Frank Baker Read online

  There is a similar incident in Hitchcock’s film, and it occurs at the end when Melanie Daniels (Tippi Hedren) goes alone to the attic and is attacked by birds. Crucially, they fly straight at the camera lens. Whatever else Melanie may be—for example, complacent at first but a quick learner, according to Hitchcock in interviews—she is a stand-in for the individual viewer. This was always Hitchcock’s way. Instead of spelling out the existential meaning of a film’s drama, his “subjective” camera would transfer that drama inside the viewer’s head. Invariably his films (like Rear Window, about a bored photographer spying on his neighbours) posit some such existential dilemma. Then, as the comedy and suspense take hold, the viewer is drawn in. And because each film is a soul-drama, and Hitchcock is making what he called “pure cinema,” the camera may emphasise eyes and the act of seeing. In other words, the film “targets” those eyes, our eyes, as at the end of The Birds. We sense that the existential dilemma applies to us, and we (rightly) feel ourselves complicit; thus the question arises, how might we, as individuals, deal with it? Not that the canny Hitchcock ever sought to pose such a question directly—with the possible exception of two wartime propaganda dramas, Foreign Correspondent and Lifeboat, which both called for more than usual direct action. Nicholson puts the matter well: Hitchcock will “show us what we need to know—but not force us to see it. We have to see it for ourselves.”

  With Frank Baker, his knowledge of cinema accounts for several of his novel’s best stratagems. The employment of a well-known landmark for his climax emulates the silent serials and early feature films like Hitchcock’s Blackmail (1929), whose climax occurs in, and on, the British Museum. Still, I find almost eerie that both men chose to give their respective heroines identical shadings of foreignness, of wronged virtue, of superior but wasted ability. You sense some archetype working. In Olga’s case, we learn that her parents died in the Revolution. After arriving in England, she found a job as a cinema attendant but was soon being taken advantage of by the local lads; on hearing herself called “the Russian whore,” she knew that she must move on. In this context, Baker’s narrator becomes her saviour, and she (with her experience) his. Melanie, too, is a complementary “other.” Played by Ms Hedren, who was born of Scandinavian parents (“Tippi” derives from “Tupsa,” meaning “little girl” or “sweetheart”), she is a sophisticated playgirl who nonetheless has been mixing in dubious company, having just returned from Rome where, reportedly, she would jump into fountains naked. Her father owns a San Francisco newspaper but her mother long ago abandoned them for another man. Melanie’s accidental meeting with lawyer Mitch Brenner (Rod Taylor) in a bird shop is a “meet cute” situation that you just know will deepen into love once the wild birds start attacking. Both heroines, then—vulnerable, defamed, but looking to improve themselves—invite our interest and sympathy. Similarly, both heroes are given “problem” widowed mothers, no doubt to account for those heroes’ own peculiarities (and allow the pop psychologist in us to speculate) but also to raise further poignant issues of family and the future. Marred humanity is the “given” here; eros and thanatos underlie each story’s existential situation. As for the respective avians (whatever satisfaction Baker and Hitchcock derived from inflicting them on us), they are ultimately mysterious. Simply another given. Hitchcockians may think of them as the “reality” that Norman Bates in Psycho (1960) could not face.

