Sometime in February 2006, Mr Crow met up with a fine young bird of his own age, whom we shall call Mrs Crow. They found the perfect tree in which to build their nest at 49 Lonsdale Road, Barnes, a huge cedar with branches spreading so far that underneath there is a secret garden. On the top floor of the house works an artist, who paints from dawn till dusk, usually standing at an easel, as an artist should, with a beautiful model in front of him. Mr and Mrs Crow did not know his name so they referred to him as Mr Artist, but they often heard him calling for his dog, a large, languid, brown and white beagle, whom he called Woody and who ran about the garden during the day. When evening came and Woody was taken into the house, the garden belonged to the Crows.
The cedar tree stretched so high that even the squirrels seldom climbed to the top and in a crevice near the crown, Mr and Mrs Crow began to build. They collected at least five hundred twigs and Mrs Crow lined the inside with fluffy feathers she pulled out from under her wings as well as chicken feathers she found in the garden two houses away. When she had turned round and round until there was a nice cozy nest, Mrs Crow sat down in it. After a time she had a funny feeling inside her that she had never had before: quite suddenly she laid a beautiful greeny-blue egg with speckles. Over the next few days she laid another three and after a short discussion, they decided that four were just the ticket, rather hoping to end up with two boys and and two girls, but no matter if not.
Crows have to sit on their eggs for three weeks and Mrs Crow resigned herself to the long wait, making sure the eggs were at just the right temperature and that she turned them over every day. A week later, Mrs Crow was very surprised to feel that same funny feeling she had had before, and indeed it was followed by the appearance of another beautiful greeny-blue egg with speckles . ‘Dear! oh Dear! ‘she thought, but as long as no more came along, she’d put up with it, and so she kept it warm and turned it over daily with the others.
About the middle of May, she couldn’t help noticing sounds from inside the eggs and one morning when she was taking a nap, she felt something stirring underneath her; she peered down and one egg had broken open. It didn’t take a moment to clear the bits of shell and reveal a tiny wet fluffy, helpless creature that hardly looked like a bird let alone a crow but brought out all her motherly feelings. A little later, the same thing happened again and then again until there were four little black creatures. Together with the remaining egg, they all had to be kept warm. The babies were fed with tiny bits of worms and insects that Mr Crow brought back and Mrs Crow munched up before feeding them. The four babies seemed to double in size every time she looked at them, so when the fifth egg broke open a week later, she had quite forgotten how small babies were to start with.
Well, it was now that the problems began. However hard she tried to feed the smallest one, the other four managed to steal half the food and although day by day the little one grew, it didn’t seem to grow nearly as fast as the others. The wing and tail feathers turned out white and scrawny and some of them even snapped off at the ends. When the baby called for her, it sounded quite different from the other four and the voice was more urgent. She called it Craw-Craw, because that was the sound it made. Mr Crow asked what the others were called and Mrs Crow admitted she hadn’t called them anything yet, so they settled on Crackle and Crankle for the two girls and Crum and Crock for the boys because these names were very like the sounds they made.
Mrs Crow now began to help Mr Crow find worms and bugs to feed the young and sometimes they were both away from the nest at the same time. One day Mrs Crow returned to find only four babies.
‘It wasn’t me.’ said Crackle. ‘It wasn’t me’, said Crankle; ‘It wasn’t me’, said Crum and Crock in unison. but they didn’t look their mother in the eye and she knew. The stronger babies had pushed Craw-Craw out of the nest and there he was down below on the ground, calling for her. Hour after hour he called, but there was nothing Mrs Crow could do except wait for dark and know that a cat would come and eat the little creature.
Just then, Mrs Crow saw Mr Artist look out of the window.
‘ What’s that noise I hear?’ he was saying to his model. He disappeared and a few minutes later came into the garden with Woody and walked towards the baby crow. Mrs Crow and the others peered over the edge of the nest. Woody went right up to Craw-Craw and sniffed him. Mr Artist looked down and seemed to be speaking to something in his hand and a moment later they could hear a phone ringing two houses away, where the chickens lived. It was not long before someone arrived and he too came over and peered at Craw-Craw. But this time Craw-Craw let out a series of such urgent and distressed calls that the man leant down and picked him up. The calls stopped. The two men talked for a while and then the man with Craw-Craw on his wrist went off .
‘ Well, that’s the last we’ll see of him,’ said Mrs Crow.
