A Time of Birds Read online

  HELEN MOAT

  A TIME OF BIRDS

  Reflections on cycling across Europe

  A Time of Birds is dedicated to the memory of my parents, who gave me their unconditional love.

  To them I am eternally grateful

  How could the drops of water know themselves to be a river?

  Yet the river flows on.

  Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Map

  Prologue – Horizons

  PART ONE: WESTERN EUROPE

  Netherlands

  1. Waterways

  2. Miri and the Israeli Immigrant

  3. From Holland to Hollywood

  4. Vaarwel Nederland, Hallo Deutschland

  Germany and Switzerland

  1. Storms, Bread and Bombs on the Lower Rhine

  2. Petra

  3. Looking for Marcella

  4. Monika and the Chilean Seaman

  5. Ghosts from the Past

  6. Hitler’s Birdsong

  7. Romance and Death on the Middle Rhine

  8. Cycling through Vineyards

  9. Cuckoos and Storks on the Upper Rhine

  10. Ingrid’s Redstart

  11. Manuela

  12. Back and Forth

  Germany and Austria

  1. Starting Out on the Danube

  2. In the Wars with Klaus

  3. Blah-blah with Kat

  4. Auf Wiedersehen Deutschland

  5. A Detour along the Inn and Salzach Rivers

  6. Cycling with Coffins

  7. Mary Poppins and the Lock Keeper

  8. Sabine and Sisi in Vienna

  PART TWO: EASTERN EUROPE

  Slovakia, Hungary and the Western Balkans

  1. Slovakia

  2. Into Hungary

  3. Budapest Reunion

  4. A Tale of Two Teachers

  5. Croatia – Bullets, Landmines and Deadly Mosquitoes

  6. A Place Broken

  7. Into Serbia – Cheers in Bačka Palanka

  8. From Belgrade to Bela Crkva

  9. Tarzan on the Serbian Border

  Romania and Bulgaria

  1. Into Romania

  2. Spokes and Spirits

  3. Troubles in Dolj County

  4. High-fives, Horse Carts and Touring Cyclists

  5. To the Black Sea

  6. Into Bulgaria

  7. House Martins

  8. Stranded in the Balkan Mountains

  9. Birthday Blues

  Turkey

  1. Into Turkey

  2. The Turkish Twins

  3. The Sea of Marmara

  4. Into the Megalopolis

  5. Between Sea and Sky

  Epilogue – What If ?

  Acknowledgements

  Copyright

  Prologue – Horizons

  There is a beach, and beyond that, islands. There are dune grasses that buckle in the wind and a cold sea frothing on the shore. There is the call of the gull, a volley of rasping cries above the ocean. I am standing on the edge of the sandbank. Squinting in the sunlight, I look across to the basalt rocks of the Farnes, and remember from school how Grace Darling had rowed from her lighthouse to look for the shipwrecked. I imagine Grace tossed and spun by the storm in her little coble boat as she searched for survivors from the Forfarshire. Darling, Slessor, Nightingale and Ferrier: all were house names at my school. But it was Grace I was drawn to – her fierceness and grit out there in the North Sea.

  An idea begins to take shape.

  I watch the clouds scud across the sky and the light playing off the ocean – slate grey to petrol blue, olive green to steel – then follow the path down through the dunes to the shore. Beyond the islands, there is the thread of horizon between ocean and sky. I feel the pull of the line between the visible and invisible. And I think, What if?

  This is the beginning. As I remember it.

  *

  ‘Have you got a hat?’ the boatman asked as he flung a rope over the mooring on Inner Farne, screwing his eyes up against the sea-misted sunlight. I laughed, not understanding, until the boys and I climbed the path lined with Arctic terns – a littering of white, like windblown paper-bags on the verges. The terns fluttered up, snow-pale wings feathered out to their full span, and hovered over us with lashing wingbeats before dropping down to our heads. Blood-red beaks jabbed at our skulls.

  ‘Watch out. We’re under attack.’

  ‘The birds!’ Jamie said.

  ‘Run for it!’ Patrick crouched down beneath the screeching terns, clutching his head, and hurled himself forward.

