intimacy.
It was an education without the intervention of a master, an absorbing study of birdlife, habitats and habits, in my native heath. It was natural religion with yourself alone and the god-in-things to lift you and keep you, an outlaw now as youâd be, a wicked disgrace, a thief of those extraordinarily beautiful eggs, never quite the same in their markings even within species, from nest to nest.
So much that was possible then is impossible if not unimaginable now. So much that was legal then is now against the law, and if we broke the law in little ways, the law slept or turned a blind eye, and no harm done give or take a small egg, a speckled trout, an apple.... I remember how for a time we had a sawn-off double-barrelled four-ten shotgun in our possession, to a boyâs eye a beautiful little weapon with hammers, like something in a Western. It was given to my father or lent, I donât know which, by the postman. He used it to shoot pheasants from his Royal Mail van as he did his rounds out in the back country.
It didnât seem at all a serious matter that the postman should behave in such a way, or that such a lethal and illegal weapon should come into my fatherâs hands: so did barbed snatching hooks for taking salmon, and a barbed tine for spearing them, both with a socket that would fit on a hazel stick and a cord through a hole in the socket to draw it tight and secure it in place while you snatched or speared. So when you had cunningly done the deed you could dismantle your tackle, wrap the cord round it, and slip the incriminating device into your pocket and concentrate on hiding the fish.
I donât know when the concept of protected species arrived, but it wasnât illegal, at least as far as we understood, to possess the blown eggs of wild birds. Game-birds I suppose were always off limits. Not that that deterred me, if I came on a hen pheasant incubating eggs in the bottom of a hedge. The bird might slip away, but an egg, if not too far gone, might be taken and blown. The whole clutch might well have been taken and eaten. I never did that but Iâm sure that was not upon any principle, but a matter of fortune. The only eggs I gathered to eat were the herring gullâs. The egg from which might have hatched the original English Chinese restaurant joke, only we had scarce a Chinese restaurant then, to wit: waiter, this egg is rubbery. And lovely-rubbery they were too.
I had inherited two boxes of the eggs of many species my father had collected as a boy and youth in Scotland. Just to prise the lid off those flat shortcake tins and gaze at the eggs in their partitioned squares and nests of cotton-wool was enough to inspire a hundred adventures, not least flights of fancy to North Clutag and to Galloway. But it wasnât possessing the eggs or adding ever rarer ones to a collection that really mattered, but discovering nests, stalking, observing the comings and goings of birds, their startled departures as you happen on them, their fearful or fearless sitting tight until you can all but touch them, the looping arrival of a greenfinch into a holly hedge and its circumspect diversions; to find a nest in process of being built, to watch as building materials, fine moss, slender grasses, a feather, mud, twig, shavings of silver birch bark like fine foil, are carried... where? Here... in this branching fork, this mossy nook or cranny, thorn thicket, eave or outhouse gable, limestone cliff-ledge, or without building at all on a sea-pink thrifty pebbled shore.
This was knowledge won with patience and it fostered intimacy of seeing and being, absorption into the world, one thing leading to another. There was you might say nothing to distinguish between a boyâs eye and a birdâs eye view for watchfulness, and time stood still, attention undivided. Though I think there was boredom involved too, of a unique order in rural life, not self-conscious like the townâs ennui ,
It was an education without the intervention of a master, an absorbing study of birdlife, habitats and habits, in my native heath. It was natural religion with yourself alone and the god-in-things to lift you and keep you, an outlaw now as youâd be, a wicked disgrace, a thief of those extraordinarily beautiful eggs, never quite the same in their markings even within species, from nest to nest.
So much that was possible then is impossible if not unimaginable now. So much that was legal then is now against the law, and if we broke the law in little ways, the law slept or turned a blind eye, and no harm done give or take a small egg, a speckled trout, an apple.... I remember how for a time we had a sawn-off double-barrelled four-ten shotgun in our possession, to a boyâs eye a beautiful little weapon with hammers, like something in a Western. It was given to my father or lent, I donât know which, by the postman. He used it to shoot pheasants from his Royal Mail van as he did his rounds out in the back country.
It didnât seem at all a serious matter that the postman should behave in such a way, or that such a lethal and illegal weapon should come into my fatherâs hands: so did barbed snatching hooks for taking salmon, and a barbed tine for spearing them, both with a socket that would fit on a hazel stick and a cord through a hole in the socket to draw it tight and secure it in place while you snatched or speared. So when you had cunningly done the deed you could dismantle your tackle, wrap the cord round it, and slip the incriminating device into your pocket and concentrate on hiding the fish.
I donât know when the concept of protected species arrived, but it wasnât illegal, at least as far as we understood, to possess the blown eggs of wild birds. Game-birds I suppose were always off limits. Not that that deterred me, if I came on a hen pheasant incubating eggs in the bottom of a hedge. The bird might slip away, but an egg, if not too far gone, might be taken and blown. The whole clutch might well have been taken and eaten. I never did that but Iâm sure that was not upon any principle, but a matter of fortune. The only eggs I gathered to eat were the herring gullâs. The egg from which might have hatched the original English Chinese restaurant joke, only we had scarce a Chinese restaurant then, to wit: waiter, this egg is rubbery. And lovely-rubbery they were too.
I had inherited two boxes of the eggs of many species my father had collected as a boy and youth in Scotland. Just to prise the lid off those flat shortcake tins and gaze at the eggs in their partitioned squares and nests of cotton-wool was enough to inspire a hundred adventures, not least flights of fancy to North Clutag and to Galloway. But it wasnât possessing the eggs or adding ever rarer ones to a collection that really mattered, but discovering nests, stalking, observing the comings and goings of birds, their startled departures as you happen on them, their fearful or fearless sitting tight until you can all but touch them, the looping arrival of a greenfinch into a holly hedge and its circumspect diversions; to find a nest in process of being built, to watch as building materials, fine moss, slender grasses, a feather, mud, twig, shavings of silver birch bark like fine foil, are carried... where? Here... in this branching fork, this mossy nook or cranny, thorn thicket, eave or outhouse gable, limestone cliff-ledge, or without building at all on a sea-pink thrifty pebbled shore.
This was knowledge won with patience and it fostered intimacy of seeing and being, absorption into the world, one thing leading to another. There was you might say nothing to distinguish between a boyâs eye and a birdâs eye view for watchfulness, and time stood still, attention undivided. Though I think there was boredom involved too, of a unique order in rural life, not self-conscious like the townâs ennui ,
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