Home life
Night owls
Alice Thomas Ellis
Iwas not up with the lark the other morning because I was up all night with a positive parliament of fowls. We went to bed late, since we were watching John Mills being quietly staunch in the face of disaster and Richard Attenborough turn- ing from a bit of a mess of a seaman second-class into a real brick — or, as they put it in the accents of the Forties, a jolly good chep. They went down with their sub: right down to the bottom of the ocean, where they sat heroically eating corned beef with a knife and fork off a plate while the air ran out.
It was the funniest film we'd seen in years. 'Send up an oil slick so the salvage team can see were you are,' we cried. `I say, sir,' suggested a rating humbly, `should we send up an oil slick so the salvage team can see where we are?' My word, what a whizz idea' (or words to that effect), cried John Mills, clapping a hand to his forehead. In the end there were four of them left down there until one died -- oddly enough, it seems of malaria — and then there were three. They played cards while they waited. We waited too, con- fidently expecting them to be rescued, but no: a force 10 blew up on the surface, so the salvage team went home to the pub and John Mills put aside his corned beef to read aloud from the prayer-book. It was rather moving, but also terribly annoying, so I went to bed and lay awake planning a more satisfactory ending. I had just introduced Jaws to bite off the conning tower when a bird started tweeting in the tree next door. It was about 2 a.m. and a bit early for the dawn chorus, but the weather was mild and the street lighting on, so I concluded it was just confused; or perhaps it was being bothered by a cat creeping up its tree. I put it out of my mind while I wrote in a part for Jean Simmons, or possibly Margaret Lockwood. One of them might have stowed away for'ard and her husband (I saw him as James Mason or Stewart Grainger) would be the captain of the rescue ship and have a hunch she was down there. The actual captain of the rescue ship was lamentably defeatist, hav- ing no real incentive to continue the salvage exercise. A little bit of wind and he cut the cables and floated off. If they'd made that film some years later Henry Fonda would have gone down and got them out single-handed.
Thus musing and unable to sleep, I next heard a screech owl screeching. This is not unusual in our road, and it is appropriate for owls to express themselves in this fashion at two in the morning, so I didn't mind, but then simultaneously I heard a kraak as of a raven croaking. We have ravens, on the hill behind us in the country, but in London I believe they're all confined to the Tower. I don't know when I last saw a crow locally, although a jay occasionally flies past, but we do have two magpies who go to great pains never to be seen together. Presumably they are each married to other magpies. They make the unmusical noise common to the crow family, and I imagine the spouse of one of them had just disco- vered what was going on. Richard Atten- borough had trouble with his wife in the submarine film. She was always going dancing, and squandering the extra half- crown he got for spending so much time under the water.
The church clock struck three and these ill-assorted birds were still variously tweet- ing, shrieking and croaking whenever a thought occurred to them. In the magpie altercation there was a distinct note of 'and what's more'. Then they woke a little dog up the road. Why do little dogs bark so much more than big ones? I waited fatalis- tically for a burglar alarm to go off but I must have gone to sleep — goodness knows how because the next sound I heard was all the little birds tweeting, and a seagull crying. There are thousands of them round here, because they don't bother ever going to sea any more, and I don't blame them, when you think of the conditions.
I still feel discontented when I think of J. Mills, R. Attenborough and the other chep sitting playing cards with the malaria victim laid out on a bunk and the duffel-coated toff on top leaving them to their fate. They took it remarkably well, I must say. I suppose it was, at least, very quiet down there. No dawn chorus.
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