Winter
It’s 1985 and I am four. Mum and Dad’s friend Charles has given us a bird box. It’s for tits. He told us to put it up in a north-easterly direction. He chose a bit of fence by the back patio doors. The bit of fence above the hydrangea, where a scrappy bit of cotoneaster grows. Mum says the birds won’t come so close to the house but Charles says they will. We’ll see! says Mum.
The box remains empty for so long that Mum and Dad forget all about it but suddenly, eventually, it’s being used. It has attracted tits, just like Charles said. The tits are blue tits. My sister Ellie is too young to really appreciate them but Dad makes me stand still and wait for the birds to enter and exit the nest. I am better at being silent now I’m four, better at understanding why and how to be still. But it’s hard, waiting in the shadows behind the patio window, craning my neck to catch a glimpse of them. I see the parent birds journeying to and from the nest. They look the same but we think the male has more of a Mohican hairdo. They look frazzled and tired, unkempt, not looked after – Mum makes a joke about parenting. The birds bring big green caterpillars from the trees by the garage, take faecal deposits from the nest to distribute around the garden. Sometimes a tit will perch on the top of the nest box, sometimes we leave crumbs and bacon rind for them to eat. I like watching them. They go in and out, in and out. As time goes on they become more used to us and if I stand beneath the box I can hear the chicks cheep-cheeping inside. If I make a noise they cheep louder; they think I am a bringer of caterpillars.
It’s a nice sunny day and the patio doors are open. I’m on the patio, wheeling around on my toy truck. The tits don’t seem bothered by me. Dad is skulking in the corner. What are you doing, Dad? I’m watching the birds, he says. He’s watching them intently, learning the different routes the male and female take, timing the gaps between food deliveries and faecal drop-offs. He has worked out that they gather most of the caterpillars from the border between the gravel path and the driveway, that it takes up to five minutes to find enough food to bring back. He watches the female come with a beak full of wriggling green grubs, watches her disappear into the box, feeding her hungry babes on the other side of the hole. He notes the male, waiting in the sidelines, he, too with a beak full of baby food. The female pokes her head out and takes off. Dad notes the tree she flies into as the male sails down to deposit his parcel of food. Dad’s poised, waiting, me none the wiser on my little red truck. The male flies off, into the same tree as the female.
Quick! Large hands scoop me up and I’m transported in the air to the tit box. He puts me on his shoulders and opens the hinged roof. Five yellow mouths open to greet us. Five naked pink bodies and barely open eyes. Can you see them? Can you see the birds? I’m speechless, I don’t know what to say. Dad closes the lid as quickly as he opened it, takes me off his shoulders and places me down again. Did you see the birds? Did you like them? I look at him and then back at the box, now knowing what’s inside it. I am troubled, almost, with this new information, that baby birds do not look like birds, but tiny monsters with giant, gaping mouths. The female flies back with a mouthful of caterpillars and we watch, together, as she feeds her young, unaware of the recent intrusion. She flies off again and the male returns, he, too, unaware. I want to see them again but Dad says no, we have to let them raise their young in peace. That was a one-off, just to see what was inside. I spend the rest of the day thinking about what they’re doing, what they’re eating, if they’re sleeping, if they’ve grown any feathers. Five little birds in a box outside the back door.
When I erected the trellis I had to move the bird feeder. Not the one the sparrows visit, which I refill every other day, but the one on the back fence, the one full of sunflower seeds that the sparrows ignore, the one with the food that goes mouldy and has to be replaced every three months because it’s never eaten, even though I only ever half-fill it. Over the last few weeks I’ve watched blue tits, goldfinches and the robin fly in from the smoke bush in the garden at the end to the feeder. One by one, each takes a sunflower seed and dashes off again to shelter. I had hoped this might be the beginning of something – robins are fairly antisocial beings but goldfinches are nearly always seen in big groups, or charms, and blue tits hang out in winter with other tits in ‘roving groups’, which basically means they eat together. I imagined a swinging feeder with goldfinches and tits fighting over food, imagined the pecking order, the fledglings being taught where to feed. It wasn’t to be. Shyly, the birds have stayed in the smoke bush and only popped in to grab a seed and fly off again.
