Vesper Flights

by Helen Macdonald

  So – quite apart from my moral qualms – it’s unsurprising that I’ve never ridden to hounds. And I’ve never really understood foxhunting. I’ve never been part of that particular rural crowd, and even though the Hunt met often outside my parents’ house, by the grain dryer at the top of the hill, ready to take in miles of good country, I never really understood what it was all about. I only ever saw the pink coats and the horses and the hounds clustering and the fence-menders and the police and the saboteurs. That didn’t seem very interesting to me. And I also felt very sorry for the fox.

  It was a Saturday, and I was at my mother’s house. It was a day of heavy rain and wind, and I was tired, and sad, and distracted, for it had been a year that week since my father died. And while lots of times, talking to Mum or my brother helped share the pain, sometimes the words wouldn’t come, and the loneliness stoppered me up, and I couldn’t talk at all. So much pressure was building up inside me that day that by mid-afternoon I had to hide. I left the house to have a cigarette out on the porch. And standing in the murky light by the drive, I heard the music of hounds.

  Even with my sporting ignorance, it seemed clear that the Hunt was drawing the covert at Ham Farm, a thick copse of coppiced hazel, sweet chestnut and bluebells just across the road and away. I pulled up the collar of my coat and walked out into the near-sleet. Sure enough, a succession of muddied, battered 4x4s passed where I stood at the edge of the drive, windows steamed on the inside. They all turned left down the track to Wadgett’s Copse.

  After they’d gone, a long silence but for the hounds in the distance. A giddy, wet, rainy echo of a cry. My hair was soaked and my cigarette damped to extinction. The asphalt at my toes was running with water, and shallow pools were slowly being born in the waterlogged paddock across the road.

  And I heard a light pattering of footfalls growing louder; a pattering of nails and pads through water to tarmac. Coming along the road towards me on his way to the covert, his head high, his body smeared all breast-deep in clay that stained the lower half of him copper-ochre, came a foxhound. A pale hound. He was alone, which was wrong. But being alone made him the type of all hounds that ever existed. He was running as if he’d been running all day, and he was running as if he would never stop, tongue out and eyes fixed. He was running to be with the rest of the hounds, and the sound was drawing him along the rainy roads as if he were underwater and swimming up to the light to breathe. I was transfixed. I’d never seen a hound be a hound before. He was doing exactly what he needed to be doing, and he was tired but joyful. He was late, but getting there. Lost, but catching up.

  Swan Upping

  In the days after the Brexit vote, I became obsessed with an oil painting called Swan Upping at Cookham, which portrays a scene from an ancient and colourful English tradition. Swan upping refers to the annual summer voyage of a flotilla of wooden skiffs that sets off from the town of Sunbury-on-Thames on a five-day journey to catch all the swans on the upper reaches of the River Thames. The crews check the parentage of young birds and place a mark on them to claim their ownership: some belong to the Queen, others to the Worshipful Company of Vintners and the Worshipful Company of Dyers, two ancient trade guilds based in the City of London. The painting depicts a traditional stop on the uppers’ trip. Here is the river and the Ferry Inn, wooden punts, moody clouds, women carrying cushions, a fretted iron bridge and a swan bound and hoisted in coils of rope and canvas, white neck craning from a man’s shoulder.

  Swan Upping at Cookham was painted by the mystical, eccentric English artist Stanley Spencer, who left it half-finished in his bedroom in Cookham when he went off to war in 1915, and the knowledge that it was there sustained him over the next three years. He longed to explain to his military superiors that he couldn’t take part in attacks because he had a painting to finish at home. On his return, he picked it up. ‘Well there we were looking at each other,’ he wrote in his diary. ‘It seemed unbelievable but it was a fact. Then I wondered if what I had just come from was fact & caught sight of the yellow of the Lyddite or whatever the Bulgars used in their shells on my fingers & finger nails.’

