I am eighteen months old and my sister, Ellie, is newly born; the garden is parched. Old Met Office weather reports tell me we had a good summer that year: June was changeable but mainly dry, July was mostly very hot and dry but thundery in places and August was warm, dry and sunny. A proper summer, not like we get now. There’s little in flower but a few roses and the beginnings of crocosmia: early July, I should think. The photo is taken before the fence was fixed and I can see where my toddling self would sneak next door for a milkshake. The lawn is yellow, the borders overgrown and straggly. The air-raid shelter is not yet covered in ivy. There’s a giant bamboo I don’t remember but next to it is a tiny rhododendron that I would later claim as my own and climb. The ‘rockery’ is a mass of giant ferns; the garage has its door open and its windows reflect green and yellow back onto green and yellow. Still, now, I can close my eyes and stand in that garage and see chinks of light from those windows on the dusty floor.
Beyond it all is my dad’s vegetable patch, where I played. There’s the blue swing, netting covering cabbages and a huge row of runner beans. I count the canes: twenty-four, meaning forty-eight in total. That’s forty-eight runner bean plants, as if anyone would ever need that many. Dad would send me through the leafy cane tunnel to pick the beans he couldn’t reach. Go on, he would say. Just pick the young ones and pass them through to me. I’d enter this world hidden to all but the tiny, my chubby arms reaching above me to grab and pull fresh young beans from the plants. And the big ones, do you see any big ones now, he would ask when I thought I had finished. I always did. Pick them and pass them through as well, he would say. The big ones stop the little ones growing. I would pick those I could and alert him to those I couldn’t, and his giant Popeye arms would reach in and up and pull them away. I was a good little child runner-bean picker, travelling through my row of canes with fresh green leaves and bright red flowers glistening in the leafy light. There were things here that no one knew about. Sticky gatherings of black fly farmed by ants and feasted on by ladybird and hoverfly larvae; slugs and snails waiting out the day to wreak havoc later in the coolness and darkness of the night. There were spiders here if I looked hard enough. It was a terrifying and thrilling experience in a world no one else could penetrate, where I was both lost and found.
Each time I look at this photo I see something different. Tonight I see the red T-shirt of the tennis player in the sports club beyond the garden, the roofs of houses built on the land beyond it, part of Mum’s garden until Grandad sold half of it to developers. I see grey sky and a patch of white clover flowering in a parched lawn. I see the ghost of me in the runner-bean tunnel, the ghost of me in the garage, on the swing, on the lawn, in the rhododendron tree. My first ten years packaged neatly into a sun-damaged photo of a sun-damaged garden in 1980s Birmingham – the beginning of me.
I didn’t have a BMX but I had a bike with BMX stickers on it. Like it was pretending to be a BMX, like I would think it was a BMX but it wasn’t a BMX. It was a hand-me-down from someone or somewhere; I didn’t have it new. I learned to ride on that bike, first with stabilisers and then without. Spokey Dokeys on the wheels; more stickers that came from cereal packets and magazines, stuck carelessly over the fake BMX ones. Siren whistle around my neck or in my mouth, I would cycle around the garden, from the kitchen up the drive to the garage, turn and then head back to the house along the winding gravel path between two large borders. Again and again and again. The path was too narrow for a six-year-old and a pseudo BMX bike, really. I’d take a wrong turn and fall off onto plants that spilled over the edge. Stop doing that! said Mum. I drove her round the bend. I’d be shoved out onto the street and told to be back for tea. Roam the streets that she roamed before they were streets. Before her dad sold part of her garden, before this Close was built here, these five houses there. When gardens backed onto fields and woodland, when you could sneak in and ride a pony called Tiny, fill jam jars with tadpoles and sticklebacks from the mere. Round and round on my bike, scratched legs and scabby knees, the ghost of Mum and her scratched legs and scabby knees around the corner. Houses, roads, sports club, a fenced-off mere. Carved-up land, locked-away play, out-of-bounds adventure.
