The Owl Who Liked Sitting on Caesar (14 page)

My three visitors were sitting in a row along the sofa with their wine glasses when Mumble appeared on top of the living-room door. She gazed down with interest at the three drab-painted metal turtles below her, tilting and bobbing her head. Then she made her choice, and parachuted on to the middle one. Her claws made a scrooping noise as she touched down on the matt sandy finish of Gerry’s martial headgear and shifted to get her balance.

The conversation tailed off, and three heads turned to watch Gerry. His smile hardly wavered, but his eyeballs rolled up towards the clicking sound on his personal metal roof, and he instinctively leaned his head back a little. The helmet he was wearing happened to be the handsome 1918 Swiss Army model shaped rather like a medieval sallet, with a deep front sloping down to the brim at a rather shallow angle. Naturally, when the helmet moved Mumble stepped forwards to compensate for its backwards tilt, which had brought the front of the helmet almost
horizontal under her feet.
Click – clickety, click
… Gerry sat still and silent, his eyes straining upwards.

Slowly and deliberately, Mumble shuffled forwards and leaned over the edge. First Gerry saw the gleaming tips of four razor-sharp talons curling round under the front brim of the helmet. Then, between her parted feet, her upside-down face appeared, peering back at his. As she held this pose – intrigued, and considering her next move – Gerry’s expression became indescribable, and the rest of us burst into helpless laughter. Mumble took off vertically, and I poured Gerry a refill.

* * *

January and February is the season when Tawny Owls mate and nest, and despite the fact that we were living above a busy town centre Mumble seemed to attract a certain amount of attention from hopeful males during her first winter:

There was a lot of noise from the kitchen cage last night, and again when Mumble woke up this evening. There was a wild owl somewhere outside, hooting repeatedly, and she joined in an exchange of calls. She did not seem to be replying to a hoot with a ‘kee-
wikk!
’, but with a repeat of the hoot. The calls lasted about five seconds, with a couple of beats in the middle: ‘
Hooo!
[two, three] – hoo, hoo-hoo
HOOOO!
’

During last night I had to get up three times and go into the kitchen to try to hush her, at about midnight, 1am and 2am. I’m really worried about the neighbours on that side or in the flats above hearing her and trying to find out where the racket is coming from, but with any luck they will never guess the truth. After all, the idea that the bloke in No. 40 might have an owl living in his kitchen is not the first explanation that would spring to mind.

While she was loose around the flat this evening she got into an exchange of opinions with a wild owl. Although I couldn’t hear the visitor, she clearly could. She zoomed around from window to window, bouncing on her feet along the floor at the foot of the all-glass wall and then flying to the end windowsill, yelling and peering out intently. Eventually she sat on her barrel on the windowsill [a ceramic keg, originally some sort of advertising prop, which I had picked up in a junkshop], and hooted so monotonously that in the end I pulled the curtains closed and shifted her. When I returned from a moment in the kitchen she was in a cloaked position with wings half open like a giant moth, clinging motionless to the division of the curtains high up while she peered through it, with one widespread foot clinging on to each side.

About 9pm last night Mumble was fidgeting around in the
living room, clearly feeling disturbed, when she suddenly went bananas. I was standing close, trying to soothe her, when she hurled herself past me at the glass door leading to the balcony and started hooting furiously. As my eyes followed her I saw another tawny sitting on the balcony rail. Far from being put off by Mumble’s abuse, he merely looked interested (‘Well!
Aren’t
you a spirited little thing …’ – in my mind’s eye I could see slicked-down hair, a pencil-line moustache, a bunch of flowers in one foot and a box of chocolate-covered mice under his wing). He took off when he saw me, but not before hesitating for a second, which I found mildly insulting. Clearly I am not the only one around here who thinks Mumble is cute.

After several disturbed nights, I think I’ve found a way to stop Mumble screeching back at her hopeful suitors, whom she gives every sign of regarding with furious territorial resentment. Quite counter-intuitively, what seems to do the trick is simply letting her fly loose around the flat all night. Perhaps it’s the feeling of being shut in her kitchen cage and unable to defend her patch that drives her mad when she hears another owl close by? I’ve taken to feeding her earlier in the evening, and keeping an eye on her mood as night draws on. If she seems quiet and unruffled, I shut her in the night cage last thing, but if she’s restless and noisy I just leave her loose to roam, with the freedom of the living room, kitchen, bathroom and hallway. This
seems to have curbed the excessive night-hooting, and when I get up in the morning I find her dozing on top of the bathroom door.

