Corvus (2 page)

Without asking us, Georges one day gave the girls a pair of small white rabbits, which grew in a distressingly short time into large white rabbits. They were brought into the house frequently and were for the most part continent and uncomplaining, hopping and shuffling up and down the stairs, only occasionally attempting to eat the wallpaper or chew electric cables. We enjoyed their presence but when after a couple of years we moved to London, the rabbits stayed behind without any great regret being expressed, or even the kind of plaintive request that might have inspired guilt. I suppose that the proximity of so many other rabbits and daily reminders of the consequences of a combination of fecundity and lack of hygiene helped lessen their charm. We did take with us the tortoise one of the ‘boys’ had given to the children, a tortoise as any other, slow and ageless, named, for a reason I can’t remember, Isambard. While I stayed behind to finish packing up the house, David and the girls travelled to London by sleeper, taking the hibernating Isambard, swaddled in his box, with them. When, after a few days in the back garden of our house in Kentish Town, he had shown no inclination to move, the proper diagnosis was made. (I assume that it must be difficult to tell much about ectotherms, those creatures with the odd and fluctuating body temperatures, the ones called ‘cold-blooded’, or ones with exoskeletons for that matter, who in the usual run of things may do very little to allow one, even one medically qualified, to differentiate between their being alive or dead.)

only occasionally attempting to eat the wallpaper

In London, we lived not too far from Regent’s Park Zoo. Years before, after we had moved from Glasgow, I had lived with my mother in a flat opposite the zoo, near Lord Snowdon’s aviary, so near that at night, through the sound of traffic on Prince Albert Road, the calls of the taiga, the steppes, the savannah reached us, sounding through the north London night, an experience described by Patrick Leigh Fermor in the introduction to
A Time of Gifts
, when in the late 1920s, from his mother’s house at Primrose Hill Studios (where one door had been marvellously decorated by her neighbour, Arthur Rackham), he could hear the sound of lions from the zoo at night. We went there often and it was on the journey between home and zoo that we used to pass Palmers pet shop in Camden Town, a splendid institution above whose door hung a sign that appeared to suggest that naturalists, as well as monkeys and talking parrots, might be purchased within. One day, we went in and bought a rat, Rupert, worthy representative in both intelligence and beauty of the genus
Rattus
, who lived out his allotted thousand days amicably enough with us, undertaking the journey when at last we made the definitive move, the one we hoped and expected would be the last, back to Aberdeen.

We left the edgy clamour of London and came here to Aberdeen, to a house as unheated as my childhood home (a situation swiftly
altered), one much as all houses are in this part of the city: stern, strong edifices built from unforgiving granite hauled from the deep quarry at Rubislaw only half a mile away. Granite, in its singular density, creates a truly Protestant aspect, forbidding, grey, accepting of little ornamentation, a stone that in its greyness, its occasional, glittering brilliance, has created a city that seems to mirror a gunmetal sea, a high, ashen sky. The houses in this district are large, many of them very large, but all sufficiently plain as to avoid offending God with ostentation. It’s a district that was built by granite merchants for themselves and the other wealthy of the city – lawyers, doctors, families grown rich from the fish trade – much as now, except that people in the business of North Sea oil have replaced the granite merchants, people who, to judge by the frank displays of glossy, elephantine vehicles (whose number plates seem often, oddly enough, to feature the letters O, I and L) squatting on their driveways, clearly feel no obligation to show such deference towards God’s sensibilities.

Quarrying ended in 1971. The granite used in Scottish building is imported now from China. The huge quarry at Rubislaw is silent, abandoned, water-filled, surrounded by trees which are home to the sparrow-hawks that, from time to time, drop from the sky to feast on one of my doves. A colony of roe deer, which must have been there since before the barrier of stout wire was put up, lives undisturbed behind the fences that keep people out.

We moved into three storeys of dark, alarmingly varnished woodwork and staircases, a reminder in every way of the fact that it had been lived in for the majority of its hundred or so years of existence by
one lady and her companion. The lady was scion of one of the famous Aberdeen granite merchants’ families, who, on being widowed, moved from one house, a larger one nearby, to this one, both built from the stone her family had hewn and cut, and there are days still when I feel as if I might pass one or other on the stairs, the companion carrying buckets of coal up to the top floor where the children’s rooms now lie empty, the intact fireplaces a reminder of the way people lived then, people praised as hardier than we. (I assume they were only so by necessity, because I don’t see many Scots now choosing to reject the softening comforts of central heating.)

