was a little flush of pride dangerously near possession. One spring my father built a backless nestbox and mounted it against the single glass window of our garden shed. Inside, a blackout curtain kept the nest dark. After school, my brother and I would creep inside, shut the door, lift the curtain and press our noses to the glass. What we saw was all secret: three inches of moss and feathers and, pressed deep into it, the back of an incubating blue tit, so close we could see the rising and falling of its breathing, the tiny feathers around its beak lit with the light falling through the hole above. The nest fledged successfully and later that spring we’d sit on the lawn hearing the begging calls of blue tit fledglings and think, They’re ours. These days, nestboxes in gardens faintly remind me of the provision of workers’ cottages on landed estates. Indeed, one nestbox pioneer was the eccentric nineteenth-century naturalist Charles Waterton, who installed sand martin nest pipes and other avian households at Walton Hall, his Yorkshire estate now famed as being perhaps Britain’s first nature reserve.

  In Britain, the class system inflects nestboxes as it does everything else. You can buy boxes that resemble scale models of pubs or churches, ones with poems or flowers painted on the front, or with tiny glued-on gates and picket fences. These are frowned upon by the gatekeepers of British nature appreciation, who recommend plain wooden ones. The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds explicitly warn against using decorative boxes in case their bright colours attract predators, even though they’ve admitted there’s no real evidence for this. Yes, metal boxes a
re a bad idea because they can overheat nestlings, but a handwritten ‘Home Sweet Home’ isn’t much of an issue when robins can and will nest happily in discarded teapots.

  Like garden gnomes, decorative nestboxes fail to conform to the aesthetics of middle-class garden design. Making them cute and homely raises the spectre of anthropomorphism, something still anathema to bird protection organisations who in their earliest days battled for cultural capital by denying accusations of sentimentality and cleaving instead to hard ornithological science. Nestboxes are supposed to be for the birds, not us, in this view. There’s a kind of performative largesse about the utilitarian ugliness of plain nestboxes in gardens, whereas decorative ones bespeak delight for people too. The birds don’t care, of course. They really don’t. And while my house martin nests aren’t colourful, I am all about the personal enjoyment I hope they will bring me. I bought them because I want those birds here. I want their submarine chirrups to fall through the open windows while the late-spring evenings lengthen, want to watch their hawking flights to scoop flies from the burnished air. I want the mess, the drifting feathers, the small faces of youngsters peering down at me as I walk up to our own front door.

  Deer in the Headlights

  The deer drift in and out of the trees like breathing. They appear unexpectedly delicate and cold, as if chill air is pouring from them to the ground to pool into the mist that half obscures their legs and turning flanks. They aren’t tame: I can’t get closer than a hundred yards before they slip into the gloom. I’ve been told these particular beasts are fallow deer of the menil variety, which means their usual darker tones have been leached by genetics to soft cuttlefish and ivory, and they’re the descendants of a herd brought here in the sixteenth century as beasts of venery, creatures to be pursued and caught and cooked. The look of the estate hasn’t changed much since then. It’s still an extensive patchwork of pasture and forest – except now the M25 runs through it, six lanes of fast-moving traffic behind chain-link fence threaded with stripling trees. The mist thickens, the light falls, the deer appear and disappear, and the deep roar of the motorway burns inside my chest as I walk on to the bridge that spans it. This bridge is grassed along its length, and at dusk and dawn, I’ve been told, the deer use it as a thoroughfare from one side of the estate to the other. I know my presence will dissuade them from crossing so I don’t want to stay too long, but I linger a little while to watch the torrent of lights beneath me. For a while the road doesn’t seem real. Then it does, almost violently so, and at that moment the bridge and the woods behind me do not. I can’t hold both in the same world at once. Deer and forest, mist, speed, a drift of wet leaves, white noise, scrap-metal trucks, a convoy of eighteen-wheelers, beads of water on the toes of my boots and the scald of my hands on the cold metal rail.

  Deer occupy a unique place in my personal pantheon of animals. There are many creatures I know very little about, but the difference with deer is that I’ve never had any desire to find out more. They’re like a distant country I’ve never wanted to visit. I know the names of different deer species, and can identify the commonest ones by sight, but I’ve always resisted the almost negligible effort it would take to discover when they give birth, how they grow and shed their antlers, what they eat, where and how they live. Standing on the bridge I’m wondering why that is.

  Perhaps my feelings about deer might partly be down to their place in British culture. About five years ago, their images started appearing on soft furnishings and homeware. Deer candles, deer drinking glasses, stag’s-head wallpaper, prints of antlers on curtains and cushions, mock trophy heads stitched out of patchwork tartan. I was used to reindeer motifs all over Christmas, but this cervine proliferation was new. At the time, one design spokesman ascribed it to the British public’s love of cosy country hotels and log fires in winter. But I suspect there was more to it than a yen for seasonal hotel atmospherics. The years following the financial crash of 2008 were marked by a growing glorification of myths of Englishness, ranging from a flourishing of books on the countryside and rural life to ‘Keep Calm and Carry On’ Second World War posters and chintz-printed aprons – and a strong shift towards political populism. When a country is hurting it so often grasps for ideas of itself in a longed-for past, and a simple motif like a stag’s head can function like an upholstery button to pleat together a whole slew of useful meanings.