When I wasn’t on my bike, I was with Mistletoe. We would explore the garden together. He was given free rein – he’d sometimes sneak next door but he would always come back. Sometimes I would push him around in an abused doll’s pram; later I was given a bright yellow harness, which I would squeeze him into and then ‘walk’ him to the shops, like a dog. I played with Ellie, of course. We would slide down the huge tree stump at the back of the garden, see how high we could get on the ancient blue swing. We made mud pies, expertly so, with different types of soil – clay here, stony stuff there. Add grass clippings and leaves, top with a pigeon or magpie feather, bird poo if we were lucky – the more gruesome the better. It wasn’t a wild childhood as such. No one sat me down and introduced me to ‘wildlife’. But we would glimpse foxes, watch blue tits in the nest box, gather blackberries from the mass of brambles at the back. We would find moth cocoons, all shiny and red. I didn’t know what they were until I was in my late twenties. It never occurred to me to keep one and see what it turned into. We kept a stick insect in a jar once but I don’t know where it came from. Bees and butterflies were sort of irrelevant to us, ignored. But I suppose it’s easy to ignore things when they’re abundant. Which, of course, they were so much more thirty years ago, although not compared to thirty years before that.
I climbed trees. There was a huge box tree beyond the kitchen, plus the two great rhododendrons, front and back. Ellie and I would dare each other to venture into the air-raid shelter with its ivy-darkness and mass of giant spiders among walls of old plant pots. I still shudder at the thought of it. It wasn’t just Mum and Dad’s stuff here but other people’s stuff too. Dead people’s stuff, war stuff: blackout curtains, the British flag. There was so much to explore and find, so much history I took for granted. I would escape into the garden and head as far away from Mum and Dad as possible. Make little dens in the long grass at the back, where no one could see or find me, sit in the greenhouse and smell tomato leaves, pick up moth cocoons and wonder what on earth they were, examine bright green gooseberries with their delicate veins and tiny hairs and the little residue of browned flower stuck to the base. I always had a stick to poke around in the soil with, hack at nettles and cow parsley with. A mud pie to ambush Ellie with.
Mum visits me in Hove, bringing with her bottles of wine, a few bits from home. We drive in her car to the Downs for a bit of country walking. It’s a grey day, the first of the autumn mists linger on the horizon; rain hangs in the air, waiting to pounce. Everything is quiet: there’s no birdsong, not even a buzzard wheeling above us, and certainly no other people. We could have picked a better day, love, says Mum. We tramp on in our heavy, mud-caked boots anyway, watch squirrels cache acorns, blackbirds gobble rowan berries. We walk a loop that takes us on a quiet country road which, in summer, is flanked on either side by nettles as far as the eye can see, but which today is cut back, suppressed. Ashurst. It’s the perfect English village: there’s a medieval church, large houses and gardens, honesty boxes where you can buy chicken and duck eggs. We turn left into a farm where swallows and tree bumblebees nest in the outbuildings – memories of summer past. Everything we see today is eating or caching. Winter is coming.
Past the farm we take a path that runs between a copse of trees and barley fields, the woodland edge dripping with fruit. We walk among fallen leaves and fat worm casts, summer returning to earth.
I hate autumn. I can’t get past the death, the decay. I see beautiful red and orange leaves and I want to cry. Everything is departing, dying or shutting down. And, yes, there are waxwings and other migrants that make winter a little less miserable, but on the whole it’s deathly. Give me green and lush over grey and damp. Give me caterpillars writhing in the foliage, hedgerows bursting with birdsong, bees spilling pollen from flowers. As the half-lif
e of winter approaches, masked for weeks by the Judas of autumn, I yearn only for spring.
The company is nice, though. Mum and I chat as we gather haws and sloes, a few sweet chestnuts, sparse compensation for the approaching misery. There’s a chiffchaff in the great willow tree, having a last stab at holding its summer territory. Its call is weaker now, like it’s finally giving up, too. We lunch in the pub before turning our backs on the grey autumn day, the decay and the giving-up, and head home.
In the garden it’s been winter for thirty years. It doesn’t change. There’s no love, no life. The decking has paused growth of all but the strongest, and autumn is killing or putting to sleep those bold few anyway, just as in the wider world. Mum puts her feet up with a cup of tea and the paper. I’ll just have a little rest, she says. I open the back door.
I climb the steps and sit on the decking. It’s a mossy, slippery mess, patches of rotten wood where you’d go right through if you were careless enough. The walls are still clothed in the remnants of summer: brambles, bindweed, purple toadflax. The back wall is crumbling, neglect oozes from every pore. It’s as if I’ve done this to punish myself.
