The Moth Snowstorm: Nature and Joy (6 page)

For holding us together in the midst of all this, I realise now, Mary and Gordon were beyond praise. But even more than the first time, John could not bear it. He could not bear Norah’s disappearance. He was driven hysterical with upset, quite literally: he began to scream in the street. He screamed at the
prospect of her going away again, screamed after she had gone, and screamed that Jesus didn’t love him, and the local children began to call him ‘the mad boy’ – I once actually heard two girls on rollerskates rattle past our front gate, one saying to the other, ‘that’s the house where the mad boy lives’.

Once again, I was indifferent. But the indifference was perhaps not quite so innocent now. For although there were clearly powerful psychological mechanisms holding sway over my feelings, something unsavoury had begun to creep in: a sense of embarrassment. As I got older I grew ashamed of John, and far from trying to assuage his distress, or even be his occasional comforter, I regarded him as an embarrassing encumbrance (it was the very opposite of ‘He ain’t heavy, he’s my brother’; as far as I was concerned, he weighed a ton). I grew ashamed of my mother, too, for aspects of her behaviour which were bizarre and disturbing; and to this day I am torn between remorse at the way I deliberately turned away and did not support them, and anger that I should feel any such guilt, and talking about it in the formal setting, in the quiet room, trying to understand it all, long after both were dead, I suddenly burst out that I thought that they formed the Mad Club, which I was excluded from, and they excluded me because I wanted to be normal and
why was that wrong
?

So I turned my back on the acute distress of my mother and my brother; I resolutely looked away, pretended everything was fine, seized hold of normality and got on with life, and life became very much about nature, and birds in particular. Sixty years ago many young schoolboys in Britain, following a tradition no doubt centuries old, found birds a ready fascination, not least for their eggs, which were then being avidly collected (although the practice had just been formally made illegal, in 1954). I collected them myself, beshrew my soul, and I remember clearly a conversation between a group of nine-year-olds about the appearance of a wood-pigeon’s egg, something quite
unimaginable today. Lots of boys collected butterflies too, and even moths – scrawny little pipsqueaks were familiar with yellow underwings and cinnabars and five-spot burnets (although wild flowers were for girls) – but it was birds that were the bigger part of what we now call youth culture, perhaps as much as computer games are today. With natural abundance still flourishing, birds were all around us, even in the suburbs – every day the lawn and the rear hawthorn hedge at Norbury Close were swarming with house sparrows and tree sparrows, hedge sparrows and starlings, blue tits and great tits, blackbirds and song thrushes, robins and wrens – and so an interest in them was natural; but I imagine in most cases a real enthusiasm needed something specific to spark it, and in my own case it was tea cards.

Tea cards were the junior relatives of cigarette cards, those small portraits, usually at first of sporting celebrities such as cricketers in Britain and baseball players in America, which from the late nineteenth century onwards began to be given away in cigarette packets by tobacco companies as a marketing attraction. Forming collectable sets of twenty-five or fifty, they proved enormously popular, and eventually thousands of different sets were issued and the subject matter expanded far beyond sportsmen to everything from cars to cathedrals, from fishes to flags of the world. Gradually the marketing wheeze spread from cigarettes to other popular purchases such as, in America, chewing gum, and in Britain, tea. In the post-war years all Britain’s major tea companies were giving cards away in their packets, the most energetic being Brooke Bond with its PG Tips (which eventually became the leading tea brand in the country thanks to its popular advertising campaign featuring chimpanzees dressed in human clothes and having a tea party, which half a century ago was thought of as a real rib-tickler).

Brooke Bond’s cards were very popular, because the company not only produced numerous different sets of them but also went to the trouble of providing simple but appealing and
extensively captioned albums to hold each set, attractively priced at 6d, or as we used to say in those pre-decimal currency days, sixpence (or, as we also used to say, a tanner). We took PG Tips in our house, and the cards in the set which caught my eye began to tumble out of the packets from 1958, when I was eleven. It was called Bird Portraits, it was a series of bird paintings by somebody called C. F. Tunnicliffe, and my interest was sparked immediately by the first one I laid eyes on: the stone-chat. It was dazzling. The brightness, the colours, the
life
of the image, were magnificent. Here was a bird, perched atop a sprig of yellow flowering gorse, which was the very acme of alertness, displaying a black head and contrasting white collar with a breast of a wonderful fiery orange. It was a striking contrast not only with the birds on the lawn at Norbury Close, which, pleasing though they were, tended to be a tad on the toneless side, but also with the species I had been gazing at in
The Observer’s Book of Birds
.

