I was a lazy child. So lazy, in fact, that in other circumstances I might have had a scale of laziness named after me, against which other, less indolent children could be measured.
Exhibit A: Holiday Diary, 1975. You know the drill, I’m sure. They weren’t obligatory, but a prize of some sort was no doubt dangled as incentive.
I can’t remember exactly how much I wrote, but I do remember writing most of it in a splather on the last day of the holidays, and my entries for two consecutive days in late August in particular stick in the mind.
August 28th
Today was a very boring day and nothing happened at all.
August 29th
Today was another very boring day and nothing happened.
I was, if nothing else, concise.
While others (slimy swots, chiz chiz) wrote swathes of gleaming prose, adorned with witty cartoons, accomplished pencil drawings and oh-so-mature assessments of their relationships with their parents, I left it to the last minute, trotted out as little as I thought I could get away with, then retreated to my shell for my 58th reread of Asterix and Cleopatra.
It was half term last week. Let the following account stand as a rebuke to my lackadaisical ten-year-old self.
I went for a walk on the local common at dusk, an endeavour only marred by the moment when a drooling miniature Cerberus with teeth the size of the Washington Monument appeared from nowhere and ripped out a chunk of my leg.
I swore loudly and repeatedly at a man.
I listened with incredulity as the man explained that the dog didn’t do that kind of thing ‘very often’.
I swore loudly and repeatedly at a man again.
I hoped against hope that a hospital visit would be unnecessary.
I heeded the advice of everyone, from random Twitterfolk to actual professional doctors, and went to hospital.
I braced myself for a three-hour wait.
When they called my name after barely half an hour, I managed not to shout ‘Yes! Get in!’, a reaction that might easily have resulted in a savaging from my fellow out-patients that would have put Cerberette’s ministrations in the shade.
I was a very good boy and I didn’t cry.
All the above happened on Sunday, the first day of half term.
Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday were very boring, and nothing happened at all.
On Thursday I went with my family for a mini-break. Suffolk. Flat, frosty, big sky. Everything you’d want for three February days away from grime, away from noise, away from London. There’s grime and noise in the countryside too, but of the kind welcomed by city dwellers. A whiff of slurry, smelled once, is preferable to the pervasive smog we live and breathe; and I’ll always prefer the combative caw and graw of a rookery, or the ‘two-finger typing’ alarm call of a fieldfare, to the relentless mechanical grind of rush-hour traffic.
On the whole, I behaved well in Suffolk. I didn’t force my family to go birding from dawn to dusk every day. This was, believe me, a noble and notable sacrifice. But I did make them go to Minsmere, because forty thousand starlings are not to be missed.
We stood with a hundred or so other people as the nightly miracle unfolded before us. A billowing cloud of birds, each an individual in its own right, with starlingy dreams and aspirations, but subsumed into the greater whole for a performance of such drama, such showiness, that we’re tempted to assume they put it all on for our benefit. They swept across the huge sky, left to right and back again, framed against the fading light of day, Sizewell nuclear power station in the background only adding to the theatricality of the sight. They swelled, full of menace, the play of light and dark transforming them into a bulbous cloud of doom. For an instant they took on the shape of a whale, an extraordinary Rorschachian moment of collective imagination. Then a split appeared two-thirds of the way up, a kernel of panic, visible even from afar, disrupting the fluid movements for a second and giving the seething mass a hint of tornado.
Peregrine.
I focused my binoculars on the top group, watching the fluid, tessellating horde sweep back and forth. The peregrine, no doubt thinking that the sheer number of starlings would make for easy pickings, tracked them patiently, chose its moment, swooped. It missed once, twice, three times, before plunging deep into the throng and coming away with a single prize.
