The cooing of wood pigeons in autumn reminds our columnist of his grandmother and her sisters, one of which was in a secret service in the Second World War.
My grandmother and her sisters were born before the First World War, with a brother who became an army padre. I never knew him: he was killed in the D-Day landings. Like half the men born before the war, he was called Walter. The girls were known as Min, Joan and Pooh. Min — Helen — was my grandmother and for three or four years, while my parents went through their divorce, my big sister and I lived happily with her in a cottage in the New Forest. Because I was only two or three, and because Granny was of an imperial generation, it left me with an old-fashioned feeling for things. ‘We could never have loved the Earth so well if we had had no childhood in it,’ George Eliot wrote in The Mill on the Floss.
Granny was widowed young. Aunt Joan was the widow of an old admiral, who had married her to be his carer, and had no children. Pooh was what used to be called a Maiden Aunt. She belonged to the generation of Surplus Women who never married because there weren’t enough men to go round after Ypres and Loos. There were faint rumours — all the fainter for being murmured above the head of a small child — of a Cambridge master of college, and of love in the war in Borneo.
The sisters lived close to each other in the New Forest. Granny and Joan had Morris Travellers and Pooh, the youngest, drove a Mini. They spent a lot of time dropping in on one another, calling ‘Cuckoo!’ when they entered a hallway, baking fruit cakes and punctuating their chats by falling about with helpless laughter. Pooh was sharp and witty. She had spent the war in secret service, in some capacity.
Ahead of the Japanese invasion of Borneo, I was told, she had memorised all the top-secret embassy codes to prevent them falling into enemy hands. She spoke fluent pidgin, which was a source of constant joy and amusement, and she decorated her ancient Hampshire cottage with sparse elegance, with rattan and matting, which had a particular, comfortable, grassy smell. I sometimes encounter it today and it takes me back, like Proust’s tea biscuit.
So, too, does the sound of wood pigeons, fluting in the trees. When Eliot goes on to talk about ‘the mother tongue of our imagination, the language that is laden with all the subtle inextricable associations the fleeting hours of our childhood left behind them’, she mentions ‘these well-remembered bird-notes’.
It’s at this time of year in particular that fledgling wood pigeons try out their voices, in preparation for finding a mate in the spring. Unlike the relatively monotonous three-part treble of the collared dove, which Peter Cowdrey, the composer, ornithologist and founder of Planet Birdsong, hears as ‘I love you, I love you’, wood pigeon song consists of five beats, or coos, with the emphasis on the third beat, then a pause and two more in quick time.
Mr Cowdrey hears it as: ‘I love you, I do.’ Others apparently hear: ‘My toe bleeds, Betty’, ‘A proud Wood-pig-eon’ or even ‘Take two cows, Susan’. Aunt Pooh, however, must have had an ear for pigeon as acute as her ear for pidgin, and she heard something else. Now, when the pigeons murmur in the woods beyond the garden, I hear what Aunt Pooh invited me to hear: ‘You did say you would.’ Of course. Some things of childhood become clearer as you grow older. Now, the wistfulness of a maiden aunt, long dead, plays for me sweetly through the trees, tuned to some gentle echo of regret, and faint reproach.
Jason Goodwin is a novelist, writer and historian
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