Chapter 2
Craw-Craw was very weak by this time, but he managed to balance on the wrist of his new friend as they walked a couple of houses down the street. When they arrived, a small sliver of delicious raw meat, tastier than any worm he had ever had, made him feel a great deal better. From then on, he hardly had a quiet moment: he was given worms and little slugs and beef and indeed little bits of all sorts of things, which of course he only learnt the names of much later. But I can tell you, there was cheese and pasta and bread and when he got somewhat stronger and more demanding, dry dog-food , which came in the form of delicious little nuts. When Craw-Craw couldn’t eat any more, he found he could store quite a few nuts in the back of his beak and then take them off and hide them under a leaf, where the dog, called Bridge, nearly always discovered them.
I must fill you in about the household. Bridge was the most important character and Craw-Craw spent her waking hours trying to befriend her, trying to share her food and basket and generally to draw out signs of love and recognition. Bridge was not at all sure she wanted to appoint Craw-Craw as her intimate friend but then in a way, Craw-Craw was better than nothing and a great deal better than the eight bantams who were creatures of a much lower order.
Craw-Craw’s new feathers were growing out fine and black but all the long flight feathers were broken and useless so he would just have to wait until they fell out and were replaced by new ones, a thing that doesn’t happen in a jiffy. In fact it may only happen every year and so Craw-Craw had to stay at Oakgates, his new home, for many months. The less important inhabitants of the house were two elderly gentlemen, whom Craw-Craw called Mr Bumble, because he was always bumbling about and Mr Mumble, because it rhymed so nicely. They were both kind to him and Mr Bumble took him on expeditions to the compost heap almost every day to find worms and wood lice. Craw-Craw soon gave up eating slugs as they left horrid slimy smears on his beak; he didn’t mind the worms except that he could do without the wriggling when he grabbed them.
Craw-Craw was a bird of habit. The days and nights began to assume a regular pattern: Mr Bumble gave him his own basket, made in some faraway country and purchased for all of £20 at Habitat in Hammersmith. It was circular with a thick edge and you would think that the maker had Craw-Craw in mind, it was so perfect to perch on. At first the basket was placed in the hall at night, but Craw-Craw developed a taste for peeling off the wall paper at dawn before the first person got up and put the basket outside onto the terrace. So when it came to bedtime, he was banished to the kitchen, where he could explore without doing much damage.
As soon as breakfast was over, the thought uppermost in Craw-Craw’s mind was a bath. He had his own bowl, so perfect in size that you would have thought it had been made by the person who wove the basket. But no, Craw-Craw would only use Bridge’s water bowl. He seemed to have missed his calling as an electric fan because he would vibrate and shake so vigorously that within a few minutes all the water had been whisked out onto the kitchen floor, if Mr Bumble had forgotten to put the bowl outside, or over the terrace, if he had remembered to do so. After the bath, a session of preening left every feather looking as fine as it possibly could in the circumstances. The new feathers glistened with purples and greens reflecting off the black, and when they were fluffed up, they hid the mangy white ones from sight. In short he looked his best at about 10.00 am.
Provided it was not raining and as those of you who lived through the summer and autumn of 2006 will remember, it seldom was, Craw-Craw would take a tour of the garden. The vegetable garden was his favorite spot. Once he actually came back with a live and fairly complete worm, which he showed Mr Bumble as if to say that he was making efforts to look after himself. That these efforts were not altogether successful was apparent from the amount of dog food and other treats that he still gobbled up during the day.
There were usually several people to lunch at Oakgates and if the weather allowed, lunch was on the terrace. Craw-Craw thought that he should be able to wander freely around the table, inspecting and sampling whatever he came across, but no one else seemed to think this a good idea; he was banished to the back of Mr Bumble’s chair where he perched, peering around either shoulder to keep an eye on proceedings. If he was ignored too long, he would produce an indignant squawk.
This brings me to the subject of Craw-Craw’s language, or at least his ‘voices’. Besides the indignant squawk, there was the ‘angle grinder’ noise to express rapture at a tasty morsel. Raw beef never failed to turn it on. Then there was the ‘gabble-gabble’ or ‘crackle-crackle’, a rather contemplative voice usually heard in the morning, as he wandered off to the vegetable garden, full of the joys of life. Another voice could only be compared to a loud ratchet and appeared like a sudden unexpected thought. At about three months old, he produced a loud, confident ‘Craw-Craw’. This seemed to say that he was growing up, but at first was kept for special occasions. The only other voice, which became less frequent as he got older, was a plaintive sound, ‘I’m just a baby, don’t hurt me’, if he was frightened by too sudden a movement .
