Matthew Paul reviews The Ayrshire Nestling by Gerry Cambridge (Tringa Press, 2024)
Sacrifice
Opening the cardboard box that had held
a long winter coat for my mother out of the catalogue,
the ash-frail rows, arranged in sawdust,
from bough-cleft, twig-fork, thorn-bush, tussock,
were flooded with sterile day in their angular nest.
But to me they were beautiful,
my thick-freckled face pored over
each peppered, blotched, speckled or smudged or swirled
stopped beginning of a small bird’s world,
in pastel blue and green, or white so pure
it seemed just solider light,
each airy husk a token of sorts
in the egg kirkyard of a schoolboy.
In those days, robbery was my form of love.
Redpoll, goldcrest, song thrush, wren,
willow tit, linnet, skylark, dunnock—
only my gaze then incubated them,
and all that hatched was possession’s joy.
Let’s start with the book’s highly attractive appearance. It’s a hefty paperback of 240 pages, the print interspersed with gorgeous hand-coloured engravings of birds, all taken from The Naturalist’s Library, a series by Scottish naturalist Sir William Jardine published in forty volumes between 1833 and 1843. The cover shows another Victorian print (of eggs of eight different bird species) with a turquoise surround that almost matches the colour of the largest egg, that of a raven. Tringa Press is an imprint of the Scottish poetry publisher, Red Squirrel Press. The Ayrshire Nestling, though written by a poet who also edits a longstanding poetry journal, The Dark Horse, isn’t poetry, but what it is can’t easily be pigeonholed. It’s a hybrid, as so many fine books seem to be nowadays: prose which reads as a novel, but which Cambridge describes as, “generally speaking, memoir”, adding that “most of it is ‘true’.” He also says that, “even in memoir, imagination, invention, and sheer misremembering have their place. So to have written Jed [the central character] as ‘myself’, in the first person, would have felt inaccurate. The third person narrative was a useful way of differentiating him from me as author; not only in time, but in character.”
Cambridge’s youthful egg-collecting, which dominates the first third of the book, isn’t new literary territory for him. The opening sequence of his fine poetry collection Notes for Lighting a Fire (HappenStance Press, 2012, rev. 2013) includes five poems which touch on the same ground, most notably, in ‘At Twelve’, which deals with the guilt he felt when seeing:
[…] the helpless look of a hen blackbird,
glazed wide eye and beak and tail
terrored above the rim of straw among
thorns when our clamouring gang
flushed her in bursts of clucks, to thrust
our hot hands in.
It’s the look I remember most today.
So for me, the interest lies not only in reading The Ayrshire Nestling per se, but in seeing what different angles, details and emotional weight Cambridge might be bringing to the subject now. Almost immediately, he gives two of the reasons why the eggs were so compelling: their fragility (they are “as light as air” and, later, “You could put ten of them […] on your palm”) and their appearance (“It was beauty”). ‘Jed’ falls in with two other, bigger 12-year-olds, of whom he is fearful, who force him to climb “too high” up trees to reach the nests. The description of tree climbing is intense, vertiginous and lovely:
“The first six or seven feet were without branches but he knew how to shimmy up, throwing his arms around the trunk as if he was hugging it and pushing upwards with his feet like swimming against the bark while relaxing his hold on the trunk. His feet slipped a couple of times, but he managed. Then he was among the first branches and it was mainly working out which to grab as he eased himself up among them, considering a route, while the ground slowly descended below him and the branches were rough against his palms and the twigs tickled and scraped his face as he moved upwards with his heart thudding in his ears.”
This is delightful, lyrical writing by any standard. Cambridge’s prose is poetic but focused on telling the reader precisely the sensations and feelings he experienced. While poetry can, of course, also do this, the broader canvas of prose surely enables a fuller account and a broader sweep of time and events. It’s instructive to compare the following sentence with the excerpt from ‘At Twelve’ above:
“He remembered the big strawy nest of a blackbird in the hedge, the eggs like miniature crow’s eggs (though he had not seen a crow’s egg at that time)—one of the gang thrusting his hand and arm deep into the barbed thicket of the hawthorn with face grimacing, the bird having flown off in a burst of clucks, till he got his hand over the strawy rim.”
Cambridge isn’t the first writer to treat the same material in both poetry and prose: Ciaran Carson, for example, uses phrases in his psychogeographical memoir The Star Factory which are identical to those in his poem ‘Belfast Confetti’. To his credit, though, Cambridge never repeats the exact wording. In The Ayrshire Nestling, he recounts how an egg would be cleared of its contents: “Sometimes they would try to blow the eggs using thorns immediately—a prick in the blunt and the narrow end, and the egg held on the fingers and raised to your lips.” This instance is much more succinct than his previous account, in his poem ‘Blowing Out an Egg’:
[…] First,
the pin-pricked hole in each end, then
holding it poised to your lips
with nail-bitten fingers and thumbs
like a miniature musical instrument
you were trying to gentle a note from,
pursing your mouth with precise pressure
to start the albumen’s gossamer
lengthening into the toilet bowl.
