In the English countryside the Kingdom of Heaven can still exist
PAUL JOHNSON
For the best part of a month I have sunk deeper and deeper into the total peace of the Somerset countryside. For days on end I scarcely hear a human voice. Yet the fields and woods and forest heave with life. In the garden a white mist of butterflies rises from the nasturtiums, phlox and delphiniums, the bees drowse busily, and down below, among the hidden leaves, countless caterpillars munch and chomp. The big field below the fox woods is once more full of sheep. There are noisy bullocks in its neighbour, bellowing for their mothers. Around the pond and stream a multitude of fowl dash about — fancy-bred chickens dominated by two majestic rival cocks, a flock of muscular geese to scare away the foxes, and a band of comedian ducks called Indian runners. These delightful creatures, a mild and unoffending lusus naturae, are tall, unsteady and hyperactive, and totter around ceaselessly, the adults gleaming white, their young in all shades of purple-brown. These birds get on well as groups, but not always among themselves, and periodically their eirenic silence disintegrates into a sudden crescendo of shrieks and cackling. Then the geese spread their tremendous wings in paroxysms of rage, the cocks mount aloft and declare war, and the runners accelerate their frantic pedestrianism until they become dizzy and fall over. No one takes any notice. I rather like these artificial pandemoniums, as ritualistic and predictable as a UN General Assembly debate on the Middle East, full of forced sound and fury and signifying only that men and fowl have much in common. The noise lasts exactly ten seconds and then ceases abruptly as though the chairman had ended the debate by switching off the mikes. Perfect peace descends again.
I notice that the birds of the air, of which there are scores of varieties around and in my garden, are totally uninterested in these fowl goings-on, with the solitary exception of the crows, who sometimes descend in platoon strength when a chubby farm-girl brings out the special nutrients at feeding time. The geese then form up like Italian riot police confronting Greeniks, and the crows are ceremoniously routed, watched without comment by the little songbirds from the safety of the solitary telephone wire which loops across the poultry field. What do they think of it all? Or, indeed, do they think about it? One of the great virtues of animals, so unlike the human race, is their habit of minding
their own business until unneighbourly behaviour leaves them no alternative but to react. Yet they are much more observant than we are. They miss nothing. The acuity of vision of birds is enviable, Their eyes are formidably large in relation to their size, and meticulously equipped for survival. They have a third eyelid of nictating membrane', which keeps the eye surface beautifully clean and polished, rather as submariners look after their periscope lenses. The position, size and shape of their eyes mean that most birds have a field of vision two or three times wider than ours, Snipe and woodcock have an all-round vision system which becomes binocular immediately behind their heads. So an Irish woodcock can actually see better what is behind it than in front of it, and needs to, poor thing. A bittern, by tilting up its beak and head to the vertical, then gets perfect sight in both eyes of any danger in front of it. Our eye positions are grossly inefficient by comparison. I don't know how the idea got around that people with deep-set eyes are more thoughtful. In fact, they observe and so know less. By contrast, Lord North, whose eyes bulged out of his head, was acute at spotting moods on the ministerial benches behind him — one reason he was prime minister for so long.
I have been learning about birds this August, or rather learning how little I know about them. The way they fly is extremely complicated and instructive, as any aircraft designer can tell you. Like jets, they create vacuums with their wings and they use high air currents to achieve immense speeds in relation to the land. I remember standing on a 3,000 feet-plus peak in the remote Highlands and watching a flight of grey-lag geese high above, their wings beating slowly and steadily. That great ornithologist John ListerKaye, who was with me, calculated that their groundspeed was over 60 miles an hour. They were riding a wind speed of perhaps 50 mph. For though average wind velocity at ground level is 10 mph or less, it rises to 65 mph at 10.000 feet. At 30,000, the height of Everest, it is about 100 mph. And four kinds of bird choughs, curlews, godwits and lammergeiers — have been seen near the top of Everest. It's not surprising that one Indian bird, the spine-tailed swift, has been clocked at 200 mph. Usual groundspeeds, however, are between 20 and 40 mph for most birds.
So birds have an easy time of it, do they? Certainly, the golden eagle, the British bird
which makes the most use of air currents, appears, like the lion, to be lazy, at least to my uninstructed eyes. But a real expert, like my friend Dement May, who writes the bird bits in the Times, might call it 'efficient'. For many birds in the wild, life is brutish and short, though perhaps not nasty. I found in the old stables a book called How to Study Birds, which Stuart Smith first published over half a century ago. It may be a bit out of date but I have been reading it eagerly, and recommend it. He calculates that birds in aviaries live twice as long as they do in the wild, rather as blacks exported to the Thirteen Colonies in the 18th century lived twice as long as in the 'freedom' of their own continent. A song thrush or a robin may survive to he 20 in captivity but rarely tops two years in freedom, We think of birdwatchers as sentimental but they need to be realistic. Actually, they come in all kinds. Edward Grey, who encapsulated 1914 with his phrase 'The lamps are going out all over Europe', was one enthusiast, But then so was the insensitive and brush-off), Neville Chamberlain.
These hills are a good place to watch birds, or indeed all forms of our native fauna, sometimes in apostolic conjunction. Last week brought a memorable experience. I was on my way to Alfoxton Hotel, at the northern foot of the Quantocks. This old manor house was the place rented by Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy in 1797, when he and Coleridge were putting together the Lyrical Ballads. The sleepy old house itself, and the deep woods which surround it, have changed little in 200 years, and if you dine there you can sample the excellent produce, as the Wordsworths did, of a magnificent walled kitchen garden, which must be the biggest in Somerset. As we were nearing the house, shafts of evening sunlight suddenly illumined a great meadow which overlooks the sea. In it there were 20 or more red deer with tiny offspring peacefully browsing in perfect amity amidst white cattle and sheep, and even, I think, a goat or two. This rapturous glimpse of the animal kingdom at its most ecumenical will long gild my memory. Was the Garden of Eden like this? Turner might have painted such a scene — indeed he did paint it, in the evening meadows of Petworth in Sussex, not long after the Wordsworths were delighting in such visions here. 1 reflected that, though it has been a tragic year for the English countryside, it still reminds us that the Kingdom of Heaven can be a real place.
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