It’s May and the nightingales are back again. Three years ago and in the midst of the Covid pandemic, for my residency at the Cotswold Water Park (Lake 32, to be precise), I immersed myself in the song of the nightingale and developed a poem in collaboration with cellist Oonagh Davies and field recordist Joff Elphick. Here’s an extract from a piece I wrote at the time.
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.
Since writing this post 3 years ago, my friend and poet Claire Collison told me that “the original historic event was in fact faked up using a bird impressionist – thought to have been Maude Gould, a whistler or siffleur known as Madame Saberon on variety bills.” Funny though that is to me now, our fascination with nightingales and our yearning to connect with them is undimmed by the revelation.
This relationship with the natural world and its meaning for us, which Harrison’s nightingale duet (quite literally) orchestrated, seems more important than ever.
If you visit the lakes at this time, you might hear the nightingales singing as you swim or stroll at sunset after the noise of the traffic dies 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 wrote and thought about the nightingales during this locked-down time, they came 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.
I couldn’t stop thinking about this little bird’s journey to and from West Africa. It brought to mind an old love affair, so powerful but ultimately fleeting, in the way young love can be.
Almost two decades ago, I had moved to West Africa to work and left behind someone I was truly, madly in love with - and he me. By the time I came back, he had moved away across the world. I went away again, he came back – we kept missing each other, but we still wrote and kept our correspondence going. He kept singing for me, but his song never quite caught on me.
In the end, he wasn’t "the one who got away" - I did see him again and it didn't work out between us - turned out our love was better at a distance. I hope the poem captures something of that yearning, but also the yearning we share for our world to be brought back into balance.
To return to where I started, I 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.
It was a challenge to record as a group and to the quality standard we would like (it was made 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, cyclist, graphic designer, bushcraft instructor and River Severn surfer.
Like the nightingale, I don’t really hold with borders and this piece reflects for me the way people cross boundaries to come together and make beautiful stuff happen in difficult times.
Listen to ‘Night Watch’ in full on YouTube here.
Do you have nightingales where you live? Talk to me - I’d love to hear from you in the comments. Drop me a like just to let me know you’re there! x
Such a clever piece Juliette, I love how two seemingly disparate things (ex-loves and nesting nightingales) can come together like this! Also loved working on this with you and joff - virtually and in gardens - in such a weird old pandemic-ey time! X