At the back of the house was a disordered vision of broken crazy paving and cramped leylandii straggling their way towards the light, a garden so neglected and misused that, for years, whenever I embarked upon rare but enthusiastic digging, I found the layers of old linoleum someone had dumped there years before, under a thin coating of soil in what were once flowerbeds. There was a scrubby lawn, some eccentric garden statuary, a shed and a coalhouse. I put on white painter’s overalls and for many months breathed paint-stripper fumes and wrestled leylandii to their destruction.

I remember now the long train journey from London, the feeling of moving from clangour to quietude, the final miles, field and cliff and sea hanging at my right shoulder, the sudden view of river, of grey, spired city. It’s north, 57 degrees latitude, within the ambit of the aurora borealis, that marvellous fusion of dust and sunglow which flings canopies of light across the northern skies, a city of gravity-defying, impossible horizons, of steely seas glimpsed above a line of roofs, masts at the end
of city streets. The harbour jostles, clangs with oil vessels, huge, chain-hung leviathans, towering northern ferries looming over the street traffic. Built on viaducts, a busy city lives over a quiet one below of empty streets and tunnels, the dark, vaulted undersides of bridges; beyond, a hinterland of farmland, mountains, skies as high and as wide as to give a person the true feeling of the place they occupy in the universe. I always have the sense of not being from here, a sense I like, an edge of opposition, the outsider’s view.

David’s grandmother lived, at the time, in a village thirty or so miles south. A neighbour who kept doves asked her if she knew anyone who wanted some, and she asked us. I said I’d think about it, and did. Not only did I know nothing about doves, I knew nothing about birds. I could attach a name to a few, the most common, to fewer still a sound. I knew more about birds in literature than those surrounding me in every street and garden. My education had been partial, one-sided, left me with an odd, skewed, unlikely assemblage of knowledge, the perils of the academic degree. Usefully enough, I knew the Chinese characters for birds: snow goose, pheasant, kingfisher, phoenix. Real or fabulous, there they were and there they stayed, fixed on the pages of
One Thousand T’ang Poems
, in the lines of Du Fu and Bo Ju-yi, calling their snow-goose or pheasant calls in the neat concision of classical Chinese, with all the weight of their long and cumulative history, unending loneliness and sorrow, the loves and regrets of poets long
ago. I was good with symbols. I could manage poignancy, sorrow, longing, separation. On the other hand, did I know how to feed a bird? Hold one? Had I ever looked a bird in the eye? What did I know? Nothing. Less than nothing.
yī wú suǒ zhī
. But I took them all the same.

T
he doves arrived. I didn’t then realise the momentousness of the day. The implications escaped me, the intimation that this was a beginning. They were brought from St Cyrus by Gran’s unsmiling neighbour. I don’t know if she was naturally usmiling or if, as I suspect, it was because on meeting me she understood that she was giving her birds into the care of an unfit person. She may have had hopes for my improvement, or even my ability to learn, as she told me in the most basic terms what to do. She demonstrated, I remember, exactly how much each dove needed to eat each day, a quantity that might have filled an egg-cup which I thought a miserly amount, an instruction to which I have never paid the slightest attention. She carried in the birds, four of them, in boxes, then left. She was, of course, entirely correct. I was an unfit person.

We had prepared the coalshed, newly designated as the doo’cot,
nailing up perches and shelves, removing some bricks from the outside wall to form an entrance. Over the entrance we fixed a triangular wooden stucture with a small, arched doorway, a removable wooden hatch-door and a landing platform. We painted it white to look like a traditional dove-house. We hoped that it might provide everything a dove could want.

As soon as we had carried the boxes in and opened the flaps, the doves hopped on to the sides of the boxes and then stepped, looking with appraising interest around them, into their new establishment. They were white-feathered and perfect, and showed more confidence than I did, inspecting the interior of their house with the air of someone being shown round a dubiously appointed show-home.

Given instructions to keep the birds confined for three weeks, I obeyed. I was glad of the restriction, although it felt slightly cruel, because I was scared that when they were released they’d disappear instantly to fly back to their previous owner in St Cyrus with a volley of aggrieved complaint against me.

