Frank Baker Read online

  “Aren’t you interested in the birds?” I asked. With remarkable contempt she declared that no doubt they had all “escaped” from somewhere and would soon be caught.

  I was irritated by her lack of interest and went into the kitchen to eat my supper of cold meat, salad, and tea. There, Annie en­couraged me to give another and fuller account of the birds. This conversation between Annie and myself so enraged my mother that she stumbled impatiently into the kitchen, fussed incoherently with one of her most histrionic gestures over a minute tea-stain I had made on the tablecloth, and declared passionately that nobody cared for her, I least of all; her money was all I wanted; and she might as well never have been born for all the use she was in life. She shouted, she clutched things, she paced up and down. I sat and glowered and snapped dark cynicisms at her. And the strange thing is that all the time we were on the point of laughter. At any moment her mouth, twisting with abuse, could have broken into wild and lovely laughter.

  I went out towards sunset and walked to the top of the ridge called Mountview, where there were seats overlooking brittle, sun-scorched lawns. Here a number of people, dressed in white clothes and hold­ing instruments composed of networked catgut, were patting grey balls over sagging string nets. This was a diversion called tennis, very much favoured by City people as a relaxation from the labour of the day.

  Gloomily I watched them playing. It was growing dark, and they could not see the ball very clearly. Laughter came from a group of youths and girls in the clubhouse.

  I sat up there, thinking and wondering about the birds. The scent of lime trees hung in the air and small white stars began to pierce the deep veil of the sky. Spread out in the hollow beyond the tennis courts were all those haphazard pieces of roof, chimney, spire, and dome, which fell miraculously into the one great mosaic of London. Set in the middle, poised like a pensive judge over a babbling court, was the dome of the Cathedral. It seemed to be composed of some flexible substance, like a bladder of smoke, pausing for a while before it should disperse into the luminous green sky around it. Viewed from the ridge it became the heart from which all activity seemed to emanate. I could see the sumptuous and strangely Oriental tower of West­minster from which the immense clock struck its bells—those friendly quarterings of music which Englishmen all over the world remembered with the affection a son feels towards his parents. I could see steeples and bridges, towers and factory chimneys, and in the foreground the gloomy drum of a gas-container. Yet always my eyes remained focused on the Cathedral; almost unwillingly, because it made such a claim upon vision, my eye returned to that dome.

  Whether it was a trick of evening mist I did not know, but as the sky darkened and the red glow of the sunset began to hold the City in an embrous flare, I thought I saw a thin, spreading shadow of fast-moving cloud. It was unlike any cloud I had ever seen. As it moved it seemed to prolong itself until it was nothing but a thin whip of blackness.

  I turned to go. The people were leaving the tennis courts for the night. I heard their voices crying “Good-night” and “See you to-morrow.” Some couples lingered arm in arm under the plane trees.

  I came to our road. Before I descended the hill I stayed a moment looking at the sprawling shape of the Alexandra Palace, all its win­dows lurid with the last rays of the sun.

  I felt in everything a dreadful sense of the instability of the mock-world we had set up in place of the real world which was our heritage.

  A woman was walking slowly up the hill, without hat or coat. I saw it was Lillian, and ran to greet her. We were immediately in sympathy with each other’s mood. She reproached me gently for leaving her alone so long, and said she could not rest, it was so hot. I told her I was sorry, and desiring to show her the City as I had seen it, took her arm and led her up the hill to the ridge.

  “You’re like your mother, son,” she kept saying. “Like your mother.”

  But at the top there was no dying twilight City to show her. The sky was dark, the stars blotted out above the City. Only a pale yellow ribbon of light lay on the horizon. There was no breath of wind. The pavements seemed to thrust a sticky warmth up into our faces.

  “Come, son,” said Lillian, “we shall be caught in the rain and catch our deaths.”

  So we hurried down the hill, went into our house, and opened a bottle of red wine to quench our thirsts. We sat in the room till late, the windows wide open, the air so still that the curtains never stirred, and the voices of people talking in a little group at the corner of the road were easy to hear.

  Lillian did not retire to her room till long after midnight. Although I went to bed before her I could not sleep. I lay naked, with one sheet half covering me, listening to the clock striking the hours and trying to assemble into some shape a hundred confused images that raced and twisted in my bewildered mind.

  *

  In the night while we all slept, the birds had come again. I had known it, of course, from the moment I had seen that long black line over the City, and tried to assure myself that it was a cloud. Lying in my bed sleepless for many hours, I had known the birds would come. Yet even to myself I would not admit this fact.

  The next day was the last in the week, a half-holiday for the City workers. There were fewer people in the train at Stroud Green, because many were allowed the whole day in which to rest. Some carried tennis rackets or cricket bats. They would spend their afternoon on one of the many sports grounds around London.

  This predilection for athletics possessed the English tempera­ment to a remarkable degree and was probably the only part of their lives which many people considered with any real seriousness. Their national game, cricket, was so respected as to be discussed in the newspapers in a leading position together with international politics and celebrated crimes.

  (Were crimes respected? Well, yes. In a sense they were. They gave employment, do you see, to a vast number of people—police­men, judges, lawyers, and such like, who would otherwise have had no place in society.)

