WAITING FOR WINGS

Up in the attic with the window ajar in implausibly glacial late April.

A wafer of ice has made sorbet of the bird's water dish and the bee-bath. I shatter it when I'm out scattering mealworms, filling feeders, dispensing lard and suet. Back up in my den I nudge the window wider. The chill's going to be worth it.

This morning I'm listening for something special.

I'm waiting for wings.

The Red Arrows are staging a fly past from RAF Scampton. Scheduled to pass over Robin Hood Airport at Finningley quarter of an hour later, they're flying east as far as Humberside Airport before heading back to Scampton.

Aircraft out of Doncaster regularly cruise low over my roof, at hundreds of feet instead of many thousands. Thrilling yet unnerving. Imagining their wings against this stainless blue sky, anticipating the rumble as they soar over, was what set my fingers notching the window sash onto the latch.

Through the open glass can I hear goldcrests zithering in the conifers over the road at the old farm, rippling further off in the grounds of the Grange. A chaffinch is doing his impersonation of a cricketer running up to the wicket to bowl a spinning googly, the fall of notes at the end of his trilling phrase bouncing down from the Ash tree through the budding leaves. Greenfinch tops the linden, whistling nasally in long coils of whoop. My ear catches the cross tutting of Blackbirds fighting over supplies of sustenance on the patio. Dunnocks are flying off the handle. Robins are in a song contest knockout against their rivals with a medley of their hits where the lyrics always sound like "Do you know who I am?"

There are already babies to feed. I've not seen any in feathery person yet. I only know because their parents' gathering outweighs their grazing. I'm hoping the frosty night hasn't taken them by surprise. You can't throw on an extra heated blanket when your bed's a few twigs in a draughty hedge.

I never do see the Red Arrows, after all. The clock hands sweep past the moment of their homing. The planes must have headed out to the coast and back without darkening these inland skies. The tilted roofs with their aerials sucking signals from the sky, the telegraph wires swinging liquorice skipping ropes in the playground of nippy air are satisfied with the sunshine.

With the window open, I can see sparrows giddying along the eaves, inches from my upturned eyes, skippy shadows fluttering, overwound clockwork automata driven by the ceaseless chivvying of their hungry youngsters from their playpens in the roof.

I think I got the best of it.

I know I did.

It was worth the wait.

I witnessed the wings that make the future brighter.

Young Wood Pigeon - more wings to watch for in Spring

ATTIC

When I was little, I dreamed of writing in a magical attic.

I dreamed of just having an attic!

Back then, in Railway Cottages, painted Railway Green with Railway-regulation paint, we didn't have one. No attic to go writing and dreaming in. Only a dusty cockloft where my dad would store those once-a-year, just-in-case household items, reachable only by adults, only by ladder. Only an outside loo and a coal-shed of similar compact dimensions in our little yard, where the zinc bath hung from the brickwork, the bath we filled with kettle-and-panfuls of boiling water the night before school.

But I wrote all the time. On the dining table. On the three-legged tipsy stool my granddad made. On the dressing table surrounded by scary mirrors that made you look every which way into the shadows in the corners in the fading lemon light. On my lap. On the couch in the front room with the big light on before tea. In my bedroom. In the garden, where steam trains whooshed by and sometimes sizzled to a stop at our branch line station, spiriting my imagination away to wondrous unknown horizons beyond our valley.

I was writing my world a word at a time but still I would dream of my writing attic. Was it out there, lonely, waiting for me?

I dreamed the Moon would peep in through the little window set into the roof, peeking encouragingly at my scribblings. The sparrows would twitter in their cosy nests under the eaves, urging me on to tell them stories.

I've lived in many houses, many manses, flats, digs and dives since those dreams first melted into maybe.

Then one day, illness sneaked up, smacked my hands off the wheel of working, dismantled my strength, drained my batteries, clogged my muscles and bones with rubbery uneven pain, fogged my clarity, burgled me of my old whirlwind of energy, pickled my possibilities.

I moved here, forcibly retired with half my life still not written.

A little rented house in a village where woods, streams, fields and wandery ways have crept close enough for me to visit them on my better days. A garden full of flowers that imagine themselves into colourful calendars of the passing seasons. Eaves laden with sparrows and a clear southern view to track the Moon sashaying her catwalk arc towards the west.

And guess what else was waiting here for me?

My attic.

My writing space. My rooftop chamber of dreams.

I feel so blessed. I feel its joy, its sigh of relief surrounding me as I write.

I hope I was as worth its wait!