It confused and disappointed me, this book, especially after the youthful reverence I had accorded
The Observer’s Book of Butterflies
. Both were early volumes in the long series of
Observer’s
books produced by Frederick Warne & Co., the publishing house which had given Beatrix Potter and Peter Rabbit to the world. (
Birds
was the first, in 1937, and
Butterflies
the third, in 1938;
Wild Flowers
came in between.) They were pleasing pocket-sized handbooks on wildlife and hobbies and sports, on ferns and fungi, on coins and cricket, compact and inexpensive at five shillings each (or five bob, as we further used to say, in pre-decimal days); they were to delight three generations of British children, and adults as well, with the ninety-eighth and final title,
The Observer’s Book of Opera
, appearing in 1982.

With a text written by Miss S. Vere Benson, a doughty campaigner who had founded the Bird Lover’s League in 1923,
The Observer’s Book of Birds
was fine as a mini-handbook, as a proto-field-guide, as far as factual information went; the problem
was its illustrations, which were paintings. Some of them were excellent, even memorable, but some were rather weird, not seeming quite realistic (and there was no artist information). I did not understand why until years later when, in common with other nature-loving bibliophiles, I began to collect and research the series, many of which could still be picked up cheaply in junk shops, and I learned that Frederick Warne & Co. had owned the rights to numerous sets of wildlife illustrations from Victorian times onwards, and had simply reused them for the
Observer’s
books.

The ones for the birds volume were taken from a celebrated and sumptuous collection of more than four hundred bird paintings, published from 1885 to 1897 in seven volumes and still sought after today, entitled
Coloured Figures of the Birds of the British Islands
, which was put together by the 4th Baron Lilford, a birding nobleman who was the long-time president of the British Ornithological Union (and the man who, on his estate in Northamptonshire, introduced into Britain the bird of the goddess Athena, the little owl). Lord Lilford brought three artists together for
Coloured Figures
: a Scot, Archibald Thorburn, and an Englishman, George Edward Lodge, both only twenty-six (the work was to make their reputations); and a Dutchman, John Gerrard Keulemans, who was in his forties. Thorburn went on to become one of the greatest of all bird artists, now residing without doubt on the upper slopes of that mountain on whose summit we place John James Audubon; Lodge is also greatly esteemed, if not to the level of his Scottish contemporary. The case of Keulemans is more problematic. An authoritative modern history of wildlife art refers to his output as ‘workmanlike’, and I eventually discovered that the paintings I found unconvincing in
The Observer’s Book of Birds
, at the age of nine or ten, came from his brush. They were just not true to life. It troubled me. Take the yellow wagtail. In the flesh it is the epitome of the dainty. In Keulemans’ image, it was a great fat lump. The pied
wagtail was no better. But the one which really confused me was the willow warbler, which is the size of a man’s thumb or smaller, but which, thanks to John Gerrard Keulemans’ interpretation, I was unshakeably convinced, for an inordinate amount of my young childhood, was two and a half feet long.

There was nothing confusing about Tunnicliffe’s willow warbler. It fell out of the tea packet neat and tight and slick, like the real bird; he had caught it, on a branch of willow catkins, in mid movement, in the jerky incessant gleaning of tiny insects off twigs and leaves. (And seen
from above
, which I now think is just so clever and original.) As the McCarthy family, like the rest of Britain, lapped up its PG Tips, image after image came out of the packets to surprise and delight (and of course, to be collected). They were instantly striking, not only for the vibrancy of their colour, which was often exquisite, but also for the boldness of their presentation: since the small size of the cards meant the space available was very limited, Tunnicliffe made the image fill the frame and often it did so dramatically, the gannet plunging, the teal springing, the barn owl pouncing, the sedge warbler singing, the pied flycatcher spreading its wings in a sort of flycatching ecstasy. Some images, like the bullfinch surrounded by apple blossom, the goldfinch amidst thistledown, or the water rail emerging cautiously from the vegetation next to a clump of marsh marigolds, were calmer, but breathtaking in their beauty. They were charming miniatures, every one.

