Seven bare-chested swimmers and a friendly Labrador step out from Brighton Swimming Club onto the pebbles. I sip hot tea, leaning against a rusty metal column as the swimmers scream into the water, dog splashing giddily around them. Some stay for only a few seconds while others swim out, beneath and around the pier. They could tell me where the starlings are.
The sky is lightening now as the sun inches towards the horizon, the gentle blue-pink of a perfect dawn, contrails and cloud reflecting the fire beneath them. Herring gulls line up on the railings and roof of the pier, clack-clacking expectantly: the starlings’ alarm clock. Against them and the splashes of the encroaching tide I hear rising chatter. Two thousand birds waking up, getting ready to head back to the gardens and parks of Brighton and Hove.
Swimmers spill out from the sea as the pier ejects its first batch of starlings. The birds don’t hang around but immediately disappear, a trail of smoke weaving into the distant sky, notes spilling off a sheet of music. I walk up off the beach and around to the other side of the pier and along Albion Groyne, a huge, brick-built groyne that takes me further out to sea and brings me closer to the roosts, the action. I wait, sip tea, laugh at herring gulls.
Civil twilight. They come out like bats now, thick black plumes snaking out into the day, contracting and expanding like a yo-yo as they head off in different directions. There’s little dancing but who cares? It’s just me here now. The swimmers are having hot showers indoors, commuters fill buses and cars beyond steamed-up windows. The pier is closed; this, here, is mine alone.
I watch my noisy, sharp-suited birds tumble out and disappear across the city as the golden glow of the sun rises from the horizon. By the time the sun is up they have gone and I cycle back along the seafront, following them, one eye on the sky.
At home I make tea and toast. I open the back door and greet the starlings on the rooftops, calling and chattering to each other as they have since they woke. I throw out mealworms and suet treats and retreat to the shelter of the doorway where I can watch them unnoticed, nibbling toast as quietly as I can. Still they laugh at me, still they don’t come.
The thin, leaded window never fully shuts and a cold breeze blows through it. Dad has tried to block it with cardboard but it doesn’t really work. We’re watching the snow together, me standing on the windowsill, his hand on my back, steadying me. I am about three.
We’re looking out to the garden, which has become a stranger in recent weeks. The snow falls in giant blobs and lands on top of itself as a blanket. It’s proper 1980s snow, not like you get now; it sticks and builds and reinvents. There’s no longer any lawn or winding gravel path, no border or driveway. Just snow from one fence to the other, only the trees and garage give the space away, identifying what lies beneath them. Dad points things out: the icicles hanging from the garage roof, the footsteps being gradually filled in. Snow mounts too on the window ledge and I wonder if it will reach the top and block the view. It won’t, says Dad.
Dad lifts me off the windowsill and stands me on a chair in front of it. He starts taking photos and opens the window to get better shots. The snow comes in and hits my face. It sticks to me and melts on me. I touch it and it feels cold and gritty for a second and then it’s gone. It’s another world out there, he says, a world we don’t venture into when it’s like this, where things go on that we don’t know about or understand. I ask him if we can make snowballs and he says yes, yes, just let me take these photos.
Movement, suddenly, at the back of the garden. It’s a fox! Ssssh, can you see it, says Dad, can you see the fox? Bright orange against white, it’s unmistakable as it slinks across snow. There’s a den in the brambles at the back, we know this but we never see them. I’ve never seen them. Now it’s as if Dad knew the fox would come out and we have been waiting here to see it. You must be very quiet or you’ll scare it, says Dad. You must talk only in whispers and you mustn’t bang on the window. Yes, Daddy, I say, as he puts a finger to his mouth. He changes lenses quickly, aims the camera, fiddles with the focus. He’s poised to click and I bang. I bang really hard on the window, just as he told me not to. The fox bolts. Dad’s furious, I can tell, but he tries to hide it. Why did you do that? he asks. I can’t answer him. I suppose the excitement of being told not to do something was too much, or maybe I wanted to see the consequences of doing the very thing I was forbidden to do. Perhaps this is the perverse way children learn, or perhaps I am awful. I frightened the fox by banging on the window and my dad didn’t get his photo. Still, I want to make snowballs.
