Part 2

But he told her his name, the name he’s now inhabiting. Hannah told him her French name. She told him she didn’t have papers.

He told her how he’d picked up an actual Bentley on the road. What? She didn’t know what a Bentley was? He laughed. A Bentley was an English car, a very fine one, and it had been abandoned, door hanging open, engine still running, by English people rushing to get the last ship that’d take them back to England. He’d also picked up on the same road a bicycle left the same way, he’d tied the lid of the boot down on it and driven as far as he could get.

When the car ran out of petrol he got on the bike and cycled the rest of the way to Toulon. He’d met the gardeners there. They pass as gardeners.

They’re pretty good gardeners, too. They garden all across the Midi.

Ever been? he said. You’ll like it.

He sorted it. He got her papers. He got her across the zone line. It won’t be non-occupied for long. The Italians want it. The Germans will let them have it till they decide to take it for themselves.

He never asked her about anything.

She told him about her mother, said that what she was telling him had happened to someone else’s mother. This other person’s mother’d been ill and medicines were forbidden and dying and nurses were forbidden.

Meanwhile the thugs took the flat and everything in it.

Now there’s no need to tell me anything else, he said.

He gave her the bicycle.

He told her laughter was the best way to conceive, so whatever she did, best not to laugh. Then he made her really laugh. It was impossible not to; he was an excellent mimic. He mimicked the concierge. He mimicked the Nazis.

He mimicked the Maréchal watering his red white and blue flowers in his Azur garden. He mimicked any film star she could name, could do Colbert and Gable. He mimicked the grim woman at the baker’s. He made her laugh at all of it and then he held her body in a way that completely understood her, he was good at doing her too, then, a whole other kind of mimicry.

She’d woken, she’d thought he’d be gone. He was still there next to her, smoking a cigarette. The light was coming up outside.

New day, he said.

There was a caterpillar in my dream, she said. It was walking the length of a rifle. It’s a sign, what do you think?

In which direction was the caterpillar heading? he asked.

Away from the handle towards the shooting end, she said.

Away from the trigger, he said.

Yes, she said.

Good, he said. If you’re going to get shot, don’t get shot by a caterpillar.

Tell it you’ll wait to be shot by the butterfly.

That’s when she told him the first real thing about herself, by mistake.

(It was dangerous. You had to blank your brain. You had to think way beyond yourself. Life depended on it, and not just your own. Her father, her brother. Her mother was safe in heaven dead, thank God.

You had to not know, to know as little as you could. You had to find new ways of thinking and saying and not saying everything and anything.) She’d spoken thoughtlessly openly about her father and how he liked to catch butterflies, and to kill them, pin them behind glass. She regretted it as soon as she did. Her stomach dropped inside her. She felt sick. She thought she might well be sick any moment.

But Claude shrugged, flicked the done cigarette into last night’s dirty water in the washing bowl.

You can’t put a pin through a summer, he said.

They’d kissed, got up, got ready for the day.

What she knew about Claude was that he was a man who could make damp newspaper catch light and burn.

Because of him she’d be warm enough through a cold winter.

—

Mad dogs and Englishmen. We’re out in the Midi sun.

Hannah puts her face against the shawl that’s round the child when she says it, so close that the shawl is partly in her mouth making her words not actual words, so nobody can possibly have heard her say anything, or anything meaningful.

The city of flowers – the bright coast under the bright blue sky next to the bright blue sea, with its flower fields on the hills above it in a riot of bloom for the perfume industry – is ragged with refugees.

Some of the big hotels are making a fortune because some of the refugees still have money. Most of the smaller hotels are going under.

After Claude goes, she has to move. She chooses this city. She chooses the hotel she’ll stay in by the delight on the face of the woman who comes to the door when she sees the baby.

When the woman tells her a name Hannah replaces it instantly. The name the woman said is gone. Her name in Hannah’s head is now Madame Etienne.

