Tail-end Charlie
It occurs to me now that there was a hint of whimsical tenderness in the name that Dad suggested. Consciously or not, he had gone back to his memories of the War. ‘Tail-end Charlie’ was RAF slang for the rear gunner on a plane, the airman with the shortest life expectancy. The sitting duck. It was uncharacteristically good shrewd psychology on Mum’s part that she let Dad, who wasn’t that keen on pets, have a hand in their naming. It made him part of their lives. Who knows? Perhaps Gipsy was named after the Gipsy Moth, his favourite biplane.
I knew quite a lot about budgies by this time, and although I was happy about Charlie’s miraculous survival I was sad to realise he would never be a dad himself. You can’t breed if your own kind rejects you, and it wasn’t clear if Charlie even knew he wasn’t human. All my objections to the business of reproduction melted away in this case. The bond between us tightened as we shared our disadvantages. I became attuned to the faint whirr of his wings and the high humming of his heart.
Charlie was a talker, and an excellent one. Since he had been rejected by his own kind, talking to humans was the only sort of communication he had. His repertoire included snippets of songs and nursery rhymes. He would be let out of his cage to fly around the room, but when I called ‘Charlie’, he would always come and sit on my finger. He gave me love-nibbles on the lips without ever going so far as to bite. Sometimes he would hop across the pillow and whisper secrets in my ear.
Charlie would have been a fine companion for any child, but he was tailor-made for my needs. He responded to a word, to the merest movement of the lips. No agitation of the bones was required to set him in flight towards me. Charlie responded also to Peter, but if I called to him while he was in flight he would change course and come to me. The summons was answered almost before it was formulated, as in the ideal working of a prayer.
Sometimes I would close my eyes when I called him, for the slightly spooky heightening of sensation, feeling the wind from his wings and the little blurting noises he made as he landed. His feet, which were hard and warm, gave a feeling exactly half-way between tickle and prickle.
It gave me a great feeling of intimacy with creation to feel Charlie’s warm beak rubbing and brushing against me, and to feel the tiny bursts of slightly warmer air puffing out of the slits in his nose. ‘Birds can’t have nostrils,’ said Mum, though. ‘Not even noses really.’ I thought that was unfair. For a while I hated dictionaries for being so killingly exact. When she went out of the room I spoke to Charlie about his non-existent nose, telling him that it’s what you can do inside that counts. As far as I was concerned, there were no nostrils wider or more flarable than Charlie’s.
Charlie was fascinated by Gipsy. There could be no question of restricting Charlie’s movements after all he’d been through, so Mum clipped the dog’s wings instead. Before she opened the cage, Mum would raise her hand and say, ‘YOU DO!’ to Gipsy, who instantly froze and stayed motionless. Charlie would land on Gipsy’s head, talk to her and fiddle with her ears. This was great fun for Charlie. Gipsy was furry and silky and she had wonderfully satisfying ears. With humans you could go straight to the hole in the ear and tell your secrets, but with Gipsy you had to burrow and pull up the flap. When Charlie seemed to be climbing bodily into the poor dog’s ear, Mum would step up her vigilance. She would call out a stern warning (‘CHARLIE!’) if she thought he was probing too deeply.
Dad thought all this peace-keeping between the species was ridiculous. ‘Let Nature sort it out’ was always his principle. If it had been up to him Charlie would have ended his first mission of exploration as a fluttering snack, since that is generally the way Nature Sorts It Out.
Then one day ‘the girl’ forgot to close the window of my room, and Charlie escaped. I remembered those other blue birds flying off into the doom of the even bluer sky, and I wept. Surely God could not be so nasty as to take away the one thing I really loved and could actually play with? My dear friend kept me cheerful and never got sad himself. He was a playmate who weighed so little that he couldn’t hurt me even if he flung his whole ounce-and-a-bit against me. His play could never get rough. I prayed like mad to God at least to look after him. My praying style was crude and I hadn’t yet learned to add ‘If it be Thy will’ to every petition, but just as I was getting to my ‘Amen’ the door opened and in came Mum with Charlie in her hand.
It was a miracle. I had to hear the whole story from Mum. I made her tell me time and time again. How she had watched him landing in a tree, how she had climbed the tree stealthily like a cat. How she had laddered her stockings but didn’t care. How she climbed right up to him until she was ready to pounce, all the time making tiny tch … tch … noises with her lips. Tell it all again, Mum. From the beginning.
Charlie’s disability must have added to his disorientation at being outside. All birds were hostile to him, even other budgies. It had been Mum who had coaxed the orphaned bird out of his egg in the first place, so he was only going home when he chose to land on Mum’s hand. We weren’t keeping him against his will. Ours was the only home where he could thrive. And soon Charlie was chirping and dancing again, making additions to his vocabulary.
The twenty-seventh letter
The Collie Boy and I had a bit of a barney one day, about the twenty-seventh letter of the alphabet. I memorised the order of the letters to her satisfaction, which was the sort of thing I enjoyed, but then I started asking about the letter that had been left out. I knew there was one more. One more makes twenty-seven. But did it go before the A, or after the Z? Or somewhere in the middle? ‘Nonsense, John,’ said the Collie Boy, ‘there’s no such thing as a twenty-seventh letter. Twenty-six is plenty.’
‘Shall I draw it for you, Miss Collins?’ I offered politely. ‘I know exactly what it looks like. I just don’t know what it’s called.’
I suppose I was a faintly alarming child from the word go, in terms of curiosity and oblique obsession. Illness had intensified my mental life without feeding it. And I had always been the sort of child who looks troubled — as his mother notices — during tellings of ‘Goldilocks’. Always at the same point in the story. Something puzzles him about the details.
Then he tells her what he wants. They must do an experiment. He wants her to go into the kitchen and fill vessels of different sizes from the hot-water tap. He is trying to reproduce experimentally the conditions of the Bears’ interrupted breakfast. Fairyland is in breach of the laws of physics. This offends him. It doesn’t make sense. Baby Bear’s bowl is the one which must by rights lose its heat the fastest. If any of the helpings of porridge is to be ‘just right’, not too hot and not too cold, then it can only be Mummy Bear’s. Why has the story gone wrong?
On the day of our alphabet quarrel Miss Collins humoured me at first, by bringing the little blackboard in range and handing me a piece of chalk, so that I could draw the twenty-seventh letter, but her expression was not indulgent. Perhaps she thought I was being cheeky. I did what I could with the chalk, to reproduce a letter shape that I had only seen in print — and only as a capital. Collie Boy hardly glanced at my drawing before saying, ‘There’s no such letter, John. Perhaps you’ll allow me to know best. The English alphabet has twenty-six letters in it. No more and no fewer.’