There is now a genre “people writing about their connection to wild animals” and in my experience two stand out: H is for Hawk and Raising Hare. This one is remarkably insightful and like the other two, successfully interests us in the human involved and what the human thinks.
Frieda Hughes is a poet and a painter and was living in the countryside in Wales during the time George was with her. And I can’t fail to mention that she is the daughter of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes. She speaks about the worst aspect of losing her work as The Times poetry columnist, which was that when she began that job, it gave her a title other than “daughter of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes,” a guaranteed conversation-stopper.
Her great hope for the move to Wales was to find a permanent location where she could create a house and garden that pleased her and would enable her to write and paint happily for years. She was happy with the mountain of work it would take to make the house comfortable. She loved creating the garden, hard physical labor that helped her maintain her health. This was interrupted when she had a relapse of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome.
George comes into the picture when a storm overturned the nest where he and his magpie siblings were; they didn’t survive, but she did save George. I’ve long had an aversion to birds generally, but one flying around the house, shitting everywhere is unthinkable to me. Magpies, a member of the corvidae family, are intelligent birds and I love all the stories about their long memories and mischievous ways. They are famous for secreting food and bright-colored objects in spots which they amazingly remember. George liked to land on the heads of people, a habit that suited the author despite his clutching claws. Neighbors and people who came to the house to work were not so charmed. He had an especially bad connection with Mary, who came to clean the house weekly and protecting her was very difficult.
Like Chloe Dalton, who wrote about the wild hare she raised, Hughes understood at least theoretically that she must recognize that George needed to live in the wild. Unlike Dalton, she gave him a name and wished he had been more connected to her as a pet. Ultimately, he did leave before she finished the large aviary she was building for him and she grieved for him. After he left she took in a dying crow and cared for him to the end of his life, letting him rest on her shoulder while she worked at her desk, never mind that his shit ran down her back. She reported that by the time she finished writing the book, she had eleven owls.
Throughout the book, Hughes refers to her human companion as “the ex,” and she makes clear why their lives together ended after an intense and happy love when they were in Australia. She describes her terrible physical ailments which disappeared within days of the departure of “the ex.”
Frieda Hughes, George: A Magpie Memoir, first published in Britain by Profile Books Ltd, 2023, 272 pages. Not available in the public library.
Haha!