Blue Tits, Great Tits, Robins

Green status.

The storms of early summer were abating, slowly. The constant damp, endless days of moisture, punctuated regularly with bright bursts of hot sun. As a result, the garden of our ramshackle house had burst into life. We’d decided to allow the bluebells that had bloomed. Uninvited but welcome guests.

            Dodging the rains when I could, I’d been out in garden, digging, fighting my doomed fight against the weeds. I found it hard to muster up venom toward them, they were survivors, like the foxes and squirrels that would visit us. Their flowers helped the insect life, and I couldn’t hate them, these outlaw plants.

Using a fork bent out of shape last summer, a new trowel bought (I was ashamed to admit) from Homebase, I cut into the earth, disturbing centipedes, woodlice, ubiquitous worms that were duly thrown into the compost bin to help with the mulching. A pair of robins had watched me silently. I dug out pits to fill with rich compost, bought from a local garden centre and dragged like a dead body home. For reasons we never understood, the landlord had left a near endless supply of red brick lying uselessly round the garden. These formed the raised barricades separating the bedding grounds from the inert sea of earth that was failing to grow what we wanted. What we needed.

            My desk was awash with nature writing, Richard Mabey’s Nature Cure, Richard Adams’ novels The Plague Dogs and Watership Down, Kathleen Jamie’s wonderfully acute essays in Findings and Sightlines, a collection of poetry celebrating British birdlife fittingly entitled Birdbook. Our beautiful set of the Readers Digest Nature Lovers Library, rescued in pristine condition from a second-hand for the price of a few beers. The possible idea was growing, suggested to me by George McKay’s Radical Gardening, that we could reclaim this piece of land out back. Grow our own veg, but do it the way we wanted, DIY, autonomous. Encourage the wildlife. Do whatever we wanted, get muddy.

            I wanted the birds back. I knew that London supported more birdlife than most people realised. I had seen green woodpeckers, tufted ducks and sparrowhawks in Clissold Park. Buntings by the Lea. 

            Once, returning home through Millfields Park, close to the noisy lea Bridge Road, I had heard the machine gun fire of a great spotted woodpecker, looked up amazed to see it in full view, here in Hackney. I stood there, watching the black, white and red bird (surely an anarchist), for a few minutes, before three young men on bikes rode past me, one of them shouting:

            ‘Oi, mate, it’s a tree!’.

            They had laughed. I was tempted to shout back ‘I was looking at a woodpecker’, but wisely decided against it.

            Grey herons, Canada geese and cormorants were plentiful down on the Lea Navigation, and I had been informed that, somewhere, bittern were to be found.

            London could, in its margins and forgotten space, harbour life. We were now attempting a tiny act of reclamation in our back garden in Stoke Newington. 

            There was space. Space, in the carnivorous city, was at a premium. We had a chance to get mud on our knees, an opportunity for nettles to sting our bare arms, sore shoulders, cat shit stuck in the grooves of our boots. Suddenly this seemed revolutionary, an undeserved gift, the chance to use green space when only those who could afford to get on the property ladder were worthy of such privileges. What about allotments? my partner had suggested. I liked the idea, but you’d sit on a waiting list for years. The Olympics had destroyed many of the local ones anyway. 

            I would finger the green man pendant, bought off Scandinavians at the Viking Festival in York, and flick through a book on organic gardening bought in a remaindered bookstore near my mother’s home in Whitstable, and learn about composting, worm tea, threats from aphids and whitefly, the tyranny of chemical pesticides. I would listen to certain songs as I did this, ‘Free the Land’ by Inner Terrestrials, ‘Foundations’ by Autonomads, ‘Terra-ist’ by Oi Polloi. I was beginning to write fiction based around the environmental road protests of the nineties, when I was turning from child into teenager, Twyford Down and Solsbury Hill. 

            We bought a compost bin. Next time, I thought, I’ll make one. 

            I dug the beds, far more soil and earth than I expected shifted and redistributed across the garden. In the turmoil, an exposed earthworm was plucked, wriggling, by a darting robin. 

            The robin is, according to the RSPB, Britain’s favourite bird.

            The beds were dug, filled with compost, every spare pot also filled, and we started seeding, purple broccoli, potatoes, baby carrots, cherry tomatoes, lettuce, beetroot, courgettes. Pots of mint, sage, coriander, parsley, like balustrades to keep us safe from the mundane world’s predations.

            My mother, in an act of helpful eccentricity, had donated twenty fatballs, a greasy compound of suet, fat and seed designed to attract birds and give them an energy boost in the colder months.

            These went out along with the peanut-stuffed bird feeder, metal now, the previous one having been destroyed by a seemingly vindictive grey squirrel.

            In the early mornings, my housemates asleep or already departed for work, I sit on the step overlooking the back garden, and I watch the birds that I’ve attracted, with my fatballs and peanuts. Handsome blue tits, the aggressive great tits, the pair of robins. I try and chase away the squirrels when I see them, though they pay me little heed. Bastards.

            I drink coffee and I watch these birds feeding, such a common sight still across England, yet endlessly new. My flesh feels more solid, my presence more certifiably real when I am in the presence of these tiny avians, no other humans around to disrupt the peace.

*

            Today, the beetroot sprouted. I’m running low on birdfood. The robins come every day, as do the blue and great tits. Today I saw the first swifts and house martins of the year, back from Africa. It was good to see them.