A Cage Fit For Eagles

Cage birds were once the pet of choice as far as the working classes of London and the South East were concerned. These days you might even call them Estuary Pets. Easy to keep, unlikely to offend the neighbours and certainly cost effective as far as food was concerned. There were even songs written about them such as the once celebrated Music Hall ditty about the couple doing a moonlight flit – My old man said follow the van and don’t dilly dally on the way. The story-teller is the wife who walked behind the cart with the family pet and the popular melody itself would certainly be familiar with all who now qualify for a government pension.

A hundred years ago statistics estimate that every second household kept a cage bird of some kind and the craze began a long time before that if Pliny the Elder is to be believed. He laid the responsibility at the feet of Marcus Laenius Strabo of the Order of the Knighthood at Brindisi who, he wrote, began the practice of `imprisoning within bars wild creatures that Nature had assigned to the open sky’. He then went a step further and outlined the excesses some of his fellow Romans indulged in, citing an actor called Clodius Aesop who favoured his birds roasted, particularly favouring those that whilst alive had spoken in human voices. Pliny was scandalised, seeming to view this culinary treat as some kind of minor though hard to categorise form of cannibalism. Whether or not the vogue for pet birds started with the Romans is of course debatable but the craze was definitely trending in Europe in the early seventeen hundreds when French Huguenot weavers descended en masse upon London bringing their songbirds with them. And when I was a child the fashion was still alive and well in the streets of working class Gravesend and Northfleet and if my mother was to be believed the feathered friend of choice was then the Linnet. This relative of the Finch family was either routinely trapped in the wild or bred specially for sale in local pet shops and highly prized for its singing ability. It is likely that the male bird was especially sought after because of its colourful plumage although for some inexplicable reason the colours were slow to appear when caged. My mother decided that this peculiarity was almost certainly because once caged they pined for their freedom, dreamed of soaring high into the Kentish sky – in other words it was a definite symptom of avian depression. Well she didn’t quite put it like that but nevertheless she could have been right.
Although I know that we were a linnet owning family when my parents first married and moved into York Road it wouldn’t be true to say that I actually remember Bobby, the bird itself. In fact by the time I was aware enough to take any interest in him he had already been given his freedom. This was in the hope that once restored to the wild he would grow a bright plumage and learn to sing rather than huddle on his perch in a woebegone and guilt-inspiring manner whilst conspicuously moulting. The only tangible evidence of Bobby himself was his empty cage, fashioned from slim lengths of bamboo and undeniably attractive. I wasn’t allowed to play with it in case I did it some damage and it was stored in the cupboard under the stairs on a hook above the coal bunker awaiting his replacement.

Years were to pass before birds of any variety were to once more share the kitchen of number 28 with us. Although my brother was to become a firm ornithology enthusiast, birds either as pets or in the wild was not a subject I gave much thought to. However, I found it vaguely interesting when my favourite teacher Mr Will Clarke revealed that local author of some note, Charles Dickens, was said to have at one stage kept a pet Raven and Winston Churchill was a parrot fancier owning a Macaw called Charlie. My young brother, on the other hand was already wont to comment on the bamboo cage above the coal bunker from time to time, wistfully wondering if it would hold an eagle. Well he was only five years old at the time of that query and the only eagle he had actually seen was that which graced the front page of the recently launched boys’ comic book. Still young enough to be easily confused and mostly bereft of reading skills he actually believed for a time that the popular periodical was some kind of Bird Fanciers’ Weekly and even planned to name any future eagle he might own, Dan Dare in honour of the front page hero. Once he graduated from the first raft of Early Readers provided by St Joseph’s Primary School it was with some embarrassment that he hastily tossed aside this particular notion though not the comic in its entirety. The first issue had been released in April 1950 following a huge publicity campaign and for a number of years it was enormously popular with boys between the ages of seven and sixteen providing a range of popular stories together with news and sports items.