  Deer tend to signify a conservative view of the world. I learned that in my twenties, at a time when I was spending a lot of time with hunters, mostly men, many of whom expressed a sneaking admiration for the antics of powerful stags who battled each other to take possession of harems of docile hinds. And it was around that time that I spent a rainy afternoon wandering around an exhibition of paintings by Edwin Landseer in a London gallery. The walls were hung with sad dogs, gleaming horses, various British game animals being torn to pieces, and numerous portraits of red deer stags that seemed the very type of elite Victorian manhood. These stags were grand and harried and very good at striking poses, Monarchs of the Glen whose fragile rule was perpetually threatened by upstarts, whose crowned heads were always lit perfectly by mountain sunlight, paragons of strength bound entire into unshakeable courses of action by virtue of being what they were.

  The wash of traffic noise subsides as I leave the bridge to regain the path. It’s too dark now to see the deer but I can hear the hollow thump of hooves trotting on sward and when I look behind me the motorway casts the palest, faintest glow behind the trees. Something about this place, I think, will solve the puzzle of my attitude to deer, and I’m beginning to understand that this puzzle isn’t just about a type of mammal. It’s about animals more generally, and what it might mean to not want to know more about them: a much bigger why.

  I trudge back to the car, wondering whether motorists passing this place sometimes glance up and see a procession of antlers against the sky, a slow parade of ancient beasts walking across modern infrastructure. The thought brings to mind much older notions of deer, like the white stags that were Celtic emissaries from the underworld, or creatures in medieval romances whose appearances portended the beginning of a quest or great adventure. In this tradition they’re slippery, spooky beings in possession of the deepest spiritual significance and their visitations are always a surprise. I think of one quiet, cold afternoon nearly twenty years ago when I was glumly traipsing through a small wood near my parents’ house musing on the shape of my life and finding it sorely wanting. As I approached a tangle of briars growing over a fallen tree I saw a small, slow curl of smoke rising from behind it, glowing palely on its ascent through rays of winter sunlight. It was exceptionally unsettling. I moved closer and was treated to more incomprehensibility; a sweeping arc of something like upraised bone, something skeletal behind the leaves, and then the resting fallow buck whose rising breath I had been watching leapt up and crashed away into the trees. My heart kicked and raced and for a long while afterwards the wood seemed made anew, fretted with rich possibility, and for a long while after that my life also.

  Not knowing very much about deer has made my encounters with them less like encounters with real animals and more like tableaux of happenstance, symbolism and emotion. My ignorance, I think, has been purposive. It has been me saying: I wish there was more magic in the world. And then the deer have appeared to say, Here it is. This is what deer are for me. They stand for the natural world’s capacity to surprise and derail my expectations. And I have wanted them to do that more than I have wanted them to be anything else.

  Driving home in the dark I know I’ve reached this understanding because of the geography of the place I’ve just visited, its conjunction of asphalt and trucks and deer. For the capacity of deer to surprise, to hijack the quotidian, is not merely a matter of legend or of remote and ethereal speculation. It is a blunt fact, bloody and frequently deadly, and it happens so often there’s an acronym for it: DVC, which stands for deer–vehicle collision. Thankfully, it has only ever been an almost, for me.<
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  A few years ago, driving a downhill curve at night, I saw a deer in the road in front of me, stark and tense with shock, and then the deer lofted itself into the air, bright and somehow motionless, like the etiolated horses with outstretched legs in eighteenth-century hunting prints. A blooming scald spread under my skin and the car felt as light as if it were sliding on water, even before I braked. What I remember most about that endless moment apart from the blind heat of it was the angular neatness of hind hocks and ankles, and the deer’s hard landing against the hedge, the way it shoved itself into that cross-hatched, thorny difficulty before disappearing. And all the rest of that journey I saw nothing but deer crossing the road where there were no deer at all.

  Deer are dangerous animals. In America around two hundred people die every year after their vehicles collide with them, and while official figures put the number of DVCs at about one and a half million, it’s likely much higher, for many go unrecorded. The correct advice for drivers encountering a deer in the road is never to swerve, for most human deaths occur when people wrench the wheel away, hit trees, rocks, fences, other cars. But how can you not? There it is, right in front of you, cut out of black and surrounded by a suffused halo of reflected light, a beating heart the size of a fist in a hundred, a hundred and fifty pounds of pearl and terror. It’s coming towards you at fifty, sixty miles an hour. How can you do anything else?

  If you live in places prone to DVCs you can buy deer alerts: small whistles for the exterior of your vehicle that are supposed to warn deer of your impending arrival. Some drivers swear by them, but it might just be that knowing the alert is there makes you drive differently, perhaps a little more slowly, a little more defensively, a little readier to expect a deer to appear in your path, because I’ve read that there’s no statistical proof that they have any effect and deer may not be able to hear them at all. They’re tech solutions that work like nazar, those dangling blue and white glass charms against the curse of the evil eye.