Taken Away
When the hikers passed the station cabin a half hour ago, I overheard them asking Jared, my assistant, directions to Yellow Pine and Johnson’s Creek. From the cabin window where I labored at the paperwork I had glimpsed the tanned complexions of the girls, the bloom of adolescence still evident in their smooth skin, on their open faces. Their light voices bubbled with excitement as they explained they were just getting away, going out into the wilds to camp, to enjoy the flora and fauna. College kids probably. Since they’d headed out up the dusty grade towards Warm Lake, I decided to take a break, to escape the impasse I’d boxed myself into in my writing. I hadn’t composed a worthwhile sentence since they appeared. I still had time before the conference, a few days to spare before the deadline for the paper, my final report on the osprey ecosystem project we had been conducting on the reservoirs around Cascade in the Boise National Forest of Western Idaho. The girls. Just as they were taking their leave, a phrase, a tone of voice arrested my normally practical mind: one of the girl’s called to the other, “Maggie, look! Do you see it? See that beautiful osprey!” The words jangled a neural chain and activated unused networks within me, circuits far afield from the ones I’d exercised in my brain on at the computer. From the cabin porch, I spied them through binoculars--ambling, carefree, their animal inclinations guiding them on, into the forest, into the hills.
Twenty-fiveyears ago I was not unlike them, but far away from Idaho’s forests--in an English woods in the heart of the once agricultural Midlands. It was during the last years of my English existence, in the years of my juvenile innocence when my enthusiasm for flora and fauna first took spark.
Beyond the shops and flats on Studfall Avenue, bordering the rows of houses along Willow Brook road, the Thoroughsale Woods remained some of the last natural treelands that geometric housing developments had not advanced upon and gobbled up. In those woods my friend, Margaret, and I hid our bikes and took long walks following the main footpaths past the tangle of brush and thickets and out among the sprinkling of ash, elm trees and groupings of collossal sycamores. It was usually the warm summer day that directed us into this wild land on the town’s outskirts, beyond which it met the farmers’ fields that cordoned the town around.
Margaret, never a Maggie to me, was my close neighborhood friend in those closing years prior to my emigration to North America. Never cut out for naturalist ways, she was more aimless than I in her reasons for enjoying these walks in the woods. She felt a collection of a variety of wild flowers, her preference being for periwinkles and bluebells, was a lovely reward for daring to forage out in the woods with me. Perhaps her mother liked the limp bouquet she’d collected. Her purse bounced on her hip and rattled with the lipsticks and compact she insisted on practicing make-up with. Crimson fingernail polish was her favorite and after she had run out of her own nails to paint, I even let her do my fingers and toes. She could spend hours sorting her make-up kit and peering into little mirrors, pretending to cover up the flaws. She was a romantic, constantly gearing herself up for romance with Tommy Steele, Elvis Presley, or any one of dozen rock ‘n roll idols of the times. She knew the songs and danced the new crazes. At 11 years, that was just not my cup of tea. Since Sadie, our common playmate of the streets, had gone away to Ireland for the summer, Margaret took up constant companionship with me during the idle weeks of school holidays.
Having her with me gave me comfort. Especially in the woods it was important to have a friend along, another set of senses for what was alive under the canopy or on the passage areas where the hawthorne trees stretched in long lines, as though some ancient farmer had set them once as hedges. The overgrown May thickets created odd cavern spaces we took cover under, from the heat or the rain, when we could safely scrape under the overhanging thorny outer growth. Not fascinated by powder and lipsticks, only an occasional collector of the latest hit records, I did share her passion to collect wild flowers--my preference, the dainty scarlet pimpernels, vari-colored scabious, and sky-blue cinquefoils. I had a book to identify them by. Many got pressed in an old dictionary or perhaps it was a heavy Bible. Memory does play tricks.
Beyond that, though, from years of our living close to the pasture fields on Rockingham Road and close to the outer village roads, since childhood my eye had grown more alert to creatures on the wing. My uncles and aunts encouraged my interest in naturalist ways long before I was aware how serious such play could be.
