Rooks, maybe,or Loss

We started talking about rooks. He had just moved in with a woman who lived below the rookery, where the nests are built high in the poplars around the goosepool, and the celandines below are spattered with enough guano to alter the ecology. He wasn’t that keen, but she was. He didn’t like the noise they made in the spring mornings, but if he wanted her the rooks came too.

Country people have always felt ambivalent about rooks. Were they the sound effect in radio plays that said ‘English country churchyard’, or were they a nuisance that woke you too early in the morning? Were they good because they ate leatherjackets, or bad because they ate seeds, or irritatingly confusing because they did both? In short, were you allowed to shoot them?

When I was a nasty small boy I wanted a rook’s egg for my collection, like every nasty small boy, but we didn’t dare to climb so high. Only Victor the gypsy boy was mad enough to dare, and he was too busy with his family collecting more saleable things. Some country people said rook pie was good, if you got them young enough, and others said it was nasty. To get them young enough you shot them when they were venturing out of the nest onto nearby branches to exercise their wings, so that they never got to fly properly. I hope such rook pies were very nasty.

I started telling your man a bit about rooks. I have to be careful, I can get a bit informative about this sort of thing, but I was trying to reassure him that the rooks wouldn’t be noisy in the mornings for much longer.

This rookery could have been there for a hundred years or more, but the noisy clamour (that led our explorers to call all noisy colonies of seals or penguins ‘rookeries’) only happens when they are nesting. During the rest of the year they leave their foraging in the fields to convene briefly at the rookery every evening for mysterious social purposes and then just as it is almost dark they all fly off to a secret roosting place. I have watched this happen on many frosty nights at a rookery in Radnorshire, where they sneak off furtively to roost in a plantation up on the Radnor Forest. I meant to follow them, but somehow never did. Another huge roost fascinated me as a child. The rooks would fly out every morning, always accompanied by jackdaws, and gradually spread out and split into separate groups to forage in small parties. If you saw them in a tree they always perched in pairs.

My neighbour seemed reassured to hear that the rooks would not be so noisy as soon as the young rooks had fledged, and I walked back from the pub to my cottage just as the first star was showing. The rooks were settling into the wood behind my house to roost. I had never known them do this, and I began to wonder if I had not noticed it before, or whether, teaching the year’s new rooks about roosting, they had chosen my trees as a new roost. Had they chosen a new roost for some reason, or was this just a starter roost while they socialised their youngsters? I wanted my trees to have been chosen by the rooks.

So the next night I sat in my garden to wait for them. I looked forward to their company, and as I walked to my favourite bench I looked for other signs of life. My garden is made for wildlife, and should be what I am going to call an oasis because I can’t be arsed to think of a more original way of saying it. That’s what’s so good about a cliché – you reach for it and slot it in and off you go. But the thing about an oasis is, if there is a desert all around, what survives to come to drink the waters?

I saw three caterpillars on a rose tree by the bench. I didn’t see them at first, but I noticed where the leaves had been cut away leaving only their ribs and three caterpillars, green as the ribs, pretending to be ribs when they saw me coming. I wondered if a bird’s way of discovering tasty caterpillar snacks involved this kind of reasoning. It doesn’t do to underestimate such creatures.

Once on the bench all was still. I was reading, and looking at my house, with a light on but no-one at home, and the old Bramley tree where the apples were just starting to colour, feeling alone in a garden with no signs of life. As I read I was hoping my stillness might help me to see some living creature, and sure enough a flutter of wings and a robin sat in the plum tree, and then flew to the chestnut paling, and then sat on the bench beside me, looked at me askance with a deep black eye, and flew off.

I continued reading. A rare book of love and loneliness, labouring and melancholy and song and exile.  And particularly loss. I wished I could write like it, although I knew I could only write what brewed in my own head, just as Timothy O’Grady* could only write what brewed in his:

‘What was she like? She was not like an animal or a colour. She was not like the sky, or weather, or a kind of food or stone. She was like a forest. Things unknown to her lived and changed inside. The light never stopped moving. The age of the forest and its new growth. She could enclose you. Her silence. The wind could not touch you. She was a woman. There was no part of her that was less, her step when turning a corner, her voice when close to you, her rings, her touch, her look when walking. I try to bring her here. Her rosary is here, her dress with the bluebells, the photographs. Her leg narrows in a long line from the knee. Her skin is the temperature of new bread. It glows a little like polished wood around her shoulders from her time in the sun. If she lifts her shoulders when explaining something the bones in her neck make hollows. The skin has a smell, of sun, of the bed and of lavender. Her laughter comes not from her throat but from within her centre. I see the sweep of her lines, the patterns in her skin, her movements. I follow them. I am enclosed within her….’

I look up from the book, gifted feelings of loss and loneliness and love, evoked so lightly, not sure if they are welcome.  It is dark enough for bats, and one appears, following a route between the apple and the cherry tree, off round the house and under the yew tree by the well. This is only the second time I have seen bats here this year, though I rebuilt the roof to welcome them. I haven’t seen anything else all evening in my oasis. No thrush, no wren, no bluetit even, no blackbird making the nightly roosting call. I’m glad when a crow calls behind the rooky wood. I sit there as it gets darker, hoping the rooks will come to roost, hoping to enjoy their presence in the winter evenings. I wait until it is dark, but they do not come. I go into the house so that someone will be at home.

·       I Could Read the Sky, by Timothy O’Grady, with photographs by Steve Pyke, 1997, The Harvill Press.