On the Marsh

by Simon Barnes

  12

  THE POWER-BALLAD OF THE EARTH

  Spring is back. Is that a piece of sky got loose, or is it a common blue?

  A rabbit? No, damn it, it wasn’t a bloody rabbit: it was a great big, gorgeous, sexy hare and in our bloody garden. I’d as soon expect a crocodile. In the five years we have been here, not a sign of a hare. Plenty on land higher up, of course, what we sometimes refer to round here as the uplands. Hares prefer dry to wet, and Norfolk is a great county for them. All East Anglia is pretty good: once in Suffolk I saw 60 of them all together, which isn’t bad for an animal that’s supposed to be solitary.

  We see them all the time when we’re out in the car doing local jobs. Cindy usually stops the vehicle, if there’s not someone behind, and pulls in so we can all take a good look: the hare sometimes motionless, sometimes withdrawing at a staid, balanced canter, sometimes streaking away in a mad gallop.

  One of the fascinations of hares is the shape-shifting thing: one moment they’re probably a bunny and the next moment they’re quite certainly nothing of the kind, jacking themselves up on those long hydraulic rams of legs and running in the manner of a deer, nothing like the hopitty-hop of a rabbit.

  And now one had dropped down to the flood plain to come and join us. He seemed about three-quarters grown, making what looked like an odd decision, to come here on his own to make a living.

  How beloved hares have become in recent years. You can hardly go into an art gallery in East Anglia without finding images of hares. Cindy has produced a few belters herself, preferring the fully stretched-out, cheetah-like galloping stride to the more static poses that hares go in for when they’re trying to be invisible.

  It’s not even necessary to see them: people have told me about their special feelings for hares, and it turns out they’ve never seen one in their lives. Some animals attract a special form of love, not because they are cute or big or fierce, but because they have some kind of mystery that attracts us. They seem to be an extension of our hidden wild selves: from the drastically cultivated fields of England steps forth a creature of devastating wildness, with a life spectacularly remote from our own – and yet, being a mammal, it is still one of us.

  Come into our sitting room and you notice a large piece of sculpture: two boxing hares by Ann Richardson, presents for a rather big birthday. They fill the place up with their vitality, with their movement and with their stillness.

  Real hares excel at the same contradiction. Movement catches the eye, so stillness is an important survival skill for many creatures. But you can acquire an eye for a hare as you travel through and round the fields of Norfolk. For as long as the crops are low to the ground, a practised observer can pick out small humps and hummocks that are not-quite-invisible hares. Sometimes they sit up like a cat on a mat, their enormous ears the highest point in the entire field, if not the entire landscape, tuning in to danger. At other times they hunker down, belly to the earth, ears flat on the back. They seem to do this almost as children hide by covering up their eyes, but there’s no need to be patronising about hares. This stillness is a highly effective strategy: and when you walk too close, they will explode away from you as if they had been fired from a gun.

  Here was a hare, scarcely more than a leveret, running through the gamut of these ploys. He – I’m pretty sure this was a male – was sometimes visible from the sitting room, looking nearly as lively as the sculpted hares. I saw him from the bedroom; I saw him more than once from the kitchen, when I was cooking.

  Not all day and not every day: but within a few weeks he was a recognised feature of the place. He had come to stay: or at least, to see how that played out as a general plan. He was most often seen on the higher meadow, which is more like classic hare territory, but the garden was full of grass and though there wasn’t much room in it to get up to full speed, it was reasonably free of predators; presumably he was too big and too swift for the stoats. So he stayed and he nibbled and he prospered.

  Already he seemed to feel safe at our place. Sometimes when he saw us, he would go into that long, flat gallop, but more often, he would jack himself up on those long levers and canter with stiff elegance to a safe distance.

  Perhaps he was a pioneer: the first of a new generation of wet-loving creatures. Mad marsh hares.

  A female cuckoo. And the day bubbles over.

