By Patrick Galbraith.
Our birds and the places they inhabit are disappearing at a terrifying rate. Over the course of two years, I travelled Britain, in a very roundabout way from Orkney to West Wales, to try and see and hear what we’re set to lose. I also wanted to meet the people who are fighting to save our birds and to understand why it matters so much to them. I had successes and failures. I never saw a black grouse, I heard a turtledove, and I held a nightingale in the palm of my hand but what I gained, more than anything, is an understanding of the cultural void that will be left when our birds are gone. Through talking to artists, poets, and musicians who are inspired by the wild, I realised that when we lose our birds, we will lose a part of ourselves. This is an excerpt from my book In Search of One Last Song, out now in hardback with William Collins.
All down the A1, pigeons in the gutter gather grit. The combines are rolling and they need it in their crops to grind the grain. At Rosebrough, I pull over onto the side of the road and push my way through the ripening elder to piss out of sight of the truckers going south. It’s only 9 miles to Beadnell, but the world isn’t ready yet it seems for strangers to start peeing again, in each other’s houses.
*
In the photograph, Katrina Porteous, camouflage bucket hat and blue corduroys, sits on a bench between two old fishermen. On her right, Charlie Douglas, with a bicycle clip around his trouser leg, looks away from the camera, and to her left, Charlie’s brother, Tom, smiles broadly from beneath his woollen cap, a cigarette held between bony fingers. Katrina, at that point, was only 30, but she was already well known to what remained of Beadnell’s fishing community, as the young poet who hung around the huts and wanted to know everything.
When I arrive at the cottage, all the lights are off and I walk round to the side, across the grass, trying to work out if I’ve come to the right place. It looks both very lived in and like nobody’s lived there for 30 years. Beneath the window, there is a pile of books on a faded turquoise carpet, and when I press my nose to the thin glass, I can make out a row of china plates hanging on the wall above a tiled fireplace that was probably white once. Back at the door I knock twice, then I turn round and lean on the wall. Down on the beach, over the road, two small boys are running nets through a rock pool, shouting about shrimps, and in the thick late summer air the sweet rot of the sea hangs heavy. As I raise my hand to knock a third time, footsteps sound, a bolt is pulled across, and Katrina appears, crooked teeth, bright blue eyes, a jumper covered in stars, and smiling the very same smile as when she sat between the Douglas brothers three decades ago. For a moment, she looks down towards the beach where the boys are playing, then shows me to the kitchen, weaving her way through the houseplants in the hall.
Her mother, Katrina tells me, never really thought much of her moving into her grandparents’ cottage, in her twenties, to write about the fishing community. ‘She was from a Durham pit village and it was something you didn’t do because you wanted to better yourself. I think for a lot of people that means moving to the city, but really this has sort of been my life’s work.’ Katrina pulls a face like a happily defiant child, then puts the kettle on the hob, and wanders to the kitchen window. ‘Until 15 years ago,’ she says, looking out, ‘this was pasture and you could see all the way to the border, right to the Cheviots, and I remember the corncrakes as a child.’ Twenty yards out, just beyond the fuchsia bushes, two houses with solar panels on their roofs loom over the garden. Katrina spoons coffee into a pot and places it on the ironing board next to a vase of wilting roses sitting on a pile of yesterday’s papers. ‘Not many of them are lived in,’ she says as she takes the kettle off the stove. ‘They’re owned as holiday lets and the visitors have no attachment to the place.’
In Beadnell now, there is just one fisherman left who still lives in the village, but back in the 1990s there were always men mending creels and the harbour was full of boats. ‘It’s why I loved living here for the first 10 years,’ Katrina tells me. ‘There really was a community and I came to care about it deeply. I cared about its values and its future as well as its past, and its place among the rocks and the birds.’ She sits and leans forward in her chair, then says, scrunching her eyes almost closed, that along with the rocks and the birds it gave her an understanding of ‘big time’. Katrina gets up, puts four white rolls on a tray and places them in the oven. ‘Their relationship to corncrakes,’ she says, as she roots around in a cupboard above the sink, ‘was very close. They were important. They remembered them and they missed them.’
