At the passport office thirty tight-lipped people file singly through X-rays. We turn off our phones and computers. Our bags are searched for sharp objects and compressed gas canisters. And we sit waiting to be processed, feet on grey carpet. Soft murmurs. Flatscreens. We watch BBC news in spooling text and clips, riots and far wars and a seaside political party conference.
That party conference was in Brighton. I was there one winter. I stood on the pier at dusk and watched the starlings coming in to roost, blobs of running oil over the ocean rising in packs to settle in the ironwork under the planked wooden floor, and as they settled in the dark beneath the arcade lights they began to sing and their songs mimicked the fairground music from the sideshows above, the same notes in new avian order, tapes spliced and doubled and whistling, a thousand shortwave radios tuning between circus stations out east, across the Baltic from whence they came. And I stood there hearing mimicked human music under the floor and the sea beneath us was slick and pointed with tiny lights and
Nay,
I’ll have a starling shall be taught to speak
Nothing but ‘Mortimer,’ and give it him
To keep his anger still in motion.
I look at the security guards at the passport office and they look at me and I remember a British officer called Peter Conder who spent the Second World War in prison camps in Germany. He survived by watching birds. Goldfinches. Wrynecks. Migrating crows picking through the waste spread on the frozen fields. Hours and days and years on end. When he came home he didn’t talk. He stayed with his sister and stared out of the window at London starlings roosting in long lines on ledges of Portland stone. With war-worn eyes he perceived that they spaced themselves equally, just far enough apart to reach the next bird, so they could deliver a blow or a rebuke. Bunks and camps spooled out again in post-war ornithology. He christened it the principle of pecking distance.
And before that, after the First World War had made caustic maps of Flanders fields and woods, built no man’s land, built fields of mines and wire and ingraved trenches of men and filthy water, a man called Henry Eliot Howard decided that birds held territories too. He told us that they did not sing for love. Told us that males sang to other males, and there was warning in every note. Each curl of song was staking a bird’s small claim to a patch of English ground. And the birds’ bright colours weren’t to attract a mate. The plumages they wore were badges of threat: little warring uniforms.
I think of Julian Huxley on the wireless back in 1942, explaining that if you don’t know your birds you can’t fully know your country. He said the yellowhammer’s song was the essence of hot country roads in July. The crooning of the turtle dove of English midsummer afternoons. Birds were ‘the heritage we are fighting for’. When war broke out and the Navy sent Peter Scott to sea he looked back from the deck of his destroyer and knew he was fighting to protect the mallards and teal that reared their ducklings in the reed beds of Slapton Ley. Somehow they were England.
I clutch my numbered ticket and wait to be processed. I think of the new nature writing. Of Springwatch, migrant watch, leaflets through our doors. It has happened before, when things collapse, when ideas fail, when economies slide, when newsprint is crisp with fears of invasion and the loss of who we are. We mark ourselves on our maps to consider our territory. We police. We turn inward. Seek ourselves in the mirror of the countryside. See nature as refuge. As ours. As us. In the winter of 1934 Norfolk farmers learned the skylarks in their fields were migrants from the Continent. They shot them for raiding their spring wheat. ‘No protection for the Skylark’ ran the headlines in the local press: ‘Skylarks that sing to Nazis will get no mercy here’.
A woman in a blue coat is sitting three chairs away, her eyes closed, her knuckles white against the envelope of application forms. Is she asleep? Can you sleep and hold something so very tightly? I close my eyes too. Perfect forms, held steady. Forms of sympathy.
When I was a child I had a book called Garden Bird Study that told me to draw a map of the land around my house. To mark upon it the singing positions of its resident birds. If you watched very carefully you could work out where one territory ended and another began. I did what the book told me to do. I drew lines on my map. I marked nests. I kept lists of birds, resident, summering, wintering, overflying. Every smudge of pencil tied myself closer to the birds and the garden. But it untied me too. It unfolded layers of other eyes, other lives, other visions of what the world might be. When we left that house, years later, I mourned the memory of all my childhood rooms. But I mourned, too, the lines, the lists, the little crosses for the pigeon’s nest, the blackbird’s nest, the robins outside the door. They had become part of the nature of home.
1933 saw the formation of the British Trust for Ornithology. This new organisation didn’t protect birds. It studied them, and it recruited the British public for its large-scale investigations. Birds were no longer to be watched. They were to be observed by a volunteer army made of sharp-eyed citizen-scientists. Trained observers on bicycles who followed the movements of swifts. They filled in cards and reports and questionnaires. They had their orders: to buy ‘a 1-inch ordnance map of the whole district, a 6-inch map of local surroundings, and a 25-inch map of the immediate neighbourhood’ upon which they could mark the distribution of birds. ‘Use these,’ they were told, ‘and do not be afraid to mark them.’ Thousands of new observers, tied to the idea of a nation through acts of looking, acts of walking, acts of counting, tallying, recording what was there. What they were doing was war work.