  We ran, ducking and tripping on the path, our hearts drumming with each new attack. I thought, then, of the electric shock treatment they’d given my father all those years ago: the bit in his mouth and cattle prods to his temples. What had that felt like? The short, sharp shocks of electrons ripping through his brain? The convulsion of his body? The aftermath?

  Once, my bird-loving father would have adored the Farnes, brimming over with Arctic terns, stubby-winged puffins, kittiwakes, guillemots and cormorants – and the punk-tufted, yellow-beaked shags lording it over the islands from their twiggy thrones. Before the depression and the electric shocks, that is.

  The Arctic terns gave me a gentler shock, attacking the numbness in my own head. As we came out of St Cuthbert’s Chapel, there was a fresh ambush, the terns swooping low and coming in from all sides, angry, screeching, clacking. I gulped air and my head was spinning with the birds. I’m alive! How had I got to this place where I’d stopped feeling? Was it the school where I taught, or was that just the trigger? Or did it go further back to some place I’d buried away?

  Back on the mainland, the boys ran along the beach, ill-fitting wellies threatening to pull them down into the fluid sand, their cries lost in the roar of the ocean as they thudded along. Jamie, lanky and dark, awkwardly lolled along the shoreline. Patrick, smaller and paler, a stock of russet hair against the dark sea, turned in circles, arms outstretched. I watched them and felt a motherly love, which was almost immediately followed by an urge to be something more than mother, wife and teacher. Something beyond the horizon.

  Gusts of North Sea wind snatched my breath and smacked at my cheeks. Sea spume dampened my skin. I pulled off socks and shoes and ran into the water, jumping over the surf as I’d done as a child. The sea was singing in my ears and the tide’s rhythm was a pulse in my brain. On the hillside behind us, in our rented cottage, stacks of school books, test papers and progress sheets lay waiting for me on the kitchen table. To hell with them. As I ran through the water, I thought of the soulless school where I worked – where numbers on paper had become more important than children. I thought of my blunted soul and the dullness in my brain, and I feared I had inherited my father’s depression. I looked again at the horizon. What if?

  I ran after the boys and grabbed Jamie.

  ‘How about we cycle to Istanbul? When you’ve finished school. Would you come with me?’

  Jamie shrugged with the nonchalance of a fifteen-year-old and said, ‘Yeah, why not.’

  Patrick laughed and danced around us, kicking up sand. ‘If you two cycle to Istanbul together, I’ll eat my hat, I’ll eat my hat, I’ll eat my hat!’

  Maybe Patrick was right: long-distance cyclists were usually bearded, lean and muscle-bound. I was a fifty-year-old woman, definitely not lean and definitely not muscle-bound, and, thank goodness, not yet sporting a beard. Long-distance cyclists were young and single and free of responsibilities. I had a husband and two children – and a job that helped pay the bills. Would Jamie even consider cycling with his mother when he was eighteen? But the idea of cycling to Istanbul had taken
hold and wouldn’t let go.

  *

  It wasn’t just a fear of depression that came from my father – it was his restlessness too.

  He sat in the care home, body slumped in the armchair, white hair thinning, face and hands covered in liver spots. ‘Helen, Helen,’ he said with a small smile as I greeted him. ‘You were always wandering off.’

  He took me off-guard in that moment, for he’d closed down years ago, decades even. Like a beach-hut shored up for winter, he’d battened down the hatches and stopped communicating beyond the smallest of small talk that tailed off into silence after minutes. Mostly his eyes were closed, his mind somewhere out of reach. Now this echo from the past.

  ‘You were an awful wee girl.’

  My father always said contentment was the most desirable state of mind, and though he could sit for hours staring peacefully out at a world filled with his birds, he also possessed a restiveness. He would drive us children across the cracked and pot-holed roads of Ireland, sometimes for two or three hours, all for a soggy sandwich on a rainy beach and a quick runaround before we did the long journey home again. It should have dampened my own wanderlust. But it didn’t.

