I got home at about five that afternoon. ‘I never want to leave,’ I had thought, but that night I packed my bags, and left the next day to live in another country.
Immature Blue Crane, Goat Island, Kawau, 9.12.36
In English
PINK-FOOTED GOOSE. Red-throated diver. Herring gull. Meadow pipit. ‘Jay!’ gasped Bill. A moment later: ‘Oh. It’s gone.’ We were standing in a lovely copse at the Holkham country estate owned by the Earls of Leicester since 1534. It was so quiet. Soft autumn light fell on the stands of cedars and sweet chestnut trees. We passed by deer. There was a lake. And a sensational monument to Thomas William Coke (1754–1852), its base crowded with sculptures of bulls, sheep and a plough. The inscription declared: ‘It imports posterity to know that he pre-eminently combined public services with private worth … Love, honour and regret attend the father, friend and landlord.’
Egyptian goose, grey heron, great crested grebe. Bill had prepared a species checklist for the two days he acted as my bird guide in East Anglia and Norfolk. It contained 253 birds; he hoped we might find about 100, and we got near that figure on our merry field trip. Red-legged partridge, moorhen, ringed plover. I diligently ticked them off one by one, each time consulting my copy of Birds of Britain and Europe, published by the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds. Knot. Sanderling. Little stint.
Birds, everywhere, in an English sky – it was a dreamy couple of days, driving through that green and pleasant land, along narrow lanes and past flat fields, towards forests, woods, copses, marshes and the Norfolk coast. Kestrel, collared dove, goldcrest. We travelled from dawn to brittle dusk, the light falling at seven in the evening, every minute revealing England and England’s birds.
But I was already dreamy. ‘You all right?’ Bill kept asking. I must have kept going quiet. My mind was so often faraway, on the other side of the world, on the other side of life. I hired Bill’s professional services a few weeks after arriving to take up a journalism fellowship at Wolfson College in Cambridge University. I had won the fellowship as a prize. It was too good to turn down – a term in Cambridge, fed and watered and housed. But I longed to be home, longed to be by Emily’s side. The day before I met Bill, she had sent an email showing the first scan of her baby. Our baby, with a face and arms; our baby, a girl, whom we called Minka.
‘You all right?’ asked Bill. I was more than all right. A girl – there were her arms, her legs; there was her face, and her lips and her eyes. Sandwich tern, greenshank, dunlin. There were a lot of beautiful and fascinating birds; I adored seeing the green woodpecker, and greater spotted woodpecker, sharp and vivid, battering at wood in the tops of branches. Beside a grain store at the side of the road, there was the frankly hilarious lapwing, with its long crest shooting out the back of its head. On a beach facing the bleak Atlantic, there was one dark, tough Arctic skua, which then turned and flew over the flat sea, its flight surprisingly long-winged and elegant.
My eyes were on the birds, the sea, and fields. My heart was on Minka. I wanted her to come here, to see everything I saw. She was on the other side of life – unborn, something taking shape. But already I was imagining her as a little girl, climbing on to the horns of the bulls of Thomas William Coke’s preposterous monument, staring at the warm, dead body of a wood pigeon that I found on Sculthorpe Moor. And then as a young woman, her aged and boring papa escorting her around the fens and colleges of Cambridge. ‘This is where I came for ten weeks while you were still in your mummy’s tummy.’ ‘Yes. You told me,’ she’d say, and exchange a look with her mother.
I kept saying her name: Minka. I wanted to talk to her, I wanted her with me. But I was with Bill. He was a nice man. He lived in London. He was married; his wife had two children to her first husband. The school they went to, he said, was rotten, typical of what had happened to England. I didn’t know what he meant by that. I had no idea what had happened to England. I was just passing through, living in a house in a cul-de-sac called Barton Close with academics from around the world. I decorated the walls with wall posters of birds that came free in The Guardian and The Daily Mail. ‘Birds,’ said the vast Nigerian literary scholar who cooked odious pots of catfish each morning. ‘Birds,’ said the slender Italian political scientist who regularly phoned his mama at her home on Sardinia. ‘Birds,’ said the young Ghanaian historian who dreamed of drinking bottles of Star beer on the beach in Accra. We were all foreigners.
England was another country. Bill drove on through pretty East Anglia, each place-name like a grim comedy – Chalkpit Lane, Gong Lane, Grout Lane; Creake, Muckleton, Little Snoring, Wells-next-the-Sea, Sculthorpe Moor, Ickburgh, Gayton, Graunston. For the tourist, every day in England is a history lesson. You wonder about the centuries of peasants and kings, plough and smokestack. Birds, too, form the story of that island nation. There were the early myths, such as the ‘robin miracle’ of 530 AD, when Saint Kentigern performed the miracle of bringing back a dead robin to
