Read Online Gods of the Morning by John Lister-Kaye - Free Book Online

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    Before I depart the colourful world of rooks (for now – their story is far from over), I have one more tale to tell. In the 1950s, when I was twelve years old and at a Somerset boarding school, I rescued a fledgling rook that had been storm-gusted from the nest before it could fly. I don’t think it was badly hurt, but it sat huddled in the long grass at the foot of a large elm, crying wheezily to its parents high above who probably hadn’t noticed one of their brood missing.
    I was thrilled. By the age of twelve I had raised (not always successfully) many orphans: squirrels, rabbits, hedgehogs, a whole brood of greenfinches after their mother was snatched by a sparrowhawk, even a fox cub. I caught the genderless rooklet in my hands and carried it home rejoicing. I gave it a suitably sexless name – Squawky. For the rest of that summer term, my last at the school, I was the envy of many boys, who vainly searched the drive avenue of elms for Squawkys of their own.
    Squawky never flew and I never knew why. There wasnothing broken, both wings flapped vigorously, and he knew enough about flight to use them for extended flapping lurches from perch to shoulder or head or other convenient landing. Try as I might, I never got him to do more than cross a room. Outside I thrust him up into the air in the hope of teaching him the joy of rapturous flight. He flapped raggedly to the ground twenty yards away where he landed entirely normally, then strutted about looking indignant. I took him back to the avenue to show him the wavering in-and-out flights of his own kind and to listen to their raucous chorale. He would sit on my forearm, head tilting quizzically at the wild birds high above, but with no hint of any inclination to join them. After many fruitless attempts I gave up.
    He became my constant companion. During lessons he would sit outside the classroom on a windowsill peering in and occasionally tapping on the glass to attract my attention. Other boys either loved Squawky and followed me enviously about, begging me to let them ‘have a go’, by which they meant let him sit on their shoulder for a while, or they jealously resented the attention I garnered and sniped at me with snide remarks like ‘Serves you right if he craps on your essay.’ Even the headmaster revealed tolerant sufferance in his mild but humourless sarcasm, ‘Lister-Kaye seems to know nothing about arithmetic but everything about crows.’
    At the end of term, and to my utter desolation, on the illogical pretext that because I was moving on to another boarding school I couldn’t look after a pet rook, I was not allowed to take Squawky home. A friendly domestic ladycalled Ruby, who worked in the school kitchens and who for many weeks had offered a clandestine supply of left-over scraps for Squawky, came to my rescue. A gem she truly was. She took pity on me or the rook, or both, and offered to have him. Her farm labourer husband agreed to build an aviary onto their cottage in the village nearby. With a heavy but grateful heart, I delivered the rook into it on my last day.
    Life moves on. I have to confess that I never gave Squawky much thought again until one day twenty-two years later I happened to be driving past that Somerset village (the prep school had long since closed) and turned down its only street, trying to remember where precisely Squawky had been housed. I recognised the cottage straight away, unmissable for the spacious wire-netting aviary attached to its gable end. I parked the car and walked up the garden path. To my utter astonishment, I was met by rasping cries from a ragged-looking and extremely ancient rook with an almost bald head. It was Squawky.
    He was certainly not beautiful. His naturally featherless cheeks had developed the leathery baldness of a welding glove, a mark of age all rooks over three produce as an adaptive response to habitually piercing the damp soil