Young Phillip Maddison (29 page)

“A green woodpecker!” he whispered. “I saw one on the Socialist Oak on the Hill once, just like it!”

The woodpecker looked at them round the bole, its red head moving snake-like; then it moved back and hid. Phillip could hear its claws on the bark. Again came the wild mocking cry, then it was flying away from the top of the tree, rising and falling in a series of half-loops.

“Come on, man!” said Phillip, and they ran to the tree.

The birch was a thick one, with many chippings spread around its base. One of the upper branches was snapped off, and lying below in the ferns. The wood had rotted, becoming tinder, but the white bark was still round and firm.

“It’s the oil in it that preserves it, Desmond. And look, can you see the holes in the trunk up there?” he pointed. “That’s where it chisels out insects in the wood. And golly, that round hole among them is its nest! Here, give us a bunk up!”

He started to climb. Desmond pushed him up until he
reached the lowest branch. The nesting hole was about twenty-feet above. Phillip reported, as he clung to the trunk, that it went in about three inches before it turned downwards. “It’s the nest, all right. But it is too early for eggs. We ought to leave it, in case the bird deserts. You can have a look next time.” He climbed down, dropping the last six feet upon the sward.

“Come on, man, isn’t it a wonderful preserve?”

The next nest they found was in a holly tree, out of which a woodpigeon clattered noisily. There was a small platform of crossed black twigs on one of the branches. It was Desmond’s turn to climb up. The tree was easy.

“Careful of any eggs” called up Phillip. Desmond reached the nest, and said, “Two white eggs.”

“The ring dove is the farmer’s enemy, but we will leave them, for a photograph later on. Some people tie the young pigeons, called squabs, by their legs to the nest, for their parents to feed long after they are fledged, Desmond. Can you guess why?”

“For pets?”

“Well, hardly. To get them nice and juicy, for cooking. It’s rather cruel, don’t you think?”

“Yes. I would like to keep pigeons in my garden.”

“Well, we’ll see. Come on, my ambition is to get a young hawk, to train it for sparrows in the Backfield, but it’s too early for them nesting now. Jumping Jehoshafat!”

A mottled brown bird, with a long beak and liquid dark eyes, had flown up with a whirring, clicking noise from the dead leaves of the woodland, seeming to dart away through the trees.

“A woodcock! Father saw one here once, he told me. They don’t usually nest in England, but a few stay behind in the migration, and lay their eggs on the ground. Carramba, this is a wonderful place! Come on, let’s explore!”

Phillip felt that they must miss nothing. Here was the world he had dreamed about during foggy evenings with the soiled copies of
The
Field
before him on the kitchen table; while sitting quietly behind Father’s armchair later in the evening, reading library books (none of them glossed nowadays) about birds, animals, fishes, and rural customs. He had searched through the bound copies of
The
Gentleman’s
Magazine
in Father’s glass-fronted bookcase, and lived in the accounts of fishing and collecting birds for stuffing in Norway and other foreign countries; and best of all, descriptions of English fields and
village people. He had put up nesting boxes in the elm in the garden, and watched through the window tits and starlings inspecting them at the beginning of spring, determined never to shoot at the starlings in the close season. All that he had read and seen, together with what Father had told him of his own boyhood doings, during Sunday morning walks, now seemed to be coming real in his own life.

A flattish nest made of brown beech leaves in another holly was recognisable from one of the engravings in an article in
The
Illustrated
London
Magazine.
He was sure it was a squirrel’s drey, but said nothing, in case of disappointment.

Trembling, he told Desmond to climb up, and feel in a hole he would find in the side. He felt too weak, almost too dream-like, to climb up himself.

Desmond picked his way up through the spiny leaves of the holly, which surrounded the base of the tree. Phillip had read that holly leaves often had no spines on them above the reach of grazing cattle. He told Desmond this; and Desmond called down, “You’re quite right, Phillip, the leaves are quite a different shape up here, more rounded and smooth.” He reached the nest. “I can’t find the opening.”

“Feel very carefully all round it. Don’t pull it, whatever you do. Feel carefully, and something inside might feel warm, like Timmy Rat in his nest.”

“Oh!” cried Desmond. “Look!” He held out a fawn-coloured animal, with short working legs and stump of tail. “What is it?”

