2008 - The Bearded Tit

TO BE PROOFREAD

Title:

The Bearded Tit: A love story with feathers

Author:

Rory McGrath

Year:

2008

Synopsis:

‘The Bearded Tit’ is Rory McGrath’s story of life among birds—from a Cornish boyhood wandering gorse-tipped cliffs listening to the song of the yellowhammer with his imaginary girlfriend, or drawing gravity-defying jackdaws in class when he should have been applying himself to physics, to quoting the Latin names of birds to give himself a fighting chance of a future with JJ—the most beautiful girl he had ever seen. As an adult, or what passes for one, Rory recounts becoming a card-carrying birdwatcher, observing his first skylark—peerless king of the summer sky—while stoned; his repeatedly failed attempts to get up at the crack of dawn like the real twitchers; and his flawed bid to educate his utterly unreconstructed drinking mate Danny in the ways of birding. Rory’s tale is a thoroughly educational, occasionally lyrical and highly amusing romp through the hidden byways of birdwatching and, more importantly, a love story you’ll never forget.

Many thanks to both of you.

There is nothing quite like the sentence ‘And this is a true story’ to make you instantly doubt all that you are about to hear. And ‘This is no word of a lie’ invariably precedes a tale of palpable mendacity. ‘I kid you not, hand on heart’, you just
know
heralds a pile of arrant bullshit. With all this foremost in my mind, I nervously say to you now that what follows is a true story.

Hand on heart. Hand on heart.

Some of it anyway.

A lot of this happened a long time ago. Strange, is it not, that most of the things that happen in our life seem to happen in the past?

This is a love story; well, some of it is a love story.

It is a love story with, and without, feathers.

It is no ordinary love story, though. It has ‘boy meets girl’ and ‘girl meets boy’ elements to it, but, as far as I know, it is the only love story in which the scientific name for a Caspian snowcock plays a significant part.

The truth is that I have only recently become interested in birdwatching in a truly dedicated way: six or seven years maybe. But I realized, as I came to write this book, that birds have been with me all the time, singing in the background of my growing up, hovering over key events of my past and shitting, from time to time, on the windscreen of my life.

I hope you find in these pages something to titillate you, tickle your fancy, amuse you, inform you, irritate you or perhaps even offend you.

I hope you like it, of course, but if you do not, if you think it’s a piece of garbage, if you think it’s the worst book you’ve ever read and a total waste of money, just go out and watch a kestrel for a few moments and you will glimpse the beauty and the joy of the world, the enormity of nature, the brush-strokes of God and you will realize how microscopic and insignificant you are in the history of the universe…And, at least, you’ll be off your arse for five minutes and out in the fresh air.

L
izards don’t scream with pain. They don’t have the mechanisms for making noise. They can’t purr or growl or bark or sing. The one we were watching was not screaming. It should have been. Its mouth gaped dumbly. Its eyes were blank. Its claws twitched and its tail flicked occasionally from side to side. We knew it was in pain though. It must have been.

It was impaled on a metal spike. The point of which was freshly and moistly red.

I felt scared.

Not for the lizard; not for me; but for the girl next to me. What did she make of this? She, who seemed to be made for compassion and humanity. Made
from
compassion and humanity, even. The girl whose eyes were green, bottomless pools of love and sympathy.

Would she be appalled by this?

And the lizard was not alone. A few inches further along the fence, a grasshopper was stuck on a wire barb.

Perched next to it was the bird.

A beautiful, cleanly marked grey and white bird with black wings. Its bill broad and heavy with a fine hook on the end. A bandit’s black mask failing to conceal two dark eyes, lively with mischief.

The great grey shrike.

The butcher bird.

Lanius excubitor
according to the textbooks.
Lanius
from a Latin word
lanio
, which means ‘to mangle, tear, rip or mutilate’.

Like an
excubitor
—that is, a vigilante or sentinel—this bird perches high up on branches or telegraph wires alert to any movement on the ground: an insect, maybe, or a reptile or small mammal. Whichever, it will soon disappear in a feathery flurry of black and white death. The shrike will eat it there or take it off to its ‘larder’, where it will be kept for later, stuck on a thorn or a spike.

