A Single Swallow (40 page)

I retrieve my old car from under an arch in Battersea and set off west, chasing the sun. It is as though the forward motion of the journey has become a way of life that I cannot surrender. I follow the road south-west to Dorset where I gate-crash an old friend, and leave the next morning, meandering still westwards until at last the road runs down to the coast. I pull the car up beside a small harbour and look around, blinking, to see where I have ended up. There is a low mist on the sea. People are stretching and yawning and turning their faces to the sun, its bright but slender heat magnified by the cold air. Wandering along
the quayside I come face to face with the Ancient Mariner, a sinewy, stricken bronze figure, clutching a spar, with the albatross roped around his neck.

‘We raised the money for it, the townspeople did,' says the duty curator of the little museum, proudly. The small town is called Watchet and it seems to be a universe entirely of its own, obtusely out of step with time. Two ladies join the curator in a lament for the old harbour, which was replaced with a yacht marina, against their wishes.

‘It's only usable for a couple of hours at the top of high tide,' one says, scornfully. ‘The rest of the time those fancy boats just sit on mud.' Behind them a picture shows a coastal steamer from Wales eternally half-loaded at the quay, a sepia morning preserved in its spotless photo frame.

‘Oh, we used to get the Welsh here, raiding and plundering not so long ago,' says the curator. ‘There hasn't been much pillage recently though. The local girls would probably say they miss it!'

On the harbour wall a man is selling organic vegetables from a stall, handing them over with enormous care, as if they were jewels; on a bench a black woman is stretching herself out in the sun like a cat in an over-large coat.

‘Lovely day!' she says. ‘Like summer.'

‘Yes! First day of spring, anyway.'

‘Do you think so? You might be right, you might be right . . .'

There is a whistle-blast behind us and a steam train comes puffing along the line just above the town. I look up and see two swallows, flying together, heading up the coast.

I follow them along the coast road. It is difficult not to sing at such a beautiful day; the mist lifts slowly off the channel and though I cannot quite see it, I know home is on the other side. There are more swallows over the water meadows of Somerset, hunting the marshy ground around the river Axe. The road winds down into Bristol, through the Avon gorge, then up to the bridge and the giant, ripped surge of the estuary. Up and over, and we are in a bilingual land again.
Croeso y Gymru
, says a sign, Welcome to Wales.

There are several routes into the hills from the motorway; the one I take goes due north first then branches off, following the river Usk. As soon as you leave the main road you are in a different land: Wales is a small coat made of deep pockets. Suddenly there are little meadows; though it is late afternoon last night's dew has not lifted. Hedge lines are splashed with blackthorn blossom and the woven greens of oak and ash. The sun is slanting down now and fair weather is coming in from the high south-west. Swallows swerve and twist low across pasture near the Usk; their travel still has that purpose about it; they are still coming on. The river is swollen, I see, there has been rain. It runs with a reddish churn. The fields are halfway to recovery after the winter; some still look tired, where the flocks have been, but the colours of others are deeper and brighter. The celandines are out, the swallow flower which gave the birds their Greek name,
chelidon
, because they come at the same time. Our valley seems not to have changed at all. I stop the car, get out and breathe in. There is that smell, the smell of the alders by the stream, the sheep fields, the hay in the barns, and something else, a smell as pale as the sky but as sharp as the earth, which nothing else smells like, only this place. A song stops me dead, rich and twisting, bright notes coming from behind and above me. I turn to look up and there is a thrush in the cherry tree, in full voice, and behind it, just there, over 6,000 miles from where I first saw them, are two swallows, a male and a female. We seem to have arrived at exactly the same time.

Swallows and a thrush come together, famously, in Robert Browning's poem ‘Home Thoughts, from Abroad':

The poet was in Italy when he wrote it, and through his imagination simultaneously in England, receiving sensations from places he knew, knowing them so well that he can be sure exactly what the blossom looks like, and exactly how the thrush sounds. There is the amazement of the alchemist who has actually made gold in his exclamations – the chaffinch is singing on the orchard bough now! – and you wonder if he did not look up from his desk in Italy and see swallows as he was writing: while everything else in the poem is a conjuring, a picturing, the swallows have the power to be in two places at once.

‘A pair came today,' my mother says, beaming. ‘The 22nd of April,' she says, marking the date on her calendar.

And now there are two pairs, and in the following days one pair begins to nest in the derelict part of the house she calls the back kitchen, and eventually raises two broods.

‘The first one came on the 1st of April,' she says, ‘and I was terribly worried about it because the weather was awful, snow and rain, and he went away again.'

That was the day, April Fool's, when I asked the girl, laughing but entirely seriously, if she would marry me, and she replied, seriously, I
believed, but smiling, that she would, and I gave her my green stone from Zambia, bought from the trusted man and carried surreptitiously across innumerable borders, and she gave me a gold ring, which would only sit comfortably on the third finger of my left hand.

And that was supposed to be that. I thought I would come home, and my Mum would make me a cup of tea, and I would sleep and eat and return to my life, and sit down and tell the story of everything I had seen and done. But it did not turn out like that at all. Within a few days I was in Dorset, teaching a writing course, half bound up in the work and worries of my students and half not there at all, as my gaze followed my mind's eye out of my room in the writing centre to the water meadows and the telegraph wires, as spring stormed through the trees and hedgerows and a large band of swallows swooped over the fields, then gathered on the wires in chittering groups, exactly as if they were planning another journey.

‘I see your swallows have turned up,' I said to Noel, a pipe-smoking gentleman who looked like Father Christmas doing the garden, whose wife ran the administrative side of the centre.

‘Oh those aren't ours,' he said. ‘Those are someone else's. They just stop here to hunt. They'll be on their way north again soon. Ours are still on their way.'

The next day, as predicted, they were gone. I wanted to go with them. I found it impossible to settle anywhere, except where Rebecca was, and soon I found myself in Rochdale, amazed that it was all true: it really had happened, we really did meet in Morocco, and there were
les Deux Princesses
to prove it, and Rosie, and we really did love each other, and I really did plan to spend my life with her, and with her beautiful little boy. I set myself up in their spare room and began work. Sometimes I ached for the lost notebooks, but not often. As if writing it down as it happened had fixed it firmly in my mind, I had no difficulty returning, in my head, to all the places I had been. I can still see it all now, vividly, as if I was just there.

And because I am a romantic, and because perhaps I really had been
knocked sideways by the journey, I imagined that what had happened to me would be met with universal rejoicing by my family. It was not. Rather than being happy, they were worried to distraction by me. One hot, still morning in June, the day after my mother's seventieth birthday, I sat in the garden with my family and my Intended, looked up and saw an extraordinary thing.

‘My God!' I exclaimed. ‘Now I really do know something about swallows which no one else does!'

Half an hour later my brother and mother practically forced me into the car and drove me to see a doctor. I was scared but only half unwilling to go with them. I went partly because Rebecca swore she would not let me be sectioned, and that she would wait and get me out of there when I had seen the doctor, and partly because I was secretly terrified that I might have lost my grip on reality to the point of hallucination.

The doctor asked if I was worried about anything, and I said apart from my family, because they were worried about me, no. He wanted to know if I had had any thoughts of harming myself. No, again. He told me that there was always help available, if I wanted it, and I thanked him, and we said goodbye. But I was worried, terribly worried, because I thought I had seen something that I could not have seen: if I was hallucinating then I was surely in serious trouble.

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:

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.