A Nameless Lane
Feed the Birds
We All Have to Eat
The weak November daylight was almost gone; leaves were spiralling down in slow motion as I drove deeper into the gloom. I was steering round potholes, crawling down the nameless lane that winds through Mill Wood. So much had gone wrong in the last year I was praying for this adventure to succeed. Not much inclined to trust my own judgement, I was tossing a mental coin yet again. Six weeks isolation in a chilly farmhouse on a riverbank –was this really such a great idea?
In July I had visited at the owners’ invitation, been charmed by the tranquillity of their gardens and a heavy evening silence broken only by owls. Then one day in the Green School Cafe Tom and Billie Drake bought me a cake to go with my cappuccino and requested that I ‘mind the farm’ for them while they holidayed in South America. The cafe was our regular meet-up -the social hub of the village where I had crash-landed that summer. I was puzzled. They had many close, long-standing friends living nearby. Why me?
“Everyone else has too much to do already,” said Tom. “Up to their necks in rescue chickens and donkeys and dogs. You’re the only sensible chap left who hasn’t got his hands full.”
I don’t often hear myself described as “sensible”. I looked at their calm, smiling expressions, the swan-white-hair framing their tanned, lined faces. Had I taken a photograph –and how I wish I had- the caption would have been wisdom of the years.
“Of course, I’d love to. If you think I can manage it.”
“You’ll enjoy it— won’t he Tom?” Billie elbowed her husband and he winked. “One decrepit cat and a dozen assorted poultry. A lot easier than running a bar, eh ? ”
My recent debut as a landlord had been a disastrous failure, and the way things stood that winter I must have seemed an obvious choice, with neither a job or domestic ties to fill the days.
In my shoebox apartment, I wrote down their departure date and made a list of several important creative projects I had been avoiding. Now I had the best possible excuse to put them all off until November.
By the time D-day came around, I knew where the Drakes stored their home-grown vegetables, how to start the wood-burner, where the shotgun lived and the food routines for poultry and cat. And I had a secret mental map of pot-hole lane –a crucial issue for the weary rust-bucket I was driving.
But now, stuttering down the track in the darkness with my suitcase on the passenger seat I was pondering the likely realities of a deep- freeze winter alone. Tom had admitted –once he was sure I wouldn’t let them down- that the lane would be impossible to navigate come the inevitable December snowfall. I would be marooned until the thaw. Secretly, I had found that prospect very appealing.
“I’ll cope,” I had told him. Now I said the words again, as I pulled up outside by the small golden rectangle of the porch window. I switched off the headlights and got out, shivering. The blackness beyond the stone-built farmhouse was a totality, a universe of darkness. Hard on the breeze was the taste of tomorrow’s frost. The door opened and Billie, swaddled in shapeless woolly garments, waved a bottle of Gordon’s gin and beckoned me inside.
“Just in time!” Tom –short and lithe- was skipping between the larder and the big kitchen table with glasses, lemons and snacks. In the tall, square fireplace blazed the biggest fire of the year so far. I surveyed the room. Art and souvenirs, ornaments, books and curios from every continent; a patchwork of forty-five years of roaming. I envied them.
By the door hung a painting of a superb cockerel at full strut, head up, tail feathers fanned in a rainbow. Crispin, the subject of this portrait, was just twenty yards away, locked up for the night with his harem.
Tom and Billie walked me through a file of notes covering every conceivable emergency (I thought). We ate supper, drank a lot and talked till midnight, our various anticipations colliding. Six hours later I waved them off, watching the taxi hobbling across the pot-holes to vanish in the trees.
I passed a week in that guiltless daze that isolation invites. Life beyond criticism is a dangerous dream for the rudderless type I was fast becoming. Birds were the bookends of my days. I rose at dawn to scatter corn and release the chickens and ducks who roosted together. Each night before darkness tempted the fox I herded them back to brick-built safety. In between, I did the necessary things slowly, pottered aimlessly and carefully avoided the projects I was sworn to complete. Wherever I roamed, by the bank of the rushing river, among the gardens, greenhouses, beehives and ponds, I would hear, from time to time, the great yodeling as Crispin split the air with his trademark cockerel song.
