Crackerjack's Story
Carrot and I lived in small, matching cages, hung high on a wall in our owner's house, and through our cage bars we had a perfect bird's eye view of the room that was our world. There was a large window opposite us, through which we could see the grey concrete back yard, and below us, on every surface - the cupboard tops, the bookcases, the dining table and the nest of coffee tables - there were other cages housing other birds: turquoisines, finches, cockatiels, budgies, kakarikis, and some that I didn't even recognize. Our owner was an elderly human with white hair. He gave us grit and seed to eat and water to drink, and occasionally he cleaned out our cages. Sometimes he brought new birds to join us. Sometimes he took some of us away, I'm not sure where to, but they never came back. We found this rather upsetting, not to say unnerving. I had been there longer than most, and had seen many a friend come and go. I can only hope that they are happy, wherever they are now.
Every morning our owner's wife would clean the entire room, ensuring that every last seed husk was removed. She cleaned around our cages with a hissing pipe attached to a machine. We all sat rigid on our perches, not daring to utter a cheep in case the pipe suddenly turned on us and sucked us up into the roaring belly of the machine, and when she had finished we breathed a sigh of relief. The wife usually left us alone then until the evening when she and our owner would sit down to watch another machine that made moving colours and all sorts of sounds. This one got on our nerves if we were trying to sleep but at least it didn't suck things up.
During the afternoons Carrot and I used to amuse ourselves by making up songs. Carrot was good at low-pitched rolling trills while I was good at hitting the high notes. Sometimes I invented fancy, complicated little arrangements, while Carrot did the backing. We called it 'canary karaoke', and the other birds, who were not quite so gifted at singing, used to egg us on: "Bravo! Encore!" they would call in unison, "Give us another, please!" We would go through our entire repertoire, singing until we could barely croak another note. Or sometimes we would spend ages perfecting some new piece that I had dreamt up, and drive the other birds mad by repeating the same few bars again and again until we had got the thing just right. Then they would shout rude comments like: "Give us a break" or "Put a sock in it," and we would have to hum our tunes more quietly so as not to irritate the others. When we had sung ourselves hoarse we and all the other birds would have a siesta.
Thus we passed our days, singing the hours away, or eating seed or sleeping. Then one day something happened which changed our lives forever. The doorbell rang and our owner showed a lady into the living room. Apparently she had come to collect Bianco the snow white cockatiel who lived on the bookcase. He was pleased because he had started life in a place called an aviary, and now it seemed he was going to live in another one. The lady who was to take him there came into our living room to meet him, but for some reason as she stepped through the doorway she stopped dead in her tracks. She looked around our room very slowly, and her eyes met the eyes of every bird in every cage there. There was a very embarrassing silence, then she turned to our owner and said: "Do you ever let them out to fly?" "Nope," he replied. This little word 'nope' made her flinch. She looked away from him and seemed to be staring at something on the carpet, though it was perfectly clean.
"Where do you buy them from?" she asked presently, and he told her about the monthly bird sales at the local pub. Suddenly a faint memory came to me - of a stuffy smoke-filled room, with caged birds and beer glasses on tables and the sound of humans laughing and calling to each other loudly. For some reason a shiver went down my spine. Our owner told the lady she ought to go there sometime if she was interested. She smiled and thanked him sweetly but her eyes were cold.
The lady took some pieces of paper out of her pocket and gave these to our owner. He counted them and put them into his own pocket, then he lifted Bianco's cage down off the bookcase and gave him to the lady. Suddenly she looked up and fixed her gaze on me and Carrot, which made us feel very uncomfortable. "Those canaries," she said, "do they sing?" "Oh yes, and how!" replied our owner. She took a deep breath, and then, bold as brass, she said: "I don't suppose you'd let me have them too, would you?" He grinned from ear to ear. "For a price," came the reply. The next thing we knew we were being unhooked from our wall and handed to the lady. "Join the club," said Bianco. "What's going on?" whispered Carrot. "I'm scared. Why did we have to be taken down off our wall? I felt safe up there." I tried to reassure him, despite my own anxiety. But I couldn't answer his question.
"Anything else?" asked our owner, rubbing his hands together like a shopkeeper. The lady drew out the remaining pieces of paper from her pocket and looked at them. "Well…" she began, pointing to a cage on top of a cupboard. Half of this cage contained a large wooden box with a hole in the front, and the other half contained Larry, a rather elderly grey cockatiel with such unkempt plumage that he resembled a bottle brush. "How long has he been in there?" asked the lady. "Eight years," came the answer. The lady's eyes flashed, and Carrot gave a long, low whistle: "Preeeeeee-historic," he whispered. "Oi, cheeky, I heard that," Larry retorted. "And who is in that wooden box inside his cage?" queried the lady. It was Larry's wife Sherry, sitting on an egg which later turned out to contain Cherry, their first and only baby. The lady gave her remaining pieces of paper to our owner and he seemed satisfied. "You will have to come back later for Larry and his family, when the chick is weaned," he said. She agreed, because it would be wrong to disturb Sherry when the chick was so close to hatching.
Before leaving, the lady turned and ran her eyes over the remaining birds, who stared back ruefully. Then to our amazement, and to the confusion of our owner, she gave a funny little whistle and said to them all in the most dreadful, broken birdspeak I have ever heard: "I am so sorry, I wish I could have taken you all home with me. May your lives be peaceful." We nearly fell off our perches. We had never heard birdspeak spoken with a human accent. However we recovered enough to remember our manners, and replied in chorus: "May your life be peaceful too." "Thank you dear bods," she tweeted sadly. "I think she meant 'birds'," sniggered one of the kakarikis. "Sorry, birds," said the lady, correcting herself humbly, and the kakariki blushed. There was another embarrassing silence, then one of the budgies called to us: "I hope your new home will be nice." "We'll really miss your canary karaoke," said a turquoisine glumly, "even the rehearsals." "It'll be so boring without you," added a finch in a tiny voice. "Take care," chirped the kakarikis. "We'll always remember you with affection." The lady then picked us up - me, Carrot and Bianco, all piled on top of each other in our cages, and as she took us out of the room the other birds began to twitter amongst themselves about the extraordinary events that had just taken place.