It’s Madame Etienne, young and sweet, so keen that she runs up the stairs ahead of Hannah and the baby and waits on each landing for them to catch her up, who opens a door in the slope of the roof and shows her a room.

It’s worn, I know, Madame Etienne says now toeing a rip in the carpet.

But if Madame Albert will look. It has the sea.

Madame Etienne is quite lovely to the baby. She also promises with all her heart that some days there’ll be more than just turnip for supper. She does this with a wink in case she can’t fulfil her promise. She tells Hannah, whom she refers to respectfully and repeatedly as Madame Albert, as if Hannah is twenty years older than she is, which she isn’t, they’re clearly about the same age, that last night at one of the cinemas in the town the authorities had come in and made the staff turn the houselights up! So they could pick out whoever was shouting or throwing things at the screen whenever the Maréchal or Hitler or Mussolini came on!

She tells her this with an air of blithe disconnect, same as you’d say, but it’s raining! or, what a lovely day! or, look at that funny-faced dog, it does make me laugh! or, you’re wearing such a pretty blouse today!

Her husband, she tells Hannah in the same jolly manner while she punches a pillow into better shape, told her last night when they were listening to the radio that people caught listening to Les Français parlent aux Français can be fined up to 10,000 francs and also put in prison! For two years! Does this room please Madame Albert?

Very much, Hannah says.

Madame Etienne pulls open the bottom drawer of a chest of drawers. She pulls it out as far as it’ll come. She takes a blanket off the bed, goes down on her knees and folds the blanket into the drawer like a thick lining then tucks the pillow in at one end. She stands up leaving the drawer open and gestures to it like a ballerina might, but with no idea of the delicacy of her own gesture.

For the child to sleep in, she says. Does Madame Albert think it’s good?

Does she think it is too small?

I think it will work very well, Hannah says.

Madame Etienne kisses the baby one more time then flurries out and down the stairs.

Hannah sits on the bed in the room.

The baby kicks her legs.

Claude, gone.

Three others from the group, also vanished.

They’re dead.

He’s dead.

She hopes for his sake he’s dead.

She’s here to do his job, to meet a cousin at one of the big hotels tomorrow.

She dandles the baby, sings the song about horses going to market and coming home again. The baby laughs.

The baby is beginning to form words already and wants to test the strength of her legs, every chance she gets bracing herself against her mother.

It is a happy baby, which is a lucky thing.

Hannah spends the days between the child and despair. There’s a happiness in these days that’s unquantifiable up against the foulness.

In the first days here she goes out with the baby in her arms along the Promenade des Anglais with its vegetable gardens in the lovely sun.

Almost every day she does this she reminds herself that a child makes you too visible, that too many people will start to recognize you.

She walks the baby back to their hotel room again.

Even so, the days since the baby came pass so fast it’s as if they’re jealous of happinesses.

She meets the go-between every fifth day of the week, always in a different place. The go-between, for now, is a fourteen year old schoolgirl who gives her name as Sylvie.

Sylvie is as simple as a wooden door; she is plain and elegant, closed and solid, locked. Hannah gives her the bicycle, indicates without saying that it’s a gift. Sylvie understands, nods impassive thanks with all the articulacy of such a door.

Don’t underestimate the articulacy of a wooden door. Everything has a voice. What Sylvie is made of has its own good seasoned voice, even in a girl still so young.

Sylvie settles in to being the usual contact. It works well. They pass each other in the appointed street or square at the appointed times. As they do, Hannah slips the packet of papers into the basket of the bicycle under Sylvie’s folded raincoat or under the (very) occasional slab of meat wrapped in the brown paper, or the turnips or beets or chard she’s delivering to the big hotels.

One day Sylvie takes Hannah’s wrist in her small hand as she manoeuvres the packet under the food.

For you, Madame, she says.

She hands Hannah a folded cone of paper. She puts a foot on one pedal, swings herself up on to the seat and she’s gone.

Hannah opens the paper cone. It’s full of wild strawberries.

That’s a locked wooden door for you.