Margaret had up until that last summer no exceptional interest in the birds that flew around in the gardens or over the fields and she knew nothing of the those in trees and hedgerows. With my new Observer’s Book of British Birds I was keyed to follow the flittering and staged flight of individual birds and for many months in those late juvenile years I had been quite content merely to identify the species--the different sparrows, wrens, finches and titmice. When Margaret could pull herself from vanities, together we would consult my bird book which I carried in a purple bag knitted by my grandmother. However, because of her loose attention she could never mind enough to distinguish the brown ones, but only those with the bright colored marks or a definitive crest. Not all the photographs in the book were colored either, which did make the verbal description much more important. Margaret was a visual girl; only the pictures seemed to interest her. The book was crisp and new, and the sized pages had an intoxicating fragrance when first opened. Margaret loved it too, the binder’s glue having the smell of fresh nail polish. I believed with time she would become enchanted with a lark’s song or a finch’s call, but, for her, four-by-five glossies of her musical idols held sway as culture worked its collective trickery on her.
Many beautiful birds had been nesting in those shrinking woodlands and we enjoyed our afternoons together because of the general excitement of the forest refuge, so I thought. I know we enjoyed the woods because of the lively movement of nature in the trees and for idling in peaceful clearings of grasses we bedded down in. If Sadie was at home, though, Margaret often stayed to play at skipping ropes with her or learning to jive to a new hit song. For her the woods presented leisure hours in which to teach me the advances in cosmetic beauty and to tell what she had learned about boys. She was a wonderful gossip and the only one I could trust. But then, at least for a short period, things changed when I showed her the mystery of the nests hidden in the inner crotches of the thickets. A year behind me in this discovery, Margaret was touched but restrained herself from full possession of the woods’ magic.
My initiation had come the year before at my aunt’s house out in the old village countryside. One afternoon in late spring, my older cousin Alan Fletcher came out where I was sitting in a low sloping deck chair. He pulled out another deck chair and stretched it out to suit his big body. Alan was very large next to me and he had a tough manner of speaking. I remember how I could feel his voice when he spoke my way. He played rugby with the local toughs on a school team. The chairs faced out towards the back vegetable garden that looked out onto the farm pasture beyond the dense hedges bordering the bottom of the yard. A meadowlark hovered high overhead, singing a distracting shrill whistle, keeping an eye on its ground nest in the green meadow tufts. Alan craned his neck to observe the noisy lark. As we sat, my cousin, never one for idle chatter with me, kept muttering words I could not fathom in his gruff yet whispered voice. “Lookee!” and “See there!” or “Over there, d’ye see it?” I did not know what he meant or what he saw for quite a while. With one hand cupped on his brow for shade, he pointed down at the hedge and said plain and straight, “The little bird, a linnet, there in nest, just midway along from the path.” I then saw the tiny yellowish bird, a little flash of red, sitting in the upper hedge. In the next moment the bird had vanished; just a flutter and it had escaped my view. “It’s there, down in its nest now. See its bit of tail?” But I could see no movement, no nest, no tail.
At this point Alan got up stealthily and crept hunched on tip-toe down the path stones, treading on the mossy clumps. He looked back at me with his hush-finger at his lips and the other hand beckoned me with a twirl of the loose fingers. I crept behind his bulky frame, fearing to tread on his massive heels changing place with long steps. At the hedge he got on his haunches and looked up, pointing out to me the dark bowl of twigs and grass the bird had matted. It was wonderfully concealed in the dark interior, a network of thorns along the branches leading inward to keep harm at bay. I wanted to get closer but Alan held me back. “Stay back,” he whispered. That was all it took to startle the linnet from the nest; it fluttered like a paper windmill to break free quickly from the cage of branches and leaf. In a panic it certainly had taken leave, abandoned the nest in fear.
Alan stood up, admonishing me about noise and clumsiness. Looking down onto the hedge top as he could with his nineteen year-old height, he peered intensely into the heart of the bowl and nodded to me. “What?” I must have said with my expression alone because he followed with “Eggs. Five of ‘em.” He lifted me up to place me aerially over the small hedge-gap down which the colored orbs could be spied. Little blue-tinged eggs, speckles on the large end, but mostly pale white against the inner bowl of twig-matter. “Linnet’s eggs.” From that time on, Alan was my teacher, my naturalist hero.
