Jesus among the pigeons

When he was a boy, Freddy collected birds. Something about the way they travelled through the skies, their wings unclipped and free, offered solace within his own small, trapped world. He could be a Jesus among the pigeons, or the old lady in Mary Poppins who fed pigeons on a foggy London Street. 

He could feed birds, keep them safe. He never considered his decision to confine his birds, curtailed their natural impulses, any more than he considered his own servitude a problem. It just was. And when I say servitude, Freddy was not alone in the style of life bequeathed to him at birth. 

The son of a postman who spent everyday cycling through suburban streets, a sack full of correspondence between one person to another, which he delivered devotedly at each door. 

Freddy’s father was a loyal servant of her Majesty Elizabeth, the Queen of England, even as his world, his newspaper rounds through Newport and Williamtown on the other side of the Yarra River from where a better class of people lived, was nothing like hers. 

Freddy’s mother stayed at home. She tended to their small workman’s cottage, kept it tidy and tried her best to turn it into the castle of her childhood dreams before Freddy came along and life became more haphazard, money harder to find and the everyday struggles to find the best quality but cheapest cuts of meat to put on her table required she take in other people’s garments in need of resurrection, hemming, or repair. All to offset the family’s limited income.

From earliest days, Freddy dreamed of freedom. As soon as he was old enough to take off on his bicycle, and old enough to travel the streets without parental supervision, he was gone. At age ten he began paper rounds offering a few coins in return for early rising like the birds. 

Once he had money of his own, Freddy took to saving. When the world woke up on Saturday mornings, later than usual, after his regular paper round, he rode to the Victoria Market close by the hospital where he was born and visited the live animal market where farmers sold sheep, goats, and egg laying hens. 

Freddy loved the bantams. Tiny red feathered creatures with claws that reminded him of the tendrils on an ancient vine. Freddy carried his bantam in a shoe box strapped to the back of his bike with holes punched in the lid for air. 

The cost of one bantam ate a whole week’s pay, but Freddy did not mind. If he spent his money there was nothing left for his mother to demand by way of board. Her motherhood had stopped with Freddy. Unable to bear more children, she became a stickler for order at home. 

It was as much as Freddy could do to persuade her to let him take up a small corner of the yard against the grey paling fence where he built his first cage. With wire he found at the local tip and nails stolen from his father’s workshop, he fashioned an aviary. 

His father at least trusted Freddy with his tools and was pleased to see his son showing signs of following in Jesus’s footsteps. He might after all become a carpenter and not live the more impoverished life of a postman.

Freddy’s bantam was lonely and although Freddy longed for eggs so he could demonstrate the productivity of his venture, his bird was unyielding. For weeks he saved enough to re-visit the market and buy his bantam a mate. Two birds would have to be better than one. 

He had not bargained on any animosity or cock fighting between his birds given the man at the market promised they were hens and therefore unlikely to squabble. They did not though they clucked about conditions and Freddy imagined they were not happy with the size of their coop. 

He resolved to make it bigger and more secluded from the elements. He found tin sheeting at the tip and unused wood palings from a building site to build up walls on one side and a roof. For the rest, the ever-available wire meshing let in light and air and sun. 

His birds were happier. And Freddy was delighted knowing his birds were contented for all their clucking and ongoing refusals to yield eggs. In time, he thought. In time.

One day Freddy returned home from school to the sight of the red fire engine parked in his street bang smack in front of his house. A thick black hose snaked up the side path beyond the front door and out to the back yard. A plu  me of smoke drifted over the skyline. The air was acrid.

No one could say how it happened. The weather had warmed and the sun more intense over that final summer. Someone must have tossed an unfinished cigarette into the grass behind his house in a lot that had not been mowed for some time, dried out with the heat.

Freddy’s birds were no more, and Freddy’s heart broke apart, the way young hearts are prone to break when their best efforts are destroyed.

Freddy stopped collecting birds thereafter. And his life narrowed to one in which he dared not venture too widely. His life became even more circumscribed than before.

Until the hormones that coursed through his body as a twelve-year-old compelled him to try again. And that’s a whole other story.

I shall never be a fiction writer. I am too anchored in my memories as artefacts of my life, and even as the story of Freddy has its roots in my memory of one of my brothers who collected birds as a boy until the cage burned down, the backdrop to Freddy’s life is fictional and leaves me sensing its total implausibly.

As usual I have written more to this story which has slipped from view.

When our first-born daughter was ten years old, friends asked her to take care of their two African love birds which their daughters kept in a cage in their upstairs bedroom in a terrace in Carlton.

While they went on a holiday to Coffs Harbour. My daughter was delighted to share her room with these birds for all their incessant twittering and mess making. She loved to watch them and imagine they were more humanoid than bird and conducted long conversations after school. 