From conversations she’s had over the years, Katrina thinks it’s absolutely true that for fishermen born before World War I, they almost didn’t think in terms of dates at all. Instead, they knew it was time to do things like paint the boats again because the corncrakes were calling in the night and the swallows had come back. Three generations later, though, rather than being a bird that signified continuity, the corncrake, in its absence, came to symbolise great change. ‘They talked about them a lot,’ Katrina tells me, ‘in the sense that they were disappearing. It was a measure to them. Tom, who you saw in that photograph, would say to me that the fields were full of corncrakes. Just like football rattles, he always said, and he’d hear them when he was on his bike early in the morning.’ Katrina takes a plate from the sideboard, next to where a heap of cold tea bags is piled up on a saucer. ‘I’m afraid I don’t have much in but we’ll have these rolls and there might be some cheese.’
Katrina shrugs slightly when I ask her if the fishermen knew why the corncrakes had gone. ‘Just greed,’ she replies. ‘Charlie would have said it was greed in the end. They filled those fields with houses, far more than had been originally planned, and the locals were priced out.’ As Katrina is trying to open a seized lid on a pot of raspberry jam, the phone rings and she looks up at the clock then tells me she has to answer it. Her father is in hospital. When she goes, I’m suddenly aware that the old Prestcold fridge in the corner is humming to itself softly and making occasional sickly gurgling sounds. ‘I can’t speak,’ I hear Katrina saying in the other room. ‘I’m sorry, I can’t. I’m with someone.’ By the time she returns, I’ve managed to get the lid off and she takes it from me and smiles anxiously.
When she sits, she pours me a cup of coffee, then tears at a roll, eating it piece by piece, spreading jam on each individual chunk. ‘You know, I can’t remember vast numbers of corncrakes,’ she says between mouthfuls, ‘but I do remember being with my grandad. It would have been 1966 or maybe ’67 and he would point them out. It was that sound, and sound has always been incredibly important to me.’ Katrina believes poetry starts in listening and she feels that, to truly understand a place, it’s essential to pay close attention to the aural landscape. ‘I think sometimes that a recording of a place, a sound recording, is more evocative than a photograph and birds are the animating spirits of place, and that I would say is the role they play in my work.’ In the upstairs window of one of the houses out the back, a topless man with a soft pale belly lifts a large box onto a bed and pulls something down across it, a screwdriver or a blade, then opens it up and looks inside. I watch him over Katrina’s shoulder and she looks at me strangely, running her fingers through her black hair. ‘But I also think,’ she says, spilling a few drops of coffee on the tablecloth as she fills up my cup, ‘that birds express things about being human. They are deeply embedded metaphors about our longing, our longing to escape, and our gravity and physicality.’ As she speaks, she closes her eyes again and her mouth tightens in deep thought. ‘Because they can fly,’ I reply, ‘and we can’t.’ She opens her eyes again and smiles. ‘Yes, in part, because they can fly.’ I lean back in my chair, yawning and stretching my hands out behind me and then they touch warm fabric and I lurch forwards. I’m not sure what I thought it was or why it frightened me. Katrina laughs and brings her mug down on the table. ‘Sorry,’ she says, as though she really means it. ‘My electricals are very weird in this house.’
*
Bald and with cheeks covered in a web of burst blood vessels, the ice-cream man leans out of the hatch to talk to the two little girls below. The smaller one glances up at him then whispers, anxiously, into the bigger one’s ear. ‘My sister wants hers in a tub,’ the older girl tells the man, before pulling a £2 coin out of her pocket and stretching up to place it on the counter.
