The Owl Who Liked Sitting on Caesar (15 page)

And there she stayed, for at least forty-five minutes – all the way out through the Saturday shopping streets of South London, with their constant traffic-light halts and stop-start crawling along between crowded pavements. We drove slowly for miles before we reached the dual carriageway that took us out to the Kent countryside, yet as far as I could tell
not a single person noticed that I had an owl on my shoulder
– not even passengers in cars stopped beside me, whom I would at least have expected to do a brief double-take before deciding their eyes were playing
tricks. She nibbled my ear a couple of times; crapped once down the plastic sheet over the seat behind my shoulder; then decided to go back into her basket, where she stayed for the rest of the two-hour drive. She didn’t make a single sound the whole way.

As far as I could tell she stayed dopey, malleable, and a bit off her feed for the whole weekend she spent in one of Dick’s spare aviaries. She seemed riveted by the sunlight on the grass and the duck pond, and by the chickens and ducks nearby. When Avril brought Wol out on her fist and showed them to each other through the wire mesh, Mumble adopted a hunched, cloaked posture, just as she did when she heard a wild owl outside the flats. But she didn’t get hysterical, and she didn’t challenge him; could she have recognized that she was on his turf? Anyway, the experiment was inconclusive.

I would repeat it more extensively the following Christmas, when we went down to Water Farm for a five-day family holiday. The spare aviary was in an exposed position and the weather was dreadful, so I was grateful for my nephew Graham’s help in trying to fix a wildly flapping plastic sheet to shelter the roof and one side of Mumble’s quarters against the rain. (I had long ago learned that she was quite unworried by bad weather. If caught in her balcony cage by a thunderstorm she seemed to positively relish it; she would emerge from her hutch to crouch on her furthest front perch in the blowing drizzle, admiring the lightning flashes like a child at a fireworks display.)

The adjoining aviary now housed a semi-wild pair of
Tawny Owl siblings, so the Christmas visit promised to be interesting. In the event, Mumble seemed perfectly happy so long as she could see these neighbours, and she spent some time chatting to them with interest but no apparent hostility. They seemed the more anxious; they often hid from her, and when Mumble heard them moving around out of her sight she got suspicious and watchful. She ate her chicks with a hearty appetite, however, and took a bath despite the lousy weather. On several nights the three owls sang together, Mumble making the most noise. Since they were only a couple of feet apart and usually in mutual view, it did not seem likely that they were challenging each other, and more plausible that they were collectively sending warnings to more distant owls.

After we got home there were slight but unmistakable signs that Mumble’s routine had been thrown by meeting these temporary neighbours. She was never rough, but for three or four days she was a bit stand-offish, and she demanded food, and hooted, at the wrong times and places. I consoled myself for my slight and fatuous feeling of neglect by reflecting that this seemed to confirm that if anything happened to me then she could probably be introduced to another aviary without much distress.

* * *

Despite her allegedly polite behaviour towards Jean during the owl-sitting episode in June, as the summer and autumn of 1979 had passed it had become clear that Mumble was getting ever more territorial. Her behaviour towards me
didn’t change, and it was still sometimes possible to bring her in to meet an insistent visitor after they had already been installed on the living-room sofa. However, if somebody arrived when she was already loose in the flat she had started to regard it as an intrusion on ground she had occupied, and she might fly for their scalp. Tin hats were all very well, but on a couple of occasions I had to catch her quickly and shut her inside the kitchen. There she would leap around and scratch at the other side of the glass door, with furious glares and hoots. This was embarrassing; some visitors chose to take it personally, and it also greatly complicated the process of making coffee for them.