Auguries, perhaps. No one knew. Strange phenomena in the days of fear of invasion. Birds entering houses. Sparrows stripping wallpaper. Blue tits stealing cream from cardboard-topped milk bottles. Have you read Daphne du Maurier’s The Birds? Not the film, the story. An English story, a fable of some great change that turned birds into foes, massing on the fields and sea before flying inland to attack humanity. What he thought were the white caps of the waves, were gulls. Hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands . . . They rose and fell in the trough of the seas, heads to the wind, like a mighty fleet at anchor, waiting on the tide. Someone should know of this. Someone should be told.
But there could be no signs and wonders for Britain’s mid-century birdwatchers. Irrationalism and superstition were things of the past. Sentimentality was to be replaced by science; poetic vagueness by conscious control, by constructive, critical thought. Even so, something more than science made itself out of little England and all its delicate cliffs. White chalk. Coastal early-warning radar stations called Chain Home. Everyone was observing. Everything watched. The Royal Observer Corps sent reports of aircraft movements while other observers sent reports of birds. James Fisher grew ever more obsessed with fulmars, ghostly onyx-eyed seabirds that were spreading their range along British shores. From Lundy to Land’s End and Tintagel; from Land’s End to Scilly and Lizard; from Lizard to Start Point; from Start Point to Swanage; from Swanage to the Seven Sisters; from the Seven Sisters to Hastings . . . fulmars have been seen, recently, flying by the cliffs of Broadstairs and Margate, he wrote. I do not know where it will stop. He recruited Coastal Command stations to watch for fulmars as well as enemy aircraft. He arranged RAF reconnaissance flights to photograph fulmar breeding sites. Confusions of wings and eyes. All the world at war.
***
There are bird observatories at prime migration points all around the British coast. Bardsey. The Calf of Man. Cape Clear. Dungeness. Flamborough. Gibraltar Point. Portland Bill. The Isle of May. Their great flowering came after the war. Imagine: you are a prisoner in Germany. You have an Army number, you have a POW number. When you are freed you come home. But you are not entirely free because you have to do it again, and again, and again. Some part of you is fixed in the past courses of troop movements and maps and borders and escape and hope and home. If you are George Waterston, you start a bird observatory. You establish it in ex-military buildings on the far-flung edge of Britain, on remote Fair Isle. And t
here you and your colleagues trap lost and migrating birds in nets and cages and give them numbered rings before you release them again. You hope that someone will find them, so you can draw maps that show the invisible movements of birds across the globe. You let them go, but part of you goes with them. Your birds are feathered proxies, transcending human borders. You envy them.
In the booth the passport officer holds my photograph up to the screen and narrows his eyes. There is no shadow anywhere in the booth; there is an entirely even distribution of light. Yes, it is you, he says. I am relieved. He turns to my forms on his desk and scribbles a string of figures on them. In the bright and glassy calm I think, What do they mean? Doubts wheel and swarm. Facts insubstantial.
There was a man called David Lack. He worked during the war on the early-warning chain of coast-watching radar stations. When the wavelength of their transmitted radar waves shortened to ten centimetres the operators started reporting echoes out at sea. They were not ships or aircraft. They were ghosts. They moved at thirty knots. Air-raid warnings resulted. Planes were scrambled. Nothing was ever there. Lack and his colleagues established that they were the radar reflections of seabirds. But there was more. When higher-power radar was invented, more ghosts appeared. Operators called them angels. They were commonest in spring and autumn. They didn’t drift with the wind. They disturbed those who saw them. In Marconi’s research laboratory, scientists wrote of lines of angels moving along the coast. Scintillating discrete angels broke away from the line during its strongest period, they said. And a well-marked stream of persistent angel echoes could be seen moving up the Thames estuary. The angels were starlings rising from their roosts in pulsing circles, lapwings moving north along weather fronts, pushed by heavy snow. The whole sky etched livid with aircraft and the reflections of moving wings. This was a new thing. Science turned to romanticism. The particulate beauty of unimagined hordes of lives that aren’t our own, tracked minute by minute across the sky and rising out of mystery. This is a music made comprehensible by war, but the songs the birds sing are hymns of slowly moving light.
I leave the building with the promise of a passport and so does the woman in the blue coat and the man with the shopping bag and the elderly couple off to meet their grandson in Australia for the first time and the teenage boy going to Ibiza with his mates and I’m walking to my car thinking of when a bird-bander told me what happens if you mist-net long-tailed tits. Because they forage in family flocks, these mouse-sized birds get trapped in mist-nets all at once. Freed one by one from the mesh they’re hung in individual bags from hooks in the ringing shed, ready to be weighed and measured and ringed. And in that awful solitude they call to one another, ceaselessly, urgently, reassuring each other that they are still together, all one thing. And once the rings are closed about their legs, they’re released, all together, to resume their lives, carrying their tiny numbers with them as they fly.
A Cuckoo in the House
It’s a strange, sharp-winged grey bird with button-yellow eyes, a down-curved beak and an expression of perpetual surprise, and its song is one of the best-known and best-loved in Britain. But most people have never seen a cuckoo, and it is getting harder for anyone to do so. Over the past quarter of a century, England has lost more than 60 per cent of its cuckoos and no one knows exactly why. Habitat loss, the effects of climate change, or the myriad perils cuckoos encounter on migration are the likeliest culprits, and of all those the latter is the hardest to research.
