HAUNTED BY BIRD SONG

By the hedge, I have left a gift for the birds, a wispy filigree ball woven from the long white threads of my hair. I’ve been collecting it for a while, daily freeing the strands from my hairbrush. In the early morning sun, it sparkles like a finely wrought silken sphere. I watch as a thrush studiously separates individual strands then takes flight, wisps of silver streaming behind like ribbons. A part of me will live within the heart of the hawthorn, woven together with moss and grasses, swaddling a clutch of pale blue eggs.

With face pressed into its thorny labyrinthine midst I try to sneak a peek inside this hidden world of shadow, where the wren scuttles and the robin trills. I inhale the earthy smell of shadowed places, damp and decay, fresh grass and new life. Through the skeletal lattice, flashes of sunlit green from the neighbouring field illuminates the dim interior like stained glass. At sunset the tracery of branches will glow translucent orange. A robin briefly alights on my shoulder, either out of curiosity or in search of a suitable nesting site within my long trailing plaits. A vision of myself depicted as a female version of Edward Lear’s old man with a beard, housing a whole menagerie of owls, wrens, larks, and hens comes to mind. For closer scrutiny I fetch an old pair of binoculars and lose myself in this subterranean world of hidden alleyways and vistas. Like an overgrown Alice, I gaze with longing into this wild world just out of reach. Alder, holly, honeysuckle, ivy, and bramble intertwine. A great tit busily hurries through the fretted branches, and I briefly wonder how many birds have made their homes here in this leafy high-rise.

Every summer the male members of my family battled to tame and control the wildness of the hedge. Ladders, sweating, swearing, cut cables, near electric shocks until the deed is done and it stands shorn, clipped, and apparently controlled like a newly shorn sheep – unsure, a bit naked and vulnerable. A beer or two is poured, thanks is given, a shower taken, and my folks are happy. Yet as the sun moves across the heavens, the planet turns and rain showers fall, the honeysuckle twines, the bramble weaves and new shoots stretch out from the carefully manicured and coiffed hedge; like hair springing free from a tightly twined plait eventually breaking free in abandon.

My wild untamed musical hedge squats like an overlarge leafy radiogram of the style my grandparents had in their lounge. There’s was dark highly polished wood with gleaming gold lettering. From the woven front grill Benny Goodman and his Big Band Tunes trumpeted. This one though plays birdsong from its cavernous depths and straddles the length of the garden, bookended by mature Norwegian maples.

I rise as the sky lightens and stand swathed in the fragrance from mum’s lilac tree, its star shaped pink blossoms pattern my dew damp feet. Audio recorder in hand I listen as my outsized verdurous radiogram slowly tunes in for the day. We start with a soloist, and the clear notes of the blackbird. Bit by chirruping bit the choir flutters into position, robin, wren, chaffinch, thrush, greenfinch, dunnock and goldfinch all add their voices. The last to come stumbling from bed to join the ensemble is the cushie-doo, forever late to the party. On walks with my dad as a kid, he would name the birds we saw using colloquial nicknames, peewee, willy wagtail, corbie, jaickie and mavie. Names he gifted me. At times I wondered where he acquired his knowledge yet sadly never asked. Perhaps the local shepherd he spent summers roaming the Galloway hills with. Maybe Uncle Jock the gamekeeper or his beloved grandfather and namesake, a tough stake net fisherman on the Solway coast. I shall never know. The collective song rises, pirouettes, and spirals across the air swelling with each new arrival. I listen for those who no longer are able and think of them borne onwards by a thousand dawn choruses.

When the performance is over, the hedge quietens, and we all go off in search of breakfast. I shake blossom from my hair as a kestrel hovers over the hedge, wings a mad flutter, eyes trained on the field below. A Collared dove, maybe old lazy bones from the chorus, laboriously climbs upwards as though toiling up a steep hill on a bicycle before freewheeling down the other side, calling out with silent w h e e e s! as it goes.

*

Faint strains of birdsong drift from under the closed door of what was once my sister’s room. The notes twirl around the framed portrait of dad hung in the stairwell, then lightly trickle over the patterned green wallpaper that Mr Jones the decorator hung and whose autograph remains inscribed above the kitchen door. Chirrups and whistles float down the beige patterned carpet stairs into the hall where I stand listening. For some time now I have been collecting the dawn chorus. The middle room, with its white and brown bedroom, suite once the height of eighties fashion, is my repository, every recording meticulously labelled and filed away.

From the dark recess of the wardrobe where serried ranks of dad’s carefully ironed shirts and mum’s elegant long evening dresses once hung, comes the melodic song of the thrush. The drawn-out fluty notes of a robin rise, fall, pause and quicken from shelves once piled high with pillars of precariously balanced shoeboxes, overflowing with monochrome family memories. The lively chatter of a wren fills the window cupboard where our LPs and 45s lived, an avian reminder of our teenage lip-syncing with the canary yellow hairbrush, in front of the round vanity mirror. Rather fittingly a shelf that once housed the poetic reflections on nature by John Clare and A. E. Housman is now brimming with the rich mellow baritone of a cloud of blackbirds. Undulating twitters of greenfinch, the squeak of dunnock woven through with the fluid warbles of goldfinch seep from the open drawer of the bedside cabinet. Punctuating all like a percussion section, is the steady rhythm of the collared doves which pulses from the cupboard where Monopoly, Frustration and Scrabble and recollections of family arguments over bad losers and cheating resided.

The ghostly fluttering’s and song from 125 dawn choruses, surge and vibrate as one from these dark enclosed spaces and I am haunted by the echoes of bird song.

Sheena Graham-George is an Orkney-based multi-media artist researcher who uses text, film, sound, photography and painting to explore the layering of memory, place, and presence within the landscape. She holds a MFA from Southern Illinois University and a PhD from Glasgow School of Art. She has been the recipient of many grants, bursaries and prizes including Creative Scotland, The British Association of Irish Studies, Scottish School of Arts & Humanities and was shortlisted for the John Muir Creative Freedom Prize