It was during the autumn of 1979 that Mumble’s behaviour towards guests became terminally intolerant, and intolerable. One evening I was cooking supper for Graham, who was passing between the kitchen and the living-room table with cutlery, wine and so forth. Mumble was sitting on her door top, watching him pass below her. In all previous encounters with him she had been friendly enough, or at least politely distant, but on this occasion he didn’t like the way she was looking at him: ‘There was a definite sense of radar lock-on.’ The next time he walked past he felt a sharp clout at the base of his skull. Startled, he put a hand up, and it came away bloody. Seeing Mumble back on her door, measuring the range once again, Graham had mixed emotions (very fast). On the one hand, she was fluffy and cute, and was his uncle’s treasured pet; on the other, she had just drawn blood, and was obviously about to try again. He just had time to snatch up an empty
cardboard box to use as a shield; it worked, but Mumble immediately circled for another run.

When his yell brought me sauntering in, still with a wooden spoon in one hand, my reaction on seeing him holding a cardboard box above his head was apparently less than helpful. He recalls a lot of tutting, and ‘Well, she’s never done THAT before’; I am ashamed to recognize the infuriating manner of fond dog-owners, whose tone implies that victims of their slavering mutts have only themselves to blame. Mumble was duly scooped up and reinserted in the balcony cage; but Graham remembers that his relief was definitely tinged with sadness, that he could never again share the same room space with this beautiful wild creature.

Despite this clear evidence that my owl was now – perhaps rather belatedly – fully in the grip of the adult instinct to defend her hunting and nesting territory, I confess that I remained briefly in denial. That came to an abrupt end soon afterwards, on a day when my friend Bella visited. The former Mumble had been happy to accept at her hands a certain amount of ‘coochie-coochie-coo’, and this time Bella reached up to her on the door top as usual. Mumble immediately dropped on her head like a feathery brick, all talons extended. As I checked her scalp for cuts, Bella let me know – with the directness proper to her birthright in the Northern Caucasus – how she felt about this treachery on the part of something that she had previously regarded as an animated fluffy toy.

The lesson was clear, and final. Mumble was no longer
an unpredictable but generally adorable pet to be shown off and shared, but a grown, territorial, dangerous and strictly one-man bird. From that day until the end of her life I could never allow anyone but myself in the same room with her. Many years later Dick and I performed an experiment (with protective headgear for him). My brother and I are superficially alike – similar in height and general build, both bearded – and as an experienced falconer he projects no nervousness when he is around birds of prey. We spent time together in the same room as her un covered night cage so that she could get used to him. As soon as I opened the cage she attacked Dick, but then allowed me to handle her to put her away again. Whatever bond she and I had, it was between us alone.

* * *

I occasionally relented over my rule about never letting Mumble into my bedroom or office. The bedroom was the only place where I had a large enough wall mirror in good enough light to attempt to photograph her sitting on my shoulder. Since the room had very little space for anything other than the double bed and a chair, and offered neither attractive perches nor a window view any different from that in the living room, she normally showed little interest in it.

The exception was the first occasion when I happened to be changing a duvet cover while she was free in the flat. That always awkward exercise was doubly so in this very confined space, and was physically impossible without
leaving the bedroom door open. When Mumble caught sight of me struggling with the billowing cotton she naturally interpreted it as a new game invented entirely for her amusement. Given her obsession with holes and tunnels, it was inevitable that the large, contorted bag of the half-replaced duvet cover would attract her at once. At the first opportunity she swooped down and scurried inside it; then, whooping like a Comanche, she tried to force her way down to the furthest corner, between the duvet’s interestingly squidgy surface underfoot and the thin, translucent tent resting lightly on her head and back. It was some time before I could extract her and banish her to the kitchen, and not before her claws had left their mark on the bedclothes.

Like any fond parent, I found it hard to apply the rules consistently, and in a weak moment one day when I was working at home I let her come into the office with me. (There was always a temptation to expose her to some new experience, simply for the interest of watching how she reacted.) I can’t recall that first occasion exactly, but I suppose she was being particularly delightful one morning, and I simply thought: Oh, what the hell – what harm can it do? Of course, once I had first weakened I did so again; I soon lost all moral authority, and Mumble found the office a much more interesting space than the bedroom.