The light took on the pinkish shades of approaching dusk, a hint of yellow, and suddenly it was three shades darker. From the north came a different shape, disrupting the theatre, seemingly oblivious, only wanting to get to their roosting spot and bed down for the night. Fourteen Bewick’s swans, a magnificent squadron, all the way from the Russian tundra to winter somewhere more congenial. They took me away from the starlings for a few seconds, and then an instinct told me to look back. The massive group, now in the more or less regular form of a huge speech bubble, centred their activities over the expanse of reeds to our right. They circled for a minute or two, and then, miraculously unanimous, they flopped down, settling on the reed bed like an aired duvet on a double bed. An extended moment of squabbling, tetchy children not settling down after lights out, then silence. Walk past a minute later and you wouldn’t have known there was anything there.
We went back to the cottage and ate fish and chips and watched The Sting. Friday night, done right.
I rose before dawn the next day and drove back to Minsmere, hoping to see the starlings wake up and fly back to their constituencies, but there was no sign of them, and all I heard was the distant roaring of the sea as I trudged round the empty reserve to the East Hide, where, right in front of me, and to the exclusion of all else, the fourteen Bewick’s swans from the night before had an almighty fracas, squabbling and honking. Then, on a signal from one of them, or perhaps because that was what all the honking was about, they splashed and flapped and rose as one, and banked away and round and off, their pre-dawn majesty fully justifying the early start.
On the way back to the cottage, fighting off thoughts of bacon butties and gallons of coffee, and impelled by nothing more than an innate sense that it was something I should do, I glanced across to the field on my left. A man, all alone save a couple of disinterested rooks, walked slowly across the field. He was concentrating hard, making sweeping motions in front of him – left, right, left, right, slowly and steadily does it – with what seemed like a long stick. Three years ago I might have laughed, knowing, superior. But now I know better.
I know better, thanks to Mackenzie Crook and Toby Jones and The Unthanks and all those who played a part in the most delightful and perfect television series of, well, pretty much ever. Now I know to call them detectorists, not detectors; and now I know, from the hours of happiness my own ‘not-normal’ hobby has brought me, that we mock the enthusiasms of others at our peril.
There’s no such thing as normal. And quite right too.
In honour of which, on the last day, after cleaning the cottage and saying goodbye to the resident (and really very noisy) song thrush, we drove to the Norfolk and Suffolk Aviation Museum, and we looked at planes and bits of planes and models of planes and photos of planes and much more besides, and when we’d been through both hangars and marvelled at the wealth of material lovingly collected by keen volunteers, when I’d been struck by the different manifestations of pure enthusiasm, when I’d looked at perfect wooden models of a hundred and more different planes that meant as much to me as a collection of ring pulls, but realised that if it had been a hundred different stuffed birds I’d have known exactly which was which, when I’d realised how little difference there is between a birder and a plane spotter and a detectorist – when I’d done all that, I went through the little shop and into a back room filled with things. Everyday things, the minutiae of lives, assembled by enthusiastic people with an understanding of the importance of telling the stories of those who came before. There were tobacco tins, posters, billiards trophies, medals, maps, uniforms, clocks, photographs, badges, coffee cups, cheap plastic jewellery, toy cars, ration books and myriad other little items, so easily consigned to the attic or dustbin.
In amongst all this, catching my eye for no particular reason, was a small cabinet. In the cabinet, presented with loving symmetry, a series of documents. A letter from an airman to his wife. Neat cursive script, light blue ink.
‘Dear Peg, today was cold again. I miss you.’
Next to it, another letter.
‘Dearest Peg, this is the last letter, the one I hope you won’t have to read. If you do, know that I loved you with all my heart.’
Beneath this, another. Formal, typewritten.
‘Dear Mrs. Howe, It is with great regret…’
And now I have an image of a civil servant, hunched over a typewriter in a cold room. Dark suit, cigarette, cold coffee. Typing and typing and typing, the same message over and over again.
‘Dear Mrs. Smith, It is with great regret…’
‘…your husband was declared missing, presumed dead…’
‘…gave his life in the line of duty…’
I read the letters to the end and wandered back through the little shop, thinking of sacrifice and duty and love and the fragility of life, and I went to the loo and Oliver bought a Spitfire badge, and a robin sang free jazz to the world, as did its forebears before it, and then, carefully, I drove us home.
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