Four years after our son finished college, I’m back on the daily commute to take my daughter there. There is no morning bus and the afternoon one drops her at a village seven miles from ours. We drive up the high road over the downs and along narrow lanes filled with baffled pheasants, newly released from their pens. There are shots and gunpowder puffs from a line of guns shooting partridge.
As we pass through an ancient hamlet, the sudden, burned-wet-straw smell reminiscent of lightning-struck thatch makes me slow down and look. But there is no smoke. There was a fierce little storm last night, and a pre-fever, lucid clarity about the blue sky suggests more to come. Above the creamy, chalk-ploughed fields, the first “weather-breeders” are coming in: loose, ragged-edged scraps of white cloud.
Just past the long-established stopping place of the Romany family on the wood’s edge, the smoking, fizzing rockets of rosebay willowherb animate in the breeze. Snaking like spent comets, their last flowers and curled-back seedpods retain a faded lick of purple fireweed, their other name, from a propensity to colonise burnt ground, and look like they are doing it again. The scent from the camp’s extinguished fire completes the trick.
Then, in the air that just left this place, a bird drops, seemingly stricken from the sky, ragged as a shot jackdaw. Before it meets the car bonnet, it reforms into a small, dark, scythe-winged hunter, and flashes a white throat, black‑streaked underbelly and the orange breeks and yellow legs of a classic sartorial that wouldn’t look out of place down Marlborough High Street.
It jinks away with the butterflied blue gleam of swallow wings clutched in lethal gold talons. My daughter and I turn to each other open-mouthed, trying to process and identify what we have just seen; sickle wings mirroring those of the swallow’s it puppeted away, stealing a smoking patch of sky with it. A hobby at close, dramatic quarters; a barn‑raised swallow that will only make its way back to Africa in the body of another.
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