2008 - The Bearded Tit (5 page)

‘Yeah, yeah. I don’t like you snooping around my room.’ My anger had subsided but I had already revealed too much. I was studying languages; I had eleven bird books. I had snapped. I’d given too much away. We were always in each other’s rooms. I’d once turned his upside-down looking for the
Razzle Readers’ Wives Christmas Special
. I couldn’t find it, but he was eaten away with embarrassment when I’d found stuffed under his bed a four-gallon catering pack of powdered chicken soup; a present from Aunty Sadie.

‘So what has changed about the teaching of Spanish, French, linguistics and phonetics that they are concentrating on the birds of Britain and Northern Europe?’

‘I’m interested in birds.’

‘Bollocks, are you. Is there a girl at the bottom of this?’

‘None of your business!’

‘Aha! Tell me about her!’

I tried to wrong-foot him, ‘How’s Miranda?’ In below-the-belt-ness, this comment was subterranean. Miranda had been the love of Kramer’s first few months at college who after one night of passion with him had gone off with the captain of the ladies’ rugby team.

Kramer paused so he could lower his downtrodden-ness a notch. A deep breath, then, ‘Such cruelty, my son, betrays desperate tactics. So defensive!’

‘Well, what’s anything got to do with you?’

‘I care about you, my friend. And you are in danger!’

‘You know nothing.’

‘OK, let’s think about this.’

Carl Kramer was my closest friend at college. His room was directly below mine on N staircase. The other six occupants of N were, bizarrely, all members of the Christian Union. Kramer and I were regarded with suspicion on weekdays and contempt on Sundays. Branfield, Kramer’s neighbour, and the rest of the flock held a prayer-breakfast on Sundays before chapel. Kramer and I were not invited. Branfield had ill-advisedly referred to Sunday as the Sabbath, which had given Carl a juicy opportunity to lecture him on Judaeo-Christian history and the Hebrew language. Branfield was reading divinity and had hoped to join the clergy. ‘I intend to be a man of the cloth,’ he told Kramer.

‘Hey, what a coincidence,’ Kramer had said. ‘My family were tailors in Pozen!’

But Kramer was always going to be a barrister and missed no opportunity to snap into character. ‘So, Mr McGrath, the modern language student, is defensive about the eleven expensive bird books by his bed. Is he involved, do we think, with a young lady who works in the natural history department of a bookshop and needs various excuses to hang around there during the day and perhaps arrange his timetable around her tea-breaks?’

I decided to tell him a little. ‘She’s lovely and she’s interested in birds and so am I!’

‘Since when have you been interested in birds?’

‘A long time, as a matter of fact.’

‘What do you know about her?’

‘She’s stunning.’

A tut. ‘What’s her name?’

‘JJ.’

Another tut. ‘What does that stand for?’

I didn’t actually know. I didn’t know anything about her really. Except that she was phenomenal and I would probably be hopelessly in love with her soon and she was called JJ.

‘I don’t know what JJ stands for!’

‘So, you’re not even on first-name terms with her. Has she got a boyfriend? Husband? Girlfriend? Children? Terminal illness?’

‘Next time I see her I’ll give her the questionnaire.’

‘Have you kissed her?’

‘There’s just me and her. I know it. I feel it. I’ve never been so sure.’

‘But have you kissed her?’

‘None of your business.’

‘That’s a no, then.’

Kramer was getting on my nerves, but he persisted.

‘So you haven’t had it off then?’

‘What sort of question is that? That question is an insult to the relationship me and JJ have. I’m certainly not going to dignify it with an answer.’

‘So that’s another no, then.’

‘We are in the process of getting to know each other; the physical side will emerge in its own time, it cannot and will not be rushed.’

With three tuts and a portentous shake of the head, Kramer went on, ‘I don’t like it. I see pain on your horizon.’

‘You’re the only pain on my horizon at the moment.’

Kramer picked up the
Atlas of European Breeding Birds
(was £10, now only £7.50).

‘OK, then,’ Carl flicked through the pages. ‘
Lanius collurio
.’

‘Red-backed shrike.’

‘Ha,’ he jeered, ‘it must be love—he’s doing scarce summer visitors. Here’s one but I don’t think you’ll be familiar with it:
Phalacrocorax aristotelis
?’

‘Shag.’

‘He’s heard of it!’