We’ve only ever had the vaguest idea of where British cuckoos spend the winter, and no idea of the routes they take there and back. But we are starting to understand. Since 2011, the British Trust for Ornithology has fitted satellite tags to British-trapped cuckoos and tracked their migration routes to Africa and back. The project’s ‘band of feathered brothers’, as the national press has christened them, have attracted huge media attention. And they are uncovering all manner of ornithological secrets.
The BTO project is important. But it carries with it more than science. When I read that BTO cuckoos are ‘missing in action’, I think of wars overseas. When I look at the project’s migration route maps, I wonder how satellite-tagged ‘sentinel animals’ such as these cuckoos fit into our surveillance-hungry world, and into the digitised dreams of network-centric war. I remember, too, several international incidents in the past few years in which tagged and banded birds have been taken as spies – as feathered, living drones. And I start to wonder how notions of nationhood, defence, secrecy and surveillance are caught up in how we think about cuckoos.
When I was small, I read a book by a man called Maxwell Knight. It was the story of how he had reared a baby cuckoo. Back then I thought A Cuckoo in the House was just another animal book from the 1950s, and that Knight was just an ordinary man. But the BTO project spurred me to read it again, this time knowing more about Knight. On rereading, I found it a very different book – a troubling fable about the meanings we give to animals, and a book that unwittingly revealed all sorts of strange collisions and collusions between natural history and national history in post-war Britain.
This, then, is the story of Maxwell Knight – the man called M – and a cuckoo called Goo. Knight was a tall, patrician British intelligence officer in charge of MI5 departments dealing with counter-subversion on home ground. And yes, as ‘M’ he was the inspiration for James Bond’s controller. From the 1930s to the end of the Second World War, Knight placed agents in organisations such as the British Union of Fascists and the Communist Party of Great Britain. He was an extraordinary character: secretly gay, a writer of appalling thrillers, a keen jazz trumpeter, a disciple of the dark magic of Aleister Crowley, and an inveterate keeper of animals – crows, parrots, foxes and finches all shared space with agents in Knight’s safe house in the Home Counties.
After the war ended, Knight began a second career as a BBC radio naturalist. This new and much-loved Knight was an avuncular, tweed-clad expert, a regular fixture on programmes such as Country Questions, The Naturalist and Nature Parliament. On air he described the habits of British wildlife, and told young naturalists how to rear tadpoles and how to hone their observational skills by playing ‘Kim’s Game’, tellingly named after the hero of Rudyard Kipling’s novel about a boy training to be a spy. From a clandestine career to an audience of millions, agent-runner to family naturalist, Knight appeared to have had a spectacular change of identity. But that Kim’s Game reference is a giveaway: the worlds of naturalist and spy were closer than one might think.
There are many similarities between the observational practices of field naturalists and spies. ‘Birdwatcher’ is old British intelligence slang for a spy, and if you read Robert Baden-Powell’s Scouting for Boys, you’ll see how long natural-history fieldcraft has been seen as a preparation game for war. In his MI5 communications, Knight had once recommended that agents should be taught ‘when, where and how to take notes, memory training and accurate description’. And on the radio he gave exactly the same advice to young naturalists.
But it is Knight’s animals, and their relation to his secret life, that are most relevant to this story. He shared his London flat with a bear cub, a baboon, vipers, lizards, monkeys, exotic birds and rats. And they were not confined to his home. ‘He always had something live in his pocket,’ recalled John Bingham, an MI5 colleague best known as inspiring John le Carré’s character George Smiley. Writers on Knight are fascinated by his animal-keeping, but the animals themselves are always treated as ciphers: we are never given an inkling of his motives for keeping them, apart from the animals being, perhaps, a kind of camouflage or misdirection. In the words of the literary critic Patricia Craig, they ‘helped to gain him a reputation for eccentricity, certainly an asset in the devious world of MI5, where a lot depends on your ability to keep things dark, to impress your associates, and to spring surprises’. But Knight’s animals were no simple camouflage.
Despite his own exotic pets, Knight championed the keeping of British wildli
fe. In his 1959 book Taming and Handling Animals, he described them as ‘infinitely more instructive than creatures from far-away climes’. This sentiment is much in keeping with the sensibilities of the period, for during the war, British wildlife had become firmly embedded in myths of national identity. As invasion anxiety and spy-fever swept the nation, concerns about allegiance and patriotic identity rapidly colonised both popular and scientific understandings of wildlife. National and natural histories blurred. In a series of wartime radio talks, the evolutionary biologist Julian Huxley, brother of the writer Aldous, explained that birds had special importance because they were the means through which you oriented yourself to your country.
Knight’s radio persona was built on such patriotic understandings: his Letters to a Young Naturalist from 1955 – a fictional correspondence between a nature-minded boy and his naturalist uncle – opens with the following: ‘My Dear Peter. So you want to be a naturalist! You could not have chosen a better hobby, nor a better way of getting round me to help you. Apart from you becoming an England cricketer in the future I can’t think of anything I could have wished you to do more.’
Vesper Flights Page 17