  He finished his painting. But the war is caught up in it. Years before he had laid complex, sunlit ripples on the river below the bridge, but the lower post-war parts of the picture are lifeless, muddy and dark. Boats are painted odd colours and have the wrong shapes, his familiar childhood landscape coursing with new and ominous strangeness. And in the days after the referendum, as the purple ‘Take Back Control’ pro-Brexit posters on telephone poles near my house faded to violet in the sun, and as I read of a 42 per cent upturn in hate crimes since the result came in, I realised two things: first, that Spencer’s painting had unwittingly recorded a schism in national history, and second, that it was haunting me because I felt I no longer recognised my country, that everything around me had become ominous – muddy and dark.

  The past was always conjured in Brexiteers’ dreams of the future, as it was in Donald Trump’s stump speeches across the Atlantic. The winning power of the Brexit campaign slogan used by the UKIP leader Nigel Farage, ‘We want our country back’, lay partly in its vagueness, which let it appeal to all manner of disaffected constituencies, but also in its double meaning. ‘Take it back’ in the sense of saving the nation from things perceived to threaten it – seen variously as immigrants, faceless European Union bureaucrats, globalisation, the ‘Westminster elite’ of Britain’s political establishment – and ‘take it back’ also in the sense of back in time, to some ill-defined golden age. Preserving a continuous national heritage and tradition was an explicit part of the ‘Leave’ campaign. For years I had read in tabloid articles that the EU was destroying much-loved English traditions – baseless claims that its bureaucrats were going to ban everything from English breakfasts for truck drivers to the Queen’s favourite dog breed, even barristers’ wigs. The quaintness of these conjured shibboleths was no accident: Brexit rhetoric was all about a battle to save English values and an English way of life beleaguered by waves of immigration and European interference. It had weaponised history and tradition.

  In its antiquity, its pageantry and its evocation of deep English history, the subject of Spencer’s painting exemplified these themes, and I wondered if seeing swan upping firsthand could help me understand a little more about the state I was in. In a few weeks, the uppers would set out on their journey. I decided to go with them for part of the way. I could have chosen to witness any number of English customs, from Morris dancing to village cricket matches, but swan upping drew me, partly because of the painting but also because I’m fascinated by the relationship between natural history and national history. Symbolically, swans have long been entwined with nationhood and identity. Politics is bound up with them.

  The swans on the Thames are mute swans, a native species with a curious history in Britain. In past centuries, when they were commonly served roasted at feasts, fewer free-flying wild ones existed here, and even today they seem to me more like feathered livestock than birds: huge, faintly menacing inhabitants of local parks and rivers, neither fully wild nor fully tame. Swans’ royal ownership dates at least to the twelfth century, and certain flocks – known traditionally as games of swans – were granted by royal charter to hundreds of favoured dignitaries and institutions. All the young swans in the country were once upped each summer, the last joint of one wing cut away to render them flightless, and patterns incised in their bills or webbed feet to establish ownership. Exquisitely inked manuscript records of these marks still exist: lines and crosses scribed across diagrammatic beaks. As geese and turkeys became popular eating – less territorial than swans, they were much easier to keep – ownership of swan flocks reverted to the Crown in all but a few locations, like the Thames.

  In Britain, killing a swan still generates unexamined outrage: it is wounding the body politic, a thing akin to treason. The symbolism of swans is so commonly understood in Britain – emblems of the monarchy, and by extension the nation –
that these birds have long been counters in the game of what is us and what is not. Perceived threats to swans closely track the imagined enemies of British society. All the swans on the Thames, or so one story goes, were killed by Cromwell’s soldiers during the Civil War, and the river was restocked only with the restoration of the monarchy. Mournful Victorian obituaries for Old Jack, the swan who lived at the seat of the monarch at Old Buckingham House, relate how his decades-long reign over his pond was brought to an untimely end by a gang of warlike Polish geese. A nineteenth-century magazine article claimed that swans in the royal parks were killed and skinned and their remains tied to trees by Jewish feather traders.

  It’s easy to read these fables of nationhood as curios from another age. But they are not. In the early 2000s, the Sun tabloid accused asylum seekers of stealing the Queen’s birds for barbecues. Later it transpired that the basis of the story was a telephone call to a swan sanctuary to report that someone had been seen pushing a swan in a shopping trolley.

