As moving as Kes… the tale of how troubled Charlie Gilmour was healed by a thieving magpie

Featherhood

Charlie Gilmour

W&N £16.99

Rating:

Like many children, Charlie Gilmour never had much success with goldfish and hamsters and mice. ‘No matter what you do, it seems like they always end up in the same place: a shoebox at the bottom of a shallow grave.’

But then in his 20s his girlfriend Yana brought back a fledgling magpie her sister had found in a South London gutter ‘lurching towards the kerb like a drunk staggering down an alleyway’. The little bird had been abandoned and was facing death from dehydration or being run over.

At first, Gilmour was wary, but his girlfriend was made of stronger stuff. ‘Yana is incapable of encountering a broken object without wanting to pick it up and make it better.’

Together, they fed grubs, worms and tiny balls of lamb mince to the magpie but then Yana had to go away for a week, leaving Gilmour to cope with it alone. ‘I stare down at the bird. The bird stares steadily back at me… I’ve never felt so seen by an animal.’

One thing led to another, and before long the magpie had the run of the house. As Gilmour points out, magpies have a bad reputation. Historically, they have been accused of everything from theft to eating the eggs of other birds to assisting in witchcraft and – alone among wildlife – refusing to mourn the death of Jesus Christ.

Gilmour’s magpie, now named Benzene, may not have been guilty of all these offences, but he (or, as it turns out, she) was certainly no stranger to bad habits. Only the dottiest reader could come away from this book imagining that a magpie makes the perfect pet.

Benzene’s bad habits were legion. The better he was treated, the worse he behaved. Magpies and other corvids are notorious hoarders, stashing stray bits of food wherever they go. Accordingly, Benzene tucked gobbets of raw meat all over the house. ‘Any crevice will do: the USB port of my laptop, the eyelets of Yana’s work boots, the folds of a discarded sock…’

At any given moment, Benzene would swoop down on Charlie and Yana, employing them as sedan chairs to ride around the house. Whenever they ate, he would squeal to be fed. In return, Charlie would find his hair filled with partially consumed titbits, ready for snacking on later.

The better the bird grew at flying, the more unnerving he became. ‘Nothing is now safe from his destructive curiosity; no calm moment protected from the possibility of a sudden rush of wind and the feeling of talons sinking into your scalp.’ Most terrifying of all, Benzene once swooped down on a woman and whipped the contact lenses from her eyes.

Benzene’s hidey-holes, and his propensity for theft, became more and more elaborate. Beneath a dirty tea-towel at the bottom of a wicker basket, Charlie and Yana discovered a treasure trove of stolen goods including pebbles, lighters, coins, screws, safety pins, string and sealing wax.

Whenever they left the house, they would return to havoc: soil from a potted plant strewn over the floor, a jar of pens upended, Yana’s sewing box disgorged. ‘A spool of black thread has been unwound and tracked around our bedroom, criss-crossing from one end to the other… At the very end of the line is the magpie, caught helplessly in a net of his own construction, no doubt regretting the decisions that led him to this point.’

Books about pet birds tend to revolve around the author’s identification with the bird, and Featherhood is no exception. Just like Benzene, the young Charlie Gilmour had also been caught helplessly in a net, though that net was not entirely of his own construction.

His father was Heathcote Williams, a hippy Old Etonian cult poet, a bad combination even at the best of times. Williams had abandoned Charlie and his mother without warning when Charlie was just six months old. One day, Williams was there, living with them on a cottage on a big estate, and the next he was gone, hiding down the road in the main house, owned by an old school friend, Peregrine Eliot, the 10th Earl of St Germans.

‘He’s having a breakdown and he doesn’t want to see you,’ explained Eliot to Charlie’s mother. ‘You can’t expect him to play mummy bear, daddy bear and baby bear for ever, you know.’

The book is, among much else, a damning insight into the self-centred narcissism of the hippy mentality. Williams seems to have convinced himself that looking after a mother and child would interfere with his work as a poet, so he ditched them. He then spent the rest of his life producing long, rambling works which on the surface may seem to be love letters to whales and elephants, but which are in truth fuelled by a deep hatred of human beings.

Late in life, in a rare gesture towards fatherhood, Williams sent the grown-up Charlie one of his terrible ranty poems:

The business of America is business

And its number one business is war,

Using Hollywood to peddle its values

It turns the world into its whore.

Having read it, Yana tersely observed: ‘Did he really need to abandon his family to concentrate on writing stuff like that?’

Perhaps inevitably, Charlie spent his childhood and youth yearning for the father who had vanished. His mother had married the kindly David Gilmour of Pink Floyd, who then legally adopted him, and provided him with ‘a dream childhood: full of care and affection; campfires and dogs’. But all the while, young Charlie longed to see the father who didn’t want to see him. ‘There’s no accounting for the perversity of the human mind. Like a tongue seeking out a sore tooth, my mind kept on probing the tiny hairline fracture running through this perfect picture.’

When Charlie was aged 12, Williams finally agreed to meet him for a meal at Paddington station, and again, the week after. But then, just as abruptly, he stopped answering Charlie’s emails. A year or two later, Charlie found Williams’s phone number, and rang it. While Charlie was gabbling down the line, ‘he hung up and never answered my calls again’.

‘I blamed myself,’ writes Charlie. ‘I hadn’t been interesting enough, or clever enough, or as rebellious as I needed to be to hold his attention.’

From then on, Charlie’s life went off the rails. Aged 13, he started drinking spirits and smoking cannabis. At university, he stopped going to lectures, and began to lose control. Zonked out with a lethal mixture of tranquillisers and brandy, he joined the student protests against the Cameron/Clegg coalition, and ended up, out of his mind, swinging from the Cenotaph.

For this offence, at the age of 21, he was sentenced to 16 months in prison. A prison officer greeted him by saying: ‘Come with me. There’s someone wants to meet you.’ He then locked him into a cell with a murderer. ‘He’s asked me to break your neck,’ declared the murderer. ‘And are you… are you going to do it?’ asked Charlie. ‘Course not. I hate that w***er,’ he replied.

Charlie emerged from prison in a heightened state of paranoia, convinced that all cars displaying remembrance poppies were going to try to run him over. Meeting Yana was his first step to redemption, followed by the unexpected appearance of Benzene the magpie.

From early on, he felt that acute sense of empathy that sometimes springs up between birds and people. After teaching Benzene to fly back when he whistled, he remembers feeling ‘a rush of exhilaration as he drops onto my wrist, as if I were the one to have just shot through the air’. He was aware, though, of the dangers of ‘identifying with it to a degree that is quite possibly psychologically unhealthy: the bird as abandoned offspring, as an adoptee, a prisoner, a paranoid entity’.

Nevertheless, Featherhood is a book about this identification, and much else besides. When I first heard about it, I feared that it would be a misery memoir by a pampered rich kid who had gone haywire, with a crazy corvid thrown in for good measure. But it is infinitely more interesting and subtle than that. It is wise, self-aware, never forced, often funny, beautifully crafted, and, in the end, as moving as Kes, that other great work about a boy who is given the gift of liberation by a bird.