I thought about them constantly, worried about their welfare, whether they were eating, the state of their mental health. I looked in often to watch them, with no clear idea why, or what I would do if I discovered something untoward, or how I might tell if I did. They seemed content. They were eating. They perched. They made the sort of sounds one might have expected, their voices indicating to me for the first time that perhaps keeping doves would be more pleasure than anxiety. After a further few days, I began to creep into their house through the door at the end of the kitchen with a sense of
determination, the grim, reluctant sort, knowing that I had to learn how to catch one. I’d select my victim, pursue it relentlessly, grab clumsily and, in the event of success, hold on, for a purpose of which neither of us, I think, was entirely certain.

The girls mastered the skills of dove-handling with far greater speed and confidence than I did. While I was still blundering ineffectually about the doo’cot, they’d go in and emerge calmly, holding an apparently contented dove between their hands.

On the day of eventual release, I removed the door and, after considerable hesitation and anxious hovering (mine, not theirs), they walked out on to the small platform in front of the house, looked around them, seeming almost blinded by the possibilities in front of them, and then flew. The first revelation of seeing a creature that one knows personally flying is like no other, the nearest thing one might have to flight (in the same way that one’s ambitions may be fulfilled vicariously by encouraging one’s children to do something they would have done anyway).

I did, in that moment, assume that this would be my final glimpse of them, but I was wrong. After some flight, a bit of brisk circling in the air above us, a period of what I assume was orientation, they flew back into their house, confirming remarkably, amazingly, the truth of the designation ‘homing pigeon’. (The terms ‘dove’ and ‘pigeon’ are loose, interchangeable ones, I discovered. Doves are generally thought of as smaller than pigeons. White ones always seem, I don’t know why, to be called doves.)

All birds that travel long distances – migrating birds, homing
pigeons – have many methods of navigation, most of them still not entirely understood. Their knowledge of direction appears to be innate. During their first migration, birds already understand where they are to go and for what distances they must travel. Although many birds share remarkable direction-finding abilities, some species of pigeon are the most reliable at finding their way back to a precise location over distances of hundreds of miles. The way they navigate has been referred to as the ‘map and compass’ method, a kind of super-efficient internal GPS system that pin-points their location allied to a series of equally efficient internal ‘compasses’ that indicate direction; the sun and its movement across the sky is one; the stars, another. In
Gatherings of Angels
, Kenneth P. Able suggests that during the first summer of their lives birds learn the layout of the stars, including the importance of the North Star for navigation. The ‘magnetic compass’, the magnetoreceptor, composed of magnetite crystals situated in a pigeon’s upper beak, is a mechanism that appears to allow it to find its way by sensing the earth’s magnetic fields, although the precise method by which this is accomplished is still unclear. Chance, circumstance, the vagaries of weather or the activity of the sun may cause birds to become lost. Gales blow them from their course; surges of solar wind cause geomagnetic storms, distorting the earth’s magnetic field, interfering with their direction-finding. (Attentive pigeon fanciers monitor daily geomagnetic activity, keeping their birds confined when conditions might be dangerous.)

Strong evidence demonstrates that scent also plays an important
role in direction-finding, as do visual and topographical clues, watching patterns of polarised light in the sky, following the line of rivers and motorways. Birds may be aware too of ‘infrasound’, those ultralow-frequency sounds too low for the human ear, the sounds of the movements of the earth, the deep whisperings, the groanings, creakings, crackings of the fabric of universe, the sounds of sea and wind, of oceans and volcanoes, the explosion of meteors, the gathering of hurricanes far away.

As I watched my doves’ light, easy flight, I was delighted by them, by their certitude and reliability, the way they flew off into the sky and returned unfailingly each evening with the onset of dusk.

The doves had lived here for a few months when the first dove-house crisis occurred. One evening, one of them failed to return. It was, I think, more likely to have been as a result of an unfortunate encounter with a sparrow-hawk than of any mishap in direction-finding, but I remember the anguish of the missing bird’s distraught mate as I joined her in vigil. She watched from the roof vainly for his return while I peered from the window, ineffectually carrying out sufficient hand-wringing for us both. I didn’t know what to do when the others began to peck and harass her, taking advantage, it seemed, of her solitary status. The pet shop suggested I try Kevin the bird man, owner of a small bird sanctuary north of Aberdeen. I phoned him, an ebullient-sounding Londoner who said that yes, he had several possible mates
for her but he would have to see what kind of dove she was before choosing a suitable partner.