But I open the back door now and the bird feeder is swinging. There’s a commotion in the smoke bush. It’s tits. Lots of them. A roving group all burping and fluttering and hanging off the branches which bend under their weight. Tits. Then there’s a flutter of wings and I catch sight of the robin leaving the garden, and I realise I opened the door on a party of birds, although probably, if the robin was involved, a party involving a fight. I walk to the feeder and my tide-mark is a whole inch above the new level of sunflower seeds. And I am gloriously, fanatically happy because I know, just as soon as those leaves and stems inch their way into the trellis, that the birds will no longer need the smoke bush beyond the back wall of the garden. They’ll have shelter enough here and they will visit more often. In ones and twos and sixes and sevens and huge roving groups or charms or whatever. The birds want to be in my garden, they just need to be able to hide while they’re here. And they will, they will.
The next morning I get up early and drink tea in my coat at the kitchen door so I can see the tits and goldfinches that got through a feeder of sunflower seeds in two days. I’m too early. It’s still dark and only the robin is around. I can hear her warbling away in the twilight. She’s on the wall, pottering about beneath the trellis, singing away as she ferrets for food. She’s a violin concerto, a trickling fountain, a dribbling mountain spring. And those little pips, the tinny echo of someone practising their scales on a glockenspiel. I wonder if she’s actually doing scales, practising. She’s probably a he, gearing up for the big showdown, the battle for territory and females, fought and defended by the quality of one’s song. She hops around a bit, jumps on the feeder, takes a sunflower seed, returns to her spot betwixt trellis and wall. She’s well hidden there, I can see why she likes it. Just you wait until the leaves come, girl.
The sparrows visit the feeder closest to the door, happily, but if they catch a glimpse of me, even behind the window, they fly off. It would be just like them to come at the same time as the tits and then sound the alarm, emptying the garden. I’m well prepared: I stand in darkness, dressed in dark pyjamas and a dark coat with my hood up. I am a hide.
The blueing sky is full of gulls returning from the seafront. Then: whoosh! A flash of rustling of leaves. I look up at starlings flying overhead, returning from the pier. They’re bang on time, thirty minutes before sunrise, back to their street, to their rooftop. Two gangs, three gangs, four. The robin and herring gulls fill the gaps between starling flypasts until all goes quiet. The other birds don’t come and I give up.
But later, as the sparrows descend on the feeder nearest the back door, I try again. I inch forwards and peer through the window. The sparrows fly off, of course, alarm calls sound, but I can see the feeder beyond and it has something on it, something big. I tease open the back door. One big thing flies off and the other turns to look at me. Collared doves.
I stand at the door and watch; the one on the feeder returns to feeding and its mate comes back to the garden. It comes in stages: first the roof and then the trellis. Finally back to the garden. They perch, the two of them, balancing on the tray designed to catch seeds from the feeder, one beak each in a ‘port’. The weight of them; they’ll have the trellis down.
Dressed for work in a smart suit of pink-brown with a white-edged black collar and matching white-ringed black eyes, they’re smaller than the woodpigeon and have a faraway stare. I’ve seen them before but not on the feeder. They come
in, usually with the sparrows, sharks to their remora fish. They perch on chimney tops and coo-coo-coo all day long, an alto to the starlings’ nonsense soprano.
They arrived here from the Middle East in the 1950s, first breeding in Norfolk in 1955. Their spread has been astonishing – they reached Scotland by 1957 and had crossed the Irish sea by 1960. Their population exploded until around 1996. It’s no wonder: they have up to five broods every year. Sometimes they start a new nest before the young from the previous one have fledged. Two eggs at a time. They typically nest until October but in mild weather they can keep going and have been known to set up camp in municipal Christmas trees, preventing councils from ending festivities. I don’t know where they nest around here; they could be nesting now. They lay eggs on the flimsiest platform of twigs; it’s a wonder they manage to raise young at all. But they do and here they are, swinging from my hanging sunflower-seed feeder, bobbing their heads as if for apples. I watch them for a while, then head out and see them fly off. Their wings sound rusty and in need of oiling. They land on a chimney and watch me unscrew the seed tray from the feeder, retrieve the bag of sunflower seeds and fill both hanging and ground feeders, so there’s no need for them to perch and swing for food. They leave their chimney and fly off who knows where. They’ll be back in five minutes. Back to the ground feeder and not the hanging seed tray. Back to the garden and not the trellis. Collared doves.
