THE SONG OF THE SK IES
Alex Preston celebrates birdwatching, books and the call of the wild…
Our ideal home would feature Luke Edward Hall’s vibrant drawings, Jules Pansu cushions and Calder-esque mobiles by Flensted, all available at Liberty (www. libertylondon.com).
There’s a line in Sir Edward Grey’s The Cottage Book, spoken by his wife Dorothy. ‘The wren sang all morning,’ she says. ‘We talked about it while we were at breakfast, and thought how nice it was that we knew enough to be able to love it so much.’ It’s a line that means a lot to me in a book I adore. Partly it’s that Grey is an ancestor of mine, my grandmother Ursula’s great-uncle, if you can follow that, and I feel a familial closeness to him and his dear, doomed Dorothy. That line, though, is something to live a life by. The idea that deep knowledge opens the door to happiness, that the more we know about things, the more we can love them – it’s a message to warm any wintry heart.
Grey’s book was one of the signposts that led me back into the world of birds. I’d been a twitcher as a child, but gave it up when adolescence made the bird hide infra dig, binoculars a badge of shame. It’s only now, with more of my thirties behind than ahead, that I’ve returned to birds, as if, in these last hours of my life’s high summer, I’ve granted myself licence to return to what I love most. I’ve acknowledged my essentially solitary nature, the joy I take in wild things and my deep and complex love for the British countryside.
I never really stopped being a birdwatcher, though. Instead, I looked for birds in the books I read, noting down passages in poems or novels that seemed to bring the birds beautifully before me. And that’s where
Dorothy Grey’s line comes in. All those years of reading about birds has meant that this second birdwatching life has a richness and intricacy that my earlier twitching lacked. It’s as if
Ih ave all of the poets of the canon striding alongside me through Rye Harbour
Nature Reserve, and when I see a curlew, I hear Yeats in its mournful cry, while Virginia Woolf, Ted Hughes and Dylan Thomas paint the landscape behind it.
One of the great challenges as we age is keeping our impulse for joy alive. Deep curiosity, the habit of looking closely at things, the ability to be still in nature – all of these spark the sublime in us. Birds fix our attention on the world, and in their patterns and colours, in their wild wanderings and heavenly song, there is a path to happiness. We only need to know enough about them to truly love them.
‘As King fishers Catch Fire: Books & Birds’ by Alex Preston (£25, Corsair) is published on 13 July.