When I do shut her up for the night, I’ve taken to covering the cage with an old blanket when I go to bed, and this also keeps her much quieter. I feel obscurely guilty about this, but it’s necessary for the sake of the neighbours’ sleep, and thus for Mumble’s security. In the morning, when I lift it back and open the door, she jumps first to her doorstep perch for a brief ‘good morning’ nuzzle, and then right up on to my shoulder, where she stays for a few moments. While I move around putting the kettle on and making coffee, she takes her time to wake up and get over the dopey effect of being in the covered cage.

I went into the balcony cage at about 8pm to bring her in. She was already wide awake and seemed fluffed and agitated, and as I went on to the balcony I heard a hoot nearby. When I got into the cage I held the basket open for her in the normal way, and waited for her to make up her mind to jump in – when suddenly a damn great Tawny Owl flew slowly past the balcony in a controlled glide, as close as he could get, looking in at us. This was at an altitude of certainly 90 feet (28m) above the street. Mumble shrieked with fury, and EXPLODED up and down the cage, while I ducked and did my best to crouch out of her way – not easy, inside what is essentially a large wardrobe.
It was a couple of minutes after lover-boy had disappeared before she calmed down a bit, and I could talk her into jumping into the basket, with much indignant shaking of feathers and muttering.

* * *

All the excitable dialogue over the past couple of months has at least given me plenty of opportunity to note down the variations in her vocabulary. These seem to include six basic types of call, though she may go off into various jazz riffs around some of them:

(1) The normal daily conversational treble ‘
kweeps
’ and alto croons, usually on a rising note.

(2) The long, fluting Indian war-whoops, upon hearing me arrive when she’s in her cage, or as a cautious interrogation when she goes into a dark corner or hole: a flat, monotonously unvarying ‘
w-o-o-o … w-o-o-o … w-o-o-o
’ in a minor key.

(3) A chitter of annoyance or frustration, when I’m slow to feed her, or when I insist that she do something that she doesn’t want to – like getting into the transit basket in the morning before she feels inclined to do so.

(4) A sort of ‘whistling kettle coming to the boil’ as she pumps herself up in indignation, e.g. when she notices a pigeon lurking around. This starts with a crouch, a puff of the feathery throat, and an interrogation that quickly turns dangerous: ‘skwer? …
skwer?
…
SKWER! … SKWERKK!
’

(5) The regular challenge call for other owls: ‘
HOOO!
… hoo, hoo-hoo
HOOOO!
’

(6) ‘Kee
-wikk!
Kee
-wikk!
’ – the usual response to hearing another owl. My occasional impression that she is using it instead of the hoot for an initial challenge is almost certainly because she is actually replying to a stranger’s call that is far beyond my earshot.

She played a riff on No. 6 at about 10pm one night, when she was sitting on the windowsill. One moment she was quiet and serene, the next she was bobbing and peering at something outside, and making a sharp, repeated ‘
wuk! wwukk! WWUKKK!
’ This did not develop into any other sort of crescendo, and after a while it died away into a quiet, bitching mutter on a slightly different note, very spiteful and bitten-off: ‘
wwakk … wwakk … wwakk …
’

* * *

Among humans, no one was prepared to brave Mumble’s moods more courageously than my office assistant, Jean. In early June 1979 I badly wanted to go away for a week, accompanying brother Dick on a D-Day twenty-fifth anniversary tour of Normandy by enthusiasts with about a hundred old military vehicles, ranging from motorbikes and jeeps to an M10 tank-destroyer. It was obviously out of the question to take an owl on a foreign holiday in the back of a vintage armoured scout car – even British eccentricity has its limits. Providentially, at just that same time Jean needed somewhere to stay for a few days, and she bravely volunteered to owl-sit for me.

I conscientiously explained the various challenges involved, but she was sure she could handle them. We had a twenty-four-hour handover period, and the two were introduced. A photo of Jean sitting nervously with the owl on her leg reminds me that Mumble was prepared to tolerate her presence without gratuitous violence; but both of them look pretty suspicious, and I remember feeling anxious about what might happen when they were alone together for days on end while I was somewhere in the
bocage
and far beyond reach of a phone call (remember, this was long before mobile phones or e-mails).

