Common Ground (22 page)

It was just after dawn when I broke into Bachelor Gardens Sewage Works. To my surprise, no alarms rang. There were no security guards, no flashing lights or sirens cutting through the muggy air. You'd think that in our surveillance-swept world I'd have triggered something, somewhere. At least, I thought so; so I waited a while, my legs crawling and burning with nettle stings, bracing myself for the inevitable detection, rehearsing the words to talk my way out of arrest. Minutes passed in half-light; the pain intensified; nothing happened. The metal doors in the spectral floodlit buildings and sheds remained shut. No one yelled at me from the shadowy tanks or the gangways running between rust-streaked vats and water channels. There was just that simultaneous hum and whine of machinery I'd heard so many times from the other side of the fence, now louder and accompanied by the muddy brew of human waste and chemicals rising from filtration beds.

My thoughts turned to escape, for this was not a deliberate act – who in their right mind breaks into a sewage farm? Rather it was the result of a wandering mind and some (in hindsight) ill-advised off-the-beaten-track running. The baby kicking and turning inside Rosie had been giving her restless nights. I'd risen early to let her spread out across the bed and to try to shake off the shackles of too-little sleep. Approaching the edge-land from a new direction, east, through an unexplored labyrinth of cul-de-sacs and estate roads, I chanced on an unruly doorway of tree and shrub leading down to a little river. I ignored a path looping back and, instead, plunged on, running along the water's side through chest-high vegetation to where I hoped the beck might link up with the Nidd further on. Then, suddenly, my legs were on fire. Nettles concealed in the hogweed and jungle-dense Himalayan balsam had ambushed me. Flailing, flaying, angry leaves waited for the slightest movement to inflict new wounds, but the closest shore in this sea of stings lay ahead and I leaped for it like a triple jumper, hardly noticing the ramshackle wall or the collapsed curtain of fence and old wire. Hardly noticing, that is, until I'd climbed over and pushed through and by then it was too late anyway. I was trapped in this otherworldly facility.

No one was coming. That was clear. So I searched for another way out, one that might spare my legs a second lashing. The perimeter was locked-down; all high walls and sturdy mesh topped with barbed wire. The main gate was chained and its sign graffiti-scrawled: ‘The Smokers Yard', sprayed in blood-red paint with a scattering of roach ends and cider cans to illustrate the point. Almost willing to be discovered, I headed back to where I'd broken in, but via a different route, a small road that wound between the conglomerations of barrack-style buildings and choppy brown lagoons, past surreally idyllic stands of Scots pine and triangles of mown lawn. It was all very Cold War, the air a post-apocalyptic purple and pink, warm, misty and poisonous-smelling. Everything was deserted, eerie and, if I'm honest, a little exciting. Up, over a rise, and through another screen of pine trees, I was suddenly confronted with a strange geometric pattern sunken into the grass: six large, wide, water-filled concrete circles. Reaching out from their centres were great metal arms that spun slowly, churning and stirring, like the exposed mechanisms of some ancient buried machine. I could smell pine resin, freshly cut grass and sulphur. Beyond lay the huge, hanging silence of the Nidd, the gorge, the viaduct, the wood and, further still, hazed fields of rapeseed and wheat. But it was there that I saw them; there, in the air above those stinking ring-pools that they circled, silently, secretly.

There must have been eighty, maybe a hundred, but so many that at first I took them not for birds but insects clouding in whirls over the drums, turning the way tea leaves do when washed down a plughole. I forgot the pain in my legs and stood there looking east, as the rising sun laid its hot hand across my forehead, transfixed by their flight and strange flocking, feeding formations. There was none of their usual velocity; the birds drifted in the air as if in slow motion, slow enough that I could make out each one's profile: the stiff-winged, black anchor shape against the sky, reversing direction at will, taking what must have been millions of the stirred-up, snub-nosed sewage flies in balletic sweeps and dips. Here was the tidal wave of summer in its infancy, still out at sea, gathering strength. My boat had somehow drifted into its path. After a while, standing there staring seemed voyeuristic, as though I'd caught them early, backstage, doing warm-ups before the full show. I felt that I should say something, maybe cough politely, let them know I was there at least. But what do you say to birds?

Alarms, security guards, police sirens – they're what you might expect when you break into a sewage works, not a sky full of swifts. Such things lift the lead from your head. Worth crossing a sea of nettles for; twice, as it turned out.