  We can’t take things for granted when it comes to shared knowledge about nature. It’s no longer safe to say that everybody knows what noise a cuckoo makes. Much has been made of the way the Oxford Junior Dictionary revised itself and chucked out words like adder, heron, kingfisher, minnow, thrush, blackberry, bluebell, bramble and poppy, and brought in blog, broadband, voicemail, attachment, database, chatroom, bullet point and cut-and-paste. There has been a spirited counter-attack in a book called The Lost Words, which celebrates – and attempts to make sure we keep – the words no longer relevant to the dictionary-makers.

  So let me reassure you or inform you or remind you or needlessly explain to you that a cuckoo says cuckoo. That is to say, a male cuckoo seeking a mate, filling even the vast skies above a patch of Norfolk marsh with the imploring twin syllables of his name. It is a sound of hope, of long struggle, of anguish and frustration. There is a scene in Fellini’s Amarcord when the main character’s mad uncle, let out for the day, climbs to the top of a tree and shouts again and again: ‘Voglio una donna! I want a woman!’

  That is precisely the strategy of the male cuckoo, exactly what the cuckoo is singing about. Will it come? Yes, it will. Maybe just by holding still. Maybe tonight . . .

  Sometimes at this time of year, though very rarely, the air will be filled with a passionate cackling and bubbling: sudden, unexpected, and not at all part of the daily soundscape of the English spring. It is alien, startling, likely to make even the most avid non-birder, the most determined anti-wildlifer, pause for a moment and wonder what the hell is going on.

  If you happen to have the translation, that brief and often impossibly loud burst of song is a doubly glorious thing.

  You’ve bloody well got one!

  That’s what it means. It’s the answer to the cuckoo’s call: it’s a female cuckoo that’s singing back. Like the line from the Roy Harper song: ‘She’s the one who throws her pants at you and says, OK you’re on!’ It can also be heard after the female has laid an egg.

  And there was the call, richly bubbling out of nowhere and changing everything in a single second for the male who had been calling and calling. That journey to West Africa and the winter in the rainforest, the return trip, the finding of the marsh, the commuting from one song-post – technically it’s a stud-post – to the next, all that energy of the interminable song with its two notes, though sometimes, when extra frenzies shook him, there were almost three: cu-cuckoo! All this was worth it for the single moment of the reply, and for the few minutes that followed. (Though it’s possible that the male – or another – had already got lucky and the female was delivering the result of their coming-together.)

  I rushed from my desk with binoculars in hand and caught a glimpse: that hawk-like silhouette of the cuckoo. It was the female, must have been because the bubbling call was so close and her flight was sharp-winged and arrow-straight, heading in the most direct line possible – that was how I read it – towards the stud-post and the awaiting male.

  That brief tryst would define both their lives: allow them, if all went well, to become ancestors, to pass on their immortal genes, to do something to bring more cuckoos into the world. Then each would fly off: the male, when the excitement had died down and desire had reasserted itself, would resume his cuckooing while the female, in a few days, would lay her egg and trust to the fostering skills of the luckless dunnocks, reed warblers or meadow pipits – dunnocks are your best bet around here.

  It would be easier to listen to the cuckoo’s calls for the rest of his stay, reasonably confident that he had got lucky at least once. It seemed that the year was advancing apace: />
  Sumer is icumen in

  Lhude sing the bubbling song!

  Morning ride. Has it been raining leverets on these wet fields?

  Spring mixes joy, anxiety and relief, and the combination gets more bewildering with every spring. That mixture of emotions is caught in the Ted Hughes poem about swifts:

  They’re back!

  . . .

  Which means the globe’s still working

  He makes the globe – the earth – sound like a Heath Robinson device, a crazy machine put together with a mixture of crackpot ideas and dodgy technology, likely to be thrown out of balance at any moment, but somehow still rattling along. The return of the swifts gives us at least temporary relief: the show can continue; this precarious, ill-balanced, unstable device – one that in recent years has become increasingly unsuitable for its purpose – is still spluttering and ticking unevenly onwards. Yes, we’ve got away with it for another year, and things are not greatly worse than they were last year.