Foxes come into my garden now although not because it’s the perfect habitat. Clearly they can see beyond the mud and stones. I set camera traps to snap them – no one at the mercy of three-year-olds now. There must be a den nearby, in an abandoned garden perhaps or hidden beneath decking – I was surprised not to find one under mine. This one eats the peanuts I leave out for the starlings. I can’t tell if it’s a dog or a vixen but it’s badly affected by mange. The camera traps aren’t great in the darkness but I can still make out the rawness of its bare back and rump. Mange is awful but entirely curable. It’s caused by a flesh-boring mite, which eats and defecates in the skin, causing it to itch. The fox scratches the itch and its hair falls out. Gradually it becomes so preoccupied with scratching that it hunts less, eats less. It becomes weaker and, in doing so, the mites take hold. The fox dies. Urban foxes are more likely to get mange because their diet is poorer. Those on a protein-rich, rural diet seem to cope better with mange than those that raid bins. I suppose it makes sense. This one is welcome to the peanuts if they can make a difference. Maybe one day I’ll get a photo of it in the snow, for Dad, to make up for banging on the window.
In 1980s suburbia, foxes were a rare sight but they were all around us; we had to keep a brick on the bin lid to stop them toppling it over for the food scraps. Sometimes they’d break in anyway and we’d be woken in the night to the sound of a clattering metal bin lid; Mum would have to repack the rubbish in the morning. Foxes were a nuisance but nothing more. They lived at the end of the garden. Mum didn’t like them going through the bins but generally we were happy to live alongside them. They were foxes and we were people and that was that. We lived in the house and they lived in the garden.
I feel sad when I see reports of them attacking babies, calls for them to be culled. So-called urban foxes are a different beast, or so the press will have us think: they’re bigger, more aggressive, prone to breaking into homes, not bins, where they’re more likely to feast on babies than discarded chicken bones. The truth is they’re not bigger and they’re not more aggressive – those entering our homes and attacking our children are more likely to be teenagers full of bravado, unaware of what they’re doing. They live alongside us in the cities because we make it easy for them – you’re never more than five feet away from a rat or a discarded box of fried chicken in the city. Easy pickings for a hungry fox, mange or not.
To see one out during the day was a rarity in the 1980s; these days, less so. They had a huge network of gardens to hide in when I was growing up; now I see them sleeping on shed roofs. Perhaps they’re more visible now simply because there’s less space for them to hide. Visible because their territories have changed and they’re more likely to live in cities; visible because they’re forced to live on top of one another, as so many of us are. I’d love to know where their den is. A typical urban fox territory stretches across eighty city gardens, apparently. How big is a typical urban garden? Mine must be smaller. I count the number of gardens back-to-back between the two main roads bookending mine: fifty-two. Fifty-two tiny gardens with a crossroads in between them. Is that enough for them? Where are the rest of them? Where’s their family group?
I hear their screams at night. It’s the beginning of mating season now, the blood-curdling siren of the vixen in heat, the owl-like hup-hup-hup of the male’s response. I hear mating but I don’t see it; I hear fighting but I don’t see it. The camera traps pick up a bottom or a tail but the
se fleeting glimpses give little away. In some ways I wish I hadn’t put the camera traps out, that my experience of them in the garden would be only through ears and an open window. The scratches on the wall as one jumps up to drop in; the shrieking, the fighting, the mating. Memories of a dustbin lid clattering on the driveway, a rare glimpse of one briefly before I scared it away.
Winter solstice. Today the Earth is positioned in its orbit so that the sun stays below the North Pole horizon, as far south as it gets. All locations south of the equator have day lengths greater than twelve hours but here, far north of the equator, the day will last just seven hours, 56 minutes and 24 seconds.
I set my alarm for 6.30 a.m. and head out to watch the solstice sunrise. Christmas week. Schools are closed, many people have taken leave or are too hungover to care about making it into work on time. But it’s still busy. There are always cars and buses and dog-walkers and runners. Even on a day like today.
It’s miserable and I forget my hat and gloves. The wind batters my face, whistles in my ears. At the pier the sea rages and throws shapes high into the fairground rides. I pull my hood up and sip tea with my back to the wind. It’s too much even for the swimmers, whose tactic in these conditions appears to be to lie on the beach and shuffle into the water, toe-first. They look like they’re having a sort of unsatisfactory, angry bath.
