Corvus by Esther Woolfson Read Free Book Online

regarding birds and cages. There were times, many times, when various birds, being expected to socialise more than they would have chosen, made a dash for home, settling with quiet relief onto their unassailable perches.
    For years, under Bec’s system Bardie ruled, or more accurately was allowed to rule. He flew shrieking up the stairs in Bec’s wake, wandered freely (as he still does, more slowly, with greater trepidation) across the dinner table (as did Churchill’s budgerigar, who would remove the silver implements from the salt urns before attacking his owner’s cigar). He wandered freely over the books in the study, nibbling where he chose. The pages of many books in the house have, in addition to later damage inflicted by a magpie, neatly frilled edges, punched evenly along their length by a cockatiel.

    a sun conure, small, brilliantly coloured, yellow, orange and green
    Bardie would, while upstairs in Bec’s room, on hearing the ringing of one of the set of Victorian bells outside the kitchen door with which I summoned everyone to meals, turn to Bec and say ‘Come on!’ peremptorily, flying to the top of her bedroom door before escorting her down the stairs for dinner.
    In those far-off days of children, rats and assorted birds, we also had two canaries, given to us by an elderly man who came to the house to look at the rowing boat David had bought but never used, in response to an ad in the local paper. To reach the garden I had to lead him through the house, past bird-houses and birds, past calling and flying. He was, it seemed, not only a bird man but was cutting down on his own bird-house numbers. Did I want two canaries? I didn’t but couldn’t refuse. He did, I remember, spend a long time telling me about the more abstruse and complex intricacies of canary genetics. The boat remained unbought.
    The canaries arrived a couple of days later and took up residence on a table in my study (on the grounds that it was the only remaining unoccupied space) in their solid, dull, pale-green-wood cage, a green that had the old look of arsenical paint but can’t have been. All day they bounced ferociously on their balsawood perches, driving me to fury. They had qualities, but not ones I recognised easily. Perhaps if they’d been on their own, if I’d devoted more time and attention to them, been happy to settle for their song in another room, regarded them with more love and less irritation, they might have responded to Bec’s theory of bird-rearing and proved to be more than the small singing pests that they were. I looked in the canary book we hadhastily bought for indications of their possible lifespan. Females, it suggested, wearied by breeding, live five or six years. Males though, untrammelled by such demands, can live sixteen or more years. Both must have been elderly because in the course of time, not too much time, they went the way of all small singing pests.
    The rats too, a constant presence for so long, thrived, became adults, aged, and one by one died. When the last one did, we took their well-used homes from the now-empty rat room to the skip at the recycling centre.
    At some moment during the residency of the canaries we acquired Max, a starling. Aberdeen, since the discovery of oil, has become not only Oil City but Touchdown City, Move-on City; a migration stop, a place where oilmen from other places, from France, Holland, America, land, feed for the requisite length of time required for satiation before passing on to higher, or perhaps in the case of such subterranean activity, lower things, to the other places where oil is, or may be, to Houston, Baku, Luanda. Any day of any week, outside any house in this neighbourhood, a favourite of oilmen, pantechnicons may be seen. Large, square packages, taped and labelled for shipping, issue in the arms of burly house movers from the front door in a solemn procession to the van of the international moving company. Often, a laconic lady with baseball hat