Above me starlings heckle. They perch on the chimney tops making noises like R2D2, clicking and whistling and whooping. I feel like they’re watching me, laughing at me. Sitting here, on this scorched earth, this suppressed land. It could feed them if I could just . . .
They would never dare come in here. Like the sparrows in next door’s buddleia and the tits in the smoke bush over the wall, the starlings keep a respectful, safe distance. That locked-up land, that decking, is nothing to us, they sneer. I’m more determined than ever.
I don’t know where to start. I don’t know how to do this. Part of me wants to torch the decking but I’m worried I’ll kill things living beneath it. And what lies beneath, anyway? Earth? Cement? Rats? I’ve no idea. Yet here, in this space, I might be whole again. I can feel it. I just need to find a way in.
I scrape fallen leaves from the surface, bits of dirt and debris, and I reveal screws. Screws! I can just unscrew it. Can I? I fetch my drill, some screwdrivers, a saw. You all right, love? says Mum, half-asleep on the sofa. I’m just trying something, I reply. And I set to, on this grim autumn day, spitting rain, death and decay. Laughing starlings. I start to unlock the earth, thaw the freeze, bring on spring.
There’s something in the chimney. Something big. I lie in bed, alert, terrified of this thing, this movement, this irregular way to be woken on a Sunday morning. Is someone playing a trick on me? Is it a burglar? Will I see a foot? Are we in danger?
Quickly now it tumbles down, a great flapping crow. It lands in the hearth beside my bed, dazed, and then gets up and starts flapping and flying around my room. Argh! It’s flying all over now, crashing into the window and the walls, pooing everywhere. I can’t get out but I have to get out. Muuum! I can’t walk or run or it will crash into me, chase me, poo on me. I wrap my duvet around my head and crawl out of bed and across the floor, prise open the door and run full pelt across the landing to Mum’s room, panting. Mum, Mum! She’s pulling her dressing-gown on. Darling, what is it? It’s a crow, there’s a crow in my room. She thinks I’m joking, thinks I’m the one playing a trick. Mum, there’s a crow, you’ve got to help me.
Mum is now also terrified, and we have woken six-year-old Ellie, who stands pyjama’d in her doorway saying, A crow? A crow? Mum grabs a bottle of holy water and splashes it about as she says the Hail Mary. There’s no time for the Hail Mary, Mum. We can hear it, crashing and skittering and shitting around my room.
Are you’re sure it’s a crow?
Yes.
A crow?
Yes!
What does it look like?
It’s black and big.
Jesus Christ.
The three of us cross the landing to the scene of the intrusion, wiping holy water from our eyes. Wait here, Mum says, as she creeps into the room and we try to get a look. She closes the door behind her and from inside we hear laughing. It’s a starling! She opens the window and lets it out and suddenly it’s quiet again. Mum opens the door. She is laughing still but there’s starling poo everywhere and I’m scared now that it will happen again and that anyone or anything could just let themselves into my bedroom via the chimney. I feel vulnerable, but also sad. I could have met the starling. I could have opened the window for it and maybe stopped it panicking and flying about. It could have been my friend. I pick a feather off the floor. It’s long and brown, darker at the tip. I treasure it.
The starling is a wonderful bird. Sometimes brown, sometimes iridescent blue-green, sometimes spotted, depending on the time of year. Chattering always, able to mimic sounds such as police sirens and mobile phones. Sociable, doesn’t take itself too seriously, likes dancing. I don’t remember much of them in childhood, apart from that Sunday morning in 1989 when, aged eight, I came face-to-face with one I thought was a crow. But they are with me now, always, in the garden, laughing and chattering and whooping from the rooftops.
The starlings that whoop and whistle atop TV aerials and chimney stacks above my garden are the same that dance around Brighton Pier at dusk. They spend all day on the chimneys and then, a couple of hours before sunset, they become noisier. They seem to call to each other, egg each other on like friends texting before a night out. Impatiently, little groups fly from TV aerial to TV aerial, one or two slowly building up to six or seven. The whistles and clicks become louder, the flights become bolder, swifter somehow, as more join and the momentum builds, as they impatiently wait to get going. Then, suddenly, they’re gone: whoosh! To the pier. Each little gang from Brighton and Hove’s many rooftops and TV aerials, joining together for the big dance in the sky.
