The Call of the Bittern?! (2)

I have to write this at last because I have referred to it in tonight's post. One funny thing about blogs: you can't rearrange the date of them. This belongs after The Call of the Bittern?! (1) in February, and I wish I could put it back there.

It's such a long story. First you have to know about my friend Millie who topped herself, and about her lovely sons who went wild; for this you have to read what my other friend, Cliff, wrote at:

http://www.themightyorgan.com/view_wootton2.html.

Matt was her son who used to help me in the garden.

When he was tiny he was a total little darling, with huge brown eyes; always asking questions about nature.

His little voice never stopped. "Polly?" this. "Polly?" that, and always about wildlife: insects, plants, stones, animals.

He always had a toad or a snake in his pocket. He knew everything there was to know about foxes, badgers, deer, everything. He reminded me of Dickon in The Secret Garden but he was more innocent.

When he was about 17 he said things like, "I think buzzards are getting bigger these days. Everyone I talk to about buzzards agrees with me that buzzards are getting bigger."

This was the nature of his conversation.

He never had a mobile, or a watch, or an ipod or any of it. Perhaps some stolen bits of motorbike, stolen bike, stolen bits to make his bender -- any of that. But it almost made me weep to think of him wanting to engage today's kind of people in conversations about buzzards. Then, of course, everything made me weep. Two motherless boys.

Anyway, Mattie took to living in the woods in a bender that he had actually made very nice, what with its wood-burning stove and even a stained glass window (he told me; I never saw it. I just didn't want to intrude). I cared about those boys, but I wasn't going to push myself into being a kind of mother substitute for them.

Well, about two years went past and for some reason he was actually at my kitchen table with me, quite early one cold misty morning back in February, each of us with a big mug of tea. I think he had been helping on the milk tanker. It was nice, really nice to have him there; it was as if he'd burned out a lot of his anger and was becoming a man -- though still a very young man. I guess he's about 19. I will ask him if I ever see him again.

There is a small pond near my place. It never has anything come near it but a rare heron and some waterhens. We were just sitting looking at our mugs of tea when suddenly we heard this booming noise.

And what I am trying to get across here is how our eyes looked up and met and did we even say it? It was the unmistakeable call of a Bittern. Now, if we had both said it then surely we would have dashed out and looked for it? I think we didn't say it, but we both knew it, and I think it was the biggest moment in my life to know that a boy who had never seen or heard a Bittern knew what that sound was (I mean, do they ever come to Wiltshire? I thought that Bitterns were only to be found in the Norfolk Broads -- a place I have never been to).

Why? Because it restores my faith to learn that even in this disgusting society we live in, there can be a boy like that.

And I later learned that, indeed, there have been Great Bitterns at the Cotswold Water Park, but that is ten miles away.

http://www.birdforum.net/opus/Cotswold_Water_Park?bird_birdforum_o__session=d4b78bb52e8ea97afad7a1f581d02450

And you can hear its call if you click its links here, or on the RSPB site which has an alphabetical list of birds:

http://www.rspb.org.uk/wildlife/birdguide/name/b/bittern/index.asp

Polly Goes to London Again

. . . and sees no more than perhaps 50 animals in the fields between Swindon and London, largely only one lovely mixed herd just to the east of Cholsey.

Apart from some crows in a stubble field, that is all the life I saw in, say, 80 miles of farmland. It is so sad that we are now looking out on agricultural deserts everywhere. There are all sorts of campaigns to try to help British farming. I myself have never been that much into any farming that isn't organic, but now it's getting so bad that I reckon we ought to help everyone. You can read all about this in Country Living magazine -- the magazine for countrified yummy mummies everywhere. I keep meaning to cancel my order for it as I don't think I can stand one more inch of Kath Kidson, but then they come up with a good page like this in the current issue:
http://www.countryliving.co.uk/index.php/v1/No_cows_=_no_countryside

There might be some good news soon though:
http://www.southdownscampaign.org.uk/main.htm. PLEASE sign the petition. It takes half a minute.

Anyway, I got to London and was making my way through the trendy East End and despairing again. I remember Spitalfields Market when it was real and decrepit and endlessly exciting. Now think 'Covent Garden', i.e., finished. Yuppified. Done for. Done up. Tourist trap. Raking in the millions for the council, and so on. To be avoided at all costs.

'Can't anyone leave anything alone?' I thought.

Add to this the piles of conspicuous waste rubbish, unsorted and ready for landfill that I saw on every corner, in the very part of London that is full of young people and who ought to be the most ecologically concerned. I then had a vision of what seemed to me the only way to live: as the Plains Indians used to -- very close to the grass; in their tepees; close to their babies, their food; using the tribe as their only unit of life and safety; leaving no footprint on the earth. I told this to a friend who reminded me that that's exactly how Mattie is living (see The Call of the Bittern?! (2)) and how nice is that! But oh there are so few doing it. Only the convoy types and the clever people who can actually live communally or get into alternative technology. But today I never got closer to giving up everything to do it myself.

But then, later, oh how easy it was to get some cash from the hole in the wall. Seconds it took. What fun it was to clamp my Oyster card onto the Tube barrier, to jump onto that fast train and speed past the lights of the Home Counties, eating the best sarnie in the world and reading my best book of the year. Hey, I wish someone would actually read this blog and ask me what that book might be.