Post 2

I went straight to Aunt Molly's room for her Gallop and Gallop: British Birds.
"Have you seen my reading spectacles?"
"You've got them on. I've just seen a pair of jays. Fed them with breadcrumbs."
"Extremely unlikely." Aunt Molly smoothed the distraught cushions, violently interrogated in the glasses-search, while I described the blue flash. "Jays aren't breadcrumb birds." Buncrumbs to be accurate. "Get me the book."

I'd got it. Handed her British Birds impatiently. She always took longer than I did, and infuriatingly read silently before utterance. "Jays, it seems," she said at last. "If you can be trusted to say what you saw. It says here," she adjusted her reading glasses, "Jays do not tolerate any familiarity with human beings." She chuckled.

"Exactly what one would expect of that book." I had always disliked it for good reasons. All the browns and blacks of the birds I knew well were so very smart and paperweight on the page, the sky so very smart old vicarage drawing room blue, and there is nothing to be said, as I said then and there, for a picture of a sparrow all nicely flecked-out and spruce when the scrabbling in the dust and the tail-twitching hind-uppermost on the rail and the cavorting in the bushes - making the hydrangeas jump and shake and twitter as if they were being tickled to death by fleas - is so missing, there is not even the merest suggestion of life in bone or feather. Here the jay, garrulus glandarius, looked as timid and wistful, and just about as menacing as a willow-warbler, roughly the same size; and certainly without enough energy to pick up so much as an acorn. But the colours were rightish. Aunt Molly had settled to a good bird-read. Here the raggedy crow was hooked and fierce, but impeccably gentrified in city black, just as I remembered on the very margins of memory, my lovely Uncle Paul Absecond, Aunt Molly's husband, used to be even on Saturdays and Sundays.


I did not know much about birds, despite my occasional bird-watching walks of childhood memory with Matthew. They were as much poetry-rendering as bird-watching, and as a consequence perhaps certain birds never were mere birds for me. But I reckoned I knew more than the book about the birds I knew, which were all brown and beige or black and grey; sparrows, thrushes, blackbirds and pigeons, the kestrels on the common, and the choughs on the rocky pre-Cambrian coast of Wales; a bull-finch, a bluetit, a robin, a pheasant, a partridge, oh, and herons.

Once, on a steamer going up to Hampton Court, I counted seventeen shabby herons like judges, at the very least Tulkinghorns, to a man, still and silent, hunched shouldered, slit eyed, stalk legs, each giving off an aura of secrets from the charnel house, standing along the bank in the clear-water margins of an island below Richmond. They were drawn urgently to the attention of a young man opposite me and fiddling with a very large portable radio by his girl-friend who was leaning lovingly on his arm (he having taken the best seat next to the water) to get a better look at them. After a long moment, in which I feared he would miss them altogether, he glanced up at the last one of them for a second. "Some species of a penguin," he said magisterially, and went back to his radio mechanics. Oh yes, I'd seen that. I already had a deep interest in sex and its perversionary process.

There was a class of birds that I did not count as birds at all. They were manifestations of mysterious Ideas, immortals, each with a secret ministry; and that was thanks to Matthew. There was in me, a place where certain delightful creatures, things, people, sayings, poems, stories, lived and thrived together. I do not know by what qualification they passed into this dark sanctum (although some arrived by my faulty understanding and on declaring themselves naturally passed out of it), but at the heart of it I had in it the peacock, the swan, the skylark, and the nightingale. I had abundant evidence that all these creatures actually existed. I had seen the lot. But in my secret mind they had a life richer and of much greater significance in time and story than the feathered one.

I could never see the peacocks, most beautiful, most useless, most mysterious peacock, the Glory of God, hanging like strange foliage in the trees or displaying the iridescent lacy green and the blue and black of the eye feather in the grounds of the old castle, Aunt Molly's (and Matthew's as it turned out) , favourite hotel in Edinburgh; I could never see a swan open its back on the river as if it were a bride or bridegroom of goodly hue needing only to be crammed with flowers to float upriver to its wedding and back to merry London, my most kindly nurse, the air trembling against the bridal day which is not long, sweet Thames running softly, the song never-ending and my hand in Matthew's; I could never see the larks rising higher, higher, higher into the breezy summer skies over the South Downs and trilling with happiness to be so near heaven, singing hymns unbidden until the world is wrought to sympathy with hope and fears it heeded not; I could never hear fall the tiny leaflets of chased silver and gold that the nightingale sprinkled all over the beechen gardens shadows numberless of Golden Square in the small hours of summer mornings, charmed magic casements opening on the foam of perilous seas in faerie lands forlorn; never see nor hear without being captured as if rooted to the ground by my feet, without being tied by my heartstrings to whichever of those creatures it might be, without my heart aching with the loss when I and they were parted. Immortalised in the spun gold web of English poetry, birds they never were, they were not born for death. They belonged to me. They belonged to me and Matthew.

I was fond of the auks and parrots and storks and humming birds that belonged to the fairy tales I read, and I did not at all mind looking at Birds of Java or Birds of India for hours on end, because although they too were paperweight and spruce, I did not miss on the page the life in them because I had never seen them, they were all fairy-tales to me. But they were commonplace-mysterious and they never crept into the secret part of my life.


"Jays are crows. They eat birds, breaking them in pieces with their claws. They eat chicks, eggs, mice, fish. Important to acorn dispersion. Go back to acorn stores in hard winters, and so on." Aunt Molly pushed her glasses back, and the cushions had better look out.

There was about this information much that assorted well with my imagination of the jays, a strong sort of formidable creature intelligence with plenty of backbone, fearlessness; there was something of Matthew there. So I allowed also that they were possibly stand-offish with human beings. Therefore, it followed, I belonged to the elite to whom these predators would come to eat breadcrumbs, buncrumbs to be exact. I conceded that, for that day, there was something very special about me. There are days like that.

"They were probably feeding on the flying ants. There has been a swarm here this afternoon, hateful things."

I did not care. It was still a mark of favour, the jays coming down to me like that; a visitation from the gods. I was not one of those who put a mark of favour lightly aside, or accept[ed] it without letting it do its work. It was a sign. It spoke well for the coming summer.

Aunt Molly brushed her hand fastidiously across her lacklustre greying hair, and knocked her glasses off. I picked them up.