That afternoon’s discovery set my mind on mysteries I was bound to practice. For some weeks, when I had time alone from the street gatherings and when Margret had gone on summer holiday, I strived to develop the knack, the focus, to detect the quiet secret approach of birds toward their nests. And looking, I did spy many birds, and stooped and hushed to follow their hopping and flittering trails, from tree to hedgerow and up again into a tree, but I failed again and again to see them enter the brush where the nest and the eggs might be concealed.
Two weeks following the discovery of the linnet, I visited my aunt’s house again for a Sunday tea. Immediately after arrival, I stole away to the back garden. There was the nest still but something had changed. The rim was discolored with white drops and a needle of downy feather clung to the outer lip . Below, bits of white shell littered the mulch beneath the nest in the hedge and though I felt a sense of calamity, a breaking-out-of-an-egg sensation, I knew it also meant perhaps the chicks had hatched.
At the tea table, I mentioned the linnet’s nest which was a keen concern of my uncle’s who had been recently gardening right down by the hedgerow. He happened to mention that Alan was a good nester, how he was able to scout the nests from an early age, and sometimes took one of the eggs for keeping. Then he’d blow it clean for his collection. This act of plunder at first horrified me because I felt it was an awful trick to take away a bit of nature’s own like that. Uncle Fred was quite amused at my grimace and explained the care it took to pick the right egg, and only one egg, out of the nest of several, though never if only two or three, and to touch none other than the one that was plucked. Very delicate work in a thorn bush. And there was light laughter around the table, in thinking of the danger of scarring one’s hand to stick it in a thorny thicket in order to retrieve a little sparrow’s egg, for keeping and inspecting. “Quite a trick!” my mother said. “An odd sport,” my aunt commented. “Boys will do it, and then they grow out of it,” she concluded.
My mind burned with the thought of stolen eggs. After tea, I slinked away and climbed the carpeted stairs to Alan’s room. His room was musty, the stale moist air of an upstairs room, heavy with dust from his bookcases and tall cupboard. Off for weekend rugby games, Alan had left his room quite tidy for the rough man he seemed. The cupboard had a glass breakfront, the edges of the doors grimed with fingermarks. I pulled the desk chair toward the cupboard and mounted it to see into the glass case above the counter. Bronze sports trophies on marble bases stood in line on one shelf; on the next sat some old models, a sailing bark and a yellow bi-plane, Alan had pieced together from kits. On the lower shelf was an arrangement of cardboard boxes. The wood-grain pattern of the top box caught my eye. I lifted it off the shelf and it was feather-light to place on the counter. The lid came off easily from frequent opening and closing and within I looked upon a cloud of cotton wool in which nestled a set of six tiny eggs, each in its separate spot, like precious chocolates in a molded tray. The lid was labeled “Hedgerows” and each egg had a paper slip pinned to the cotton: Hedge sparrow, Chiff-chaff, Robin, Blackcap, Bullfinch, and then a small white egg, hint of blue, a few disparate speckles and the label “Linnet.” I teetered on the chair, taken aabck by such monstrous sacrilege! Had Alan taken this from our nest? How valuable must it be to have a small yellow bird’s egg as a possession? From that time, Alan’s figure lost some of its heroic lustre. I’d think : “Boys like him would do that, and love to do cruel things like that, probably get scout badges for collecting nature and boxing it up.” However evil I thought him, the mystery of the hedgerows and the investigation of the camouflaged world still lingered as a special kind of seeing that I had yet to master. The wonder of finding a hidden world. If I found a nest in the woods, would I be able to hold back my touch, or is it a magic spell that leads one’s fingers to risk marking and condemning a bird, perhaps condemning the clutch, to a coffin of twigs, a spoiled cradle. Little did I know how my destiny was being shaped.
Henceforth, with Margret as my assistant, it was my mission to watch birds and I was determined to pass the nest detective apprenticeship.