BANG! The door slammed open and an ashen-faced Branfield stood there shaking and fuming and holding a milk bottle. It was a truly frightening sight. I’d never seen a Christian look so un-Christian. If I’d been a lion in a Roman amphitheatre I might well have avoided Branfield in this mood and gone for en elderly nun.

His measured staccato speech underlined the difficulty he was having controlling his temper.

‘This…milk…bottle…is…half…empty.’

Carl and I looked at each other and sniggered.

‘That’s a very pessimistic outlook,’ said the lugubrious one. ‘Some people would see that as half-full.’

‘Each landing has a communal fridge…the property therein is not communal…’ Branfield trembled on.

‘You’ve read this on a form somewhere,’ I said jovially. ‘Do people say ‘therein’ in real life?’

‘The items marked with a crucifix are the property of the Christian Union.’

‘Oh,’ I went on, ‘we thought they were for non-vampires only.’

‘We are buying…twice as much milk…as we use!’

A sentence that effortlessly ushered in Kramer’s unhelpful comment, ‘Well, why don’t you buy half as much?’

BANG went the door as Branfield swept out leaving a life-size outline of rage in the air.

‘Oh dear, I feel a religious war coming on,’ I said.

‘Excellent. Death, pain, evil, misery, fear, filth, poverty, disease. It’ll take your mind off this ill-advised love affair you’re embarking on.’

‘A word of warning, Mr Kramer. You’re beginning to sound jealous.’

He took one last look in the bird book. ‘
Diomedea exulans
.’

‘Eh?’

‘Come on, Rory, you’ve got one hanging round your neck. Albatross.’

‘Piss off. Anyway, that’s not a British bird. Just get the felt-tip pens. We’re going to do the fridges.’

‘Star of Davids?’

‘No, four little strokes and we can turn the crucifixes into swastikas.’

Y
ou cannot talk about a Cornish childhood without mentioning seagulls. Seagulls in this context are, of course, herring gulls. Evil-eyed robbers to some, but to me they are the sound of the sea. Not that seagulls need the sea any more. When I moved from the south west to Cambridge, it was the sea I thought I would most miss, and the laughter and tears of the herring gull’s call first thing in the morning. But I had reckoned without the expanses of East Anglian farmland. When this is ploughed the black earth becomes flecked white with seagulls.

Flocks of herring gulls used to keep me amused in my very first ‘proper’ job. This was also about the time that I had my first life-threatening encounter with a bird.

I had decided to take a summer holiday job to earn a bit of pre-further education cash. Some friends of mine had got general unskilled labouring jobs on the site of a bypass construction near my home and they seemed to be making decent cash digging holes and moving earth and rearranging traffic cones, so I thought I would offer my services to the project.

I turned up at the site office to declare my general unskilled abilities. The foreman asked me what my long-term career plans were. I told him I was awaiting my A level results and if they were OK then I would be going to Cambridge to study modern languages.

‘Oh are you brainy, then?’ he asked.

‘Well, it depends what you mean by ‘brainy’,’ I replied, latching on to a useful academic device I had learnt from a few of my schoolteachers. If you want to sound knowledgeable when asked a question, one of the first things you have to do is question the question.

He was unimpressed. ‘I mean ‘brainy’. You know, have you read books and things.’

‘I’ve read books but I haven’t read
things
. Except, of course, that books are things and therefore, I suppose, I
have
read things. I’ve read other things as well as books: pamphlets, comics, newspapers, cereal boxes, sweet wrappers, road signs…’

He looked at me as if to assess whether or not I was taking the piss out of him. He didn’t say anything so I carried on. ‘I read someone’s palm once. Oh, and—’

‘Shut up and come with me!’ he said abruptly, and I thought I was going to lose my first job before I got it. He marched me along the corridor of one of the Portakabins that made up the site office to what was known as the ‘chiefs’ office. The ‘chief’ was very ‘chiefy’: he was wearing a suit, unlike everyone else I had met on the site, and he had glasses on.

‘Mark, this guy’s going to university and all that,’ said the foreman. ‘He’s here for a labouring job but I thought, you know, if he’s brainy, what about a supervisory role?’

The boss looked at me very briefly. ‘Which university?’

‘Cambridge,’ I said, adding quickly, ‘If I get the right grades. I mean, it’s not definite.’

‘I’m going to put you on earthwork compaction. It’s better money than labouring and you won’t get your hands so dirty.’

I had not intended to go straight into earthwork compaction so early on in my working life. Indeed, earthwork compaction, I feared, might be beyond my civil engineering abilities.

