Rook (36 page)
Authors: Jane Rusbridge
High above, streaming towards them across the sky, twists a sooty skein, the exuberant chatter of the approaching rooks building to a crescendo as they funnel downwards on to the fields.
‘There are so many.’ Her voice wavers. Harry cups her hands in his and rubs them briskly.
He places her gloves in her hands. ‘I came here with my wife.’ He turns away to rest his forearms on the gate and lifts the binoculars to look out over the field of rooks. She stares at his back, at the ill-fitting jacket made for a smaller man, one pocket half-ripped off and flapping loose. He has not mentioned a wife before.
Rooks begin to leave the trees and telegraph wires, funnel and dip in the sky before coming down to land in the fields, along the furrows, causing other birds to peel up and back to resettle. Nora hugs herself, shrinking into the downy warmth of her coat, and wonders about children.
‘Warm enough?’ Harry says.
‘Yes.’
Their space disturbed, another group lifts, a mounting wave, soaring higher to curve back and land elsewhere.
They had to clip Rook’s wings after he’d knocked himself out. His flying is too haphazard, seeming to take him by surprise when he is angry or frightened, the flurry of his wings beyond his control, sending him crashing into walls and ceilings, or up into trees, stranded. Nora took him to the man with mermaid tattoos at the bird sanctuary and was reassured when he said wing clipping was not permanent. ‘It’ll need to be done again in the spring,’ he said, as he showed her which of the long feathers to clip. ‘Unless,’ he looked up at her briefly, as if to judge her likely reaction, ‘unless, that is, the instinct for flight comes to him fully and he makes up his mind to go.’
Gradually the movement of the birds lessens. Fewer new birds arrive. It is almost dark. The rooks grow quieter, their murmurs simmering. Nora rubs her arms to warm herself.
‘C’mon,’ Harry says, startling her. He sets off down the lane at a brisk pace.
Her toes are lumpy and stiff with cold, but she wants to stay until the rooks finish roosting. ‘Can’t we stay and watch?’
Harry points across a flat field towards a copse of alders. ‘That’s where they go. We’ll guess at their flight path.’
They sit together, their backs against a tree, not talking. One side of Nora’s body, the side next to Harry, is warm, the other cold. The sun has disappeared and all movement in the fields has ceased. Harry is scanning the almost dark sky.
‘Is it over?’ she asks.
He puts a hand on her forearm.
And it starts: a whisper of feathers, a disturbance of air rippling into an explosion of sound as rooks rise in ragged clumps from the fields with the jubilant clap of wings beating, wave after wave. Nora’s stomach flips, like the lurch of love. A blizzard of clamour, the sky teems black as birds bank and roil, funnelled clockwise one moment, sucked back the next, eddies and spirals blurred against a glimmer of sky. Nora, shivering, barely registers Harry’s touch as he slips his coat around her shoulders.
The two of them get to their feet, surrounded by the applause of wing-beats, exultant as a standing ovation.
This is a work of imagination inspired by the landscape, wildlife and history of Sussex, and by the richness of local oral tradition. Bosham is featured on the Bayeux Tapestry. Â You can visit the ancient church, and The Anchor Bleu which occasionally floods when the tide is high, but you will not meet Steve the vicar or Jason the barman. Like all the characters, they live only in this novel. Bosham village itself is fictionalised here, though locals might recognise aspects of Dell Quay, West Wittering, the dunes at East Head, and the paths along the shoreline of Chichester harbour. Within these pages, where the story demanded, I have shrunk both time and distance.
I’d like to thank my agent, Hannah Westland at Rogers, Coleridge and White, and all at Bloomsbury, especially Helen Garnons-Williams, Erica Jarnes, Audrey Cotterell and Greg Heinimann, all of whom gave me inspiration, support and help with producing this book.
My thanks are also due to the following people: Kathy Page, Vicky Grut, Renate Mohr, Ann Jolly, Melanie Penycate, Maria O’Brien and Karen Stevens, who were early readers and offered suggestions; David Knotts, Heather Harrison, Cecelia Bignall for allowing me to listen in to cello lessons at the Royal Academy; Erica Stewart from SANDS for sharing her story; Chris Dennis for help with the Waltham Chronicles; Joan Langhorne, for coffee and biscuits as I poured through church archives, more than once; Jo Phillips, for rook information; Jill and Karl Campbell for advice on police procedure and the law; Sharon Martin, for the visits to retirement hotels and for her wonderful session about Burns Night; Yvonne Herrington, for help with smudge sticks and auras; Jackie Buxton for tips on running; Sue Bisdee, for midwifery advice and anecdotes. Any mistakes I’ve made with all this generously given information are my own.
John Pollock’s work on the history of the stone coffins of Bosham church in ‘Harold: Rex – Is King Harold II Buried in Bosham Church?’ (Penny Royal Publications, 1996, with 2002 supplement ) first captivated my imagination. For further research, the following publications have been indispensible for both inspiration and information: ‘A Guide to Holy Trinity Church, Bosham’ by Joan Langhorne;
Crow Country
by Mark Cocker (Vintage, 2008);
Corvus: A Life with Birds
by Esther Woolfson (Granta Books, 2008);
1066: The Hidden History in the Bayeux Tapestry
by Andrew Bridgeford (Walker & Company, 2006);
Mstislav Rostropovitch: Cellist, Teacher, Legend
by Elizabeth Wilson (Faber, 2007).