I turned to the girl. ‘Pretty gruesome, eh?’

She looked surprised.

‘Why gruesome? It’s only doing what a shrike does best.’

‘Lizard-torturing?’

‘What a very human interpretation. All it’s doing is being a shrike. In fact, when it comes to being a shrike, you can’t beat a shrike. I think it’s quite impressive.’

Her matter-of-factness was scary.

‘You don’t like it, though, do you?’

She looked at me with a puzzled expression. ‘There’s nothing to like. Or dislike. It’s nature. You’re being too human.’

Was this a bad thing, I thought?

‘Sorry, I was born human.’

She tutted.

‘My parents were human. In fact, there’ve been humans in our family for generations. Mind you, there’s always been a question mark over my great-uncle Daisy.’

She was ignoring me. ‘Listen, nature is neither likeable nor dislikeable. Nature is just…er, well, natural.’

And so was she. So natural. And so wise. That was scary.

And I was totally in love with her.

That was scary too.

Falling From The Nest

T
he seventies rose, ashes-like, from the phoenix of the sixties. With the ‘midi’ replacing the ‘mini’, and the ‘maxi’ replacing ‘the midi’, hemlines dropped like the shutters being pulled down on the age of carefree hedonism. I was eighteen, the age when you are the universe and the universe is you. The real world happened in an incoherent blur of meaningless names, unknown places and vague headlines. The narcissism of being an adolescent shielded me from the constant, grey drizzle of strikes, the Yom Kippur war, three-day weeks, power cuts, inflation, Nixon’s impeachment and the
Watership Down
scandal. It was a low, nondescript and dispirited decade with the bleak tawdriness of ‘glam-rock’ as its embarrassing background music.

They were a decade-long morning-after headache, but, significantly, they were also the most formative years of my life.

In fashion, hair was huge and good taste was tiny. I don’t think the phrase ‘big hair’ existed then, but it was the best way to describe mine: its curliness meant that it grew outwards rather than down. All the clothes then were made of too much material: three·piece suits, double-breasted jackets, wide ties and expanses of lapel.

And so in 1974, dressed in a dark maroon version of one such fabric nightmare, I arrived, virginal and awkward, in Cambridge to study modern languages: Spanish and French. I was to attend a college called Emmanuel.

The cinema across the road was showing
Emmanuelle
. It seemed only appropriate that I should go and see it. Nine times in the first week, in fact. I saw it so often that for years afterwards I was terrified of bumping into Sylvia Kristel in the street in case she recognized me from the end seat of row W. That said, it was the only meaningful relationship I had in my first year; a sorry state of affairs that I intended to rectify at the beginning of my second.

It was 1975, a few days before the official start of the new academic year, and a friend of mine, Richard McShee, and I were discussing the lamentable condition of our love-lives over a coffee in the market square.

‘Too many blokes, Mack. The odds are stacked against us,’ I said.

He agreed. ‘Six male students to one female student, apparendy.’

‘She’s not complaining though!’ I said with half-hearted humour, realizing that comments like that magnified, rather than relieved, the bleakness of our situation.

A pigeon landed on the table and pecked at Mack’s sandwich. I attempted to punch it and missed.

‘Oi, that’s not nice!’

‘Bloody things,’ I said. ‘Flying rats, you know.’

‘Well, actually,’ said Mack, reminding me that he was studying zoology, ‘they’re more like flying reptiles. Birds are descended from reptiles, not mammals. The feather is an evolution of the scale.’

‘No shit!’

‘Plenty of shit actually,’ Mack was pleased with this in a ‘science student makes joke—hold the front page’ sort of way.

I reminded him of our agenda. ‘Girls, Mackie!’

‘But you’ve no need to complain about lack of women, Ror. You had no problems last year!’

This came as big news to me.

‘Didn’t I?’

‘Yes, you had loads of girls. In fact, we didn’t think it was fair. You should have shared them round.’

I cast my mind back over the previous twelve months and struggled to think of a single romantic or sexual episode that included another person. Apart from Sylvia Kristel.

‘Who were you thinking of?’

