A Single Swallow

by Horatio Clare

  This is what I saw, that June morning: a female swallow carrying a nestling, her beak clamped behind its head, shooting out of the back kitchen, and away across the orchard, only to return a few minutes later without it. Was it some envisioned metaphor for the way my family seemed to have closed ranks against me, rejecting my restlessness and chatter, ascribing all my plans and schemes and my certainty over the woman I loved to some sort of breakdown?

  I kept the incident secret for months, like a flutter in the heart or a pain in the lung that you fear to reveal for terror of its consequences, until I came across this account in Swallows, a book by Peter Tate:

  One strange piece of behaviour that seemed to be the result of a whole string of mixed reactions was recorded by Mr E. I. Cuthbertson. A pair of swallows had built a nest on a curtain rail in a bedroom at Sedburgh, Yorkshire. On 17 June the first egg was laid, and on the same day it was found broken on the floor some distance from the nest. Another egg was laid on 28 June and then another two. Incubation started, but on 3 July an adult swallow was found dead under the nest. Until 5 July only one bird was seen, but then two birds visited the nest together. One of them began to build up the nest rim despite the efforts of the sitting bird to prevent it, and eventually the nest reached some three inches deep. The three eggs it contained hatched on 15 July. The next morning an adult swallow was seen carrying a nestling out of the window, and a little later another nestling was found on the floor. By the evening of 16 July the nest was empty. This entire episode is completely at variance with the bird’s normal behaviour, and a rational explanation is very hard to find . . .

  So my exclamation was an exaggeration: I do not know anything about swallows that no one else does, but it was not, thank God, a hallucination.

  I struggled with hallucination for weeks: not with visions that I was having, but with the common, shared figments of things not seen but nevertheless understood – the nationwide hallucination of what a society is, what a country is, what it means to be British. I was not the only one. At the village pub people talked in millenarian terms; this thing the radio called ‘the credit crunch’ seemed to be driving everyone slightly mad.

  ‘You’ll have to be here the day we declare independence,’ said one of our neighbours. ‘If you’re not in the valley that day then you’re out!’

  I looked at the British as though I had never seen them before, as I had all the other peoples I had encountered on the road. It was striking how militarised the country had become. On a train a group of boys discussed their training: the running, the shooting, the hand-grenades. They talked about being posted to Iraq. A middle-aged businessman at their table revealed that he had once been an army engineer. They were quite rough young lads but when they heard this they began to ask him respectful questions, and they called him ‘sir’. A few days later, in Wales, I picked up a hitch-hiker: a Royal Marine NCO who specialised in mountain warfare, he said he was convalescing from an injury in Afghanistan.

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘Oh, I fell out of a helicopter.’

  He talked about how much he loved the mountains of Wales, and the birds.

  ‘What’s your favourite bird then?’

  ‘The goshawk,’ he said. ‘Definitely.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘They are the centurions of the bird world,’ he said.

  I was struck by the doubled nature of the British: it was not malign, like duplicity, but it was as though they concealed half of themselves. They seemed a nation of actors, their outward reason, formality and civility concealing interior lives charged with passion, desire, mystical suspicion and philosophical curiosity. What else could explain the torrential floods of sex, smut, humour, peculiarity and chaos which fill the newspapers and chat shows to which they are so addicted? It is as though each Briton conceals another, our outward forms perpetually playing the straight foil to an inner anarchic comedian. The state we have constructed, however, though doubtless staffed by every shade of individual, and one or two comedians, is nevertheless an embodiment of the former form: cold and formal. While every Briton I met, from London to York, was kind and open to the stranger I felt myself to be, the state was closed and distant.

  In May news came of Patrice’s visa application: he had been turned down. The immigration officer at the consulate in Cameroon gave reasons for the rejection: he or she could not believe that Mr Kenneth would simply give money to Patrice for his trip to Britain (this kind of philanthropy being beyond the bounds of what the official considered reasonable and unsuspicious); he or she could not see a clear pattern to Patrice’s earnings in recent years, and my covering letter, being the print-out of an email I had sent Patrice, was not in an envelope and was not signed with a hand-written signature, and might therefore, the officer concluded, be a fake. If Patrice wished to dispute the judgement he was advised to take his claim to the European Court of Human Rights. The officer signed his or her own message with a number, not a name.

