Adam Mars-Jones - Pilcrow

I remember one particular day of lying out in the garden. Mum told me that the sky that day was a special colour, not just blue but azure . The word tasted beautiful in my mouth. I didn’t need a perfect sky to entertain me, though. It was pleasure enough to connect up dim sounds that I heard from my room, particularly when the back door was open in warm weather, with the activities that produced them. The scratchy whisper of a rake from the garden two doors down, the bite and chop of the same man’s hoe.

I don’t know if Mum had been distracted on her last visit to the aviary, but there was a sudden flutter and we saw that two budgies had escaped. They didn’t waste time. Soon they were soaring upward, and it became difficult to pick them out from the sky which so perfectly matched them. It was extraordinary to see their ascent into freedom, and I imagined I could share the exhilaration they felt.

Mum was naturally very upset, and I tried to reassure her. I found it very hard to believe that those glorious soaring birds would not survive. I couldn’t disregard the hard logic with which Mum had described their fate, but I was somehow convinced that this was a special case. It wasn’t even that I selfishly wanted them to return. I just felt that in this one case the birds would be discovered, captured and cared for all over again. The moment was so happy for them. It just couldn’t be death they were escaping into.

The blue cere

When her birds started to nest in their boxes, Mum was transported. Our small world was greatly enlarged when she officially became a Breeder. She loved all her feathered babies, and yet blues would always be her favourites, being the best talkers. They made the best pets and the best friends — females had a tendency to deliver painful nips. Mum loved to talk about the ‘blue cere’, a phrase I instinctively loved myself without knowing what it was. It sounded such a wonderfully grown-up word. Mum couldn’t wait for the Blue Cere to come, and nor could I. All I knew was that it would be a great day for our budgies when the Blue Cere arrived. Their lives would be changed in some way I couldn’t imagine. I visualised the Blue Cere as a sort of springtime Father Christmas, wearing blue rather than red.

Mum had a deep connection with her birds and even with their eggs. She could tell the signs that meant a clutch was about to hatch. She would become very keyed up. The excitement even rubbed off on Dad, who would pop in to tell me the news every time a hatching was taking place. Hatching wasn’t always a happy event. One day I could hear that an argument had started between them, even if I could only hear snatches of it:

‘No, I’m not going to chuck it out ! How can you even suggest it?’

‘If it can’t get out of its egg, the bird will never be a good breeder, and most likely …’

‘I don’t care, Dennis — for me that is murder .’

‘You’re far too sensitive, m’dear! Quite ridiculous …’

‘And don’t tell me about your blasted kittens. Just don’t!’

During his childhood Dad had become used to drowning unwanted kittens in buckets of water. ‘Nothing to it, m’dear. Just do it the moment they’re born, though, or then you’ll get attached to them and you’ll never be able to do it …’

The argument I overheard had been about one particular egg. The bird inside had managed to crack the shell, but had been too exhausted to get any further. It had lost its fight to be born. It was very scrawny and weak, and it had been rejected by the mother. How would it find its way back to life after that? Dad insisted nature knew best about survival, and from what I saw of the condition of the bird it was easy to feel he had a point. Newborn budgies aren’t exactly pretty at the best of times. They’re scraggy little pink things, but this one was positively unsightly.

Mum paid no attention. The baby had rights, and if it had been rejected by its mother, then she would take the mother’s place. Dad pleaded for her to be sensible, warning that her attempts to hand-feed the runty chick with special food were doomed anyway. It would all end in tears (one of his favourite phrases). She dismissed his arguments, making out that she wasn’t really going to any trouble. Since she so often got up in the night for me anyway, what was another little creature to care for?

And then the little bird failed to die, even began slyly to thrive. Little by little it grew, until there was no doubt that it had turned the corner. It loved Mum, and chirped in its little rasping voice whenever she came near. Never was imprinting more richly deserved. The baby bird had been rejected not only by its mother but by the other birds in the aviary, so it became my companion by default. The little bird had nobody, and so the little bird had me. ‘Is it a boy bird or a girl bird?’ I asked Mum.

‘I don’t know.’

This was rich. This was marvellous. Much as I wanted to know the answer to my question, I was vastly tickled by Mum’s inability to decide the issue. Sorting creatures into the right categories was so much her special subject. She had cleared up my confusion over nurses not being ladies, and she had tactfully led Miss Collins away from the goaty group to which I had assigned her, returning her to the rightful sheepish company. And now she had been stumped by a little bundle of chirping fluff!

Mum explained that you couldn’t tell the gender of a budgie until later. That’s where the blue cere comes in. The cere is the soft, waxy swelling at the base of the upper beak, which develops as the bird grows to maturity. Blue for a boy, tan or brown for a girl. Of course I couldn’t wait that long. I wanted to give the bird a name, and I wanted to call it ‘him’ until the case was proved the other way.

‘I really don’t mind if it’s a girl, Mum,’ I said, ‘I’ll love him anyway. Him or her. Even if it’s a girl and it pecks. But can it be a boy for now?’ Mum must have thought it likely that our bird was a boy, because he bobbed his head in the way that is characteristic of males. If he was female he would have been quieter, but bossy. So we assigned maleness to him for the time being, ‘on approval’, as it always said in the Ellisdons catalogue.

Dad made out that he was indifferent to the bird’s existence, but he was the one who came up with the name that stuck. The bird became Charlie. Then it was only a question of waiting for the blue cere to confirm or invalidate our assignment of gender. The change happens at between eight months and a year old, but Mum was looking long before that. Dad said, ‘You’re being ridiculous, no one can tell so early,’ but Mum said she knew what to look for. She had an eye for such things, and said she didn’t care what the books said. When the blue cere appeared, it was visible only to Mum at first. Then it became as plain as the beak on his face. There was no doubt about it. Charlie was still a boy and still Charlie.

Tail-end Charlie

It occurs to me now that there was a hint of whimsical tenderness in the name that Dad suggested. Consciously or not, he had gone back to his memories of the War. ‘Tail-end Charlie’ was RAF slang for the rear gunner on a plane, the airman with the shortest life expectancy. The sitting duck. It was uncharacteristically good shrewd psychology on Mum’s part that she let Dad, who wasn’t that keen on pets, have a hand in their naming. It made him part of their lives. Who knows? Perhaps Gipsy was named after the Gipsy Moth, his favourite biplane.

I knew quite a lot about budgies by this time, and although I was happy about Charlie’s miraculous survival I was sad to realise he would never be a dad himself. You can’t breed if your own kind rejects you, and it wasn’t clear if Charlie even knew he wasn’t human. All my objections to the business of reproduction melted away in this case. The bond between us tightened as we shared our disadvantages. I became attuned to the faint whirr of his wings and the high humming of his heart.