  Finally, what we have here are two remarkable tales of suspense. In 1934, England had experienced a year of record heat; inspired, Baker sets his novel during a long hot summer, and the trying conditions collude with the gathering birds to drive both the authorities and the populace to, first, distraction, then to something like apathy and a nameless fear. But there are moments of relief. For now, life goes on. A lovely passage describes the young clerk’s early-morning visits to an outdoor public baths near the Alexandra Palace (where Baker’s grandfather had played the organ). “At that early hour men were different . . . Here . . . with the fresh sun over them, they were alive, naked, and free . . .” As in Hitchcock’s best films, the ebb and flow of suspense in Baker’s The Birds suggests life in its full intensity that humans have lost touch with, and which both artists would restore to us, or at least remind us of. We are at one with the birds if only we could see it; they are not as “other” as our closed minds tell us. With delicious irony, both works delight in drawing bird/human parallels. Baker describes how one busy day in London a flock of birds kills a man; afterwards, “the birds rose into the air. The flapping of their wings; their harsh squeaking and gibbering—so curiously similar to the excited cries of the people—drowned the noise of the traffic . . .” Which invites a closing comment on the sheer technical skill both works show. The film’s Tides Restaurant sequence, whose Bible-quoting drunkard is based on playwright Sean O’Casey, is an extended tour de force. But it is matched by the novel’s two main café scenes, especially the second, which literally covers much ground with its equivalent of a “tracking crane-shot” and shows a musical influence when it implies the clerk’s tipsy condition by means of a refrain about “peas in a drum.” Splendidly accomplished stuff!

  * * *

  Baker wrote many more novels, including both the whimsical Miss Hargreaves (1940), whose success probably owed something to a wartime need for escapist fantasy and would later be adapted as a stage-vehicle for actress Margaret Rutherford; and the gently wise Lease of Life (1954), about a clergyman who learns he has only a year to live, which was filmed by Ealing Studios with Robert Donat. But a case can be made that the author was at his best when the “criminality” in his nature directly engaged him, and that “thrillers” were his true forte. Sadly, he wrote only two or three of those, with The Birds outstanding.

  Ken Mogg

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE

  The Birds was first published by Peter Davies of London in June 1936 as an octavo (small hardcover) volume bound in red cloth and priced at 7/6. The print run was small: the book sold only about 300 copies and is all but unobtainable today. In 1964, in the wake of the popularity of Alfred Hitchcock’s film The Birds (1963), Panther reissued Baker’s novel as a paperback, which was labeled a “revised edition.” For the revised edition, Baker marked up his own copy of the 1936 edition in pencil, making hundreds of deletions, alterations, and corrections; he also made several long additions, which were typewritten on separate sheets and inserted in appropriate places in the text. However, when the Panther edition was printed, almost none of Baker’s revisions were in fact incorporated; only a small percentage of them, mostly very minor changes, were actually made, and these were not done consistently. For the present edition, the text has been prepared from Baker’s own copy of the 1936 edition, incorporating his holograph alterations from that copy and the typewritten insertions. The Publisher is grateful to Mr. Gabriel Hughes, Baker’s grandson, for providing digital reproductions of these materials, from which this edition has been typeset.

  Though Baker’s changes are many and result in a measurably shorter book, the alterations are almost without exception stylistic rather than substantive in nature, improving grammar, removing repetitive matter, and shortening some of the longer didactic passages, resulting in a much more readable text. A detailed comparison of the 1936 and 1964 editions with this one is beyond the scope of the present edition, but publication of this unique version of the book will allow future readers and scholars the chance to make those comparisons.

  THE BIRDS

  “O all ye fowls of the air, bless ye the Lord.”

  (From an ancient Hebrew hymn.)

  “Birds, birds, we gotta get rid of the birds . . .”

  (Adaptation from an old American song.)

  AUTHOR’S INTRODUCTION

  to the 1964 Panther edition

  It is the London of 1935 which is observed in these pages—the world before the birds came; a world which had no television, jet- planes or H-bombs. Yet it was a world which di
ffers little from ours of today, except that now there are many more people and the rat-race is swifter. But the birds too are swift. If they came today they would, I hope, be even more alert to the horrors which devil our present society.

  Let it be remembered, though, that the birds are our friends—if we can learn to live up to them. To the reader today I say—take them, if you please, as entertainment (of a kind). I would not, perhaps, so readily destroy civilization as I did in 1935 when, young and ruthless, I wrote this book. For there is much about even today’s world which I love; and if the birds do have to come (who knows?) I hope their scourge will leave a cleaner land behind them.

  Read on. And be careful if you hear the tapping at the window.