Destined as he was to eventually emerge as a Bird of Prey fancier the green and grey budgerigar would not have been Bernard’s first choice when it came to feathered companions and it is more than likely that a compromise was reached with my mother. She only capitulated regarding becoming a bird owner in the first place because the Bennetts of Buckingham Road had recently become the proud owners of Richie who, if their Joan was to be believed, had already learned to say his name. A week or two later our own bird, purchased from the pet shop in Queen Street, Gravesend, would have also been known as Richie if that popular budgie name had not already been bestowed upon the Bennett’s bird. Instead, a further compromise was reached and ours was henceforth known as Ricky.

Without further ceremony the bamboo cage was retrieved from its place under the stairs, carefully wiped of coal dust and Ricky was installed. When Old Nan dropped in for tea and conversation a day or two later she said that we should have got him from the market because everybody knew that’s where the the best talkers were to be found and it was her belief that there was no real alternative. She would not be persuaded that Gravesend market did not go in for cage birds and said if that was the case it was a poxy excuse for a market if ever there was one. The fact that he had set us back the not inconsiderable sum of fifteen shillings and sixpence was further cause for derision because back in her day `them birds was ten a penny down Club Row’ which was nice and handy to her childhood home in Bethnal Green Road. Well all that information was only if she was to be believed and often it turned out that she was not.

Ricky was not an immediate success at once displaying a hostile attitude towards his surroundings when he set about demolishing the bamboo cage that now hung in a corner of the kitchen above the shelf where the wireless lived. My mother was perplexed and said that Bobby the linnet had been a bird of a far less destructive nature and had always been as good as gold in the very cage that Ricky was fast obliterating. Mrs Bennett advised that budgerigars had different beaks to linnets and should always be kept in wire cages and quite apart from that they liked toys. Our Ricky should be provided with a miniature mirror she advised because their Richie had one and these days you couldn’t stop him talking. He said all manner of things and had them all in stitches.

A wire cage was investigated at Rayners in Northfleet High Street because at the pet shop in Gravesend they turned out to be Very Dear. But the Rayners variety were not exactly cheap either and so while the idea was given more consideration a mirror with a pink plastic trim was acquired and handed over to Ricky with a great deal of ceremony. But he was growing more recalcitrant by the day and showed not the slightest interest. Bernard and I took turns sitting beside his cage enunciating sound bites in the hope that he would emulate them but he seemed to be quite averse to `Ricky’s a pretty boy’ and `What a clever budgie’ no matter how often and how slowly these mini-bites were demonstrated to him. Old Nan said we’d definitely been sold a pup and that our bird was a pig in a poke and thus managed to completely confuse Bernard who was still at an age when he was inclined to take things adults said completely literally.

In a final act of desperation and having very recently added School Dinner Lady to her raft of part time jobs my mother announced that she was now feeling flush enough to lash out and treat Ricky to a brand new Rayners wire cage which came equipped with a bell for him to play with. It had not completely escaped her attention that the Bennett bird was a keen bell ringer though the noise at tea-time was enough to drive you to Colney Hatch. What with the new cage, the bell and the very latest in Best Bird Seed with added oil to encourage the acquisition of speech she felt that our Ricky would very soon be making giant strides in every direction. But he continued to make very slow progress, showed no interest in being allowed out of his cage to occasionally fly around the room, refused to learn his name, found the new bird seed unpalatable and demonstrated complete indifference towards campanology. Overall he was not a total success and my mother was overheard to confide to her sister Mag that if there was one thing that gave her the pip, it was being forced to sit and listen to Grace Bennett listing all the new tricks that their Richie had learnt since she last drank tea with her. She just couldn’t stop blowing his trumpet and when all was said and done he was only a bird.

So when poor Ricky was found deceased at the bottom of his new cage one Sunday morning she clearly found it something of a relief and was not keen on replacing him. Once he had been buried with due ceremony beneath the only flowers in our garden, the stolen primroses from Lord Darnley’s woods the wire cage was cleaned and hung in the cupboard under the stairs without undue comment. After a while Bernard divulged that even though there was to be no successor to the wayward Ricky it was certainly a very good idea to keep the cage. When I asked him why he paused for a few seconds before adding that you never knew when it would come in useful and wanted to know if I thought it would be possible to keep an eagle in it – just a small eagle perhaps, one that was well behaved. I said I didn’t know very much about eagles.