Cold comfort farm
After a later than usual start on a chilly January morning, John Lewis-stempel–weighed down by a heavy cold– rushes to feed his bellowing stock and hungry birds
On a freezing morning, both birds and livestock are swift to tell John Lewis-stempel that he is late to feeding time
Every tree was a ballet dancer on a bare stage, frozen in mid pirouette
THE advantage of no central heating is that Jack Frost still etches on the windows; the ferny designs—which are ghost prints of Earth’s Mesozoic past— sometimes remain until midday, even later. I consider this proper frosted glass, rather than the pallid stuff they manufacture for lavatories.
At about 8am that day, I scratched a porthole in the ice of the scullery window to see a sea of white as far as I could see. I was late getting up, a heavy cold slowing me down; the lead boots of a deep-sea diver seemed to be on my feet. The sole colour through the round window was a pecking blue tit; I thought the bird was attacking the linseed putty of my repair, but no, it was tapping on the glass to remind me of my duty. Half an hour late. Half an hour late. Half an hour late.
Even through this double-glazing (the frost being the second glassy layer), I could hear the chorus of unfed animals, the trumpeting of Snowdrop the donkey sounding the charge. The animals know the time. Half an hour late. Half an hour late.
After putting a couple of scoops of Rspbapproved bird seed into a brown paper bag and a couple of past-it Cox apples into my coat pocket, I went out through the door into the front garden. January is invariably the coldest month of the year and, traditionally, the 13th the coldest day: St Hilary’s Day. The coldest moment comes in the hour after sunrise. We live up a hill and air temperature decreases by 0.5˚C for every 275ft.
To go down the front steps was to enter a fairyscape. It was the third day of hoar frost, the trees were rimed with white lines and the lawn sparkled blindingly with icefloss more than half an inch thick. Two male blackbirds pecked at an apple on the paled grass, but more in desperation than expectation, as the apple was an iron ball. All along the top of the stone wall the birds sat, puffed up, waiting. Chaffinches. Greenfinches. Yellowhammers. A row of misplaced, mistimed flower blooms. It’s not depth of cold that kills the beautiful birds, but its duration. Jack Frost is a cruel, if elegant, murderer.
Sometimes, I’m struck by our similarities with the birds and beasts—at other times, by our differences. That morning was a moment of variance. The wren, the night before, snug in her crack between the hay bales in the barn, had been no more cold than I, tucked under my 13.5-tog duvet. That morning, however, I’d put on five layers, including thermals, as well as filling my stomach with porridge from the cupboard. We already had a log fire going in the sitting room. The wren could not make fire and Nature’s heater, the sun, would be weak all day, melting nothing but the uppermost boughs of the trees. Frost had locked the wren’s natural larder.
I saw, in the winter wonderland, an exhilarating purity. An antiseptic slate. And trees never look quite so artistic as when, wintry and stripped of their leaves, they’re stark posed against the hard white of frost. Every tree that morning was a ballet dancer on a bare stage, frozen in mid pirouette. However, I doubt the birds saw the garden scene as fancifully as that…
For the birds, the £15 bird table hanging in a dwarf apple tree is a literal lifeline, as are the cylinders of peanuts and ‘fat balls’ dangling from it. (Indeed, is there a greater conservation aid than a bird table so accessorised?) A collared dove, with admirable audacity, sat on the table’s pitch roof, waiting. Soft and grey, she did not budge as I tipped out the seed and threw the apples to the ground, these for the blackbirds. I had hardly stepped away when the other birds flew down, proximate enough for me to feel the displaced air of their wingbeats.
I keep a record of all the birds to visit the garden, 41 species so far, the majority of them visitors in the ‘hunger gap’ of January to March. Some, such as a pair of red-leg partridge, have moved in semi-permanently.
Before leaving the front garden, I committed an act of legitimate vandalism: I broke the pane of ice on the bird bath; frost also kills by dehydration. I have other measures for Bird-aid in winter; so I walked around to the manure heap or, as I like to think of it, ‘a real pile of s**t’. The robin was waiting on the
fork handle; I turned over about a yard of the brown stuff, the heat geysering up, to expose the writhing red worms. The carnivorous robin was down among the tines as I forked; the wren was more cautious and tisked away in the privet hedge waiting for me to leave. By now, the clamour from the domestic animals—the braying, the bellocking, the clucking, the baa-ing—was crescendoing, so I had to away to my agricultural duties. Half an hour late. Half an hour late.
However, I felt better and I had forgotten my flu. The medical advice for this ailment is ‘stay in bed’. Sip medicaments. Rest. Yet
I have always found being outside to be the best cure for every malady.
Twice crowned victor of the Wainwright Prize for Nature writing, for ‘Where Poppies Blow’ and ‘Meadowland’, John LewisStempel was the 2016 British Society of Magazine Editors Columnist of the Year