Katrina and I are standing together on the harbour wall looking out over the grey sea towards Dunstanburgh Castle. During the early herring years, there would have been as many as a hundred boats tied up beneath the orange and green lichen-covered stone, but the fishing is hardly worth it now and there are only two boats left. ‘I often think,’ Katrina says, turning to look at me, ‘that we get very excited about ancient ruins, but in birds we can hear the same sounds people were hearing 10,000 years ago. Those corncrakes I heard as a child. That’s a sound that Bronze Age people would have known. I find that really reassuring.’ The two little girls, one with her cone and one with her tub, skip past us in their pink sandals and then they sit, 20 yards away, swinging their legs on the wall. ‘Birds are a reminder of our place in history,’ Katrina continues. ‘Birds have been here for longer than we have and somewhere they’ll probably be here after we’ve gone. We may not be here very much longer.’ Down along the harbour wall, ice cream smeared all across their faces and chocolate flakes held between chubby fingers, the two little girls stare up at us.
We turn and walk up past the old kilns where lime was burned, and then herring was salted, and where old broken lobster pots rot now. In the village, the pavement is full of dawdling holidaymakers, all moving towards the beach in a ragged, sunburned, screeching procession. Katrina steps into the road to go at her own pace and I follow. ‘In a way,’ she says, smiling, ‘I’ve devoted my life to concentrating on what are depressing truths, but I increasingly don’t find them depressing because if we continue destroying the earth at the rate we are, then the earth will get rid of us.’ Up ahead, where a sandy track runs up to the dunes, a woman is shouting at her toddler. ‘What do you want?’ she says to him as he wriggles to get free, his hands pulling at the straps of his pushchair. The boy looks up at his mother and starts to wail. Next to him, panting and with a leg at each corner, a French bulldog is tangled up in its lead. ‘I’m not uncaring about people,’ Katrina says, as we walk off the road and head up the track. ‘People matter to me deeply, I mean, more than I can sort of express really.’ She walks on ahead of me and raises her voice so I can hear. ‘At the same time though, humanity is just a glint on the surface of the sea. It’s one little speck of light in the time that the universe has occupied.’
I look back to see that the mother has turned around and is taking her screaming boy home. Katrina stops for a moment to take her boots off and then turns towards the village. ‘When Charlie and Tom were young men, they had incredibly hard lives,’ she tells me. ‘There were all these bonds and the birds were part of that, but at the same time, they slept on sails in the attic because there weren’t enough beds. They went without shoes in summer. Seven brothers, and they went without shoes to save leather.’ Katrina carries on 30 yards further up the track and stops at the top of the dunes. Below us on the white sand, families are setting up windbreaks and children paddle in the shallows. ‘I wouldn’t want to go back to that life,’ she says, looking down at the beach. There was space for everything and the fishing was sustainable, but I wouldn’t want to be a woman in that culture.’ Katrina shrugs apologetically when she tells me she’s not a romantic. ‘Not really. Capitalism has given us huge gifts. It’s given us a great standard of living, but it’s severed all those bonds.’ She looks at me as if wondering whether she’s saying things you really shouldn’t say. ‘I mean, I think we’ve got ameliorate it, but I think industrialisation is almost an organic process.’ Three children behind us are waiting to pass and Katrina puts her hand on my shoulder to move me to the side while she carries on talking. ‘It’s almost a virus or a disease, the sort of cultural progress industrialisation represents. I don’t think it’s stoppable.’ She walks on ahead of me along the top of the dunes then turns and smiles. ‘This,’ she says, pointing down to the caravan park, is what she really wanted to show me. ‘It was about 10 years ago. I heard it and I thought it can’t be. It was a sound I hadn’t heard for a long time but it kept calling and calling.’ Katrina pauses, then thrusts her hand up into the air. ‘I watched and watched, then its head popped out of the grass. It was a corncrake.’
Down at the water’s edge, 100 yards below us, a man is slumped on his side blowing up a green rubber inflatable. Every 20 seconds or so, he pauses, comes up for air and then starts again. Further along the beach, where children’s voices fade beneath the rising screech of little terns, I glance back to see that the inflatable has become a crocodile and the man is 20 yards out drifting in the breeze.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Patrick Galbraith is a journalist and author whose work has appeared in The Times, The Evening Standard, and Granta. He is commissioning editor for The Open Art Fair magazine and is currently working on a collaborative production at The Playground Theatre in London with a sculptor, and a sound artist, which develops on material from In Search of One Last Song