  It was a heavy blow to Patrice, and came with a worse one: his father died. In the same period Mr Kenneth was mugged on a business trip to Nigeria, losing a quantity of cash and his passport. I sent money to help pay for the funeral, and Patrice refused to give up. He made contact with some part of the rugby establishment in Italy; when I last heard from him he was on his way north, and had got as far as Morocco.

  Another message came from PJ in Congo: after I left the police asked him a great many questions about who I was and what I wanted. He said he was desperate to get out of Makoua and asked for help, but when I asked him what sort of help I could give him he fell silent. Without a passport he is trapped.

  For days I walked through the woods and fields around my mother’s farm, watching the swallows. Their apparent freedom is an illusion in much of the time they are with us. First there is nest-building, or repair, which means scooping up mud from the edges of the stream, and collecting dead grass, straws and hay. Their nests are like inverted cupolas, wattle-and-daub emplacements on the beams. Then there is the business of mating, and defending their nest-sites and their mates from other birds, and then they feed the young. Thousand of insects must be caught and conveyed to their nestlings’ hungry gapes. When the rain fell they rested; the moment it stopped or slackened they were out again, hunting, until last light.

  It took me a while to find an equilibrium in Britain. My travels had turned me into a Luddite: I was bemused by the stretches of life that I and everyone I knew had given to telephones, computers and email. My mobile phone boycott lasted about two months: it was amazing how much distress and confusion it caused my family, and how it exasperated my friends; going without any identity lasted a little longer. It was liberating, in a way, to have nothing but the photocopy of an emergency passport with which to prove who I was, but then Rebecca said if I did not get a passport we would not be able to go abroad, and she would go mad.

  My own madness, or travel-induced eccentricity, left me gently. I went through a phase of clearing out the trappings of my previous life, throwing things away. My rented lock-up in West London, with its piles of shirts, boxes of books and odd mementoes seemed like the tomb of a being I barely recognised. There was little enough there, but it was still too much: I wanted to slough it all off. The next phase was a kind of manic environmental consciousness. I spent days fiddling with the water and heating systems of Rebecca’s house, determined that we should live as lightly as possible. How little you can manage with, in Africa, I kept thinking, and how much we seem to need here. I found myself made twitchy and enervated by the casual, unthinking way in which people shopped, their habitual accumulation of objects. One day in a supermarket when I overheard a little girl, who cannot have been more than nine, saying: ‘Mummy, Mummy, stick to the list! We only came in here for three things – stick to the list!’

  Her mother was miles away, muttering prices to herself, her hands reaching out for more ‘bargains’ as if of their own accord.

  Having become accustomed to noting
down and passing through, it was difficult and unsettling to see these places, England and Wales, as home; to see their people not as part of the continuity of peoples, of varying tribes, stretching from the south of Africa to the north of Europe, but as distinct, as special to me. I could not quite do it. Were these really ‘my’ people? Was this ‘my place’? I had lost faith in these possessive distinctions.

  There must be many who feel this way, but they are hard to meet. I found one at a party in London, another ex-student of my old school, Mack. Mack was wearing dusty-coloured trousers and a white shirt, and he was tanned. A few years ago he drove a Land Rover from South Africa back to Britain. He described the vehicle in loving detail, in a sort of poem of jerry cans, tyres, reinforcements and customisations. It was the kind of conversation you relish in Africa.

  ‘It needs a weld on the front right window post because it’s flapping off.’

  ‘Where is it?’

  ‘In Portsmouth.’

  I sucked my teeth. ‘By the sea then?’ (Salty air, corrosion – legend has it that Cape Town plates reduce the value of a vehicle, while a Johannesburg registration, indicating that it has been working in dry air, increases it.)

  ‘Yeah but it’s inside!’

  ‘Ah, right. How much do you want for her then?’

  ‘I’m asking for £4,000,’ Mack said, reluctantly, as if the thought of selling such a trusted old friend pains him.