At night she threw a heavy cloth over the cage to encourage sleep and silence. A cloth so effective it was as if someone had switched off the birds in a movie. 

One Saturday morning my husband and I helped our daughter take the cage into our back garden for the purpose of cleaning it. I cannot remember who, parent or child, made the mistake of pulling out the base while the birds sat cosy on their perch above. Which one of us failed to recognise without a base the birds were free to dive low and beyond the confines of their cage.

All day long we left the cage cleaned and filled with fresh water and seed in the hope they might return. They never did. My husband added to my sadness by telling me, though not our daughter, such birds had little chance of survival out in the world ill equipped for a life of freedom. While our daughter comforted herself in the belief they were free at last.

Our friends were sanguine and although we promised to replace the birds with two others identical, the older of our friends’ daughters had decided on their return she was done with birds.

Too messy, too much of responsibility and not much fun after all. 

Like Freddy she gave up on the birds until adolescence when she like the birds would begin to flex her wings to fly free.

On trust

My mother trusted me, or so she even convinced herself, though why she should, I cannot understand. There was little evidence for my trustworthiness. 
 
I was the child who stole sweets from the shop my parents once owned in Healesville, crept inside the store attached to where we lived. A single room, with glass fronted cabinets, and shelves loaded with boxes of cereal, biscuits and tins of beans, spam, and spaghetti and all the stuff that was quick and easy to consume. 
 
There was a tall fridge in one corner filled with soft drink and milk and shelves below the counters stocking loose stuff like sugar and flour. Cleaning agents, soap powder, cakes of body soap and deodorant.  
 
When my younger sister and I were home alone, I led her astray while the others had gone to Mass. 
 
In the shop we filled our pockets with chocolate coated liquorice bullets, a handful of long-lasting aniseed balls, red, green, and yellow snakes one for each finger and a fistful of Smarties, all stuffed into our pockets. Then skulked to our bedroom and gorged ourselves till we heard the family car pull up in the driveway.  
 
The sound of the hand brake ripped into position, and we threw the leftovers out the window. A stupid move because one of my brothers found them there and dobbed on us. The first of my episodes of stealing. 
 
On the second, a few years later when I must have been ten, my mother, refused to believe I was the child whom the milk bar man reported stealing lollies from his counter. More upmarket sweets, this time: chocolate bars and flakes, Violet Crumbles and entire blocks of Cadbury chocolate. These I scoffed alone while walking the nearby streets of Camberwell.
 
Still my mother trusted me, even when she had every reason not to. I was her namesake and something in the name led her to believe I was like her, good and holy, determined only ever to do the right thing.
 
Not so for me, though I could never tell her as much and given she did not want to know, it was easy for me to sneak out the back door at night a decade later after I had fallen in love with my first ever proper boyfriend. 
 
Seven years older than me, he rented an apartment in Highett a couple of kilometres from where we then lived, and I snuck out at twilight before total darkness had descended. 
 
My mother believed I was studying after I said ‘Goodnight. I’m off to my books.’ She never checked on us, my sister and me, before taking herself to bed. Or so I wanted to believe. 
 
My father does not feature in this story. He was there in the background but for once I did not pay him any heed, and most of the night he was sleeping. 
 
I made my way through the back streets of Cheltenham past the school, church, and factories onto the Nepean highway where my boyfriend lived. I spent the night in his arms. Or so I like to say, but you cannot trust me either. 
 
I imagine we slept in the same bed after the usual peremptory sex, but I lacked experience, and he lacked the finesse of other men I came to know later over the years. But it was fun to behave in ways my mother despised. Breaking the laws of chastity until marriage, not letting her in on my secret.
 
As soon as early light crept into the sky, I pecked my sleeping boyfriend on the cheek and snuck through his front door back onto the gently glowing street. There were hardly any cars to accompany me on my long walk home. 
 
Slipping beyond the back door at my home a door we never locked, I tiptoed up the hallway to my bedroom. Terrified that my mother, usually the first up, might suddenly appear. But she did not. Into my bedroom where my younger sister slept. I could trust her then to keep my secret. She opened her eyes and raised herself briefly to take one look at me then slipped back under her blankets for more sleep. I dragged on my nightie and crawled under the blankets. 
 
My mother once told us the story of how during the Second World War when Nazis came to her parent’s home to check on the presence of able bodied men, such as her then young husband and brother, whom they wanted to enlist into their army, the two men hid in the roof cavity while the soldiers went from room to room feeling the sheets on beds to check whether they had been occupied recently.
 
My mother could have checked my sheets. They were ice cold when she snuck her head around our door to say good morning. 
 
‘Time to get up,’ she said. ‘I hope you slept well.’ 
 
Something in the tone of her voice, or in my own knowledge of my night away left me wondering, did my mother know I had spent the entire night away with a man? 
 
She never let on, and I never filled her in on my secret. To me ample proof, she could not trust me.