If you walk along the beach before sunset you can see them on their way. Their dark bodies bounce across the skies like charged telecom wires, throwing shadows across seafront buildings in the fading light. On the journey of two miles or so the starlings join up, meeting other gangs from other rooftops. Once, on my birthday, I was treated to a night in the Grand Hotel, made famous for the bombing during the Conservative Party Conference in 1984; on the fifth floor our balcony was at starling height, and we watched, champagne in hand, with the sun setting over the West Pier, as groups of ten or twenty or two hundred dashed to the party from all directions, calling and heckling to each other as they flew. Finally they came together in flocks of several thousand, moving through the sky in synchronised ribbons, contracting and expanding as one, a majestic being, a heartbeat pulsing above the city. If you stand on the pier and shut out the noise of arcade games you can hear the starlings whoosh past you, a million wings beating in symmetry, like wind rustling the trees. Stand close enough and on your face you feel the storm generated by their bodies. They roost in the bowels of the pier, beneath your feet. They never shut up, chatting and clicking as they rest, while their friends keep on going, refusing to let go of the night.
This thing they do, this dancing, is called murmuration. And Brighton Pier is one of the best places in the country to see it. No one really knows what it is or why they do it. Some scientists believe they do it to gain safety in numbers, to confuse predators before settling down to roost. Others think they gather to keep warm or exchange information. I don’t care why they do it, I’m just glad they do.
Starling numbers, like almost everything else, are declining, probably, as ever, due to a lack of food and nesting habitat. In rural areas the loss of permanent pasture could be a factor, but in urban areas it could be the reduction of green space, the paving and fake-turfing of gardens. Starlings love to eat leatherjackets, the larvae of craneflies or daddy long-legs, which are considered a pest to many because they eat plant roots and can damage crops and make lawns look unsightly. Potent chemicals are used on the soil to remove them, which removes the food source for the starling and probably poisons everything else in the process.
Leatherjackets like lawns. In my last garden I would watch the females laying eggs
, their pointed ovipositors easily negotiating the hard turf while blunt-ended males tumbled in the long grass. Perhaps, when this decking is pulled up, I’ll plant a lawn and watch leatherjackets here. Anything to keep the starlings dancing in the sky.
Winter
No one ventures into their gardens in winter, hangs washing, chats over the fence. My only human contact is the twitch of a curtain or the opening of a door. A drift of cigarette smoke, a call to a cat. Otherwise it’s just me, the birds and the cold, grey sky. All day, every day. After three months of unscrewing, chopping, bashing and cutting, the decking is finally up. The supporting beams remain, which are locked in place with cement, and around them is litter that was dumped beneath the decking when it was built, plus membrane and stones. The stones are big and heavy. They were placed over the membrane to suppress weeds, suppress life. They failed, of course. And now, the ultimate insult to those who lay membrane and stones: I have uncovered earth, black, crumbly earth, complete with worms and – somehow – plant roots. Willowherb and bindweed, I think, waiting for the black, heavy curtain to be lifted so they can grow again, live again, have their time again. Soon. Soon I’ll be able to dig.
I make a sandwich and a cup of tea. I sit on a wooden post I’ve been unable to shift, which I later attack with an axe. My legs are battered and bruised from poorly aimed hammers and unseen screws, my fingernails split, my red nose runny. My sandwich is cold, my tea lukewarm. It’s a celebration of sorts.
Early December, Saturday. The beginning of party season. I’m alone here, with mud and decking for company. Spots of rain assemble on my hands. Woodpigeons scoop their wings overhead, ploughing the sky. Wind tickles membrane and starlings laugh. Should I call someone?
My friends never see me gardening. In the old days, when we used to go out all the time and they would stay over, they might catch me in the morning sneaking outside while they nursed their hangovers on the sofa or blow-up mattress – a slug-shaped thing in a sleeping bag. What are you doing? Ssssh, stay there and sleep, I’m just out here. I would close the door on the stale hangover smell and the beer cans and kebab wrappers, and enter a world of bees and birdsong. A steaming cup of tea and pair of secateurs to ease in the day.
The Bumblebee Flies Anyway Page 2