When evening approached and the shadow of the cedar tree where he was born two gardens away, crept across the lawn, Mr Bumble and Mr Mumble would go down to the pond at the end of the garden, each carrying a glass of red wine and one of water. Craw-Craw would follow with spirited leaps and flutters and then jump onto the low table, which was only allowed because there was no food there, or on to the back of the curved bench where they sat. He was also allowed to drink out of the water glasses, which he frequently did and showed a certain liking for red wine but that was not encouraged.
Crows and for all I know all birds, appear to have little forked tongues, which dart in and out from the end of their beaks rather like a snake and sample whatever they have found. Craw-Craw knew very quickly whether he was going to like something. If it was new, he would go very carefully, but once the drink or food was on his approved list, he would recognize it instantaneously.
Talking of Craw-Craw’s beak, it was a fearsome object, and probably the only reason he survived, sharing a garden with seven bantam hens and a cockerel. When he first arrived, the cockerel often attacked him. If Mr Bumble or anyone else was there they would run to his defence, but when he was alone, he just flattened himself on the ground in a position of submission. The cockerel, whose name was Sultan, never went in for the kill, which he must have regretted later, because one day Craw-Craw stood up to him. Admittedly, Craw-Craw was standing in the kitchen door and on what he considered his own ground. The cockerel was a foot away on the terrace, facing the diminutive crow. Both birds lowered their heads into the fighting position, wings outstretched and tails erect, though Craw-Craw had very little to show in that quarter. They stared at each other for several seconds, without moving. Then Craw-Craw gave a small leap forward, just an inch or so, but it had the desired effect. Mr Bumble, who was standing in the kitchen ready to intercede, held his breath as Sultan turned slowly on his heel as though he had suddenly remembered something he had to do and went away. Sultan lost the battle on that day and Craw-Craw became the master, not only of the kitchen but also the terrace, a big contribution to its cleanliness, since crow poos are about one tenth the size of bantam poos.
Another favorite activity was going down the outside steps to Mr Bumble’s studio. Craw-Craw rather fancied his talents at filing, or rather the opposite if there is such a thing. He loved pulling sheets of paper out from where they lived and spreading them about the floor in new arrangements. He could nearly always find a better place to put something. The best thing ever was a jar of old coins that long ago should have been put into one of those charity envelopes British Airways give you. Each day another coin was taken out and no doubt in years to come someone will find out-of-date coins from all over the world hidden about the garden and wonder how they got there.
Chapter 3
About a month after Crackle,Crankle, Crum and Crock were hatched, they took their first flight. It was only a short one and Mrs Crow would still have to go on feeding them for a few weeks as is the custom with crows. One of their first expeditions was to the house with the bantams where a fine oak tree stood beside a pond, an ideal place from which to watch the world go by. As they sat on a high branch they saw Mr Bumble, though of course they didn’t know he was called Mr Bumble, coming out of the kitchen with a bird on his wrist. It looked a bit like a crow but how could it be, if it had no tail? Something about it caught Crackle’s attention and she decided that her daily flying practice would include coming to see this strange creature. She had never forgotten Craw-Craw and in the back of her mind there was still a feeling of guilt gnawing quietly away.
It was not long before she heard Craw-Craw babbling to himself and then she knew: only the crow family talked like that. She flew back to tell Mama and soon the whole family had come to witness this strange sight: one of their kind but with a lot of white feathers, no proper tail and not able to fly, living among human beings. It was Mrs Crow who finally said, ‘there’s no doubt about it, that’s Craw-Craw. I’d know his voice anywhere, and that man is the one who took him away the day he fell out of the nest. You keep an eye on him, Crackle.’
That was in July and every day Crackle sat in the oak tree and watched this creature whom she now knew was her little lost brother. She began to speak to him and at first he didn’t answer: it was as though he spoke a different language, but then one day Craw-Craw looked up and said quite clearly, ‘ How did you get up there?’ Crackle said quick as a flash, ‘I flew down from the cedar tree.’ ‘And how did you get up there?’ said Crackle, as though he had been having conversations all his life. ‘ ‘I don’t know.’ said Crackle after a bit of thought.
