4 minute read
BARTLEBY
Spring has sprung
Every spring, a blackbird sings in our garden. It’s a very small garden, the type you get with an Edwardian terrace house built on a Bristol hillside. Much of the space belongs to an ancient apple tree that we thought about cutting down twenty years ago but never did. Instead we ended up wassailing it, because that’s the sort of tree it is. The kind you respect if you don’t want Pomona, goddess of orchards, to curse your family.
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Sometimes the blackbird sings in the tree, sometimes on a chimneypot, competing with the croaky dawn chorus of our street’s resident crows. Like the magnolia blossoms outside number thirty-five the song of this lone blackbird tells us that spring, as a poet once said, has sprung.
I’m fairly sure it’s a different bird every year, different but similar: it’s always a bold, upright youngster who starts his shift early and sings the basic repertoire with relentless enthusiasm. He doesn’t care if you’ve got a teething baby in the house and haven’t slept properly for a month. It’s not his problem if you’re fretting about the credit card bill or that noise the car’s making that will HAVE to be looked at. Two years ago he launched his Breakfast Show just as we went into lockdown. Up and down the street freelancers and small business owners were lying awake wondering how on earth they were going to pay the rent. But there he was, at 5am on the dot, launching into his cheerful melody – a tune so jolly it was covered by Paul McCartney.
And now here we are once again in April with its showers sweet, and once again an ambitious young crooner has taken up residence. Part of me wishes I could tell him that he’s wasting his time. No blackbird has ever been raised in our back garden, which is patrolled by a vigilante army of magpies and cats. He’d be much better off, I would tell him (in my role of grizzled veteran blackbird), in the park. Plus, I might add, this year really isn’t the year for cheery, glass-half-full types like you. The future may have looked bleak when that first lockdown got underway, but we at least had the twin perks of sunny weather and the opportunity to share our new-found expertise in virology. Now we’re facing so many varieties of disaster it’s difficult to keep track of them all.
You may remember from your schooldays something called the pathetic fallacy, which describes the tendency among poets, film-makers etc., to ascribe human emotions to nature. Story-tellers of all kinds like to fit the natural scene to the mood, so the fishermen waiting for the shark in Jaws do so in an eery calm, while a lovelorn Jane Austen heroine rushes out into a ferocious storm. Likewise we remember the battlefields of World War I as a sea of mud, but spring sprung there too. In between artillery bombardments the poet Edward Thomas noted in his diary the plant life sprouting in the disturbed earth, and the birds calling for mates.
For him, and no doubt for many soldiers on both sides, these moments of natural beauty were incongruous. The situation these men found themselves in was unimaginably grim, yet the sun still shone and birds still sang. It must have been heart-rending to think of all those people in their gardens back home, barely a hundred miles away. But at the same time perhaps it was reassuring to know that the world continued to turn, the tides to ebb and flow, oblivious to human history.
Like his predecessors our blackbird has no idea that his hopes of raising a family in our back garden are almost certainly going to be dashed. His faith in the future is total. I’m sure there are optimistic blackbirds like ours singing right now in the rubble of Ukrainian cities, in the sunshine or in the warm spring rain. ■
THE BRISTOL
MAGAZINE
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