I was lying in bed with the measles with the curtains drawn and the swallows churring and twittering their quiet conversations perched side by side on the gutter in the sunshine, just outside the window.
It was thought that was the way to deal with mumps, and measles, and chicken pox, and scarlet fever and German measles, the childhood illnesses that always seemed to strike in summer.
Outside, the sun was shimmering the perry pear orchard, where the little owls hooted and the green woodpeckers yaffled. Inside, the bed was a mess of twisted sheets and blankets, and books.
Down in Dadnor Bottoms above the badger setts the quists were cooing their hot-summer-afternoon song, perched jealously together in the cool chestnut trees.
There were larks and lapwings and yellow hammers out there, and greenfinches skirling in the yew trees, but only the swallows conversed on the gutter outside my window as I lay in bed with the lemon barley water on the sideboard.
They found us every year, those that survived the journey south and back. Like the sparrows and the bats, they liked our barns and wain houses, and when they came back again they brought the summer. They had been to Africa, flocked high over Gibraltar, and come back to hawk for flies in the cow pasture as if they had never been away, like the cuckoos that laid their eggs in the nests of the hedge sparrows. (They spied on them from their hides up in the elm trees as carefully as ornithologists).
The swallows sat on the wires together, and small groups landed to mix mud to build their nests. They were as blue as the steel of a gun barrel, and their bibs as red as drying blood. Their tails trailed long streamers as they scooped flies out of the air, and the wagtails bobbed and dipped and the woodpeckers flew in wave-forms between anthills out in the orchard. The swallows amicably shared their common rights over the insects in the air around them, and their talk on the wires was not the aggressive singing of the blackbirds, warning rivals. They perched side by side, birds from the same colony, and it sounded like talk as surely as did the kronking of ravens on the hilltop above the deer park. Their swallow language seemed full of confidences and reassurances. Like dolphins twittering their names, they needed no more of conversation than to say ‘here we are, you and me, on the wires above the stable yard where we hatched last year. Here we are, alive and in the sunshine’. Perhaps they were not conscious that they were conscious, but they watched everything with their black eyes, and saw the cat creeping around in the wainhouse where they had their nests, and swooped off to shout at it. They could fly to Africa and back and move through the air as lightly as fish through water, and swoop the length of a two mile beach skimming the insects above the tide-wrack. They moved through the world in three dimensions and could see a fly at thirty yards. They were alive and as aware of their surroundings as anyone else. They flew as if they flew for fun, and behaved as if they liked each other. Their lives and the landscape reeled past together as they flew, and they knew our lanes and pastures as well as they knew the reed beds where they roosted on the way to Africa. They were forged gunmetal blue by a million years of evolution, and they were perfect.
And this year there are none in the village. The sprayers still run the roads with tanks of insecticide, but they are putting themselves out of a job. There are almost no insects and so there are no swallows and no cuckoos. We have scraped by without the passenger pigeon and the great auk, but we will miss the confidentiality of the swallows that shared our barns and farmyards with us, and who chattered outside in the sunshine when we had the measles.
It DID!
I remember that... and I secretly read with the curtains closed. I went fro "Hawkeye" at 7 to squinting to see the number on a bus at 8....