One hot afternoon as we two girls lay back on a grassy rise before the line of hawthornes, I stared across the sunny clearing, the brim of my straw bonnet shading my squinting eyes. Focusing on movement, I began to say things to myself in whispers. “There’s a thrush.” Margret would look up, “Where?” “Wait a second. There, over there by the outside bush.” I couldn’t take my eyes off the position, but often the thrush would vanish without my seeing. It occurred to me to move closer and to remain still. I thought of our bright frocks of bold color and how obvious we must be in the open. From this point on I realized the need for camouflage. Margaret was delighted to organize our dress, to pick out suitable country-drab clothes, khaki shorts or gym slips of brown cotton. She thought it all quite exciting, dressing for bird nesting, blending with the hedge, the twigs and branches. By contagion she had also felt the mystery in the woods air. Openings.
To get a closer perspective on our prey, we took to the thickets themselves. We crouched within a cave under the hawthorn trees, settled into comfortable positions, able to lie supine and look upward to see the birds enter from the bright air above. The foliage was very dense but no telling how nests might be close at hand.
Small wrens entered the cavity of brush, sat nervously, and most exited, but one smooth brown inch-and-a-half ball of feather and flitter came in to stay. It shot with a single hop flight into a leafy crotch and settled in its place, its spiked beak stuck forth above the lip of the nest it cradled in. Like mine, Margaret’s eyes grew large and I cautioned her with the hushing finger to stay as we are, just looking. Beyond the spell of the moment, Margaret stirred, uttered quiet whispers and even broke into a little laughter. I remember how I shook with joy; I couldn’t keep myself back either--the laughter was a most natural release. The noise did not at first frighten the nested wren, until we slowly moved forward, I above, scaling the lower branch to reach up for a closer peek. Within view of its bead eye, one step to reach to get on a level branch, I twitched my head to pull away from a sharp thorn that pierced my scalp. The branch shook and the bird made a hasty, panicked departure. Still within nest position and able to crane through one more small opening, I grew breathless as I looked upon the smallest eggs imaginable, six whitish marbles in a smooth mossy bowl woven closely around with fine grasses. I climbed down to allow Margaret her view and cautioned her from touching any of the clutch and spoiling the nest. She was obviously too struck with awe to want to play with the nest or its contents. She only gazed as I had done and sighed a long “oooh.”
Margaret never met Alan, and marveled that a boy, almost a grown man, would even think to collect such eggs as trophies of the hunt. It was a very savage hobby in her mind. It was peculiar and yet we were half-way obsessed by its encompassing spell. We made some decisions about the hunt and stuck to our habit of watching. Over the months following that last summer I lived in Corby, the housing developments invaded the empty pasture land, ever closer to the woods. Then trucks and equipment began to encroach upon the woody verge and and we saw then the wild land would surely vanish in a couple of years and become filled up with semidetatched house blocks.
Through the final week of holiday before school commenced, Margaret and I continued our rambles into the woods, which season happened to be my last summer in England. Alan, who had guided me into my first indelible mystery, left for university and after he cleaned out his room, he showed me his egg collection. He even gave me the patterned box marked “Hedgerow”; he gave it to me for safe keeping. “Perhaps you’d like to keep this for us,” he said. He opened the box top and pointed inside: “There, there’s the linnet’s, remember?” Oh so little did he know! Strange emblems as they were, I grew to love the weightless shells, to handle them, inspect them.
I never saw Alan again until shortly before my parents and I were readying for emigration to Canada and I never really said thank you enough to him for his box of eggs. Who knows the meaning of a gift when it is first given? Who knows the power of yesterday the next day, the next year? For Margaret, the box had a stigma of black magic and she refused to examine its contents closely with me. In fact, from that time forth, she kept apart from me and naturally, gradually began to pull away from my companionship because I would soon flit away from these houserows we’d played around. Seeking mysteries was one thing, but Margaret had to think practically, especially about which friends to club together with, now it was certain I had no choice but to be whisked away.