I showed Jean where the rations for humans and owls were kept, and watched while she gingerly practised extracting one of the pallid little corpses from the freezer, thawing it in a bowl of hot water, and later dunking it in a dietary-supplement powder. (This preparation, marketed as SA 37, contained various minerals, vitamins and trace elements, and was recommended for all types of pets at times of stress or vulnerable health. I had no reason to think that Mumble fell into either of those categories, but I had noted from the handbook that she should be starting her summer moult any time soon, and I wanted her to be in top condition for this presumably trying experience.) I carefully demonstrated the workings of the transit basket and the Double-Reciprocating Owl Valve, and left Jean equipped with protective headgear, clothing, goggles and gloves. It must have taken a lot of nerve for her to venture into the balcony cage for the first time.

Normandy was duly liberated. The first evening in a
bar in Sainte-Mère Eglise was memorable; I remember the
patron
getting his grandmother out of bed to help fry chips for fifty. I also have a vivid recollection of one of our number – suddenly overcome with tiredness and emotion – being passed horizontally towards the door above the heads of the packed crowd and laid down tenderly in the fresh night air, with a kerbstone for a pillow. Equally unforgettable, in a different way, was a sunny morning spent mooching around on Utah Beach in search of souvenirs, when to my astonishment I found not only cartridges but even the collar of a GI’s field jacket still trapped between two small rocks in a tidal pool.

Thereafter, however, it rained, and kept on raining. The only consolations were that at least I had discovered calvados, and the charming girlfriends of two friendly Dutchmen following us in an old Dodge ambulance were much better-looking than my male companions. The underpowered White M3A1 Scout Car – christened ‘Pig Pen’, from its squalid state while accommodating six permanently dank and grubby Englishmen under field conditions – broke down enough times to keep Dick happy (for him, it was the challenge that counted). Whenever this happened I found myself – weirdly like my owl – instinctively drawn to the highest perch I could find, where I sat smoking glumly while I watched my brother’s legs or backside sticking out from under various parts of a sullenly unresponsive 4-ton assembly of olive-drab steel.

How he ever got us on to the ferry home I will never know. The sun came out again on that final morning, but
all of us except Dick were savagely hungover, and Pig Pen became stranded within sight of the Boulogne docks. I remember sitting on the kerb with one of my crapulous fellow Pigs, sharing a carton of chips bought by pooling our very last francs, while we waited for Dick to come up with another miracle – which, of course, he did. As I recall, this final triumph involved trading the loan of a spare wheel against the promise of a surreptitious cross-Channel passage for a wartime flame-thrower that somebody had acquired as a souvenir.

We struck lucky. When we docked at Dover the Customs officers seemed to be picking vehicles to search on the eeny-meeny-miny-mo principle, and the DUKW ahead of us had to disgorge about a dozen protesting passengers down a ladder. After taking one look into the hull of Pig Pen at the pile of malodorous bodies sleeping it off on a floor of muddy steel, crumpled ponchos and food debris, the Customs guys wearily waved us through, all innocent of what lay beneath.

When I finally got home Jean appeared to be unscarred; she reported no episodes of bloody mayhem, and Mumble looked in fine fettle (‘New, improved Mumble – now with SA 37!’). It turned out that the biggest problem had been a bachelor neighbour of mine. After meeting Jean in the lift one day he was insistent on pursuing the acquaintance, and she had had to spend some time discouraging him. Her side of these conversations was necessarily shouted through the closed front door, while she struggled to think of a convincing explanation for her reluctance to open it.

* * *

Despite her behaviour in the mating season, I remained uncertain about Mumble’s possible reactions to other owls in the longer term, and I thought that the easiest way to check this out without taking risks was to drive her down to Water Farm for a weekend and introduce her to the docile Wol. So one Saturday morning I packed my kit, and put the transit basket open on the kitchen table. Mumble had been fairly listless that morning; now she took one look, then jumped into the basket of her own accord. Once I got down to the basement garage and inside the car I put the basket down in the plastic-lined rear cargo area and opened it. I noted that she emerged with a slit-eyed, stoned expression, and made her way up to my shoulder with a kind of blind determination. (By day, tawnies are hardwired by Nature to sit beside things, so my shoulder and head were doing the job of the base of a roosting branch and the tree trunk next to it.)