I’m very grateful to my daughter, Natalie Miller, for sharing my passion for rooks and taking photos on rooking trips. Thank you to all my family for their support, most especially David for his love and patience with all the 1066 and rook talk, as well as with the hours I spend writing.
JANE RUSBRIDGE
is the author of
The Devil’s Music
. She lives near the coast in West Sussex with her husband, a farmer, and the youngest of their five children. She has an MA in Creative Writing from the University of Chichester, where she was the recipient of the Philip Lebrun Prize for Creative Writing and is Associate Lecturer in English.
Also available by Jane Rusbridge
The Devil’s Music
It’s 1958 and Andy’s sister, Elaine, is born. While his father insists the baby is ‘not quite all there’ and his mother sinks into lonely despair, Andy’s rope-maker grandfather teaches him the knots that keep treasures safe. Then a young painter, hired to decorate the house, begins to call Andy’s mother back from her grief until, at the family’s seaside retreat, Andy is left in charge of his baby sister on a windswept beach where he discovers not all treasures can be kept safe forever.
Three decades later, Andrew returns to the place where his life unravelled and faces his past.
The Devil’s Music
is a moving novel about love, betrayal and family secrets.
‘A powerful and deeply affecting story of the bond between a mother and her children ... Jane Rusbridge is a brilliant new voice’ Alison Macleod
‘Vividly and intensely written’ Jane Rogers
‘This intricately structured, brilliantly observed modern take on a family saga is both passionate and moving and the prose snaps, crackles and pops with gorgeous detail’ Lesley Glaister
‘Sensuously written and beautifully woven together, the various strands of the story converge in a heartrending – and heartwarming – climax’ Kathy Page
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What inspired you to write
Rook
?
Writers sometimes describe the earliest stage, when something haunts your mind and you’re not at first sure why, as a ‘gift’ from the unconscious. My gift was rooks - birds I’d never particularly noticed properly before. They were nest-building in trees arching over the road as I drove to work, and I began to look out for them every day.
At around the same time, the untold side of a tabloid newspaper story piqued my interest. By chance I came across another, very similar case, and was niggled by the one-sided telling of both. I didn’t want to write about these ‘true life’ events: what happens to Nora is not something I have experienced myself, plus sensationalism was a danger. One day when talking to a friend about my preoccupation with these stories, in one of those weird moments of synchronicity, I learned she’d recently been involved with a very similar case at work. So my resistance in the end gave way and Nora’s story began to grow.
The moment when several apparently disconnected threads came together was during a wander around Bosham church. There’s a bird etched onto the memorial stone for King Cnut’s daughter and, though I’d seen it many times before, the etching suddenly appeared to me to be very much like a baby rook. Eureka! I knew then that the village traditions, mysteries and myths surrounding the ancient stone coffins in Bosham church would provide a frame around which to weave the various narrative strands which were the chaos of my first draft.
You ‘bookend’ the novel with two vividly imagined episodes featuring real historical figures – are you tempted to write a full-blown historical novel?
The brief battlefield scene which opens
Rook
was written very early on and the process absorbed me for days. The imagining of such a savage scene forced a focus on concrete imagery which links love and loss, a theme which was to be central to the novel, though I didn’t know it at the time. I later wrote more of Edyth Swan-neck’s story which was cut right back during redrafting to leave just the two episodes.
Rook
wasn’t the place for it. I had an inkling this was novel three surfacing but again resisted the idea (this seems to be part of my creative process!) because the voice which came so powerfully when writing Edyth’s viewpoint is intense and would be difficult to maintain for a whole novel. However, the hidden histories in the Bayeux Tapestry remain a preoccupation, as does Edyth’s story and what happened to her after the Norman Conquest. I’m now planning a trip to West Stow Anglo-Saxon village. So, yes, I’m more than tempted.
Both your novels explore secrets and hidden stories. Is this a preoccupation of yours?
Yes. Untold stories fascinate me, the power they hold over people/characters who, for whatever reason, can’t at first voice them. The ‘underside’ of things draws me: the secrets people choose to keep; a point of view which may go unstated in a newspaper story; mysteries which can’t be solved because we don’t have enough information – but we try to solve them anyway. More than a preoccupation, the unfolding of a story which is at first hidden is very much part of my writing process. Michèle Roberts talks of ‘writing into the dark’ with a first draft and that’s how it is for me: both exciting and frightening. The sense of the story about to be discovered, as if it already exists somewhere, is what drives me.
You write about Rook so convincingly. How did you do your research into birds?
I began with
Crow Country
by Mark Cocker, a glorious book which sent me off on an exuberant quest to Norfolk to watch thousands and thousands of rooks come into roost – one of the most uplifting experiences of my life. Rook himself grew from information gleaned from my husband and his sisters about a pet rook their mother kept for years in the casing of an old television in their kitchen. I also learned a great deal from
Corvus: A Life with Birds
by Esther Woolfson, who writes with captivating detail about a baby rook she reared. I’ve never had a close encounter with a live rook, but when editing during one early summer I often ate my lunch outside in the company of a semi-tame female blackbird. Watching the blackbird watch me, the way she moved and the way I felt when she eventually took food from my hand, all added to my understanding of Rook and Nora’s relationship, and helped me appreciate the fragile balance between what is wild and what is tame.
