Flying Words

I grew up obsessed by wild birds. They delighted and excited me. I loved being amongst them and learning to identify them. I wanted to see new ones but I also enjoyed the familiar species. When I was seven, birds became part of my life, they still are and I can't imagine a time when I wouldn't notice them or they wouldn't move me.

The experience of looking at birds through my childhood shaped the way I learnt about time, the past, the present and the future. The beginnings of a historical consciousness came to me through my bird-loving. Wanting to know more about the birds I saw took me back into the past.

I started thinking about this as a child because there seemed to be so little of the past attached to birds and other wild things. I wondered why birds existed for me so assertively in the present tense. I would describe any moment when I coincided with a bird as a lucky one. There were no guarantees with bird-watching – you might not see anything, the birds were free to come and go. When you did see something, the good fortune of the moment and the vivid presence of the bird in front of you banished any thought about how it had got there or where it might be tomorrow. Sight is perhaps the least historical of our senses. Wonder doesn't have a past or invite us to give a history to what we wonder at.

An orange-tip butterfly arrived in front of me on the first hot day of spring in the garden. The dazzling splash of orange on its forewing contrasted violently with the white and silver-grey flecking to the rear. The colour was so bright, I couldn't quite believe it. That occurred to me at the time, otherwise I didn't think about anything apart from the happy accident of seeing the butterfly. I saw swifts ricocheting around the walls of a cathedral and scootering so close to the ground in their delirium that surely they would crash. For a few seconds, I saw a badger floodlit by car headlights barrelling across a road. Time stopped in the drama of the encounters. Our paths crossed but then the badger disappeared and the swifts dashed higher and away. The moments receded but were kept out of time. I didn't think about the grass tunnel the badger had run along just before I saw it or where the swifts had eaten that morning.

As I grew older, meeting animals like this wasn't enough for me because I had started falling for them and wanted to know more about them. At first I loved cheetahs and lions, but they were only in zoos and books. I needed to get closer to wild things so I started looking at the birds in my garden; they were ordinary but also totally themselves and I loved their freedom. Birds taught me how all creatures had lives that we could only share fleetingly but which stretched behind, through and beyond us.

Before birds got me I struggled, as children will, with the shadows that fell over me where I lived in the present tense. When I was about three I tried to catch at these shadows: what did old mean? I realized that not everyone was the same age; I worked out that my grandmother was older than my parents; this meant she had been alive for longer. Then my sister arrived in my parents' bedroom next door to mine. She was new and seemed slippery; the doctor put her into one of my father's tweedy green socks and it warmed her into life. She was going to be younger than me for ever. I would somehow already have lived her life by the time she did, just as my parents had already lived mine. They would always have more past than me; I would always have more past than she. It was only when you stopped having a present that others caught up.

But where was the past beyond our house...