  Frank Baker

  PREFACE

  “Before the birds came” was a phrase commonly used by my father. As a child I paid little attention to the words; they were but a sentence in an adult language for which I cared nothing. But once, when I had done some childish act which was forbidden—I cannot re­member what—he said to me with the humour with which he always modified his rebukes, “Anna, if you had been living before the birds came, you would have had to go to a place called a school where you would sit at a desk all day learning a number of dull things which were no use to you. So be thankful for what you have.” And my mother added, “Yes, Anna. And instead of running about in the garden without any clothes as you often do, you would have had to wear ugly garments, however hot it was.”

  From that time my curiosity was awakened, and I began to wonder many things. Where had we all come from? Was all the world the same as I saw here—trees, fields, mountains, and cold rivers? What had my father and mother been like when they were young? Above all, what birds were those which had apparently changed life so considerably?

  I asked my father these questions and many others. But he always turned away with a sigh and said, “It was too long a story. Was not the present enough without thinking of the past?”

  I talked to my brothers about it, but they—being men and full of activity—did not care so much where they came from as where they were going. Their concern was with the future.

  I married and left my father’s home. I came back later with my three sons. My mother died. My brothers were away, married and busy with their own affairs. I found myself in daily contact with my father, more than ever I had been before.

  Again I asked him, “Tell me about the birds?” And he said, “Perhaps the story should be told. But it will take a long time, Anna, and you had better write it all down as I tell it.”

  Between us we devised a system of what he called shorthand, so that I could write quickly while he dictated. In the month of August, while the boys were gathering in the corn harvest, my father commenced his story, and I sat at a table by his side recording every word that he spoke.

  I

  THE BACKGROUND

  Perhaps I am the only man living in this island who re­members the birds. So many perished at the time; most of the few who remained must since have died. For some reason Providence has given me a long life. I do not complain of that—why should I? I am very happy with my children and grandchildren, like one of those old patriarchs of whom we used to read in a book of poetic folk-tales from which we extracted a great deal of false moralizing in the old days before the birds came. How long ago that is! Do you realize, Anna, that in October I shall be eighty-five? Yes, I always kept a record of the number of my years, even though the children laugh at me and pester me with questions about these birthdays—mysteries to them, of course, who never know nor care how old they are. I think there could be no happier people than those who forget their age—none so happy in the days of my youth as these children. Berin, Roger, Allan——

  But if I waste time in vain comments upon my age I shall never find the courage to start at all. Let us get to work, then. And first let me tell you of that foolhardy journey I made some twenty years ago. I remember that Olga, your mother, had no sympathy for such a venture. “You are too old,” she said. “It will disturb you too greatly.” And she was right. For it awoke too many memories and started so deep a train of thought that, when I came back, I found it hard to talk of what I had seen.

  I set off, you remember, with Fallow. She carried me well. I am not going to describe the journey in any detail. You know, from what I have told you, some­thing of the road that I took—along the centre of this island, through what were known as the midlands, and towards the east coast. Little happened on the way. The journey was a long one and wearisome, and the sun very hot that year. Often, passing settle­ments, communities such as ours, I claimed hospitality as is our custom, and was always courteously received.

  Sometimes I slept in woods by the banks of streams, sometimes in the shells of houses where our forefathers had lived. I fell in with no companion on the way, and for that I was not sorry. Fallow was a better companion than any man. I remember one sad evening, when I kindled sticks in the ruin of a great building that had once been a temple of religious worship. Such places were called cathedrals; centuries ago, men had laboured for generations to establish in brick and stone some memorial of the goodness of their God. Many of these buildings were very lovely. This perhaps, had been one of the loveliest. I re­membered it as I had last seen it, when its delicate silver spire had sundered winter clouds or carved an angle in a blue summer sky. Now it was nothing but a wall of splintered stone, like the spine of some fabulous beast, over which lichen, moss, and bramble trailed profusely. I brooded over it with many long thoughts and left it early in the morning, reminding myself that for a grain of beauty in the old world there had been a rock of ugliness. If the grain had to go with the rock, then it had to be.