  The dunes that backed so many of the beaches we drove to were a miniature landscape in my childish imagination: where sandy paths between grasses became roads that rose to mountaintops or dipped down to the great spaces of desert plains. I’d stand at the crest of dunes, holding my breath, then launch myself off, a landslide of sand giving beneath my feet, stick-thin limbs out of control, reeds pricking my calves.

  My father offered me coastal adventures. And birds. The herring gulls were my first: brutish, in-your-face and as hungry as a seaside slot machine. I couldn’t fail to notice them. They dived down for my fallen chips, their cries coarser than trawler rope. I’d make up stories for everything: the gulls, the rocks and the dune systems. I lived in the inner world of my imagination, filled with eerie and fantastic fairy-tales.

  In the care home, he was speaking again. ‘We couldn’t keep track of you. You were always getting lost.’

  I wanted to say, I was never lost, but this was his narrative and the storyline had been fixed a long time ago. In his mind. I thought of telling him about my plan to cycle to Istanbul, then didn’t.

  When did we start to walk out of step? I had wandered woodland, meadow and shoreline with him, struggling to learn the names of more elusive birds, my small hand folded into his larger stubby one; my hand growing in his, over the years of my childhood. Had I not learned the call of the road from him?

  Daughter, Mother – I’d never felt entirely at ease in my roles. Wife too. Tom held me close the night before Jamie and I left.

  ‘I don’t want you to go,’ he said, placing his cheek on mine. ‘You know I’ve always supported you in whatever you want to do, but now the time is here … well, I’m afraid.’

  I was afraid, too, but the panniers were packed and the ferry booked. And my mind was elsewhere, out of reach …

  … on the North Sea.

  The Rhine.

  The Danube.

  The Black Sea.

  The Sea of Marmara.

  Asia.

  PART ONE

  WESTERN EUROPE

  NETHERLANDS

  1. Waterways

  From deep within the bowels of the ferry, I thought I heard the thrum of the engine spluttering and dying away. I strained my ears, wondering why the engines would cut out, then relief as I heard the low throb again. I turned over to sleep, but now my mind birled in tune with the rhythmic turning of the ship’s engine.

  What if my sit-up-and-beg bicycle was too heavy to ride across Europe? What if the panniers were too cumbersome? And beyond the Germanic countries where I’d lived and studied the language, how would I manage in the Balkans, where I would understand little or nothing? How would we ward off the packs of dogs that supposedly roamed the roads beyond Vienna? And what about the Gypsies everyone warned against? How would I manage the hills after Hungary? What if we got lost? What if one of us became ill, or had an accident? What if one of the bicycles broke down far from anywhere? How would I sustain a long-distance cycle over three and a half months? And how would I manage without Tom? He organised us all: took my dreams and gave them shape, made them reality, sorted out the practical details. And how would Tom and Patrick, both hot-headed Celts, manage without me – the go-between in their heated arguments? And what about my ninety-two-year-old father? What if he took ill? What would I do then?

  Jamie’s breathing was quiet and even, unperturbed by the imagined stumbling heartbeat of the ship, or the cycle ahead. He’d told his friends he was going to cycle across Europe, though failed to tell them he was travelling with his mother. But he’d made a promise so he would keep it.

  *

  Back in Hull, we’d struggled up the spiral roadway leading to the boat, laughing at our lack of fitness as we pushed down on the pedals. ‘Luckily, this is the only hill we’re going to see for quite a while,’ I grimaced.

  That evening on the ferry, we talked late into the night, giddy from cider and the idea of the 3,000-mile journey ahead. Jamie talked more to me that evening than he had in the previous year – prised away from his online world and computer games. I listened to his voice above the hum of the ship. So, this is what my son’s voice sounds like. This is what he thinks. I smiled. Jamie took life head-on as it came to him. He was the ‘even keel’ in our passionate household, cutting through the noise with his level-headedness. He was our calming influence.

  We emerged from the fume-filled belly of the ferry on the first day of May into the man-made world of Rotterdam’s Europoort, eyes blinking in the milky light of spring. It felt as if we’d wheeled our bikes into a virtual gameshow: the grass too green, surfaces too smooth, lines too straight and buildings too angular. The Netherlands seemed devoid of texture and curve, or the worn scruffiness that characterised my own islands. I liked it just the same.