Today, of course, I am fully aware of Charles Tunnicliffe and his achievement. I share the opinion of many that he is the pre-eminent British bird artist of the mid twentieth century, and certainly, his
Shorelands Summer Diary
, filled with sketches as well as paintings of the wildlife around his home in Anglesey, is one of the loveliest books on the natural world ever produced. But back then, at the age of eleven, I had no notion of artistic achievement. I neither knew nor cared who C. F. Tunnicliffe was. All I cared about was this pageant of marvellous birds that
he was producing and I was collecting: I wanted to see them properly, to set eyes on them for myself in real life, and I began to search for them, on foot and on the bike I had been given for my eleventh birthday, in the lanes and fields and woods of the Wirral.

Birkenhead, the town where I was born, and Bebington, its suburb where I grew up, not only sit across the River Mersey from Liverpool; they sit on a peninsula. Fifteen miles long by seven wide, the Wirral has a river on each side and the sea at its end: the Mersey to its east, the River Dee to the west, and the Irish Sea to the north. When I was a boy, it had since time immemorial been part of Cheshire, and at its base was Chester, Cheshire’s county town, where nearly two millennia ago, I was proud to learn, the Twentieth Legion,
Valeria Victrix
, the Conquering Valerian, with its badge of a wild boar, built their camp on the Dee, on the right bank of the river, which they called Deva. (They were there for more than three hundred and fifty years until the day came, probably in ad 410 with Rome collapsing, that they just upped and left, and the American poet Stephen Vincent Benét, Hemingway’s contemporary – he of the wonderful ‘I have fallen in love with American names’ – wrote a chilling short story imagining the legion’s final departure from Chester and its march south, as its world began to disintegrate.)

History touched the Wirral several times after the Romans decamped, most notably in ad 937 when Æthelstan, the first king of England, defeated the combined army of the Vikings and the Scots in the greatest clash of arms the Anglo-Saxon world ever saw (before the fateful encounter at Hastings): the Battle of Brunanburh, which was almost certainly fought at Bromborough, a part of Bebington. In the fourteenth century the poet of
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
had Gawain ride through ‘the wilderness of Wirral’; in the eighteenth century Emma Hamilton, known to history as Nelson’s squeeze, grew up in the Wirral village of Ness. But it was the nineteenth
century which made the greatest mark on the peninsula, as its eastern, Mersey edge became heavily industrialised and Birkenhead, in 1800 just a small village with a ruined priory, swelled to become a major shipbuilding town, with by 1900 a population of 110,000 (and more than 140,000 when I was born, half a century on).

This development gave my Wirral its character. It made it somewhere, like the head of Kipling’s Kim, with two separate sides; it intensified the difference natural geography already provided in the two rivers, which are quite opposite in temper. The Mersey on the east narrows to a bottleneck between Liverpool and Birkenhead, so it is full of deep water, the reason for Liverpool being one of the world’s premier ports; the Dee, however, on the west, opens out into a giant funnel-shaped estuary of salt-marshes and mudflats. Nineteenth-century industrialisation merely exacerbated this contrast. The eastern side of the Wirral, my side, became urban, scruffy, cramped and impoverished, looking naturally across the Mersey’s ship-jostling waters to Liverpool’s famous cityscape, to its docks and factories and terraced streets; but the western side, looking out across the Dee and its estuary to the mountains of Wales, remained rural, unspoiled, desirable and affluent, studded with pretty sandstone villages like Burton and Parkgate and Caldy. The distinction persists, as a striking piece of symbolic social geography, and I am perennially surprised that no one seems yet to have written the defining Wirral novel of Terry, shall we say, the working-class lad from the Mersey side of the peninsula, falling in love with Tamsin, the upper-class girl from the Dee side; perhaps I have missed it. But in my own life, I was indeed drawn as a teenager from the one side to the other, although not for social or romantic reasons.