A small brown book filled with memories
Books from floor to ceiling surround me in my study. They insulate the room and keep it warm in winter I suppose. Text books on moths, butterflies, birds, mammals, fish, snails, beetles, geology, archaeology, are joined by poets, country writers, biographers, novelists, and all such scribblers.
They kept me happy in lockdown when rain closed the garden. I use them all, but one is priceless. Its small brown cover is now just hanging onto the stitching of its pocket-sized pages. It is the first book I ever owned.
I was ten when I bought it, second-hand, at the church fete: The Observer’s Book of British Birds.
When I opened the pages I saw wonderful things. There were cormorants on cliffs, sea-eagles clasping the crag with crooked hands, two great northern divers like the ones in the Arthur Ransome story, and little stints on the seashore, no bigger than sparrows. 226 species were described, together with paintings by Archibald Thorburn and others.
One by one I ticked with my new birthday fountain pen those I had already identified.
Blackbird was the first, for at the age of six I had climbed a tree over the duck pond on my father’s farm in Norfolk and seen the four speckled blue eggs in their grassy cup.
That was a moment of such joy that I promised never to swear ever again.
One day after school I stopped on my bike to watch a mistle thrush building its nest in a thick old hedge.
A lady cycling by dismounted and asked if I knew what the bird was. I showed her the picture in the book.
She introduced herself: S. Vere Benson, the author.
She had started the Bird Lovers’ League to protect birds.
She invited me to tea at her house in Redgrave, near my own village of Botesdale in Suffolk.
Using her book I quickly scoured the countryside for new birds to tick.
Other lads of my age were train-spotters on the main line at Diss where ‘Oliver Cromwell’ waved flags of steam as it
thundered off to London.
That excited me too, as did the Aston Martin driven by racing driver St John Horsfall down the village street.
He had won the Belgian Grand Prix in the car.
But it was the sedge warbler my little book identified that opened the door to the inner chamber of the mind.
The picture in the book truly captured those fusions of curves which make this tiny bird so distinctive with its rounded tail and white new moon eye-stripe.
At first I could not see it as it skulked in the ditch in the water-meadows. But I could hear the ‘loud and varied chatter, deep notes, squeaks and bubbling warbles’ of its song as described in my little book by the lady on the ancient bike.
I ticked the common tern as well, for colonies of thousands nested in the sandhills on the coast. Among the pictures was the roseate tern, hovering with its coral-red legs lowered and its pink breast like a wild rose.
Then I ticked a quail, which I had heard calling its liquid triple note in the wheat fields and then seen the small bird as it hurtled away from my feet.
Perhaps the most rare bird I recognised in the pictures was a corncrake.
They had bred on the meadows of my father’s farm in the war, and called their craking cries under the moon in answer to the roar of bombers overhead.
How many memories there are in that tiny book.