January. The compost bin is full. I blink and the bird feeders are empty. Some days it’s mild and the buds threaten to burst, other days it’s freezing. Blowing hot and cold, it’s terrible for wildlife. It doesn’t know where it is, what it wants to be doing. Nest or rest? The not-knowing wastes energy. I worry about the insects – already I’ve seen a queen wasp and a small tortoiseshell butterfly – hedgehogs out looking for food, birds carrying nest material. It’s a good twelve weeks before the sap rises.
There’s never much to do in the garden in winter. There’s no weeding to do, no tying in, no deadheading. I could chop everything back so it’s all ready for spring but then there would be no hiding places for insects, no wild seeds for passing goldfinches. So I leave everything as it is, to protect and cosset the wildlife. I’m itching to clear the decks but I can’t, not yet.
There are other things to do. Structural things. Planning things. I pull down the back seats of my car, line everything with cardboard. I drive to stables near the racecourse, where there’s an enormous pile of horse muck. I dig deep into the steaming centre for my crumbly, sweet-smelling reward – the best bit, which is full of nutrients and soil conditioners and other traces of Wonderful Things that will make my garden grow better. I fill my car boot with old compost bags full of muck, strap more into the front seat and squeeze two into the footwell. I drive back as the sky burns over Brighton, my bagged passengers of horse shit steaming gently around me. I hope I’m not stopped / I hope my car will recover / I hope I don’t see anyone I know. I drive home and relieve the car of its bags, carry them through the flat and empty them onto the borders. Everything here is hidden now, tucked under a little blanket of crumbly, sweet-smelling manure. Brandling worms and earwigs tumble out with it; I watch them scurry quickly to shelter. I tuck muck around the honeysuckle, which is still only 10cm high but which has everything it needs now to grow in the coming year; the apple tree, the clematis, the roses. I brush it off the tips of daffodil leaves which have just pushed through the soil, off seedlings of honeywort and love-in-a-mist. Over the next few weeks the worms will drag the manure into the soil, mix it together, recycle it into worm casts. The new blackbird will pick through it looking for grubs. Already, it’s a habitat. And then when the sap rises . . . it will be like fireworks going off, both in the garden and my heart.
I crouch in my corner in the rain, listening to droplets on leaves. I like it here, no one can see me. My jacket pulled over my head I blend into the surroundings. I am rained on like a leaf.
Rain on leaves is a summer sound, the water pattering in blobs, the leaves bouncing on impact, the drops splashing, disintegrating into something else, forming another drop or a bigger drop or a puddle, a pond. It soaks into earth and is taken by roots and stems, journeys through a plant and into leaves, evaporates back into sky, collects in clouds, falls again on leaves.
Does rain make less noise in winter? Fewer leaves to land on but less to break its fall – does it puddle more? Splash more as it lands? Today it’s heavy and it bounces off my raincoat, adding to the pat-patter and the bedraggled but nourished state of everything, including me. The leaves and I are in a halfway house between winter and spring. We make tentative steps, unsure, not yet willing. We dip a toe, we squeeze but don’t pop.
The leaves are children, perfect and precious. Uneaten, unmangled. The lungwort is the greenest it will ever be, its disease-esque markings a gorgeous shade of cream, its hairs erect, on guard. Primroses in tight clusters, their ribs and veins holding onto rain. Bright green hellebore leaves poke through the soil making the darker ones look old and tired. Make way for the new, they say.
The honeysuckle’s purple-green leaves catch droplets in their folds. My little cutting, that I took from Mum’s in late March and carried to Brighton in a bag of water like a fish. I cosseted it and then forgot about it as other priorities took over. Then I moved it around too much. But when the greenhouse came down and the trellis went up I found it its Forever Home – the spot beneath the trellis in the shady bit of the west wall. It would grow up its little ladder and then north along the framework to the sunshine. Honeysuckle likes its roots in shade, likes a lot of moisture, but its leaves like the sun. It will be happy here. It’s a few centimetres off the ladder but it should reach that in no time. Will it reach the trellis by the end of the season? Move along it, find the clematis coming from the other side? Does it have sufficient roots? Sitting now in its bath of manure, it’s ready and raring to go. Just another few weeks and it will head skyward, wrapping itself around the trellis ladder, a worm in the soil, a spiral staircase, feeling its way, clockwise, to sunshine, to what it can hold onto. One stem of ‘Frances E. Lester’ is tied into trellis, the other is less than a metre from it. But it’s in leaf, sort of. Little leaves at the end of a stick stem, buds unfurling, winding.