  ‘That’s a – democratic price . . .’

  ‘No tax, no insurance, no one in Africa would insure it, shit all up the side, South African plates – but it does look fucking cool when you drive it through London.’

  ‘Didn’t anyone try to stop you?’

  ‘Customs guy at Dover ran into the road with his arms up after I had passed, but I kept going . . .’

  ‘Why are you selling her, then?’

  ‘Because it’s petrol. And because I want to design another one. The ultimate vehicle for Africa, basically.’

  ‘You’re going back then?’

  ‘Yeah. It’s all I think about. I just want to go back.’

  When I heard that I could have hugged him. I was not so unbalanced or dislocated, after all, or at least, I was not alone in the dislocation. You do just want to go back.

  The swallows raised their broods. I watched them everywhere, in Worcestershire, swooping over and partly into a pond outside Hereford; in Lichfield; in South Wales; in France again, briefly, and in Spain south of the Pyrenees, and on the Pennines, outside Rochdale, flying in and out of a barn in the midst of light summer rain.

  As the year turned, their young began to fly: I watched a mother schooling her short-tailed brood. First they went just a few feet, to a cherry tree near their nest where they perched, cheeping, waiting to be fed; the next day they went further; and on the third day they were flying and hunting.

  When autumn came, the laws of migration were written in the movements of birds. The Canada geese which lived on the canal and the lakes began to move in V-shaped skeins, crying their wild call. On a walk on the moors we came across a flock of fieldfares, the northern thrushes, back from Norway to pillage the hawthorn berries and the yew trees. One day towards the middle of September the Rochdale swallows disappeared. I was writing when suddenly a large group, and some house martins, appeared in the sky above the beech tree beyond my window. They made their chattering, burbling cry, turned in the air, and then they were gone. On the 5th of October, walking out after rain in South Wales we found ourselves under a small cloud of swallows, twenty or so, all twittering and skidding in the air. They seemed to be following a black front of low pressure, matching the speed of the changing weather. They travelled with torn skies, white and azure, and dazzling, rain-washed sun. I have not seen them since except in dreams. Looking down the valley to the south-west, the way they must go, I saw it as part of a road, the swallow road, which leads to the other end of the world. They would fly south-west, for the Channel, and out across France, over the train tracks, where, somewhere, the conductor in crocodile cowboy boots will be thinking about his novel, and over Languedoc-Roussillon, where old Yves will see them and think the fair weather is ending, and over Spain, where the old lady in Zaragoza will be sorry to see them go, and know that the snows will soon come to the Pyrenees, and on down, over Denis and Judy in Madrid, and south to Andalusia, Gibraltar and the Straits, into North Africa, where Patrice might see them, if he is still there. And then my giri-giri friend will see them as they cross Niger, and Josephine, in Calabar, unless she has abandoned her brothers and moved to the city, and Pascale in Cameroon, and perhaps Bertrand, that laughing boy, will notice them as they cross Congo, following the great river to Aimé and Christelle and Dino in Brazzaville, and another few days will see them in Zambia, Botswana and Namibia in the Caprivi camp, where Christoph will note their arrival, and people who notice them will say the rains are on their way. Rick will be thrilled to see them again, he will set his nets in Bloemfontein in the hope of catching a bird with a ring that reveals the secrets of its journeying. And who would not want to go with them? Perhaps, if I had not gone into that Marrakech hotel at that moment, if I had chosen another chair, I might be going too, into all the freedom of the land and sky! It is a dizzying thought: to live again in the wonderful rhythm of change, in the unfamiliarity of every bed and the novelty of every morning; to compact all needs into a rucksack: to know again the completeness, the lightness, the self-sufficiency and irresponsibility of the traveller.

  The sky was still hazed with dark grey rain. Would you really give it all up, I wondered – would you swap security and love and friendship for the swallow road? Would you exchange the urge to build something for the longing just to be? Would you do without the scents of autumn and the colours of winter, would you turn the world under your feet, rather than let the seasons turn you?