I wait for ages. There’s no horizon today, no nautical or astronomical twilight. No stars, orange sky or wispy contrails. It’s grey and it will be grey for ever. There will be no sun. No rise and no set. I wait, drenched in sea spray, thinking of my warm bed, my home. Maybe I should return, it’s the thought that counts.
As the sky lightens I notice little birds among the pebbles. At first I think it could be the starlings, that they, like the swimmers, have a different approach to leaving their roosts when the weather is at sixes and sevens. But, gradually, I see that nothing of them is like starlings. They are brown. They walk around in small groups with their heads down; they have a pretty little twitter, like a warbler almost, as they comb the pebbles. They are beachcombers. They walk close to the crashing waves and some are dusted with sea foam. Brown with white bellies. Turnstones, I discover later.
The herring gulls are not sitting clacking today. They don’t need to wake the starlings, the wind and lashing rain will do that. Instead they shoot upwards on gusts of wind, like leaves being blown about, a bin being emptied of litter. Nothing settles.
It’s miserable. I can’t tell if the sun has risen. It’s 7.20 a.m. and the starlings are late. They come, eventually, little ribbons snaking out from beneath the pier, hard to spot against the roaring sea and dismal sky. I watch them fly off, they as desperate to leave the seafront as I am. Still the sun hasn’t risen.
Sunrise is supposed to be 8 a.m. I spot three people on the beach looking in its direction, other people braving the elements to welcome the solstice. It feels like a joke, they must be drunk, I must be mad. We all stand looking for something we won’t see today. I wonder if I should join them and crack open a beer.
The sea has vomited out driftwood and other bits. Discarded fishing tackle, a tube of grease, an empty packet of crabsticks written in French. And, helpfully, boxes, crates, to put them in. If there’s no sun there will at least be a beach clean. I start to fill the crates, one eye still on the pier, on my starlings.
The pier clock tells me it’s 8.15 a.m. The solstice sun has apparently risen. It is still the bleakest of days, the greyest of December mornings. Yesterday it was beautiful. Tomorrow, maybe again. Is it the change? Must it not be smooth? Must we, who insist on looking out to the English Channel as one season gives way to the next, be so battered by wind and lashing rain?
Today all hope is lost. I fill the crate with fishing rope, a long-lost mop bucket, the French crabsticks, the grease. I find a dead, headless gannet, which I leave. Later, three crows battle the wind, and each other, for a piece of it.
After today the days will draw out, become longer. The sap will rise. I will stop this nonsense and return to the garden.
It’s a robin that first comes to see me, as I dig a hole to plant the apple tree – the first thing I plant in the garden. She appears in a flash on top of the fence, flies to the wall and then spots me and darts off again. She’s been here before, I realise, perhaps lured by the recently unveiled earth and its uncovered worms, or the compost heap, or even the hanging feeder with its mysteriously diminishing quantity of sunflower seeds. (Robins have only recently learned to use hanging feeders. And you can tell – they look ridiculous.)
I return to my work, digging away at my ocean of mud, lifting great fat worms. Look what you’re missing, robin. I part-fill the hole with manure, compost and more worms, and fetch the tree from its bucket of water and mycorrhizal fungi. When I return she’s back, standing stock-still on the wall with her head cocked. I stand stock-still clasping my apple tree, and cock mine. We eyeball each other for a moment, her presumably conducting a risk assessment on journeying into the garden with me in it, and me wondering how long I can stand still, holding a dripping apple tree, before forcing her to fly off again by moving.
Boom. She’s on the spade. And then in the planting hole, picking at the worms and grubs before they retreat to safety. My robin. In my garden. My heart soars. I stand, rooted to the spot, watching her. I return the tree to its bucket and busy myself with other tasks for a few minutes, letting her work on the heap. Worms, in January. What a treat, little robin. And for me too – what better omen, that this, my first planting of my first tree, in this shambles of a garden, would be blessed by the arrival of a robin looking for worms. It’s quite the ceremony.