With change came considerable loss during the days as we neared emigration from England in spring of the late 1950s. I could no longer look forward to summer, the woods, the birds and their nests. Everyday approaching D-Day I had to improve my ways of seeing with fresh understanding what might lie ahead and less what lay behind. No friend was going on this adventure with me. It was all choices, very difficult ones for me as a naive 12 year-old. Of course, many of the choices were my parents’ demands. How I watched in shock as they took away what I had believed would be forever solely my belongings. To throw off needless pain I accepted their decisions. Only a few of my favorite keepsakes could find places in the limited luggage and I felt the pressure to make choices as a new force in thinking and memory. Of my books, which few must I cherish? Could I take the large dictionary in which I had pressed the tender wild flowers, for-get-me-nots and scarlet pimpernels, periwinkles and marsh-marigolds I had picked, learned by name, and carefully preserved? No, Mother said, it was much too heavy. With that choice taken away, my insight to meaning grew ever sharper.
Since I had withdrawn from school, I was waking the last mornings of home in a strange holiday state. From first blinking I awoke alert, without my mind harnessed to actions of the ordinary day. Known rituals were actions of the past. The rituals of meaningful action had narrowed to the behavior of my parents and me. No longer the need to drag my everyday self through habitual expectations. In those closing days of curtailing that old life, I realised how so little I did before had had a chosen purpose.
The mystery of the last summer, the adventure with Margaret, was just my breaking through the first veil. How much of life was conscious living? I mean, did I choose to go to play games in the street with my friends, with Sadie, with Margret, with anybody? Not really. Skipping ropes, ball games, aimless bike rides into the fields, the ambling into woods--we enjoyed these as instinctual exercise and exhilarating play. Child-time, the hours we spent skipping ropes in time. With other friends I played on swings--mostly going forth on whims, simple movement, wonderful accidents of childhood motivation. None of it seemed deliberately chosen. Before long I would take myself from all these friends and from the only neighborhood I had ever known and depended on. Soon no more house, no home. No room to invite friends to play in. Necesssity. It had to be. Mother and Father had explained it to me and I understood the plan. This was, so I was told, the withdrawal period, the time to sell all and clear out--furniture, mirrors, radio, curtains, rugs and carpets, beds, settee and chairs, pictures and ornaments, the upstairs hautboy wardrobes; in fact, my parents were bargaining off the whole inventory of our home down to crockery and kitchen pans. They would sell my books, my games, my clothes, my toys.
My natural place in the house diminished with the dwindling of my possessions. A world was being dismantled and I had better make ready for the unknown. I had to read each day with different eyes. In abandoning that comfortable habit-driven existence, I was facing a new and unimagined life among strangers. How it irritated me when my pictures were stripped from the wall. My pictured past was fading. They vanished with the frames which were too brittle and heavy to pack. Of the new geography, which I had not chosen--some far off place in British Columbia in Canada--I had no vision where we would settle in a few weeks time. My choice was to settle for a few tangible essentials.
In the new land, all else we would purchase with the cash from the sold goods, and new place would be refurnished, an attempt at settling another home. A home beyond my imagining. Yet, down the line would come school anew, evenings of reading and homework, and perhaps riding bicycles, in predictable patterns again, at times appointed for me. Who would I find as friends? How does one make brand new friends? More mysteries, awakenings lay ahead and even some lively actions I must choose, actions I had once done half-asleep. The everyday sleepwalk was decidedly in the past as I struggled to confront things to come.
When my furniture went down stairs and out the door, I felt the abandonment of all ownership. In the furniture wood, especially the cupboard of my kept objects, I used to read the grain and varnish patterns as musical compositions I imagined being lavishly performed. The cupboard’s contents Father had stacked along the wall--a pile of jig-saw puzzle boxes, some folded sweaters, and photograph albums plump with snapshots of all facets of my past life. Mother took care of the albums. Soon the bookshelf vanished and with it most of my girlhood novels, my boxes of old postcards I’d collected. My heart vibrated and my memories were on fire. With the daily disappearance of dear objects, pasttimes and playthings, cloth dolls and furry animals, each fond thing immediately took on meaning by its absence, its associations revived and amplified, and the associations went to floods of memories. Though, when the dolls were put out for sale, I realised then that dolls had long ago lost their pull and charm. I felt my mind opening to make only choices that would count. The awakening grew brighter as my room became sparer and so spacious that sounds had an uncommon hollow brilliance. I remember thinking: I still have my bed and its covers. If I spoke in the nighttime or the daytime, just to hear my changing self, I heard someone else’s voice echo in the emptiness. This returning voice possessed a treble tone, high-pitched and of weak projection. Then nothing.