His first sight of newly-hatched chicks is beautifully recalled. “The four ash-wisped, nude, transparent-skinned, gollum-ish gargoyles, the big skulls with their eye turrets of dark grey, something like a chameleon’s, at the top of their skinny necks—how they all thrust up as one, swaying a little from side to side, mistaking his vibrations for an adult bird returning with food.”
It’s evident that Cambridge is liberated by the rhythmic possibilities of prose, without any need to consider line-breaks and stanza-breaks
It’s evident that Cambridge is liberated by the rhythmic possibilities of prose, without any need to consider line-breaks and stanza-breaks. He conveys the natural history without it becoming dry, and the story he tells naturally has larger themes. These include adolescence, the first flush of sexual attraction and longing, the dare of hunting for eggs in places out of bounds, the wider geography of the northern English (then Scottish) edgelands, the ticking of the seasons, and a growing awareness of the fragility of existence for which the eggshells are metaphors. A move to Scotland brings awareness of cultural difference in the names and pronunciations of things, sectarian bigotry, and all sorts of other ways. “England had miniskirts and the girls burgeoning like late summer apples. In Scotland the girls all wore midiskirts, well down below the knee. There were no thrilling glimpses for him of pale blue or white or pink.”
The treasure of The Observer’s Book of Birds’ Eggs fascinates Jed. “He would make his way through the pages, delighted and reassured that he had some of these eggs already and excited by the exoticism and rarity and glamour of many that, he knew, he probably would never see—the far high ranges of unexpectedness and astonishment: Razorbill! Arctic Tern! Stone Curlew! Great Crested Grebe! Garganey! Gadwall! Merlin! He was only a boy in an Ayrshire caravan but somehow he could be a part of this and be lost in it.”
Even had he not used exclamation marks here, Cambridge’s boyhood enthusiasm would have been far more than adequately relayed. As Jed grows older he turns from collecting eggs to watching the birds themselves. The narrative picks up pace as he orders binoculars from his mother’s Freeman’s catalogue. Jed’s ornithological obsession provides an escape out from the confines of the caravan he shares with his two sisters, bingo-loving mother, and hard-drinking, taciturn father whose mean and petty ways extend to blocking Jed’s view of the TV. There are comic moments too: “His ideal woman would have been a Janet Donaldson who, improbably, had a huge obsessive interest in ornithology and knew already what a woodcock was—or at least was interested in finding out”.
Against the faint backdrop of the dreary 1970s, Cambridge also brilliantly evokes the embarrassment of being a teenage boy
Against the faint backdrop of the dreary 1970s, Cambridge also brilliantly evokes the embarrassment of being a teenage boy, the sense of the body changing (“He had no idea how to shave”), muscle-building, food management (and avoidance), and sex education. The last of these inspires a priceless line (“There was some brief mysterious point made about the importance of getting off at Paisley rather than going all the way to Glasgow”) and hilarious detailing of a series of medical appointments. For Jed, there’s even the unexpected pleasure of encountering poems by Ted Hughes. A post-exams summer of work in fields of ‘neeps’ (swedes) is affectionately described, as are a sighting of an avian rarity blown off-course, the world of birders, hides, and wanting to belong, and another summer job involving getting the hay in, which part-pays for a camera to set Jed off on a new preoccupation, bird photography. Cambridge devotes six memorable pages to the preparations for, and actual day of, an expedition to photograph lapwings on their nest. In a notable passage, the root of this obsession is explored:
“What was it all about, that desire? Was it a form of voyeurism, a need to glimpse into that secret world of jostling and sleeping beaks tucked in their backs, to be among them and carry some trophy back as a record of the adventure, having dared the chaos and made it back again safe to the comprehensible human world with its timetables and attempted-decent laws?”
In his afterword, Cambridge expands on this by discussing the (im)morality of Jed’s earlier passion, egg-collecting, persuasively concluding that it is “a crime against femaleness, of which the egg is a potent symbol”.
Readers with no interest in birds may find it a little hard going, but The Ayrshire Nestling is about far more than birds alone. I’d go so far as to say that it’s an instant classic, as nature writing and bildungsroman, and fit to rank alongside Barry Hines’s A Kestrel for a Knave or the wonderful writings of J.A. Baker. This is especially true in how it captures the (perhaps peculiarly male) drift from one obsession to another. It seems astonishing that it’s Cambridge’s first creative prose book (as distinct from his 2016 book The Dark Horse, The Making of a Little Magazine), but I’m sure it won’t be his last.
Owing to recent illness of the publisher, copies of this book are currently only available direct from the author, price £18.00 including p&p. Please contact him by email on gerry.cambridge@btinternet.com.
Matthew Paul lives in Rotherham and worked as a local government education officer for many years. His first collection, The Evening Entertainment, was published by Eyewear in 2017. He is also the author of two haiku collections, The Regulars (2006) and The Lammas Lands (2015), and is co-writer / editor (with John Barlow) of Wing Beats: British Birds in Haiku (2008), all published by Snapshot Press. Matthew Paul’s blog is here.
‘Sacrifice’ is from Notes for Lighting a Fire (HappenStance Press, 2013) — thanks to Gerry Cambridge and HappenStance for letting us publish it.