“I thought so, you know!” cried Phillip, in triumph. “It’s a drey of young squirrels. Bring it down, for a photo. Put it in your shirt, for safety.”

Desmond did so. He climbed down carefully. “Oh, it tickles! It’s trying to crawl away!”

The baby squirrel was about five inches long, very soft, with fine silky hair, a blunt head and rounded tags of ears. It had long claws, as yet soft and unpointed. The boys admired it, holding it against their cheeks in turn.

“Father had one as a pet when he was a boy, as well as ferrets, a white rat like mine, and other things,” said Phillip. “Only his squirrel was a nuisance when it grew up. It used to prance around the rooms, leaping from particular places every time, so that its claws wore them out after a bit. So he had to
let it go. It used to drink the cream off the milk in the larder, and also suck hen’s eggs. Hold it in your two hands, will you, while I take a photo.”

Phillip went back two paces, and shaded the view-finder with a hand. The Brownie box camera, with its fixed focus, clicked. “Good! That’s our first photo! Five more, and I’ll be able to develop the film. Have you ever done any developing?”

“No, Phillip.”

“It’s quite easy. You want some black cloth over the window, a lantern with red glass in it, a tray with developer, and when it’s done you wash the negative in the bath under the tap for an hour, to stop further oxidisation of the silver nitrate on the film, which turns black in light. That’s all. Only when the film is wet, you have to be jolly careful not to nick it with your nail, for it’s soft like jelly, and a nick comes out black on the print afterwards.

“My first camera was a penny pin-hole one,” went on Phillip. “It was a tiny little cardboard one, with a pin-hole instead of a lens. It took about a minute exposure. For the penny you got also a glass plate, chemicals for the developing solution, a piece of sensitised paper for the print, and a screw of hypo for fixing. I took a photo of Father holding his bike. The bike came out very well, but instead of Father’s face and body only my thumb-mark was there. I must have touched it with chemicals, before I developed it.”

They talked under the tree, sitting on the ground among the primroses and rising shiny leaves of wild arums. Rooks were cawing in a distant rookery among the beeches. They heard again the laughing cry of the woodpecker, and the thin singsong of a chiffchaff.

“Soon all the migrants will be arriving, Desmond. They come from Africa, many of them. My Lord, we’re going to have a wonderful time in our woods! It’s a damn sight better’n scouting, don’t you think? Though those days were fun, weren’t they? I am glad I didn’t miss them!” He rolled over with delight, and pressed his face into the drift of dead leaves under the holly. “I say, smell this earth! It’s all fresh leaf mould. And just look at these skeletons, aren’t they lovely? You wouldn’t think that every leaf had all these ribs and veins in it, would you? It’d take years to make, if you tried to do it yourself. It’s finer than any lace-work. Yet on the tree they just
grow! How? Who makes them,
really?
Have you ever tried to think about why the stars are, and everything on the earth, Desmond? I can’t think about the stars for long, it makes my head simply reel.”

“Well, God made everything, Phillip, didn’t he?”

“I suppose so, but
how?
Don’t tell your Mother, will you, but my Father doesn’t believe in God. That’s why he never goes to church. I don’t believe in church very much myself, either. Do you?”

“My Mother and I are Catholics, and Mother says it is not for man to question Holy Mystery,” said Desmond, in a quiet voice, with a slight quaver in it.

Phillip hastened to say that his mother liked the Catholic Church.

“I went once with her to the church at the top of Comfort Road, almost opposite where I was born, and I preferred it to St. Cyprian’s or even St. Simon’s. I liked the singing of the Gregorian chants, and the smell of the incense. It was like those joss-sticks my uncle Hilary had burning on the shelf at Epsom, when I was a child. But Father doesn’t seem to like the Catholics. He talks about Catholic countries being priest-ridden. Is your Father like that, too?”

Desmond went pale, and then slightly pink. Phillip pretended not to see, as he examined an empty case of beech-mast. He felt awkward, remembering that Mother had told him never to ask personal questions, or about other people’s affairs.

Desmond climbed up to put back the baby squirrel. Afterwards they walked over the pasture, among ewes with their lambs, to the gate leading to the bailiff’s cottage, and the paddock where they had camped.