  I am afraid I rarely spent those precious Saturday afternoons on any playing-field, though once or twice I had played cricket in local games. But my team-spirit hardly existed. I could not bear standing in a field all the afternoon waiting to receive the ball. It seemed always so much more comfortable to lie down. Yes, they were tedious, those games, though I made many simple friends amongst the cricketers.

  Most Saturdays in the summer I went into the country north of London where I could find a field in which to lie and compose those callow observations upon Nature which I called poems.

  In the train, that Saturday morning, I drifted into conversation with some people from whom I learnt that the birds had gathered at an early hour, before dawn, in a place called Trafalgar Square and were, for all they knew, still there. Everybody was talking about, them, although this new activity had not yet been reported in the papers, which were full of yesterday’s invasion of the City.

  As soon as the train reached the station I jumped from the carriage before it had stopped, and ran quickly to the office in Leadenhall. I expected to come across a scene of confusion similar to yesterday, and was almost disappointed when I found that everything was the same as usual.

  The office was half empty. I had little work to do, and was in a perpetual fever to leave the place, take an omnibus to Trafalgar Square, and see if the birds were still there. None of us did much work. Every broker who came into the room delivered fresh and diverging accounts of the scene in the West End, as that part of London was termed. Apparently the birds were still there and could not be moved.

  Eventually one o’clock came, the time when the office would close down for that day and the following day. I and a colleague, a youth slightly older than myself, ran out, scrambled on to a bus, and began to move slowly westward. As we drove along, it was soon apparent that some considerable disturbance held up the traffic at the other end. We left the bus near a station and walked, o
r rather pushed, towards Trafalgar Square.

  I have already told you how I went there twenty years ago and saw the column of the sea-lord strewn along the ground like the splintered backbone of some great beast. To-day he was in his proper place, secure in the sky on his lofty pedestal, with four guardian lions below him to keep his enemies at bay.

  But they had not been able to keep the birds at bay.

  Covering the graven figure and clustered along his column, bound over the entire monument like a soft carpet of moss or lichen, the birds clung with a still tenacity that made one doubt whether they were not some furry growth that had sprouted from the stone overnight.

  That was not all. As at the Bank, only over a far wider expanse, the birds had assembled. The crowd was thick, immense, and traffic was in complete chaos.

  On the balustrade of the National Gallery I saw a party of schoolgirls. There appeared to be some excitement amongst them, though I could not see very clearly. I saw the girls running about, a small fluttering shape amongst them, and I heard distressed little cries.

  My friend and I pushed here and there, trying to get closer to the birds. We found that the best thing to do was to climb to the top of a bus which stood stationary at the bottom of the Strand. It was already crowded with people, and we mounted it with diffi­culty. Only by prying between the heads of people clustered around the open windows of the vehicle could we obtain any sort of view.

  There were many more birds than the day before. They sat very still, though in several places I could detect a curious heaving of their ranks as though something below were trying to force a way out.

  Suddenly we heard shouting. The crowd swayed aside to make a path for mounted police who had been summoned to deal with the chaos.

  We watched, excited. Somebody shrieked in a thin, muffled voice. I saw something that looked like an arm, tattered with loose flesh and torn clothing, rise feebly from the mass of birds.

  Then, with one precise movement 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 and the screams of those who were near them as they ascended.

  From the National Gallery, from the monu­ment, in one dense rank they took flight, straight as an arrow along the Strand. They were not more than a few yards above our heads. It seemed that all the Strand, as far as the eye could see, was over­shadowed by this moving canopy of winged shapes. As they slowly diminished into the sky, a heavy silence fell over us all. Only when the birds had vanished out of sight did the crowd break up with excited chattering.

  I turned and looked again at the empty square. The police were attempting to restrain the people from swarming towards objects that looked like mounds of dung-bespattered rags. The schoolgirls were running wildly down the steps.

  I was faint with the heat and an offensive smell that had begun to pollute the air.

  “Come on,” said my friend, “let’s get away from this. It’s making me sick.”

  In Trafalgar Square they were reassembling on to stretchers the rags and broken bones, the crumpled flesh and blood that hours before had been the somnolent forms of destitute men and women who had been passing the night there. I do not know how many were killed. We did not stay to watch, as many did, the clearing away of their crushed, clawed bodies. We went quickly to a small sandwich-bar and sat, I remember, speechless for several minutes, drinking beer and attempting to think calmly.

  *

  The next day was a Sunday, often called “the day of rest,” the day when the few practising Christians left in our island went to their churches to worship their God. I am not going to attempt to explain the religion of those times here; it is too complicated and would only become tedious. Yet I like to remember some of those Sundays, when I travelled up to the strange empty City and attended the evening service at one or other of the cathedrals. How well I re­member walking over London Bridge on dark afternoons, with the glow of lamps bright in the quiet City, and the bells ringing noisily from every tower and steeple.