  I was pretty sure I had seen a swift a few weeks earlier, following the river course at exuberant speed. Just the one. Both the timing of the visit and the impression I got from the sighting made it unlikely to be a common swift, the sky-screamers of sun-warmed cities and countryside. It seemed a little too large, the wingbeats a little too deliberate, but then I only saw it for about 2.4 seconds. Birders will know that I am trying to claim an alpine swift here: a bird that sometimes turns up in Britain after overshooting its destination during the spring migration.

  Alpine swifts always remind me of the time I was covering the Olympic Games in Athens in 2004, when most days I could see them from my bedroom window as they flew over the Olympic Stadium – the one in which Kelly Holmes performed her majestic double. And here, seen from my place in Norfolk, was just such a bird. Well, probably. Well, possibly. Birders’ notebooks and conversations are full of probs and posses: terms that can reflect good observation, meaningful experience, profound knowledge, crazed ambition, wild hope and unabashed hallucination. And this was – quite definitely – a poss alpine swift. So not one for the list, but nice anyway.

  But where were the swifts? Where were the common swifts, the European swifts, the real swifts, the black sickle-winged fliers that perch on air, sleep on air and even mate on air, the birds that spend the first two or even three years of their lives without ever once even perching?

  I remember seeing them in uncountable numbers along the distant river: not so much a flock as a swarm, and I estimated 1,000 birds. But so far I had seen none at all. I was worried about the swifts. Damn it, I was worried about the globe.

  Then, with May already in double figures, I saw two or three of them flying over an arable field at the top of the lane. I was on horseback at the time, so that made it a double-good morning, even though the swifts seemed too few and too late. Still, it was a good deal better than none. And that evening there were more, along the river. Not many. Not exactly a swarm. But anyway, swifts.

  Next day I saw four or five swifts crossing the marsh.

  Morning ride. Two hares show how they have reimagined the gallop.

  Sometimes I have a dream of an impossible avian plenty. It’s a bit like the painting of Eden by Rubens and Breughel; Jan Breughel did most of the wildlife. In the tree the birds are so plentiful they hardly leave any room for the branches; in the water almost the entire sparkling surface is hidden: red and blue macaw, turkey, golden pheasant, goldeneye, purple gallinule, pintail, heron, mute swan; many others, more or less wing to wing in paradise as the naked human couple consider the possibilities of adding apples to their diet.

  Perhaps that’s where the dream-image comes from. Or perhaps Breughel was painting something common to us all: an eternal human archetype; a lost landscape of profusion, of endless variety and endless abundance; a place where the rare is commonplace.

  There is a mild element of frustration in the dream: the birds are so many and so various that it’s hard to identify them. I seem to be familiar with all of them yet unable to give a name to any of them. Or if to some, then not to all: not to the loveliest and the best. It’s not a dream that goes anywhere: the vision fades with the dreamer still too amazed and too delighted to make a proper record: a not-unfamiliar sensation in daily life.

  When I wake from such a dream there is always an element of regret, as there is in waking from any really good dream. If only I could have stayed there a little longer . . . and if only I could print from the screen of my mind the dream just gone. I can see it in general terms, but I want to see it in specific terms. Are those birds all real species, authentically remembered by my sleeping mind? Or are they mere fantasies, impossible birds, the kind painted by the sort of artist who – unlike Breughel – or Cindy for that matter – can’t be bothered to do the research?

  The marsh is not Eden: the shortage of swifts, the sound of the guns in the colder months, the excessive fertiliser and the million problems of the surrounding world make that quite clear. But every so often it can feel just a little like Eden: as if there were, just like the painting, rather more birds than the place can conveniently accommodate, and rather too many of them fabulous. It was May: the dawn chorus was at its height. So dawn was beckoning.

  There are always good reasons for not getting up at 3.30. But I was beginning to run out of them. This was, after all, the great month of song.

  Grass snake says this place is wilder than some people might think.

  On the other hand, getting up early lets you off the power-ballads. Eddie was going through a phase of breakfasting with power-ballads, and for some weeks he had adopted John Barrowman’s version of ‘I Am What I Am’ as a kind of personal national anthem. So a pre-school morning comprised cereals with bananas and a glass of apple juice, and a chance to sing along.

