Songs in a London Park
Song is better than sleep. I hear a robin stir in the pre-dawn through my open window. Leaving my warm bed, I walk heavily down the stairs and out of the door into the darkness, anticipating a song-filled day. The robin is hungry and needs to feed but first it must assert its territorial rights. The bird with his scarlet pot belly, and skinny little legs looking like a man who has spent a life time drinking beer in the sun, darts up to a branch in the black walnut tree, and opens his beak. Notes of utter purity lace the air with their musical threads. As he does this, I sit below him, resting against the park railings, letting my spine find the gap between the bars. My head rests upwards against the cold and unyielding pillow of iron as he sings and nothing could be more beautiful.
As the light increases, other bushes and branches begin to sing, their leaves pulsing with noise - high and light. Brisk wrens trill, chaffinches urgently quaver the air and a blackcap sounding like a blackbird on speed begins his line in the avian score. Others unknown and unseen, follow in an opening prelude.
And then on the overhanging branches of the Indian bean tree, a blackbird lands. He balances on his frail yellow feet which he plants like a soldier ‘at ease’, his claws tight with gripping. He leans back his head, opens that flute of a golden beak and sings into the dawny air with a tear shaping melody. As with Ennio Morricone’s ‘Gabriel’s Oboe’, he mixes melancholy with hope.
His solo line comes to an end, I’m able to distinguish neither blackbird, nor robin, nor indeed any voice, in this tremulous outpouring of sound. The songs have become one spirit, one song. Edward Thomas wrote of this moment when, ‘Mixed with them is the myriad stir of unborn things, of leaf and blade and flower, many silences at heart and root of tree, notes of hope and growth, of love that will be satisfied though it leap upon the swords of life.” (The South Country 1909)
In this pre-light of day, I want to hang onto the moment where everything is, ’blent into one seething stream of song’. (Edward Thomas). These moments of balm in a West London park are a liberation of sorts from the disintegration and mortality that has swept across the globe.
After forty minutes or so the initial exuberance of the dawn chorus diminishes. Breakfast is needed now that territories have been bounded by song. The robin has already set off on the first of up to a thousand flights today, bringing worms, grubs and beetles for the four hatchlings.
My back is stiff and there are grooves deeply implanted into my skin. As I rise to seek my own breakfast, a fox trots towards the nearly empty bins. He is mangy and thin; the usual hoard of left over picnic food that has sustained him for the past few years, is like so much else, just a memory of a plentiful past. The electric park patrol car hums as it nears the gate, and the fox trots off in weary resignation. He knows his place in the pecking order of life. The warden opens his car door and jangles the locks with a key.
‘Morning’, he says.
The first of the morning joggers trails him and his car into the park.
Later, in the afternoon sun, the breeze rifles through the Maple leaves as a secretary might rifle through papers on a desk . The air smells richly of green and growth, and I return to my railing spot and again see the park with my ears. The tongue clicking noise of rubber on string emanates from the tennis courts and yelps of frustration and delight bound across the grass. A Green Arrows team of parakeets shriek as they fly thrillingly close to the branches of an oak. A wood pigeon sits alone in the ash tree and softly passes on some words which might be wise, like an old person. A raspy magpie interrupts coarsely like a disgruntled teen not inclined to listen to the old. The pigeon goes quiet. I sense that in the sky above, a red kite is drifting where once there were planes. In the limes and elders blue tits chatter like kids at play. The two notes of the great tit squeak like a rusty saw from somewhere nearby. A thrush pours gold into the late afternoon.
Different noises too, drift in the eddies. People talk earnestly into phones in various pitches and urgencies. Snippets of conversation form poems when strung together. Children are encouraged or discouraged, new loves are declared and old ones rung out and set aside. The feet of joggers pound hard earth in ungainly gaits, their breaths pressed and pushed in effort. Balls are bounced, knobbly bike tyres sigh.
As evening returns with its silky fading light, so to does the robin. He seals the day with another song - as clear and pure as it was this morning. Surely he must be tired? A thousand trips in search of food, four insistent mouths to feed, not to mention all that choralling and patrolling of his beat. I savour each glorious note as it swirls in the clean, near alpine London air. By the end of summer, he’ll have lost a quarter of his two broods, by Christmas a further half. He too will most likely be dead by the time our familiar routines return. He does not live long, just as these times will not last long. Yet he sings as if his life depends upon it. Which of course it does.