I wake early on these bright summer mornings. And now that the birds in my garden have mostly fallen silent, only one is still serenading me at this hour: the aptly named song thrush. Its measured, deliberate repetitions – which this particular bird has provided without a break since the turn of the year – are unmistakable.
Whenever I hear a song thrush, I’m taken back in time. First, to my childhood, when the first sign of spring was when thrushes started singing from the roofs of our suburban housing estate as I walked home from school in the dim light of a February afternoon.
Then, still further, to another early childhood memory, and a story my grandmother used to tell me about her father, Edgar Snow. On summer evenings before the first world war, while he walked home from work, he would hear the sound of a bird. It seemed to be speaking directly to him. “Snowy, Snowy – pay the rent, pay the rent.”
It was only many years later, long after my grandmother had died, that I realised the identity of that songster. No other bird speaks to us quite so directly, nor so insistently.
And now, more than a century on, whenever I hear a song thrush I feel a special connection with the great-grandfather I never knew, through the clear, pure sound that greets me as I start each new day.