Craw-Craw’s crow language improved by leaps and bounds as the days went by, unlike his flying ability, for his feathers were taking a long time to grow out. He could jump into the air alongside Crackle but then he would fall to the ground in the most embarrassing way. How could he understand that the feathers were growing ever so slowly and that one day he would be able to soar into the air like his sister. Crackle thought it rather a joke that Craw-Craw knew so little of bird lore. When they walked about on the lawn together, she could see that he was dreadfully slow at grabbing a worm before it slithered away down into the earth, or a scuttling bug. He even turned over the odd wood louse without hurting it and then let it escape. What would Mama say if she saw that? Even Mr Bumble had noticed how slow Craw-Craw was to eat something he found and also how fussy. If a worm was too small, he didn’t seem to take any notice; if it was too big and fleshy, he turned away. How would he ever survive if he had to fend for himself?
It was not until December that Craw-Craw began to take longer flights, and then one morning when even the oak trees had lost their leaves, he took off with a particularly loud ‘CRAW CRAW’ and landed on a branch. Mr Bumble who was watching from the terrace, clapped and cheered. Craw-Craw fluffed out his feathers and pretended to be looking for something under his wing. ‘It’s not only human beings and dogs who can be embarrassed’, thought Mr Bumble.
Craw-Craw’s confidence grew daily. Crackle often came down from the cedar tree and kept him company but she would fly up onto a branch straight away if anyone came into the garden, including Bridge. It was a Saturday morning just before Christmas when Craw-Craw left the garden for the first time. He was with Crackle and from the dining room window, Mr Bumble watched them fly over the wall together. Mr Bumble knew this would happen one day. He was quite ready for it though still a little anxious, so he went outside to see if they came back.
Craw-Craw was elated by his first longish flight, but he still couldn’t fly with anything like the ease and grace of his sister. And he tired quickly so they landed in the next door garden. I can only imagine that Crackle was so busy watching Craw-Craw that she was not properly on her guard because the next moment a large ginger cat sprang out from under a bush and grabbed her by the wing. Crackle, Crankle, Crum and Crock had been warned time and time again by Mr and Mrs Crow: ‘Always beware! Always be on your guard.’ they said. She had often thought about what it would be like to be caught by a cat: she imagined she would struggle violently and maybe escape, but now it had happened and what did she do but freeze. She felt the pain in her wing where the cat was holding her; she could see this enormous eye within a whisker of hers; she could see the sinister slit of the pupil glaring at her; she couldn’t move or even breathe. Her body was rigid.
Craw-Craw however had never met a cat. He only knew dogs and chickens and he had found that he could get on with the one and master the other. He also knew that dogs didn’t like being pecked on the nose. He had tried pecking Bridge’s nose in ever such a friendly way when Bridge wouldn’t take any notice of him, and she had curled her upper lip in anger. So Craw-Craw went right up to this strange animal that was holding his sister and gave it a very hard peck on the nose. Now only those who have been pecked by a crow will understand what a fearsome peck they have. A crow’s beak is designed to make holes in dead creatures and rip flesh apart but it is no less effective on live creatures. The cat closed its eyes and opened its mouth. Crackle came to life and with a desperate ‘CRAW’, sprang into the air. What she said must have been understood by Craw-Craw because, with a confident CRAW CRAW, he too took to the air and they both flew back over the garden wall to Mr Bumble’s where he was waiting for them. He had heard their calls and when he saw Crackle letting one wing hang down, he knew they had been in trouble . Crackle stayed a long time before she flew back to the cedar tree.
Chapter 4
Crackle was conscious that she owed her life to Craw-Craw. She understood that he was not afraid and that he was foolhardy because he knew so little of the real world. She was dimly aware that by living a sheltered life strutting about this garden, he had missed so much. She and her brothers and sisters spent the day playing by the river, swooping low over the water, chasing each other round the school playing fields competing for the family pecking order, feeding off dead creatures in the roads, playing ‘chicken’ by springing away just in time to avoid those horrible motor cars, and as night fell, finding a place to perch in the top branches of the cedar tree where they could watch the whole of the Barnes peninsula lighting up below them. Meanwhile her poor little brother was growing up in this small space, with a couple of humans, a dog and some silly chickens that couldn’t even fly. What a life! But from now on, instead of laughing at him, perhaps she could help him.
A few nights later, when it was time for bed Mr Bumble went into the garden and called for Craw-Craw, but the answer he knew so well came from the cedar tree two gardens away at No 49 . On a branch, silhouetted against the setting sun he could see two familiar shapes. He was content.
Craw-Craw still came to visit occasionally, usually when Mr Bumble and Mr Mumble were sitting by the pond having their evening drink. As he marched across the lawn towards them with his familiar rolling gait and settled on the bench or sipped water, Crackle would watch from the oak tree, the chickens would scatter, God was in His Heaven and all seemed well in the world.
© David Walser 2009