  Centuries ago, it had been different. Flat-bottomed Dutch boats with their billowing sails and chubby paddles had been forced to sail through the wild salt marshes of South Holland for days, even weeks, before reaching the North Sea. By the nineteenth century, the engineering-obsessed Dutch had fashioned the Nieuwe Waterweg, or New Waterway, a large canal that connected the Rhine and the Meuse with the sea. The meandering rivulets and wetlands gave way to dredged, dammed and channelled waterways.

  At the dock, the border guard glanced at our passports and waved us on into a Europe of endless horizons and open borders. I wobbled off on Gertrude, my Dutch-style bike. The weight of my panniers felt strange, as did the knowledge that I was pedalling into the unknown. I was a temporary migrant, forging a path across Europe against the rising tide of refugees coming in the opposite direction. I felt a lightness of head at odds with the heavy weight of my bike.

  Cycling away from Europoort, we sailed into the geometry of manicured meadows, ruler-straight canals and intercepting roadways. There was still a feeling of being at sea on this reclaimed land, in the flatness of the topography and its watery veins, and in the sensation that something was shifting beneath us. There was something shifting in me too. I just couldn’t say what exactly, except it was a feeling of coming to after a long sleep.

  We continued alongside the A15, past concrete factories, chimney stacks and pale storage towers arranged in orderly rows like cheese wedges. Beyond, pylons, wind turbines and petrochemical refineries claimed the horizon, along with the city tower blocks of Greater Rotterdam. But there was also the smell of freshly baked bread wafting through the air, reminding me that a semi-organic world still existed between the factories and geometrical lines. On the lawn-short strip of grassy peninsula between the Voedingskanaal and the Breise, we scattered sheep, goats, geese and ducks as we rode along. Mute swans drifted down the canal in ballerina gracefulness, fast-pedalling feet beneath the surface belying the effortless glide above the water.

  It seemed I couldn’t escape my father. I sensed
his presence in the songbirds and waterbirds that claimed the Dutch canals and rivers. Like me, he was drawn to water: the Irish Sea, the Atlantic, Lough Neagh and the Bann and Lagan rivers. As Jamie and I cycled on into the Dutch day, he flittered in and out of my vision – a flash of memory, a burst of song. Before his depression, whistling and snatches of hymns – or the teasing mimicry of pets and birds – had filled our house. And, occasionally, a frost of voice or silence that stopped you in your tracks.

  My early life with him had been filled with walks through farmland close to our home on Wood Lane or down at the bird-filled lough. This wild place of bog and water, just two miles away from my house, was a hostile place of reedbeds and midges, but migrant birds happily wheeled in from Africa in summer, while overwintering birds flew down from Canada, Iceland, Greenland and the Russian Arctic. It was a place my birdwatching father returned to again and again.

  As I cycled along, I wondered what it was about birds that drew us to them, even subconsciously. Was it their music of the sky? The freedom of wing that allows them to travel thousands of miles over oceans? Their disregard for borders? Seeing the bent wing of the snow-white whooper swan, like Japanese origami against the slate-grey of Irish sky on Lough Neagh, had made my heart flutter. I imagined as a child that if I dared to touch those great white wings, I’d feel the exotic iciness of a far-flung North. If I hung on to its long, muscled neck and commanded it to take me to the icecaps and snowfields of its Icelandic home, I would see the Northern Lights. I envied its freedom in the air – its strong, downward beat of wing across the ocean. My father was warier of the swans on Lough Neagh as one had attacked him when he was younger. He felt happier among the beige greylag geese, with their orange-bright beaks and feet, another winter visitor at Oxford Island on our lough.

  Now on the Dutch lowlands, I watched the familiar fawn and white of geese reach for the sky above the pylons, their harsh honks echoing in the chilled May air. And for a moment I was that child again on the lough with my father, when life was sweet and uncomplicated and full of love.