  ‘Undoubtedly people do eat swans,’ Chris Perrins, a swan expert and retired Oxford ornithology professor, told me. Perrins accompanies the uppers every year as the Queen’s swan warden. He thinks the culprits are as likely to be British as they are to be immigrants. Many swans are killed by young men with air rifles, bricks and bottles, but these crimes receive far less attention from the news media.

  ***

  On 19 July, nearly a month after the Brexit vote, I stood expectantly inside the view that Spencer had painted. It was the hottest day of the year, the air heavy and luminous. Moored in slack green water in the shade of a sycamore was a collection of skiffs flying flags embroidered with swans and crowns. Waiting for the uppers to emerge from the Ferry Inn, I chatted with an older woman named Siân Rider sitting alone at a table. She wore a straw hat festooned with daisies and a gold-starred blue tabard that she had sewn herself from an EU flag. She loathed the engineers of Brexit and was dismayed by the number of people who had revealed their racist colours to her since the vote. She was following the swan uppers partly because walking the river was good exercise, but also because it offered a reassuring continuity to set against political upset. ‘It would be a shame to lose our old customs,’ Rider said. ‘Especially what’s been happening this past year all over the world, where we all seem to be going to hell in a handbasket. It is just nice to have something that . . . What’s the word? Sustains?’ She shook her head at the tide of recent history and offered me a mint.

  ‘It’s just a slice of English tradition and pageantry,’ Casey Fleming told me. Fleming is a trim, cheerful man with silver hair who works as a sustainability manager in Qatar. Friends with one of the Queen’s uppers, he had come with his young son, Reilly, to watch from the press boat in which I, too, had been granted a seat. Fleming was careful to stress that upping is a quintessentially English, rather than British, phenomenon. ‘By nature,’ he mused, ‘I think the English are traditionalists. Conservative. And we like to hang an anchor to the past. And this sort of event gives us that. It’s culture. Lineage. And without that, without celebrating past events or keeping traditions alive, what defines you as a country or as a race?’ People in Britain have been too ready to sneer at events like this, he told me, but they are beginning to realise that they should be celebrated. ‘To be proud of being English, ten years ago, was to be thought of as being small-minded, racist – you know, had negative connotations. But I think now it’s different. And I think Brexit has helped that.’ The meanings of traditions can change over time, their social functions can shift. Swan-upping data is now used to monitor the health of the Thames’ swan population, and before they set out each morning the uppers meet with local schoolchildren to teach them about swans and river conservation.

  David Barber, the Queen’s swan marker, who oversees the upping, emerged from the Ferry Inn, resplendent in a red jacket detailed with gold braid, a swan feather tucked into his captain’s hat. He was followed by Perrins and the crews of the Queen’s boats and the boats of the Vintners and Dyers, skilled watermen from the lower reaches of the Thames clad in white cotton caps and coloured shirts. Here, too, was Wendy Hermon from Swan Support, a charity that rehabilitates sick and injured wild swans. I clambered into the press boat, an elegant wooden umpire launch, and we set off upstream searching for swans.

  It didn’t take long. Two feathered white bergs and a lone cygnet drifted serenely past the riverside mansions of Bourne End. ‘Allll up!’ cried the crews, manoeuvring their skiffs to box the swans into a shrinking patch of water. Confusion. Raised oars, shoulders, shouts. The male swan raised his wings heraldically, defensively, and was grabbed by the neck. ‘There’s a catch!’ Then things went awry: the female and the cygnet ducked under a gangplank and escaped downstream. The boats raced after them, heading them off, and tried again. ‘That worked well,’ Barber shouted across the water. ‘That’s how it should be done.’

  Soon the female and the cygnet were in the bottom of a skiff, their black webbed feet tied above their tails with strings of the soft braided cotton the uppers kept looped into the belts of their white cotton trousers, and the adult bird’s wings tied, too. I couldn’t see the swans clearly from the press boat – just one distant curved white neck like the spout of an elegant porcelain coffee pot. As we drew closer, I noticed the uppers’ strangely courteous conduct now that there were swans on the boat, quite at odds with the decisive force it had taken to grab them. ‘My swan hook’s broke,’ a waterman said to me, sadly holding a long pole like a shepherd’s crook. He thought it might have been a hundred, maybe a hundred and fifty, years old. He pulled a wry face. ‘You just can’t get good swan hooks these days.’