  One day, perhaps, but not now. The swallows were flying so carelessly, with that joyful disregard of space and direction. I blessed them on their way, and suppressed the urge, like a summons, to go with them. They were twittering, calling to one another.

  One of me does not make a what? I know you know it, but who said it first? It was Aristotle! (Chelidon, those Greeks called me, and held festivals to welcome me back from my travels. Pallas Athene once became me, and watched Odysseus slaughter Penelope’s suitors from a perch on a beam.)

  You all say it now: Italians, who call me Rondine; Spanish, who say Golodrina (in Aragon and Castile I am the bird that thaws the snows); French, to whom I am Hirondelle (you used to fear I could turn milk to blood in the udders of your cows!) and Danes, and Germans, and Dutch. I built the sky, if you believe the Austrians. I stole the fire from heaven and pulled the thorns from the head of Christ – how else did I get my blood-red cheek?

  ‘Zwaluw!’ say the Dutch, when they greet me. I am Svala in Swedish and my arrival must be a comfort there, for in my name is also ‘to console’. They are all beautiful, my appellations, full of speed and turn and dash, like svale, in Danish, and the German Schwalbe.

  It was a prehistoric Germanic speaker who named me Swalwon, before all these north names, a very long time ago. Naturally, the English try to put it simply, as the English love to do. The English call a spade a spade, but they call me ‘European Swallow’, ‘Chimney Swallow’, ‘Barn Swallow’, ‘Our Swallow’ and just plain old ‘Swallow’, most of the time.

  I could go on (I am Tsi-kuk to the Cornish, Swallie in Lincolnshire and my Welsh name is Gwennol) but there is really only one division between you all – strange creatures! – and we might as well settle it now. The British and the French sum it up nicely: in Britain I do not make a summer; in France I do not make a spring.

  Index

  The page references in this index correspond to the printed edition from which this ebook was created. To find a specific word or phrase from the index, please use the search feature of your ebook reader.

  Addis Ababa 1–2

  Africom 108–9

  AIDS
see HIV/AIDS

  Algeria 207–25; border with Morocco 225; economy 215–16; history 212–13, 217–19, 224; Kabyle 224; light 211; politics 169, 213–16; visas 14–15; see also Algiers

  Algiers 208–25; Kasbah 212, 218, 219–20

  Angola 47, 56

  Antiochus 275

  Atlas mountains 250–1, 255

  avocets 30

  Barcelona 279, 280, 285_6

  Barn Swallow, The (Turner) 9

  bee-eaters 30

  Ben Bella, Ahmed 215

  Benin 186, 187

  Benjedid, Chadli 216

  Benue River 186

  Berbers 252

  Biafra 187

  Biya, Paul 145

  blackbirds 275

  Blixen, Karen (Isak Dinesen) 2

  Bloemfontein 28–36

  Boers 24–5

  Bolton, Michael 269

  Bordeaux 293

  Botswana: Okavango Delta 59

  Boumédienne, Houari 215, 216

  Bouteflika, President 214

  Brazza, Pierre Savorgan de 101–2

  Brazzaville 102–22; Brazzaville Beach 105–6, 110; cataracts 115–17; Elf Tower 102; Poto Poto 105

  Britain 298–308; Dorset 308; Dover 298, 301; London 301–4; and Namibia 56; and Nigeria 186–7; and slavery 183; and South Africa 23–5, 50; visas 167–8; Watchet 304–5

  Browning, Robert 306–7

  Butcher, Tim 80–1

  butterflies 131

  camels 250

  Cameroon 143–76; Batouri 160; Bertoua 160; Douala 171; economy 167; logging 155–6, 157–8, 164, 171; Lokomo 156–7; passport control 147–52; politics 145, 164; Socampo 145–54; Tiko 172–4; visas 13, 147–8, 151–2; Yaoundé 160–9; Yokadouma 145, 158–9

  Camus, Albert 211, 212–13, 225

  Cape Town 17–23, 24; Camp’s Bay 18; Khayelitsha 18, 23; Zeekoevlei 20–22

  Chad 169

  Chaucer, Geoffrey 34–5

  Chechnya 219

  China: and Africa 85, 117, 118–19, 127