Sedum spectabile pokes through the earth in tight knots like unfurling Brussels sprouts. The freshest grey-green, each leaf tooth snagging a droplet; leaves that look like flowers. What else pokes through? Lychnis, oriental poppy, crocus, cranesbill. Good to see you again. Felty leaves of phlomis gather, foxgloves bustle, alliums stand tall. They’re Victorians ready to promenade. There’s my Chelsea bearded iris and next to it should be the verbascum that tried to die – beautiful thing, did it succeed? I hope not. I shuffle on bended knee to where I think it might be, brush away manure. There are leaves, little and soft. But not really in a rosette like a verbascum. I think they’re lamb’s ears.
There’s so much more that’s yet to be seen. So much beneath the soil, so much I haven’t noticed. And every day now there’s a new thing, a leaf for rain to christen, a bud, a stem. Loveliest of all, in this rain-soaked garden in its first proper spring, is the forget-me-not that’s seeded in from next door. Not a little but a lot. Tight clumps of veined rosettes, long leaves spreading out, taking up room, feet splayed. There wasn’t a single forget-me-not when I took the decking down and now it’s making itself known, muscling in on the space.
I break off artichoke leaves which have fallen onto new growth. Out with the old. Make way for the new.
Spring
My ugly duckling is shaking off her grey down, the decking and stones, the mud, the thirty-year winter. Now when the wind blows it streaks through long grass, leaves of ‘Frances E. Lester’ flutter in the breeze. There are buds and stems weaving into trellis. Adult feathers poking through.
I sleep with the window open so I can be woken by the dawn chorus, bedding down each night as foxes still screech into the darkness. I pretend I’m eight years old again, in the spar
e room at Granny’s house. I see her at the doorway telling me to leave the window open because the birds sound so wonderful in the morning. OK, Granny, I say, OK. And I go to sleep not really knowing what she’s going on about and I wake up and there’s an orchestra playing in my heart.
I wish I could remember more. Did she come in and listen to the birds with me? Make me tea? Sit on the end of the bed?
It’s cold but the duvet warms me. Usually I sleep soundly, usually I miss dawn and wake only when the neighbours rise and tramp above my head. Today I’m woken by rain, the pattering on this piece of guttering or that, the repetitive ding-ding of water falling from somewhere onto something but I can never find out what. I’m disappointed by the rain because I want to plant peas. But also I’m disappointed because the dawn chorus is rubbish. I listen hard between the raindrops and can hear my house sparrows chirping, the blackbird a few doors down. No robin, she’s long gone, and no tits or finches either. It’s too early for the starlings, they’re still on the pier. It’s just me and the house sparrows and the blackbird and the rain. I drink tea, deflated, the ghost of Granny telling me to keep trying.
And then I hear it, a twittering, a beautiful sound like a tingling bell. And I recognise it but can’t place it. Chaffinch? No. Dunnock? It sounds so close but it would never be in the garden, it couldn’t be in the garden. And I’m so sure of this that I forget about it and get up and potter about and make more tea and eat porridge and then I open the back door to take the kitchen scraps out to the compost heap and there’s a dunnock on the steps, hoovering up spilled seed from the feeder above her. And I freeze and stare at this dunnock, who carries on about her business and completely ignores me, as I did her while she was singing. And she hops on the steps, into the box bush, eating a bit of seed here, investigating there. I step closer and she flies into the smoke bush at the end and launches into her incredible flutey song while I stand in my pyjamas in the rain, holding my kitchen scraps, laughing. Laughing because there’s a dunnock in the garden. Laughing because I’d disregarded her just as she disregarded me, laughing because in the last two weeks I’ve seen a bird on the camera traps that was always out of focus or in the shade and I know it was this dunnock. My walled, immature garden is about five years from providing the shelter that these so-called shy, hedge-loving birds apparently need. And either side of me is so much paving. But I know now that she’s been here for a couple of weeks and has made herself at home. Will she nest here? No, the roses are sticks, the honeysuckle is two inches tall, half of the lawn is still mud. Will she come in regularly and eat spilled seed? Yes. Will she bathe, drink water from the pond? I hope so.
The Bumblebee Flies Anyway Page 12