Where they went next, though, I couldn't tell you. Those last warm days of May broke, and in swept the storm-horses of rain and wind, catching the country out in a stampede, kicking down the flowery frills and thick green bunting with heavy, iron shoes. The light changed. Skies slated. The outside intruded. Slugs invaded the kitchen every night, leaving silvery ghostly ribbons all over the floor. Weather bulletins showed a graphic of an atmospheric depression migrating east across the Atlantic, settling over the British Isles. Its isobars corkscrewed in a lazy circle, a scribbling motion round and round, like a bored child's crayon. ‘Here for the next month,' the man said. And it was, all day, every day, from dawn to dusk until the Nidd surged high, loud and dirty brown. The woods and the wheat fields shook and cowered like slaves under an overseer's whip. I thought of the swifts often, but each time I donned a cagoule and ran down to the sewage works, seeing anything was impossible, like the sky had fallen in and lay bubbling on the earth. Everything was rank with a sulphurous fog. Eventually I stopped bothering. I knew they weren't there. Flies spasmed in soaking cobwebs between the perimeter's barbed wire; I could hear the mechanical arms turning and whining. The egg stink. That was all.

Swifts can't feed in rain and so will travel astonishing distances to avoid bad weather and find food. They are fantastic meteorologists, capable of detecting the finest fluctuations in air pressure and moisture. Then, despite only weighing the same as a bar of Dairy Milk, they will fly into a headwind to reach more clement climes on the fringes of weather patterns. I reasoned this was what my swifts had done. But exactly where they had gone was anyone's guess. Ornithological surveys have tracked swifts leaving gathering points above London to conduct foraging trips over the Norfolk and Lincolnshire coasts, way out across the North Sea, even as far as Germany, to plunder the abundant clouds of insects that swarm at the rear of an occluded front.

To grounded minds, feeding excursions that might clock up 600 or more miles in a day seem incomprehensible, inefficient even, but the more you learn about this bird, the more you realise that considering any part of its existence by our limits and measures is a mistake. Swifts are almost entirely beings of the air, as near to an element as you'll find in a creature, evolved to spend their lives in a state of permanent airborne motion. From the point that they fledge and free-fall from nests on those sickle wings, the swift's life is one long aerial journey. Unless injured, they will never touch the ground. They feed, drink, preen, mate, even sleep in the air. Only fleetingly when nesting high up in the nooks and crannies of old buildings do they become creatures of the lower realms, of our earthly world.

Just as the storms had sent the swifts soaring, the dreary, pelting days drove me inside. Each morning through a curtain of grey I waved off Rosie as she set out on her own swift-like excursions across the county. Since moving north she'd taken a job selling produce into delis and farm shops, which necessitated considerable road miles. Her ‘territory of responsibility' stretched as far as Lincolnshire in the south and Whitley Bay in the north and took in pretty much every back road in-between. Working long hours at my desk as rain machine-gunned the roof tiles above, I worried about her out there, driving alone under dark, unrelenting skies. Soon flood bulletins began to pour in by the hour. The ground was saturated. Reporters dressed in that uncomfortable mix of waterproofs and ties described how whole towns were being cut off or split in half by bursting rivers. There was talk of climate change and blame, how all of us need to get used to living with these kinds of extreme meteorological outbursts from now on, as if the weather was some moody teenager tantruming through a house. The actual source of the misery took many forms depending on who you listened to: either it was Arctic sea ice knocking the jet stream off course, pushing it south, or it was our overheating atmosphere creating drier air capable of holding more moisture, hence the heavier, increased rains. Whatever the scientific argument being put forward, all seemed to have one depressing area of common ground: the hand of man.

Every day Rosie said the same: ‘I'm fine,' but I could see she was exhausted. By the end of the month, she was done-in by the hypnotic motion of the windscreen wipers and the effort of concentrating through clouds of road spray as she followed diversions. One night she fell into a deep sleep almost as soon as she walked through the door. Lying on our bed as the rain squalled against the window, she gently held her bump, our baby, in its own little watery world. I stretched out next to her, slipped an arm under her shoulder and stared up at the ceiling. It was 23 June. The longest day of the year had already passed, unmarked, lost in the flood; the warmth and sun it normally promised seemed further away than ever. I thought about the swifts again, birds that were supposed to be the winged heralds of our high summer and blazing days, and wondered,
Had they come too early? Had they bailed on us? Do swifts make mistakes?
I wasn't sure, but something was troubling me. Their absence, like the unceasing rain, made me anxious, as though the world wasn't working properly. ‘Generally unsettled,' the forecasters might have said.

