Little Bird

I found Little Bird lying on a gritty, sunstruck pavement in the port of Patras one sweltering morning in June. I had been sent to that city by the British Council in Athens with a large contingent of English examiners, to conduct the interview component of the Cambridge Certificate examinations in English. We were put up in a luxury hotel for a change, the Astir Palace, whose cool, cavernous bedrooms and equally generous bathrooms contrasted with the grimy streets and roofless, derelict buildings of the neighbouring port, where homeless foreigners slept on the ground at night behind vestigial walls. Among them were almost certainly illegal immigrants, waiting to be smuggled onto ships bound for Italy and other western European destinations.

Little Bird was lying outside a booking office for ferries, a nestling without a nest. Muddy patches around the permanent awning above suggested there may have been swallows' nests which had presumably been forcibly removed, but Little Bird looked too large to be a baby swallow. Its eyes were still closed and it had no feathers, just bare purplish-pink skin covering a bulbous body. It was so helpless that I instinctively snatched it up off the pavement before it could come to harm, and then foolishly entered the small booking office, holding Little Bird incongruously in my hands, hoping, I think, that they might at least be able to enlighten me as to what species it was.

Greeted with a mixture of derision and suspicion, I beat a hasty retreat to my hotel room, where I made a nest for Little Bird in one of the Astir Palace's luxurious towels before going off to work my examining shift. One of the women in the team, Mary, was an old hand at looking after birds, and advised me to get some eye-droppers from the chemist, and give my foundling water, a little milk and honey, and a few drops of raw egg-yolk.

On returning to my room, I was astonished to hear Little Bird respond to my presence the moment I entered, with the shrill, piping whistle that nestlings of some species make at their parents' approach. Little Bird sensed me and already recognised me, despite the considerable distance between the door and its improvised nest. The same response every time I entered the room seemed to confirm this.

Little Bird appeared to be holding its own for the few remaining days in Patras, and then we left for Athens by charter-coach, stopping off to conduct one examining session at Kiato on the Gulf of Corinth.

I held Little Bird in my hands, swaddled in a cloth, all the way to Kiato, and then took it into the exam room with me, afraid to leave it unattended in case a mishap should befall it. In the middle of the interview, Little Bird let fly with a noisy spurt of liquid excrement on a small table in full view of the two candidates, who had been unaware of its presence until that moment. Their eyes widened in disbelief, but I coolly continued the interview, and boarded the bus to Athens after the session to titters and smiles from my colleagues, who had by then heard the tale from my co-examiner.

Back in Athens, I lined a shoe-box for Little Bird. When my flatmate arrived home from work, he was not amused by the addition to the household. Little Bird's tenacity amazed me, and I was touched by the welcome I received every time I entered the apartment. As in Patras, there were many metres between the entrance and Little Bird's box on a table by the window, but instinctively the occupant sensed my presence, although it did not respond to my flatmate's entry with the customary greetings reserved for me.

In a matter of a few days Little Bird was growing and sprouting pin-feathers. Its eyes had opened, too. It would move about vigorously before expelling waste, trying to find the edge of the nest so as not to soil its surroundings, and make drowsy, cheeping sounds when it had been fed and was warm and content. I spent a lot of time cuddling it, holding it to my chest or under my chin so that it could share my body-warmth. My flatmate was half-amused, half-bemused by the situation, but had come to accept Little Bird's tenancy.

One morning, after I had fed Little Bird some egg-yolk, as usual it had sticky residue all around its beak and on its chest. Unthinkingly, instead of using a moistened cloth to wipe it clean, I turned on the cold-water tap in the kitchen just a trickle, and let the water run onto Little Bird's head and beak.

The reaction was instantaneous. In a matter of seconds, its eyes closed, Little Bird made a swallowing movement and became still, as if asleep. Then its head sank to one side. The shock of the cold water must have killed it.

I stood there, holding the warm, bulbous body, where feathers had begun to unfurl like fern-fronds, although it was still not clear what species it was. My carelessness had cost Little Bird's life. The helpless creature in my hands had trusted me, its heart had beaten faster in my presence in a way that in a human we would probably call love, and I had proved utterly unworthy of that trust and love.

I wept so much that my flatmate took pity on me and suggested that I take Little Bird to the tiny Byzantine churchyard of Aghion Panton (All Saints), a few streets away. Dwarfed and overshadowed as it was by high-rise concrete apartment blocks, the small brown and terracotta cross-in-square building lingered as an anachronism, guarding in its precinct an ancient spring whose waters continued to well from the ground. I wrapped the little body and took it to the church, where I placed it in a niche in the exterior masonry, but then, fearing that someone might discover and discard it, I kept walking until I had ascended the slope of Likavittos, the hillside overlooking Athens where I had planned to release Little Bird if it survived to a stage where it could fend for itself.

I placed Little Bird's body on the spreading bough of a pine tree, said a prayer for its tiny, unfledged soul, and returned to the empty, silent apartment.

Later that day, at an examining session in central Athens, various examiners asked half-jokingly about Little Bird, and were dismayed at the sudden tears in my eyes. Some, including Mary, who had advised me in Patras, opined that it was usually futile to try to raise an orphaned nestling, yet I believed I had come very close to succeeding. But for my momentary lapse of mindfulness, Little Bird might well have survived, and I might have discovered his or her identity.


I can still clearly picture the ungainly body which would one day miraculously transform into that of a creature designed for flight, and, in the acoustic chamber of auditory memory, hear the eager, piping whistle that greeted me, for the brief duration of Little Bird's life, on my return home.