  There was something staunch and defiant about those old bells of the City, like a dog who will bark by his master’s corpse. I used to pause sometimes on the bridge and watch the dim lights of barges passing along the river. I could hear the swish of water inaudible in weekdays because of the traffic. Wrapt in gloom behind me was the immense pillar of the black monument which commemorated a fire that had destroyed the City centuries before. There was always a faint smell of fish and rotten fruit. I could see right along the river to the chain of yellow lights by the embankment near Trafalgar Square. How quiet, how retrospective it was—the tall offices locked till to-morrow, the few omnibuses half empty, the streets forlornly peopled by the dark shapes of strange, poor creatures whom one never saw at any other time. Where they came from, where they went to, nobody ever knew.

  I would go to an old cathedral on the other side of the bridge, buried away under a railway arch, its beautiful compact tower scarcely visible because of the warehouses and railway lines that closed it in. It was pleasant to sit in the half-dark nave, my eyes held by the brass candelabrum that swayed slightly as though the breath of its candles had given it life. The singing was good here; the music, I remember, better than in any other London church; the people who came were more devout, less flamboyant. The building was ancient and full of sombre beauty in dim roof and candle-gloomy chapel. Sometimes a train would roar over the bridge above. The the quiet psalms and songs from the sanctuary were lost; I felt I was the adherent of some dying religion secreted in a catacomb under the earth.

  Afterwards, with a warm glow of emotion spreading over me, I would sometimes go to the station tavern with a friend who came up from another part of London and with whom I had been at school as a boy. Here we would sit over the Sunday newspapers, dis­cussing new books, plays, music, and political developments. They were pleasant evenings, good to recall. When I think of those Sundays I am reminded of one in particular which stands out vividly in my memory.

  It was a Sunday when the birds assembled in enormous numbers in a large park in the west of London. Huddled thickly together amongst the trees and shrubs, they showed no inclination to move and were not particularly offensive. This more natural behaviour did not at first alarm people greatly. It was fitting, we felt, that birds should make for trees and grassy spaces.

  After some time, however, the melancholy presence of these curiously inactive creatures, forever clustered in the branches of the trees and rarely flying or making any sound, began to be, to say the least, embarrassing. Fewer people visited the park. The eccentricity of the birds was admitted and became the source of much humorous commentary. But the humour was shadowed by a dubious edge of apprehension. What were the birds going to do? What were we going to do?

  Here is the story of what we did, or rather failed to do.

  I have often told you of the cruelties of that time and how it was termed “sporting” for a man to spend five or six months feeding young birds so as to make them tame, then, on a given day, ask his friends to come and shoot them. Every year in August there was a great exodus from London to the north where rich stock­brokers and others used to rent moors and with the aid of an army of men called beaters, murder a vast number of entirely harmless and attractive birds, called grouse.

  On this Sunday in that fatal summer, twelve of the best shots in the country arranged a magnificent shoot. Having obtained per­mission from the authorities these twelve sportsmen concocted the following elaborate plan. At five in the morning, just as dawn was breaking, each of them armed with a gun, accompanied by a loader with a spare gun and a huge array of cartridges, would take up his position at an allotted place in the adjacent park called Kensington Gardens. They were to be dotted about the gardens at intervals of three to four hundred yards, and each, as was the usual practice, was to secrete himself as much as po
ssible. One, I remember, hid himself behind the statue of a very popular little boy who never grew up; another behind a huge statue of a man on a horse; another in a garden belonging to a park-keeper, and so on. Each man stood with his gun loaded, his loader behind him with the spare gun, and one or two dogs lying at his feet ready to pick up all the creatures his master destroyed.

  At 5.15 a huge army of men armed with sticks and flags were to enter Hyde Park from the opposite side. In one long line they were to cover the whole of the far side of the Park and advance in strict order and line towards Kensington Gardens and the waiting guns, meanwhile waving their flags and making any kind of sound designed to lure the birds forward. It was hoped that by these means the birds would be encouraged to fly towards the guns and that even if very few were actually killed, those who remained unhurt would be too terrified ever to return and plague us again.

  This was the plan, and up to a certain moment, all went well. With the greatest courage—at least, so I thought—the army of beaters advanced. Yes, there were the birds, thousands of them clustered together in the middle of Hyde Park. A friend of mine who was one of the beaters, told me that at this point of the sport, he began to feel extremely uneasy. What would happen if the birds refused to move?

  However, they seemed to know what was required of them. When the line of beaters came to within fifty or sixty yards of the birds, they rose with one accord, uttering coarse, derisive little cries and dropping a great amount of ordure. Then they turned and headed straight for Kensington Gardens. My friend swore that they formed into twelve sections. Any jubilation or excitement he might once have possessed sunk to a heavy apprehension of danger. A yell rang out from the line of beaters, and whistles were frantically blown as signals to the waiting guns that the birds were coming.

  What went through the minds of the sportsmen and their loaders, I wonder? The usual excitement of the “kill”? The needle-thrill of zero hour? Perhaps a faint apprehension? One can picture the scene, the “gun” standing at the ready, eagerly scanning the horizon, the loader waiting behind to pass the second gun, the dogs lying still but for the faint movement of an excited tail. Suddenly the birds appear. Up goes the gun to his shoulder; finger to trigger. “Bang, bang,” change guns, “bang, bang.”