Robins and gardeners go way back. As do robins and pigs. Take pigs into woodland and robins will turn up, waiting for the snouts to start rooting through the woodland floor and turn the soil to reveal worms, as they had for centuries before we started farming them. A gardener with a spade is nothing more than a pig, to a robin. The robin just needs to sit on the fence, on her little stick legs, and wait for her moment to sweep in and melt the gardener’s heart.
Eventually I plant my tree, a local variety, ‘Hawkridge’, grown by Brighton Permaculture Trust. Bred on Hawkridge Farm, near Hailsham, in the nineteenth century, it was grown in orchards throughout Sussex when orchards were a thing. It bears medium-sized apples with a golden-yellow skin, pale red stripes and a crimson flush. The flavour is sweet and sometimes described as ‘balsamic’. Whatever that means. Really I’m planting it for the red mason bees that roll around in its blooms in spring, the moth caterpillars that nibble its leaves in summer. The mistletoe that welds to its branches. And the robin that might sit in it and sing.
I firm the soil around the root ball, fashion a supporting post from a bit of wood from who knows where, which I push into the soil at an angle to avoid the roots, and loosely tie her in. She’s a maiden, a stick in the mud, I can barely tell she’s there. But she will grow and fill the space, eventually. It’s a patient game, gardening. Next I plant two climbing roses – ‘Shropshire Lass’ and ‘Frances E. Lester’. Both bear single flowers so the bees can access the pollen and nectar; no fancy double roses for me. ‘Shropshire Lass’ flowers only once, in summer, but produces good hips, bird food; ‘Frances’ flowers for months. ‘Shropshire Lass’ needs a lot of sun, ‘Frances’ can take a bit of shade. Both of them rampant, they will provide shelter for the house sparrows, if they come. And maybe, maybe, leafcutter bees will use the leaves.
‘Shropshire Lass’ goes in at the back, in front of the ugly south-facing fence, its planting hole part-filled with a little recycled manure, not really enough but all I have. ‘Frances’ goes to one side, at the top of the steps. They’ll need support or trellis eventually but for now they’re fine, these sticks of mine. I firm the soil around them, tuck them into bed. Hurry up and wake, I want to meet you.
Around them I plant teasels. Nine of them in various states of dishevelment. Like everything else they are all I have. I put them
in, dot them around, imagine them all tall and cumbersome, the thick, spiky stems, the hedgehoggy flowers, the giant, veiny leaves. They look like little green blobs now, driftwood in a brown ocean, floating to a shore of a thousand pebbles.
I call her Adrienne. I find her on the pavement in the dark, as traffic roars and raindrops fall. Amazing that I see her, black and velvety as she is. Adrienne.
I scoop her cold, wet body into my hands. Woken early or disturbed from hibernation, she will have been unable to find food. And here, on this bit of pavement outside Hove station, is where she would have met her end, either under someone’s foot or just from exposure. But she’s in my coat pocket now. She’s coming home with me.
We walk back together, both of us shivering. I let us into my flat and it’s colder still. I close the door, turn on lights, power up the central heating, find a takeaway carton. I pop her in, take my coat off, close the curtains.
Adrienne, it’s January and you are not supposed to be in my kitchen. You are supposed to be in the ground, in the little den you dug yourself and lined with wax to make it waterproof. You are supposed to wake when the sap rises, when the crocuses flower, when the pussy willow hums. What an awakening is this, in a freezing basement flat? Huh? She sits, motionless, like a sulky teenager, a far cry from the queen she really is. Queen of the red-tails. I mix her a potion of sugar and lukewarm water, pop it in a bottle top and lower it into the box. Now, if she drinks it I’ve saved her. If not, there’s no hope.
I can’t bear to watch. I busy myself with other things. Give her a minute.
I’ve rescued grounded bumblebees before. It always happens in a mild winter. They wake too early but there’s no food, and it’s not long before they can’t move. Bumblebees go into hibernation as early as July. They can go for months without nectar, tucked up in their little wax-lined dens. But when they wake, they need it. And they need it fast. They’re always on the pavement or the path. I find them when I’m running, I find them outside train stations, on canal towpaths. Often it’s raining, often it’s the end of the day. It’s as if they come out in the morning, spend the day looking for food and then realise their error so hobble to the nearest path so they might be saved. Bumblebee SOS. I like to think so.
The Bumblebee Flies Anyway Page 4