  I drew eastward to the outskirts of the old City. It was a wasted land that met me, desolate with the scattered ruin of house, church, factory, and shop. There were few settlements now. I followed the course of the river called Thames; that at least had not changed—though who from the old time would recognize now its banks?

  So I came into the dead City. Immense and silent it is, with not a soul to tell why it is desolate. Not a soul. . . . Many buildings were still standing; they were hollow with fallen floors and broken windows, no more than traps for the wind that whistled through them. I found myself eventually in a great open square, across which sprawled the massive column of an old memorial to a sea-lord, an illustrious hero of this island. Often at sunset, when the lights of the City began to prick the darkness and the faint stars rose, he had been beautiful, poised like some remote God in the misty orange sky—a signal of this island’s temporal power. Now he had fallen from the clouds and nothing remained of him except broken bits, shameful and small. My heart was like stone; I was cold. I wanted to weep, but I could not. To whisper my name was to summon ghosts around me. I could fancy that they reproached me for com­ing. Fallow was restive; it was hard to induce her any longer to pick her way over the scarred streets. Often we had to mount over piles of masonry clutched by thick masses of rank weeds. The air was very close; the wind that came from the river sighed without move­ment. To me, the wind was a lamentation, crying, “Babylon, thy Babylon is wasted.”

  I urged Fallow on quickly now, for I was afraid of the silence, so heavy with implied sound. I wanted to be back in this peaceful country, where silence is full of music. I had to cross the wreckage of a railway bridge that had snapped across my path. There was a little hill before me. I could not lift my head for fear of what I should see at the top. And when I did, it was only another ruin that I saw—but to me, so dreadful a record of the dissolution of the old society, that I did not like to look at it. What had once been the pride of our people—a temple capped by a magnificent domed tower—stood emptily before me now like a jagged egg-shell biting into the sky. The columns at its main entrance were crumbled down the stone steps where pigeons had once flocked to receive food from men. Nothing was left of its grandeur.

&n
bsp; I stopped by the steps, climbed to the top, sat on a scrolled lump of mossy stone and laid my face in my hands. And with my eyes closed, with my fingers pressed into my ears to keep out the thin sound of the wind through the temple, it seemed to my imagination that a youth stood at my side. “Why do you come, old man,” he asked, “to torment yourself?” “Because,” I said, with my eyes still closed, “before I die I had to see the ghosts that linger around the old places of men.”

  Then I opened my eyes, and in one brief flashing vision, I saw, as I had seen years before, the confusion and horror that had brought about the decay of my civilization. Like a shadow at my side, stood the youth. Through his eyes I saw people running wildly down the hill, falling over and tearing at each other in their senseless flight. Mingling in this crowd, drifted the black wings of a million birds, like no birds we have ever seen here. In the midst of this confusion was a grinding file of wheeled vehicles of all descriptions, tall, cumbersome scarlet cars, thick with people, and draped with the black shapes of birds who writhed in and out of smashed windows with a harsh beating of skinny wings; smaller cars, all colours and shapes. One man, regardless of the people he cut down on his way, drove his machine at great speed. I saw him crash into a building down the hill; I heard screams as his car overturned with a hissing of sharp flame. There were men on horseback in a blue uniform, and others in dirty yellow uniforms with hideous masks on their faces. Roaring low in the black sky were flying machines; there seemed to be some plan between these machines and the mounted men to restore order amongst the people. But no order could be established. The demented people, furious for their own safety, flocked densely into the crammed doorways of shops and offices. I backed aside as a thundering mass surged up the steps of the temple and broke through the doors, trampling on one another in their panic. There was a roar of engines and be­wildered shouts, a rushing of wings, a wailing of those who could find no door to shelter them. Then a dying silence, a fading away of these hideous figures, a clearing of the black sky.