Comfort reading: The Barley Bird: Notes on the Suffolk Nightingale by Richard Mabey | Richard Mabey
Comfort readingRichard Mabey This article is more than 10 years oldComfort reading: The Barley Bird: Notes on the Suffolk Nightingale by Richard Mabey
This article is more than 10 years oldSo vividly written you can almost hear the song of these rare birds, it provides similar solaceSeveral years ago, on an Easter holiday in Suffolk, I got up at 4.30am, pulled the children out of their beds and we drove together to Minsmere Reserve. This apparently madcap behaviour was because we had an early morning date with a nightingale and with RSPB guys who knew where to take us. When, in the pre-dawn dark and April cold, the nightingale started to sing, we were elated beyond measure – and felt a huge, unearned sense of achievement (and not just because of our early rise). It was almost as if we had produced the song ourselves.
The Barley Bird – Suffolk nickname for the nightingale – by Richard Mabey, is partly based on his longer book Whistling in the Dark and is the best of comfort reads not least because it describes the nightingale's song so well that it is the next best thing to hearing it yourself. The book has been produced by a small, choice East Anglian publisher: Full Circle. It is a slender hardback and can be read in a sitting – a single helping of comfort. I love the feel of the book, which is illustrated by Derrick Greaves, its bright green cover suggestive of spring, with spikily elegant drawings of birds and barley and oak leaves that separate sections (John Clare observed that nightingales always include oak leaves in their nests). Its end papers are musical lines.
I envy Mabey his ability to translate what he sees and hears with such freshness, precision and lyricism. I feel I am standing beside him listening and seeing:
"There is a lull in the singing, a huge emphatic silence that is part of the performance. It is about 10 o'clock and the moon is almost at its height. By Suffolk standards, I am on top of the world. Below me, Arger Fen arches like a whale-back across the southern horizon. Everywhere, dead elm stumps rear in silhouette amongst the scrub. The light is extraordinary – luminous, dusty, giving every pale surface the lustre of mother-of-pearl. Mounds of cow parsley and scythed grass glow in the moonbeams like suspended balls of mist. By the side of the lane I catch the scents of broom and bluebells, a blend of coconut and honey, the exotic and the homely, that has something of the ripened quality of the song itself."
The book is a nightingale education, too, detailing the ways the song has been appropriated – by Coleridge, Keats and Clare and by medieval writers. Its song has been heard as melancholy, cheerful, lust-inducing. Yet Mabey sides with John Clare in wishing not to be the nightingale's interpreter but to respect its otherness. Clare did not think much of Keats as bird-watcher – and probably wasn't too keen on Ode to a Nightingale. Mabey, on the other hand, gives us a penetrating reading of Keats's poem.
And I adore the account of 1920s cellist Beatrice Harrison who persuaded Lord Reith to let her broadcast a cello recital from her Surrey garden where local nightingales could usually be relied upon to join in whenever she started to play. When the appointed day came, Sod's law appeared to be operating:
"Beatrice tried playing 'Danny Boy"' , parts of the Elgar concerto and snatches of Dvorak, all to no avail. Donkeys brayed, engineers tripped over in the dark, rabbits gnawed the vital cable, but no nightingale sang."
Then, at the 11th hour, the nightingales relented – the broadcast was a sensation. Beatrice got thousands of thank you letters from listeners because hearing the song, even on the wireless, had a touch of ecstasy about it. Mabey gets to the heart of what underlies this ecstasy in his last paragraph – he makes you understand why the song is such a message of solace:
"Beauty is always mysterious, beyond analysis. But one aspect of it is universally appreciated. It is the quality I would describe as grace, the constant re-enactment of the vitality and elegance of life under pressure. Whatever other cultural meanings it may have acquired, at heart the nightingale's song is a small hymn to survival."
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