I faced all the last changes with stoic resolve. What else could I do? When it grew harder to hide my fondest souvenirs for the limited steamer trunk space, the moment of greatest alarm sounded inside me: Choose now from the cache of objects; pick precisely those favorites to take with you, NOW. Of all the things, first I picked a car, Tony’s car, a fine wooden toy car which I had cherished for its smooth-sanded surface and its sawn-wood smell. After littleTony died, his mother gave it to me, I was told. I could not remember Tony’s face. But his car, so carefully carved by an artistic hand, it would run like a racer with the slightest push along a polished floor as if the wheels spun on smooth bearings. How odd a choice, Father said, but Mother understood. Next, I selected my nature books, the small Observer books for identifying birds, animals, fishes, butterflies and moths. Of course, I had become attached to Alan’s collection of blue-, white, and gray-mottled birds eggs from hedgerow nests. These darlings I saved in the same ornamental box re-stuffed with fresh cotton wool, and I most certainly chose the book of birds eggs I learned to identify the species with. The rag Teddy Bear, the cartoon golliwog, and the iridescent pillow would go only as packing , soft cushions around boxes, books and toys, to wedge them and keep them from crushing the breakable things. Sadly as it happened in final choosing, the eggs were not allowed, being too fragile, Father said. The box I gave to Margaret who went to the woods with me those warm summer days to watch for birds and find nests. She didn’t really want the wretched things, but nevertheless she received the box, knowing well its meaning. What else was there? Another toy--a silly thing really--I found no way I could part with a mechanical merry-go-round, made of light tin shapes, brightly colored in shiny paints, and all set under an ochre cloth umbrella that appeared to twirl on the central spindle driven by the wind-up spring that sent the horses and riders bobbing around and around. This was a birthday gift from Margaret when I was six. Silly? Perhaps. I saw it as a need. It was its spiralling, kaleidoscopic beauty I loved to gaze at when I felt troubled at heart or ill in bed. All the other things, either clumsy in shape or too dangerous to take--my iron Eiffel Tower shilling bank, my glass bottles of perfumes I’d begged from my kind auntie, a heavy box of my record albums--all these I gave away to friends I knew liked them or who would feel happy to receive something. Margaret wanted only “Jailhouse Rock” and Frankie Vaughn’s version of “Green Door.” Sadie and the others loved the unexpected gifts. I felt swelling elation to give away what I chose and to whom I chose.
Eventually my bed went, and I lost my rational place in the house of bare cupboards, resounding floors and booming ceilings. Of home nothing was left. The boat we were notified had docked in Liverpool and departure was as scheduled. Luggage could have been shipped ahead if Mother and Father hadn’t been slow to pack their life’s remainders into the large trunks. Choices had been hard for them, too, as time rushed us towards embarking upon the ocean liner to take us away on our trans-Atlantic journey to Canada. Our bodies, individually, would move out to join the cargo of our worldly goods packed into three stacked trunks and a set of bulging luggage which sat layered in the black taxi purring at the curb. Each of us would be stepping forth for the last time out the front door, Father pulling the handle to; then off the threshold each would step, then out the front gate, Father clicking the latch behind; finally onto the well-know flagstones of the pavement and away onto new roads.
After two days limbo, a stayover in a hotel in the grimy city of Liverpool, which we had never desired to visit, the eve of sailing arrived. That night we went to a picture house to see Bridge on the River Kwai. Next morning I scaled the gangway onto the ship, and while we searched for our cabins, I heard the horns sound and felt a huge movement as the vessel made leave from Liverpool’s gray harbor. Later, on deck, leaning over the railings, I scanned the haze beyond the wake, but the sliver of shore and the green cliff tops I expected to see had already vanished on the home horizon.
David Gilmour