‘Put her on the bus and send her up,’ he said.
Put her on the bus
. We drove the eighty miles, there and back, on Cupid’s errand, through the glorious green Aberdeenshire countryside. It was a pleasant journey, companionable, my dove in her box, an anticipatory empty box beside her, both of us listening to music, exchanging whatever sounds each of us thought appropriate.

I left the bird in her box in the car as we wandered around his steading, admiring the birds he already had, chatting, as one does, of bird matters. Then Kevin inspected my dove and, matchmaker
extraordinaire
, he selected for her a handsome male, white and blue and petrol, a sturdy fellow with feathered legs, the fine fringe extending to cover his toes. He was beautiful, a suitable, appropriate match, and so, booted and cooing, he was put into the back seat in the adjacent box, calling loudly.

‘There’s nothing,’ Kevin said pensively as we closed the box, ‘as randy as a male dove.’

From the first, my dove was delighted. How does one detect delight in a dove? By voice, the quality of cooing, an indefinable note of enthusiasm, an undertow of frank excitement. Listening as I drove back that day was my initiation into an undreamt-of realm of bird-song, sound, intonation. Until then I hadn’t known that dove vocabulary extends beyond ‘coo’, that they have a wide range of tone and expression, that their voices will indicate their state of mind, from outrage to mild annoyance, from determination to protest. I didn’t
know that they communicate with one other in warning or in reaction, and that they appear to chat, as we might, a sound muted and domestic, like human voices heard from an open window. I began to listen for murmuring susurrations of endearment issuing from the doo’cot as pairs would sit companionably on their perches, preening each other’s feathers, or for the satisfied liquid, rolling sounds at roosting time.

Descriptives such as ‘coo’, I began to realise, deal with one sound only. I paid attention to see if they really did make a sound that resembles ‘coo’. I listened for it but ‘oo’ and ‘woo’ seemed predominant. When heard filtered down a chimney, the sound was more ‘broo hoo’. In most other languages, I discovered, dove calls are rendered as ‘gu’ or ‘ku’. There are exceptions. French doves say ‘
roucoule
’. Listening to the discourse of two doves on the windowsill, I’d hear the word ‘roucoule’ lavishly interspersed with a variety of tones and expressions of ‘ooooh’. Danish doves say ‘
kurre kurre
’, Dutch ones ‘
roekoe
’. Hungarian doves say ‘
a galamb bug
’. (They would.) The more I listened, the more I’d hear them say everything attributed to them, whether Indo-European, Finno-Ugric, Sinitic, Semitic, Hamitic; they say it all, calling in many languages, down the chimney, from outside the study window, in the quiet of their house in evening, expressing their dislike and fears, of both cats and sparrow-hawks, their dissatisfaction with a new type of grain that rashly, once or twice, I decided to buy for them.

All the way home that day, as I drove my match-made pair, the sounds of anticipatory delight rose from both boxes, crossed the cardboard divide, a loud, mutual, trysting, lascivious cooing. Carefully I
carried both boxes in and released the birds into the doo’cot to whatever pleasures awaited them. I had to keep them all in for weeks, but from the first their lives together were harmonious, their union obviously abundantly blessed because until now the line continues, the fine booted legs and feet of the handsome male, the same petrol patches, the sturdy build, the same roving, randy eye.

As they began to breed, I’d take an interest in the young, listening for their first squeakings and cheepings, watching for their first flight, their first return to their house, trying foolishly to help if they seemed not to know where to go, hovering in the cold and rain for hours, urging the small, probably quite capable bird towards the door of its house and safety. (The rest of the family realised much earlier than I that doves are well able to attend to their own affairs.)

I hadn’t thought about anything as practical as numbers, about the fact that, left to themselves, the doves would breed, multiply, and that they’d do it fast. Doves are fecund. By the time I learned the trick of egg-replacing, of removing the warm, fertile eggs and putting cold ones in their place, there were a dozen or more.

Another thing I hadn’t thought about was that they might be capable of violence. The realisation came to me as a piercing disappointment (a bit like the day when the very small, deeply engaging wild rabbit we’d found by the roadside and brought home looked at me reflectively as I stroked her, and bit me). I had had no idea that doves are, by most standards, aggressive, indulging in crimes that, were they carried out by humankind, would have them swiftly, irrevocably, consigned to Broadmoor or The Hague. (Dove crime requires
no great forensic skill to solve, involving as it does a combination of the white-feathered and blood.)