You'll read of the common swift (
Apus apus
) as a ‘British bird', but this is something of a misnomer – a bit like saying the passing clouds are British, or the constellations. It's true that many make the nearest thing to a home – their nests – here, but even the swifts that converge in our skies each year only spend a maximum of three months (usually between May and August) in the UK, a mere quarter of their lives. Really, we borrow them at best. The rest of the time they are in transit or hoovering up insects above the rainforests and rivers of the Democratic Republic of Congo. All the world's population of common swifts overwinters there, living the same fluid, ranging life under African skies. Just as they will in more northerly latitudes, swifts cover huge areas in the search for food. Flying high and fast they will travel as far as Mozambique in the east, Angola in the west, and down to South Africa. Then, around April, with their breeding season approaching, they surge back in their millions, rising and heading pole-wards, undertaking epic and perilous migrations over vast oceans, mountains and deserts to often long-established nesting sites across Europe and Western and Central Asia.

‘Our' swifts, as much as we can ever really call them that, were once believed to fly directly north, following what seems the straightest and shortest possible route back to Britain. That's what land-locked logic assumed. However, recent geo-location data from the British Trust for Ornithology has revealed another story. One tagged bird's ‘flyway' – as the experts snazzily term migration routes – was found to follow the Congo river west, heading out from its mouth across the Atlantic before turning up in a curve to Liberia in west Africa, taking advantage of feeding sites and wind patterns. There it circled for ten days, feasting and fattening on swarms of flying termites, before a rapid, non-stop flit back to Cambridgeshire across the Sahara, over Spain and France, covering 3,100 miles in just five days. Amazingly, within three months, just as autumn began to cool the far horizon, it made a similar-length journey in reverse. In total, the bird was recorded as flying a round trip of 12,400 miles to breed in the UK. And this was by no means the record – other tagged swifts in the same migratory loop had more than 17,000 miles under their wings.

And to think that these birds make these pilgrimages once a year, every year, cruising at seventy miles per hour as loftily as 10,000 feet, sometimes higher. People claim to have seen them at nearly double that altitude, cruising above the peaks of the snow-crusted Himalayas. That zooms out the mind instantly. Right out and up into the cold clarity of the higher, quieter realms. You enter a kind of Google Earth world where cities are reduced to smudges of grey; forests and field networks are little more than pixels of green. The more you think of it, the more the head spins, as though you're flying up there yourself amid the isotherms and the jet stream, rising with air currents as sun-edged horizons, entire countries and vast, grey, hostile seas spin and vanish between the breaks in clouds below. It's a dizzying perspective. The mind struggles to conceive of how these small, almost weightless sylphs, woven of little more than feather and thin bone, are capable of such ludicrous speeds, heights and distances. And they are nothing short of ludicrous. I read somewhere once that a swift chick ringed in Switzerland was found dead as it returned to the same nest site twenty-one years later. Observers reckoned that in the intervening years it had clocked up around three million miles.

But for birds migration is not a choice, an urge to travel like ours, born of being too long settled; it is an ancient, hard-wired instinct driven by those two biological imperatives: survival and reproduction. To the swift a British summer is supposed to provide the riches of insect hatches filling warm air and a relatively calm climate for raising chicks. If swifts had such things, the travel brochure for the UK would promise: ‘long balmy days and sunny evenings for extended feeding sorties – perfect when there are new mouths to feed!' So what happens when they arrive to a washout? Are those ancient, miraculous journeys all in vain? Almost certainly. Experts tell us that adult swifts toiling in the wet end up woefully underweight and at risk of lacking the reserves to complete the return flight to Africa. Even when they try to nest, scratching the undeniable biological itch, it seems they have an awareness of the hopelessness of it all. Knowing there isn't enough food to feed themselves, let alone young mouths, they abort, pushing eggs unhatched from nests. Over time and given persistently grim summers, it's feasible that swifts could cease to exist at all in our skies. We're only too aware nowadays that species will vanish, but the thought of losing swifts terrifies me. ‘They've made it again,' wrote Ted Hughes, ‘which means the globe's still working.'
¹
How perfect that is. Nothing speaks of this planet's interconnectedness like the swifts' migration; nothing screams so loudly of its fragility either.