‘Er, I’ll be studying languages at university. French and Spanish and possibly phonetics and Latin American history…’

‘Don’t worry; you won’t need any of those,’ he said dismissively.

That was the end of the discussion.

The foreman explained what was required of me. The bypass was to cross a valley, but because of the shape of the valley it was decided that a bridge or a flyover would be too expensive, so the plan was to fill the valley with a sort of embankment of earth along the bottom, allowing the road to continue straight and flat on its way to Penzance, which is roughly the last place any road can go to in England. I would be sitting on the top of a steep ridge high above one side of the valley and watching as lorries came and tipped loads of soil. On a sheet of paper I was to put a mark for each lorry-load of earth. After the earth was dumped a machine called a scraper would come and I was to put a mark on another piece of paper. After the scrapers came the rollers, and I was required to put a mark on the ‘roller’ sheet. So it looked as if, for the next six weeks, my day would consist of clocking on, collecting my paperwork, walking up the side of the valley to my vantage point, counting things, returning my paperwork and clocking off. And all beneath the gentle Cornish sun. This could be the job from heaven.

‘Oh, one more thing,’ said the foreman conspiratorially as I was leaving the office. ‘Let me give you a serious bit of advice.’

I was expecting something along the lines of ‘You’re a cocky little shit like all students and you’d be very wise to keep your mouth shut and keep your comments to yourself.’

But it was nothing like that.

‘Listen,’ he said taking out a pencil and a piece of paper. ‘When you’re counting things, do it in fives.’

‘OK’

‘I’ll show you. Put a horizontal mark for the first four loads,’ he said, drawing four vertical lines on the paper.

He obviously had not read very many books and things.

‘And when the fifth load comes, don’t put another mark like the other four, but put a line
through
the first four. Like you’re crossing them out. And you’ll know that little set is five. Then you just count those up at the end of the day and you’ll know how many loads you’ve done.’

It was now my turn to look at him to assess if he was taking the piss. He wasn’t.

‘Thanks, I hadn’t thought of that. That’s really useful.’

‘You see, you think you know it all, you fellas, but you can still learn a thing or two from us peasants.’ He clapped me on the back in an angry way which he wanted me to think was friendly, and gave me my earthwork-compaction sheets.

Followed by a huge cloud of cackling seagulls, the first lorry sped on to the site and dumped its load of soil. I duly marked diis event with a single upright stroke on the lorry sheet. My career as an earthwork-compaction supervisor had begun. Then came a scraper and did something to the soil. (To this day I don’t know what the scraper actually did. I assume it ‘scraped’ the soil but it seemed a large and complex machine for such a simple operation.) Anyway, the scraper did whatever it was it did, also to the accompaniment of screeching gulls. I marked the appropriate sheet appropriately and awaited the roller. This soon arrived with its attendant gulls. I’d never seen seabirds in these numbers so far from the sea; not that you are ever that far from the sea in Cornwall. It was an impressive sight: the wild birds exploiting man’s progress. I lay on the grassy knoll in the sun and looked over the valley. What a great job this is, I thought, as I made my marks on the worksheets.

Occasionally a driver would stop his vehicle and shout up at me, ‘What are you doing up there, boy? Time and motion is it?’

I had no idea what ‘time and motion’ meant but it seemed to exercise some of the operatives.

‘No. Earthwork compaction!’ I shouted back reassuringly.

What the fuck’s that?’

‘I’ve no idea.’

The only drawback about the job was that once I was ‘clocked on’ and sitting up on the ridge above the site, that was it, until I clocked off. I had not thought through the implications of this, so on the first day I had to go without food and drink from eight in the morning till six at night. I hasten to add this is something I have not repeated since. And no toilet facilities had been laid on specially for me. So the afternoon of the second day found me squatting indelicately between two gorse bushes, hoping that no one could see me.

As I squatted, something hard and sharp hit me on the back of the head. Clearly I had been seen and was being shot at. Something fluttered past. Then a bird flew directly at me and I ducked as it struck out with its feet. A vulture? A condor? An eagle? No, this was the most nondescript of nondescript small brown birds. Well, it could have been a rock pipit, tree pipit or water pipit, but as I had only ever seen those in black and white I decided it was a meadow pipit. I hadn’t realized I was near its nest, which it was defending vigorously. No matter how small the bird, they will attack as best they can if they think their eggs or chicks are being threatened.