May 2020 at Lake 32

When Beatrice Harrison sat down to play the cello in her garden one spring in the early 1920s, she couldn’t have known what would unfold. A nightingale seemingly sang back to the sound of her cello, echoing the notes. When this was repeated night after night, Harrison knew that others should hear it and she persuaded the BBC to record this curious duet in May 1924. It was the first time the sound of wildlife had ever been broadcast in Britain.

The response from the public was so astounding that the experiment was repeated the next month and then every spring for the following 12 years.

This relationship with the natural world and its meaning for us, which Harrison’s nightingale duet (quite literally) orchestrated, seems more important than ever as we face COVID19 lockdown.

While we take our daily, state-sanctioned exercise, most of us are barred from going to the places we yearn for, either because of their distance from our homes or as a result of enforced closures. Waterland is one such place for me and for many others who know, love, fish, sail on, swim in, run and walk around Lake 32 and the Cotswold Water Park.

Were we able to visit the lake at this time, we might hear the nightingales singing as we swam or strolled at sunset after the noise of the traffic had died down. The male’s song is a fast succession of rich notes with a loud whistling crescendo which can be heard at night as well as in the day. Nightingales have an astonishingly rich repertoire, able to produce over 1000 different sounds, compared with just 340 by skylarks and about 100 by blackbirds.

Known by the collective noun of a ‘watch,’ there are a number of breeding pairs in the Water Park, close to Lake 32. Over winter the birds migrate south to Guinea in West Africa, taking a seaboard route to avoid the intense heat of the Sahara. Although they are a plain reddish-brown in appearance, they represent twenty or so grams of determination and loyalty, returning again and again to the same nesting site of unpretentious copse and scrub, year after year.

As I’ve been writing my poem for the lake this month and thinking about these birds, they have come to represent a way of being in the world that is beyond rations and isolation, to represent freedom of movement, self-sufficiency and an unfussy natural beauty. At the same time, nightingales have such currency in our culture (think canonical heavyweight grade currency: Homer, Milton, Shelley, Keats, Beethoven, Stravinsky) that I found they were almost too symbolic to write about. So much so, it was necessary to take a sideways angle on this tiny literary powerhouse.

I couldn’t stop thinking about this little bird’s journey to and from West Africa. It brought to mind an old love affair, powerful but fleeting, in the way young love so often is.

Almost two decades ago, I had moved to West Africa to work and left behind someone I was madly in love with, and he me. By the time I came back, he had moved across the world. I went away again, he came back – we kept missing each other, but still wrote and kept a correspondence going. He kept singing to me, but I never quite caught his song... In the end, he wasn’t "the one who got away" - I did see him again and it didn't work out between us. Our love was better at a distance, the rhetoric of romance was better than reality.

Sound familiar?

I hope the poem captures something of that yearning, but also the yearning we share for a place that we can’t currently reach. I wonder, will we / won’t we get back to our beloved lake soon?

To return to where I started, this month I have collaborated with my good friend, fellow lake swimmer and cellist Oonagh Davies on some music to accompany this poem; and with Joff Elphick, another lake lover and field recordist who has cleverly brought together my voice with the cello and with the song of the nightingale that he recorded at the lakes. In fact, it was Joff who first told me about nightingales at the lake and who suggested a poem about them, for which I’m really grateful.

We won’t lie, it has been a challenge to record as a group and to the quality standard we would like during lockdown. Some of it may or may not have been recorded under a bed. But in the end we hope we have gained rather than lost something by having those challenges reflected in the sound of the finished product. We are where we are, after all.

The bespoke illustration of the nightingale was created by Stuart Ballard, swimmer, graphic designer, bushcraft instructor and surfer extraordinaire, to whom I’m very thankful.

Like the nightingale, I don’t really hold with borders and this piece reflects, for me anyway, the wonderful way people are crossing boundaries to come together and make great stuff happen in difficult times.

Together, we hope you enjoy ‘Night Watch.’

‘Nightingale,’ Richard Bowlder Sharpe, A Handbook to the Birds of the British Isles (1894)

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Night Watch, May 2020