Desmond produced a penny. “Mother said I must get a glass of fresh milk if I could, Phillip. Do you think Mr. Wilson would let me have one?”

“Let’s try, and see. Only I haven’t any money.” The bailiff’s wife gave them each a glass of milk, and refused to take any money for it. Rejoicing in their luck, they left, caps politely raised, and went across the road into the paddock, to search for marks of their camp-fires of long ago. Round the hedges they found two thrushes’ nests, each lined with cowdung and tinder-wood mixture, and holding four blue, warm black-spotted eggs; a hedge-sparrow’s with sky-blue smaller eggs; a blackbird’s with
its faint rusty freckles; and a wren’s building in the side of a haystack.

“I’ll make a map, and put them in, tonight,” announced Phillip.

Down in the quarry farmyard there was much to interest them, including a pink white pig with a big pouch hanging below its hind legs. It was so big that Phillip said there must be something wrong with the pig.

“I wonder if it’s deformed, Des. I think it must be. Perhaps it has been put in this pen, alone, in case the others bully it, as they always do a weaker creature,” he went on, recalling what Father had once told him. “Poor devil, its insides must have fallen out! That pink bag must be part of its intestines. You see, the pigs in the other pens aren’t like that.”

“I expect it’s ruptured itself, and is going to be done away with,” suggested Desmond. They scratched its back with their sticks, to give it a little happiness, poor thing, before its sad end.

Cows were in another building; and looking in the open upper halves of the doors, Phillip pointed out the grey mudded cups, over which feathers and grasses showed, on the rafters. “Swallows!” he cried, recognising them from a photograph in his Kearton bird book. “They’ll be home again soon. I say, isn’t all this simply
wonderful
?
”
He ran round in a circle, pretending to be a dog, panting, with tongue over teeth, hands on both sides of his head for ears. “Aough! Aough! Aough! I know how a dog feels when it’s off the lead. My Lord, I’m glad I wrote for our permit! How about some tea, are you peckish?”

They sat in the only patch of sunlight near the entrance, to be warm. While they were there, eating their banana sandwiches, the crunch of boots came down the road, and immediately a shrill squealing arose from the pig-houses at the lower end of the quarry. They wondered what the row was about, and went down to see. The pigs, including the deformed one, were all standing, snouts held still, small glassy bristled eyes staring, hairy ears raised as though listening. Suddenly they all began squealing again.

When a labourer walked down the cart track, with two pails of swill fixed to chains from the wooden yoke over his shoulders, Phillip asked him if the pigs were hungry, and was told it was their feeding time. A thought came to him. “Did they hear your footsteps, do you think?”

“Aye, they listen, their bellies is their clocks, young sir,” said the pigman.

Phillip thought that the man had mistaken him for perhaps a relation of the Dowager Countess, because he had called him “sir”. How awful when he found out that he was only a nobody! He decided to bring him a packet of Ogden’s Tabs when he came next, so that the man would not be too disappointed in his mistake, and feel he had been cheated.

The boys watched the feeding. What a jostling, grunting, slopping of chops and greediness there was! Some of the pigs stood their front trotters in the troughs, to keep others away, like staking out an extra claim, while they sucked and gulped the swill as far away as possible from their feet. It was like Ching, who if he had a bag of sweets, would hide it in his pocket (unless he wanted a favour done) in order to cadge a sucker from someone else. Phillip thought that he had done that, too, when he was at the dame school. He asked the pigman about the deformed pig. Was it going to be killed?

“That one? Not likely! That’s one of the best boars us ever ’ad, sir! His sire took the blue ribbon at the last show.”

“Then it’s not deformed?”

“Deformed? Not likely! Whatever made you think that?”

“Well, he was all by himself,” said Phillip, lamely.

When the pigman had gone again with his buckets, Phillip threw little pieces of chalk on the boar’s back, because he had been deceived.

“Fancy having them so big as that,” he reflected aloud, feeling a half-guilty pleasure in the sight. “Sows have a lot of pigs at a time, and I suppose that’s why, don’t you, Des? Don’t tell your Mother, or anyone else, what I said, will you? I don’t want it to get back to Old Pye, who lives at the top of our road, in case he thinks I have an unclean mind, and tells the Rollses. It isn’t true, for I don’t like smutty yarns. Do you?”