‘That lovely waitress from the college canteen. With the amazing red hair. The South African one.’

Oh yes, Brigid. What a nightmare that was! And I think I speak for both of us…

Brigid served dinner in what was laughingly called Formal Hall. First-years had to attend dinner in Formal Hall for at least the first term. You had to wear a gown. An academic gown, of course, not an evening dress. (Though I do recall a chap called Adrian who turned up once in a glamorous, velvet number with a daring neckline and a slit up the side. I think he now works in children’s television.)

Each evening, an undergraduate scholar was chosen by the senior tutor to read a Latin grace before the meal. If he did it well enough he was given half a cider in a pewter tankard—if Rex the Chaplain hadn’t already necked it. I think by some ancient college law the scholar could opt for a brass farthing or a bale of hay instead of the cider, though I don’t recall anyone taking this up.

The young South African waitress did look stunning with her huge blaze of red hair and breasts that could only be described as massive and freckly. And to me, back in those innocent days, quite alarming.

‘Enjoy your dinner, guys.’ This was a refreshingly friendly comment. The English waitresses could never quite put a plate on the table without some grunt or hand gesture which seemed to say, ‘Don’t know why
I’m
serving
you
. You’re no better than me. Just coz you’ve read a few books and talk posh.’

‘What’s your name?’ I asked.

‘Me? I’m Brigid. What’s yours?’

‘Rory.’

‘Rory? That’s a bit queer, isn’t it?’

The downside was that she had an impeccably unpleasant accent, even by South African standards.

‘Hey, I love your accent!’ I said. ‘Where are you from?’

‘Guess!’

‘The moon?’

‘No, but thanks for not saying Australia. I really hate that. Everyone says Australia. Aussies make me puke.’

A spunky girl but with real possibilities if you could just deal with the voice.

After a few formal dinners of casual banter with the golden Boer, I ended up meeting her after her shift in the pub across the road, where I gradually became aware of subtle cultural differences. I brought the drinks, a pint of Guinness and a dry white wine, over to our table. She tucked into the Guinness. I noticed she had taken a packet of cigarettes out of her handbag and put them on the table in front of her.

‘Cheers,’ I said and we clinked glasses. Things were going well.

‘I’d love a cigarette,’ she said impatiently.

‘Go ahead. Don’t mind me!’

She sighed deeply and raised her eyes to heaven.

‘I said, I’d love a cigarette.’

‘By all means. You just go right ahead.’

She fixed me with her eyes. ‘The packet’s on the table!’

I looked at the cigarettes and then back at her and realized I was supposed to open the packet and offer it to her.

‘Oh sorry!’ This I duly did. She didn’t take one. She looked at me with contempt. I was puzzled.

‘Well, light one for me then. What’s wrong with you?’

Clearly South African girls were used to a higher degree of chivalry from their menfolk than I would have expected. I struck a match and put it to the cigarette I was holding between my index and middle ringers. Never having smoked in my life, it did not occur to me that you had to put the object in your mouth and suck on it to ignite it.

‘Stick it in your mouth, you moron!’

The coughing stopped eventually. With the help of most of Brigid’s Guinness, the scorched patch of my throat settled down and I was able to manage a rudimentary form of speech.

Despite this setback, we were back in my room at midnight and snogging was under way.

‘Mmm, this is good,’ she said encouragingly, adding, with mock regret, ‘I’m afraid we’re not going to get much sleep tonight, babe.’

Snogging resumed. Hands and arms acquired a life of their own. Brigid’s lively and adventurous tongue seemed engaged in licking my brain clean.

So this was it then. The Games had commenced. It was going to happen at last. But something troubled me. Yes, I was sexually frustrated. Yes, I was a virgin. Yes, these were both personal features I wished to change. But I was more nervous than expected. When I had got this far with girls in the past, I knew that something would stop us. ‘I’ve got to go home!’ or ‘My parents’ll be back soon’ or ‘I’m not on the pill’ or ‘What if the bus conductor comes up?’ It was easy for me, in those circumstances, to be the one in the driving seat. To be the keen one, the more insistent one, the pesterer. It was clear I wouldn’t actually have to ‘do it’, to ‘perform’.