The lady, who was called Mummy, took us to her house, where she put me and Carrot into the birdroom in huge cages opposite the lovebirds' home (which is a giant cage called an aviary). Then she put Bianco into an even bigger aviary in her garden, where Larry, Sherry and baby Cherry joined them some weeks later, and where they are all still - well - as happy as Larry. Cherry turned out to be a little boy in fact, though you wouldn't have known it till his face turned yellow and bright orange patches appeared on his cheeks. He is still called Cherry though, which he finds highly embarrassing, and in fact word has it that he is considering having it changed by deed poll to Jerry. There are other similarly afflicted birds, for example the old grandad cockatiel called Polly, whose wing was bitten in half by a dog. But he says that when a man has stared at death through a set of canine canines, having a name like Polly is peanuts in comparison. However Cherry, not ever having suffered a near-death experience, still says he wants to be called Jerry.
We in the birdroom loved to receive such snippets of news from outside. The news would arrive in a variety of ways. Occasionally a cockatiel or budgie was brought into our room to recuperate from some ailment or other, and would bring us the latest piece of gossip from outside. Once the said bird was better, Mummy would transport him or her back to the garden aviary, and thus unwittingly be the bearer of all our tidings to its occupants. The minute the convalescent bird had arrived home, the cockatiels and budgies would crowd around, eager to hear the latest tittle-tattle from indoors. (This practice, you may be interested to know, gave rise to the English expression 'A little bird told me'.) Sending news bulletins via ailing birds is, however, hardly the most efficient means of communication, since it depends on birds who ail, which doesn't happen all the time. Frustrated by this inefficiency, the lovebirds in the birdroom aviary devised a novel new method that made up in speed what it lacked in decorum: they would simply yell their news through the open window, and then wait with bated breath for the cockatiels to scream their reply. Of course some of the detail often got lost especially when the cockatiels forgot to scream in unison, or if a high wind was blowing and Mummy had shut the window to keep the cold out. On such occasions the exchange of news was reduced to little more than a game of screeched Chinese whispers, and everyone ended up both hoarse and confused. Sometimes the lovebirds were so noisy that Carrot and I could hardly hear ourselves sing, and we were quite glad that our stay in the birdroom was only a stopover.
Mummy said that she had an aviary in mind for us, but places there were as rare as hens' teeth. Last summer she'd secured two places for Harry and Henry, the canaries who had once lived either side of a fireplace, but the aviary owner had taken some persuading. Mummy, however, has a silver tongue, thanks to which the course of our destiny was determined in a single phone call. Not long after that, she put us in a travelling cage and after saying goodbye to the lovebirds we set off in her car on the long, long journey to our new home. The lovebirds had a lot of news to yell about that day.
When we arrived we were met by the human who was to be our new owner. He showed us the way to the canary aviary. It is set in the dappled shade of some beautiful trees, with other aviaries dotted around. Finches and canaries were dozing peacefully in the afternoon sun when we got there. The owner allowed Mummy to take us inside, where she opened the door of our cage and out we hopped.
You might have thought that our story ended there, happily ever after, but unfortunately because of me there was a slight hitch. When Mummy let us out of the travelling cage, Carrot immediately soared up into the air and parked himself on a perch, but to my dismay I discovered that I could not fly! I could flit just a little bit, but however hard I flapped I could not reach Carrot. He and the other canaries and finches all stared down at me in disbelief. Mummy was very upset. I managed to climb up the wire mesh wall and got onto the end of the perch, but Carrot was sitting amongst Harry and Henry and some others who had been waiting to welcome us. I tried to flit over to a space next to him, but I misjudged the distance and fluttered down to earth. I wasn't hurt but I found the whole incident very embarrassing. The owner told Mummy that my muscles were out of practice. He asked her if she wanted to take me home. "Oh no," said Mummy, "I couldn't possibly do that to him - he would be so disappointed." I heaved a sigh of relief. The thought of spending all my days with those pesky lovebirds prompted me to flap my wings with all my might to show that I had already embarked upon a wing-muscle exercise programme.
Mummy suddenly had an idea. She asked the owner if he could put a large tree branch into the aviary, to be positioned vertically so that it formed a pathway to the perch where Carrot was sitting. Mummy's wish was granted and a long twiggy branch was brought in and firmed into the ground like a small tree. I was able to flit from twig to twig until I reached the top, and from there I could jump onto the perch and be near Carrot. The first time I did this all the canaries and finches gave a round of applause. They were very kind to me and none of them ever picked on me. The owner put bowls of food and water on the floor for me, because I could not reach the feeding dishes behind the perch. After that I was able to manage all right.
Mummy said she would visit us sometimes, and she kept her promise. She was very surprised one day to see that I didn't need the twiggy branch any more. I had taught myself to fly up to the perch instead! But the other birds and I loved resting on its twigs to sunbathe, so our owner left it in the aviary for us. Mummy would sometimes sit on the bench nearby to talk to us, and once she took some photos of us. I think she wanted to make sure we were happy, and of course she was worried about me. She doesn't visit very often now that she knows I can fly, but I don't mind - I have many friends here. I never dreamt my life would turn out like this.