It was large but dimly lit, with my desk under the window at the end looking out on to the balcony and her cage. It had another large built-in wardrobe with a sliding door, just like the one she enjoyed so much in the hallway,
though this one was mostly full of old military uniforms. There were stacks of bookshelves along the other walls and in a free-standing pier, and in the corner was a life-sized dummy wearing Foreign Legion parade kit. (To my relief, Mumble apparently found the large green-and-scarlet epaulettes on its shoulders uncomfortable as perches – these collector’s items, the gift of a veteran, had survived two wars, and I didn’t want them splashed with owl-crap.) The wardrobe and bookshelves offered many intriguing crannies where she could creep between and behind things, and when she came into the office she generally didn’t flit around for long before finding herself a nice dim den to settle in. She was no trouble while I was editing typescripts with a pen; the problems started when I began typing.

To the digital generations who are too young ever to have seen one in action, I should perhaps explain that a manual typewriter with metal keys made a much louder clacking noise than the plastic keyboard of a computer. Moreover – and crucially, in this context – a sheet of paper was tucked around a cylindrical carriage mounted across the top of the machine, which moved steadily from right to left as the keys were struck. When you got to the end of each line of type the carriage stopped with a slight chiming noise, and you automatically reached up with your left hand to a lever on the end of the carriage and slammed it hard back to the right again, which rotated it to the next line space. To summarize, this device had a sheet of paper waving out of it, made a rhythmic noise, and was in
constant movement from side to side, punctuated by chimes and exciting rushes ending in a crashing sound. What more could an adventurous young owl possibly desire?

The first time Mumble decided to investigate she came from behind me, hurling herself into the machine talons first and with wings upraised, as if she were jumping into a potted plant (a favourite game of hers). I’m a fairly fast typist, and when I am writing I concentrate hard, so when she arrived at speed in the central well of the machine she got a couple of key-taps under the tail before I could react. She found the rise and fall of the long keys under her feet intolerable, especially at a moment when she was trying to concentrate on biting the paper in front of her face, so things got a bit flappy and indignant before she was back on a bookshelf, thoroughly disgruntled.

Anybody would think that this would have put her off, but she was nothing if not obsessive in her interests. The sideways progress of the attractively waving sheet of paper proved irresistible, so she simply had to figure out an approach that kept her free of the annoying thrashing of the keys. This did not take much ingenuity, and before long she was landing from in front of me, directly on to the end of the carriage beside the paper. The first few times she did this I stopped typing and shooed her, chittering, off the machine. That only made her more determined, and she stubbornly returned again and again, until I lost patience and ejected her from the office.

We repeated this battle of wills on numerous occasions,
and she made progress. I would keep right on typing, and after she got used to it she found that she enjoyed riding the carriage along its right-to-left track. This was apparently exciting enough, and she usually gave up her attempts to savage the paper. Naturally, every time I slammed the carriage back to the right she jumped into the air, but she soon learned to hover for half a second until its crashing arrival at the end of the track, and then descended on to it again for the next ride. I won’t pretend that I got much copy written while she was playing this game, and after a while I had either to distract her or banish her. Any sane person would simply have stopped allowing her into the office, ever; but I must confess that I found the spectacle of her riding the carriage rather endearing, and I never could bring myself to impose a permanent ban.

* * *

Mumble continued to take an intelligent interest in the written word, and when I was sitting reading with a newspaper on my lap she might suddenly arrive out of nowhere, landing in the middle of it with a crash and happily kicking holes in it. When I was lying on the sofa she would sometimes land unexpectedly on my chest and walk up to my face, to investigate my beard. One summer evening I was stretched at my ease with a book propped on my chest; Mumble was off about her own concerns somewhere, and I was completely absorbed in my reading. Suddenly, and absolutely without warning, she landed heavily in the
narrow space between book and face. My protest left my brain as ‘Good
GRIEF
, Mumble!’, but reached my ears as ‘F’noog
F’NEEF
, Unguh!’, since her fluffy front was pressing hard against my mouth. She apparently construed the resultant burst of warm air up her petticoats as a physical liberty, because she bent forwards and carefully bit me on the bridge of my nose.