Then there are the hours of the day when Hannah does nothing but sit and watch the baby asleep in the drawer, like the baby’s afloat in a tiny boat.

Hannah herself is a broken-oared boat on a sea so wild she already knows any minute she’ll be flotsam.

So.

What will I make of my broke broken self?

She watches the child breathe and shift in her sleep. Rilke says that by having a child at all you’ve already served that child its own death, placed it in the mouth of the child like a little ball of greyed bread, the core of the loveliest apple.

Her own parents, did they know this feeling? And theirs before them?

And theirs before them, too? And yet, no anger.

Instead, the last word of that poem is the word unbeschreiblich. The knowledge defies words.

The baby breathes in.

The baby breathes out.

Her mouth is so small and so here.

Wer den Dichter will versteh’n, muss in Dichters Lande geh’n. Translate it, for your brother.

If you want to understand the poet, visit poet-land.

I’m in poet-land now for sure. This is time on another plane.

Weeks pass.

(The baby gets too big for the drawer.)

Hannah passes on the papers.

(The child breathes in, out, in.)

She sorts the tickets to Lyon, a little food, the instructions.

(The child is beginning to form words into phrases.) There’s a silk map to pass on to a contact in Switzerland who’ll pass it on to London.

More people to disappear.

Hannah has to travel north.

(Madame E minds the child on the days when Hannah’s away. The child throws her arms open when Hannah comes back.)

This week there are two groups. One of seven kids. They’re to look like they’re on a hike. Sort the right clothes.

(Soon Hannah is leaving the child at the hotel for days on end.) This week five adults. Check the health, the stamina, sort the papers.

More can go wrong with adults. Locals are more uneasy when they see adults crossing land. Kids they tend to care about much less. The guides have to look like the kind of young people who’ll lead other young people on a hike.

(Madame Etienne and her husband, a man who looks thoughtful, says nothing and can mend anything that’s broken, welcome the cash.) The laws change. Now you have to be ten kilometres inside the Swiss border before the Swiss will let you stay. Check the stamina.

North.

Then back south.

North.

Then south.

There are so many nights now when Hannah’s not with the child.

On those nights, before she goes to sleep, wherever she is, she sits and imagines the child on her knee and herself singing the horse going to market song to the child.

Whether she’s with the child or not she tells the child a story before sleep.

Like the one about the summer day that argued with the gods about never wanting to be over.

I will last for ever! the summer day said. Night will never fall! Winter will never come!

Well, the gods all laughed like they’d heard the best joke, the funniest thing ever. Because as soon as someone or something says to the gods, this is the way things are, this is the way they’ll be, the gods and goddesses gather at the balcony and they look down over it at our nothing-much world, us running about on its surface like ants, and it’s worth noting, they’re sometimes cruel, the gods. They like a laugh, they laugh at us sometimes so much that they have to hold their sides so their sides won’t split with the laughing and all their godliness leak out of them. Best never to split a god.

And here was a summer day, asking to be longer. As if a summer’s day wasn’t long enough.

One of the gods stopped laughing and threw out a sudden lightning strike made of ice and the lovely blue sky of the summer day was gone. In its place was a great mass of clouds, black and grey. And from those clouds it isn’t rain that fell, but snow. Big fluffy flakes of snow fell on the hottest day in July. They were so big that as they fell they stuck to each other and became a lot of little snowballs. And a summer’s day feels long, though it isn’t any longer than a winter’s day really, but that day, in the light that went on till late in the evening, so much snow fell that if you’d been standing on the doorstep the snow that fell would have reached as high as your nose.

The child put her hand on her nose.

It covered all the summer flowers. Their petals shivered and shrank.

No! the child said.

She covered her mouth with her hands.

But the next day, Hannah said. What happened then?

Sum, the child said.

Yes. Summer sun. The sun melted all the snow away. Some poor flowers had been scorched by the cold, though, because cold can burn you just like heat can.

Poor fowr, the child said.