For no good reason, I was photographing sheep at noon on the eighth day when chaos broke out. A frenzy of cackling –the unmistakable opera of panic- set me running to the hen-coop, but too late. Sprawled on the flagstones the magnificent cockerel lay dead, a ragged bundle of bloodstained feathers. Crispin was still warm, still spectacular but utterly lifeless. There would be no more heroic crowing in the mornings; his throat had been torn out. To my amazement, a close inspection of his body revealed no other wounds at all.
Jojo the tabby cat was sniffing around so I put Crispin in a bag in the barn and made a few phone calls to poultry veterans. The culprit, I learned, was guaranteed to be a goshawk. This beefy predator relishes a particular gland found only in the throat. The neighbouring farm had lost a cockerel just days ago. My head spun.
Guilt and paranoia sent me to the workshop where Tom had a tool for everything. Planks of randomly-sized wood were scattered around and under a heap of chair-legs and chisels was a roll of wire mesh. By noon I had dirty, scratched fingers and the chickens had a sizeable attack-proof compound with a wire roof.
The ducks, keeping themselves to the pond, had the bulrushes and willow branches for cover. I sat on a nearby bench drinking coffee while woodpeckers and finches raided the bird-feeders dangling from every other tree.
The gardens soon echoed to the familiar soundscape of squawking, flapping, quacking and trilling. Everyone bar me was eating their head off. I looked at the sky but there was no sign of the killer in the clouds. The hens and ducks were behaving as if all was normal; it was only nature, complete with beaks claws. I began to see the incident from the goshawk’s point of view. He was just another bird who needed feeding.
Crispin had died as he lived, preoccupied by his meals, his sex-life, and the well-being of his hens. Not a minute was wasted on anything else. His song was the mark of his existence, an endless re-announcement of his presence and potency. He just hadn’t been equal to the savagery of the hawk. I fetched Billie’s guitar and indulged myself with a sentimental farewell, strumming an improvised requiem for a bird whose lifestyle was a model of simplicity.
There were certain other things that had to be done, but I had done them all before and I did them once again, properly. Afterward, I felt much better. At midnight I strolled the yard in the moonlight, found the duck-pond frozen solid. I sat for a while on the railway-sleeper bridge the Drakes had built over the river watching the icy torrent. I wondered if my life plans would have worked out better if I had just focussed on food, sex and singing.
Straight after poultry-chores the net morning, I knuckled down to a few hours of everything I’d been avoiding. My reward was a spell of chopping logs and stacking wood. From then on I rose every day before dawn and toiled till dusk. One night while I slept the snow arrived and stayed two weeks. As predicted, I was cut off with just the fifteen acres of land, the farmhouse and its cottage, three barns a woodshed and a sense of purpose. How confined can you be?
Tom and Billie returned on time in a taxi; the snow had melted and I was waiting on the porch, as was Jojo, who marked the occasion by presenting a freshly-killed mouse. After hugs and smiles, we went indoors and Billie asked the question.
“Any dramas?”
With my back turned to his portrait, I told the story of Crispin’s sudden demise. Tom topped a frown with a shrug.
“Never mind. Happens every so often. He was a bit of a sod, anyway.”
Billie rolled her eyes. I repeated the neighbour’s allegations and they both agreed a goshawk fitted the bill. They unpacked and insisted I stayed for supper to swap tales. When my turn came I proudly announced I had a couple of new jobs coming up and had sold an article to the county magazine. Tom insisted we celebrate with some of their homemade sloe gin. As he poured, he nodded towards the portrait of Crispin by the door.
“That young fella. What did you do with him?”
“I plucked and drew him in the workshop. Then I roasted him in red wine.”
Billie laughed and clapped.
“Well done. How was he?”
“Tasty. Tough.”
We drank a toast and agreed that everybody had to eat.
Reference: There’s an important difference between a cockerel and a rooster — you can read about it here.