  I don’t want praise!

  I don’t want pity!

  It’s no doubt a gay anthem for Barrowman. Eddie’s interpretation was also deeply personal, loud and inclined to recklessness about the precise note. He ripped it out with passion and defiance. It’s a song about not being like all the rest. He would sometimes explain that he had a headache ‘because of Down’s syndrome’. There were sad times at the end of his mostly good times at his junior school, when he was the oldest one left. When he was shorn of his friends and protectors, some of the little kids sensed his vulnerability and took advantage. And as he gets older, there is a pressing need for facing the world in the right way. He knows he is not like everybody else. He knows he is who he is.

  I read the sports pages and drank a cup of tea, as Eddie went for the encore: once more with feeling.

  Your life is a sham

  Till you can shout out

  I – am – what – I AMMMMMM!

  Well, amen – and have a good day at school.

  That evening we went out on the marsh to look for snakes.

  This is good sport. I have laid three one-metre-square chunks of corrugated metal in various spots on the marsh, and on a warm spring evening, it’s worth walking round the marsh and lifting them up, one by one. It’s an old trick: it creates a warm dark space underneath and that’s a lovely thing for reptiles. They don’t generate their own heat; they borrow it from the sun: and the metal squares – ‘tins’ in the jargon – give the sun a helping hand.

  I always offer Eddie the chance to lift the tins himself. So far he has always refused. It’s not exactly frightening, but a successful lift does rather make you jump. And at the first tin we came to – the one by the old willow stump that Doris knocked in half – we got lucky.

  I lifted the tin, revealing a square of bare earth, dried vegetation, white roots, and small holes dug by rodents, and right in the middle, making a wonderful pretzel of himself, all dark green with a shining yellow collar, a grass snake. No more than two feet long, and about two fingers thick. He held perfectly still while we both got a good look, and then suddenly took himself off in that uncanny fashion of snakes.

  Grass snakes love wet c
ountry. It’s hard to see them; all snakes are experts at hiding. Their strategy for life, starting with their body shape and their super-economical leglessness, is designed for easy concealment. The tins are a technique for bringing them into human awareness.

  I remembered a jaunt Eddie and I made on the canoe on the Waveney, when I sighted a grass snake swimming across the river, and performed a handbrake turn – try it some time in a laden Canadian canoe – in order to give Eddie, in the front end, a grandstand view. It was a triumph: one of those unforgettable wildlife moments.

  We replaced the tin, drew a blank at the other two and then went to sit on the benches for a while. The singing was comparatively quiet for the time of year. The afternoon was drawing on but there were still a few hours of daylight left. Most species seemed to have agreed on a break before the final frenzy of dusk. But not the whitethroats.

  Whitethroats are yet another species of warbler. As with Eddie, ostentatious musicality is not really their thing. The song is usually described as ‘scratchy’ as if they had a sore rather than a white throat. And there were two males singing antiphonally from adjoining clumps of bramble. It wasn’t exactly a musical treat but, well, they are what they are. I enjoyed this duet very much. Without the brambles there would have been no whitethroats: no matter what some people and some other species would prefer me to do with the marsh, the whitethroats thought I was fab.

  We went back to the house in good humour. We are what we are . . .

  Morning ride. Must update the protective clothing. Between these May hedges I need ear-defenders.

  I left the house a little after 3.30, dressed for an unusually cold winter’s day. That’s experience: if you’re going to sit still for a long time of a May morning, you need more layers than you’d believe possible. I wore enough to stop a bullet. I carried my binoculars, not that I expected to be using them very much, and a flask of tea. It was light enough to see without a torch, just about: the moon helped. The idea is to be there for the first moment of song in the day, but that’s impossible, you’d have to start the day before. The singing never really stops in early May: there’s always some bird or other ready to make himself heard even in the quiet of the night. It’s like a football hooligan during a two-minute silence: he can’t help himself, he just has to break the quiet with the sound of his own voice.