The fruit trees clothe themselves in frothy pinks and whites, as if for a wedding with the summer. Bluebells burst from the floor of the woodland, and nettles and Jack-by-the-hedge overwhelm the ditches. The air is heavy with the rich whorehouse smell of lilac. Flies come out of hibernation in the window frames, and desiccate on sills.
Amid this grotesque natural prodigality, death pokes about with a stick. A young sparrowhawk lies dead at the edge of the field. Robert picks it up and thinks it is the most beautiful thing he has seen since the day that he landed the Girt Pike. A thrush falls from its nest and expires in the brambles below. A barely fledged pigeon falls directly in front of a foxhole. Two moorhens disappear from the village pond. The road is scarlet with gory pancakes that had once been rabbit kittens and hedgehogs. A baby fox is lost, and the Major slows down carefully, as does Polly Wantage, but not long afterwards it is run down by one of the nuns from the convent, whose mind is obliviously on higher things. The hedging and ditching man offers her the consolation of his philosophy, and promises that he will bury the little corpse, but after she has driven on he picks it up by the tail and swings it into the trees behind Mrs Mac’s house, where it is gourmandised by rats. The General’s dog, Bella, finds the body and rolls in it, so that she has to be exiled to the garden shed until the stench wears off.
Spring, ambiguous equally in beauty and horror, bears in on Robert. Everyone knows that he can’t help looking after young or wounded birds, and he and his Uncle Dick have even knocked up a little bird hospital in the garden, made of one-by-two and chicken wire. So it is that John the gardener, who works on the Shah of Iran’s stud farm in Munstead and who lives in one of the other council houses near the Institute of Oceanography, comes round one evening, cupping something black and fluffy in his hands.
‘The dog brought this in,’ he says to the young boy. ‘I put it back out so ’at its mother could come for it, but then the dog brought it back in again, and I thought it might be yours.’
Robert is puzzled. ‘Why would it be mine?’
John says, ‘Well, it is now, boy.’ He advances it, and Robert takes it carefully. It is a young rook, with a full-sized head, a small body and a very short stumpy tail. ‘It’s half fledged,’ says John. ‘I reckon you should be able to do something with it. It’s not scared at all. Good sign, that is.’
‘I had a pet jackdaw once,’ says Robert.
‘Same idea, this is,’ says John, ‘except different.’
‘Thank you,’ says Robert, and takes the bird indoors.
‘Oh, not another one,’ says his mother insincerely, glancing up from the sink, where she is scrubbing the green rings off the flowerpots.
‘I’ve never had a rook before,’ says Robert, in self-justification.
‘Must be from the elms behind the water tower,’ says his mother. The water tower is a notorious local landmark. It is distinctly phallic, especially now that it has been painted pink. Nearby are elms that have been a rookery for a hundred years. ‘Maybe you should take it back there and let the mother find it.’
‘I’ve tried that with birds lots of times,’ says Robert, ‘and they always die. The RSPB only tell you to do that ’cause they don’t want everyone turning up with little birds for them to look after. I don’t think they care about birds at all.’
His mother has heard this speech before, and she shrugs. She suspects that he might be right. Robert has successfully brought up quite a few birds over the years, but he did once kill a thrush by feeding it too many worms. Uncle Dick says that some little birds don’t naturally know when to stop. Rooks do, though. They eat more and more slowly and hesitantly, and then stop.
Uncle Dick has spent fifteen years in London, and now he talks like a Londoner, but he has come home to Notwithstanding because of ‘something to do with a woman’. He enjoys being back home, especially the evenings gossiping and drinking beer with barley-wine chasers in the Chiddingfold Ex-Servicemen’s Club, which does not seem to have any connection with the services at all. For all anyone knows, it might have some ex-servicemen among its members. It has two distinct classes of clientele, the older men who sit at the bar and booze for hour after hour, and the younger people of both sexes who like to dance and fancy each other. Abba’s ‘Dancing Queen’ gets played several times a night in the hall at the side. There is a lovely dark-haired Polish girl who dances to it and fills every boy’s heart with longing.
Uncle Dick works at the West Surrey Golf Club, where there is a special hut for the artisans, in compensation for not being allowed in the clubhouse, and he spends all day happily driving around on large mowers, except when it’s raining, when he sits in the hut smoking roll-ups, eating Rich Tea biscuits, and drinking large cups of strong coldish milky tea with four sugars. He sells all the lost balls he finds to Bob French, the club professional, who sells them on to the members, so that occasionally, for a small consideration, a golfer is fondly reunited with a Dunlop Warwick or a Spalding Top Flite that had been presumed missing for ever. The ones that are too cut up for resale, Uncle Dick gives to Robert, who dismantles them, adding the strange squashy bags in the middle to his unusual collection. Just now Uncle Dick is spending most of his spare time constructing a proper golf green on the lawn of Mr Royston Chittock, a recent arrival from London who is planning to spend his retirement in the village. ‘Now there’s a genuine silly bugger for you,’ says Uncle Dick, whenever the subject of the newcomer crops up.
Uncle Dick is enthusiastic about the new rook. He and Robert are on their hands and knees in the hallway, gazing down at it in the log basket, where it sits in the middle of the heap of long grass that Robert has torn from the verge side. The little bird is perfectly calm, exuding dignity and self-importance. Its disproportionately large head, hunched into its shiny black feathers, combined with its pert insouciance, create an impression that is very appealing. ‘Sweet, isn’t it?’ calls out Robert’s mother from the kitchen.
‘It’s got eyes like Elizabeth Taylor,’ says Uncle Dick. ‘They’re violet.’
It is true; the bird really does have wonderfully violet eyes. ‘Let’s call it Lizzie, then,’ says Robert’s mother, but Robert demurs. ‘It might be a boy.’ In any case, Robert has a private superstition that you shouldn’t name a baby bird immediately. If you do, it always dies.
‘How do you know if it’s a boy or a girl?’ asks Uncle Dick.
‘Wait and see if it lays eggs,’ calls Robert’s mother from the kitchen.
‘Nah, you know what I mean, before that.’
‘I asked the vet once,’ says Robert, ‘and he said that the only way to tell is to cut them open and take a look.’
‘Got a Stanley knife, love?’ jests Uncle Dick, and Robert pretends to punch him in the arm.
The older man and the boy gaze down at the serene little bird with broad, soppy smiles on their faces, and then, quite suddenly, it emits a squawk so loud and alarming that the two leap backwards, as shocked as if they had been punched in the face. ‘Bleedin’ ’eck,’ says Uncle Dick. ‘That gave me shock an’ a narf.’ The fledgling emits another disproportionate squawk, and Dick says, ‘Noisy bugger. Must be hungry.’