  Hauled up from the skiffs, the swans were set down reverently upon the lawn of a riverside house. Close up, the adult swan had a snaky neck, glittering black eyes and a waxy orange bill that opened to make nasal, squeaking grunts like an unoiled gate. The bird was a strange coincidence of solidity and air. Sleek contour feathers over thick down, pearls of water running over white feathers thick and curled as paper sculpture. The 18-week-old cygnet resembled a huge, skinny plush toy. Hermon knelt next to it and opened her box of rings. Swan uppers haven’t clipped swans’ wings for decades; these days the birds are marked with stainless-steel leg rings, not knives.

  After the ownership of the cygnet’s mother was ascertained – she was one of the Queen’s birds – and the correct ring was selected and fitted to the cygnet, Barber, his face tanned dark, the feather in his cap glowing with steely light, explained to Reilly what they were doing. ‘You have to check them over to make sure everything is OK,’ he said, gently picking up the cygnet. ‘Here.’ Reilly took a deep breath and extended both hands in front of him, and the swan was deposited into his outstretched palms, his shoulders bowing slightly to take its weight. I asked him later what it was like.

  ‘Like it had a silk wrapping on it,’ he said, and the smile he gave me then was shy and full of astonishment. ‘How did it make you feel?’ I asked. He told me it would stick in his mind for the rest of his life. ‘Hopefully it will come back to me and inspire me,’ he said. ‘Hopefully it will inspire me to be somebody.’

  The sun dipping westward, we set off once more upriver. Pulled by motorised tugs for this section of the Thames, the watermen lay back in the skiffs checking their phones. We were passing by some of the most expensive real estate in Britain, architecture inspired by feverish dreams of lost golden ages: vast mock-Tudor mansions, fake castles with crenellated concrete battlements. There were willow trees, summerhouses, immaculate sun-drenched lawns, water-meadows where cattle stood hock-deep in the river, dazed by the heat. A crowd of teenagers smoking weed by a disposable barbecue. A woman sitting with her shopping bags on a wooden bench by a car park, tossing fragments of supermarket sandwiches to ducks on the water below. She waved at us. So did the teenagers. Everyone did. They waved and smiled, and I waved and smiled back.

  I had expected to be cynical about this voyage. But as we progre
ssed upstream, I began to feel a luxuriant, drunken joy. Under the boat, constellations of tiny fry darted through sunlit weeds. The river surface was thick with craft following us: large passenger boats with bars serving beer and decks crammed with sightseers, a near-naked man sunk so deeply in a tiny rubber dinghy that it crowded into his shoulders as he paddled, grinning, along the middle of the river. We passed rowing boats, catamarans, sleek pleasure craft resembling 1920s Daimlers. A common tern clipped overhead, translucent supple wing beats over a river crowded with traffic, and something about its flight made me think that it was flying under clouds, but there were no clouds, there were no clouds anywhere and had not been all day, and the sky was the stretched, varnished perfection of linseed-thinned oils.

  I had got lost inside a hallucinatory English dreamscape. And no wonder. So many of the books I had read as a child were written about this place, like The Wind in the Willows and Three Men in a Boat. This was where Noël Coward had set his elegant comedies of manners, where Enid Blyton and Edgar Wallace had lived. It was where the stories were written that taught me what it was to be English. And so I listened agog when the affable press coordinator, Paul Wilmott, pointed out one of the Little Ships, part of a seven-hundred-strong fleet of private boats that rescued British and French servicemen from Dunkirk during the Second World War. And I laughed out loud at his story of the Spitfire pilot flying under the bridge at Marlow to impress his girlfriend, only to be hauled over the coals by an air commodore who witnessed the feat. These were stories designed to foster a reassuring sense of national pride, one in which the war is stripped of horror and political complexity and turned into a patriotic tale of plucky English derring-do.