But most of them raised their heads to the sun, Hannah said, and what did they do?

Hirsy, the child said.

That’s right. They were thirsty. They drank all the melted snow. And after a while there were soon more flowers. And there were butterflies, and bees, who visited the flowers to make honey and to make the fruit grow on the trees, and make more flowers open.

And the new summer day bowed its head and it said to the gods, I’m sorry I asked to live for longer than the length of the day I am. And the gods on the balcony bowed politely back to the summer day, and the townspeople of the city of flowers saw the flowers slowly lifting their heads after the sudden frost, and they were glad to have the flowers back, even for the short time a flower lasts. The townspeople knew that the flowers only last a summer, that a summer is soon over. So, they said – what did they say?

What we ache, the child said.

That’s right, she said. What will we make of this. So what did they make?

Very big fume, the child said.

A very big bottle of perfume. And when the summer was gone and the autumn and the winter came?

Nos, the child said.

That’s right, they opened the bottle and they put their nose to its opening and they sniffed, and enjoyed the lovely perfume. And what did they remember?

Fowr, the child said.

The flowers, Hannah said.

Other nights she tells the child about the children who sleep all night under the stars under a canvas in the marketplace in town, so they’ll be first in the queue for the next morning’s vegetables.

What are they? she says to the child.

Cever, the child says.

That’s right. They’re clever, she says.

She tells the child the story of the mother who has to go away and leave her baby, and that it doesn’t mean the mother doesn’t love her baby, it means she loves her baby how much?

Venor, the child says.

That’s right, Hannah says. Even more.

When the fields go dark, your eyes go bright, Hannah says one night.

Soon a star starts to shine, and the insects sing the night. Every sound becomes a picture, everything you thought you knew, turns strange and dark in the pale sky, but the tops of the trees get brighter too. And you don’t notice as you pass, how the dark makes the light grow, till light frees itself from the darkness, and it holds you as you go.

Old poem written by the son of a woodsman. When the light touches the tops of the poem’s trees the child flickers, closes her eyes.

Hannah puts her own hands over her own eyes.

The Italians are gone.

The Nazis are all over town.

She tucks the child into the bed, slips downstairs and asks Madame Etienne if she can have a word.

Madame Etienne pours three glasses of something that looks and smells like actual brandy. She sets them on the table.

It’s the real thing, Madame Albert, she says.

She gestures in her graceful way for Hannah to sit down.

Hannah, still standing, tells her that work has become very pressing.

Yes, Madame Etienne says.

Hannah asks her if she and her husband will let the child live with them permanently if she should happen to be away for a length of time.

I mean as a paying guest, of course, she says. Because your good care for us both means I know she’ll be safe here. But the likelihood is that I’ll be away for a long time.

Frown lines appear in Madame Etienne’s pretty forehead.

We won’t take any money, Madame Albert, she says. We don’t ever need money for this.

I insist, Hannah says.

She puts a roll of notes in the pocket of Madame Etienne’s apron.

You’ll teach her to read, she says.

Madame Etienne nods.

Thank you, Hannah says.

Madame Etienne calls her husband. He comes through from the kitchen drying his hands and stands with them both round the table.

His wife tells him, shows him the money.

I’ll come as often as I can, Hannah says. If it looks like something’s likely to change, I’ll come back straight away and collect her.

Paul, my love, Madame Etienne says.

Hannah hasn’t even known his name till now.

She can’t know his name.

She can’t have his name in her head.

She blanks it.

She can’t have her own child’s name in her head. Of course she knows it, it’s written all through her. But she is disciplined. She is ready. She vanishes it all the time.

To do this she imagines a gravestone, a headstone, but with nothing written on it.

That’s her child.

What shall we drink to? the wife asks the husband.

Brotherhood, he says.

They clink the glasses.

—

My dear old (decrepit) (ha ha) summer brother (I will always be younger than you and there’s nothing you can do about it)

Here’s something of a self portrait. It’s of me walking towards you.

Recognize me?

Shows how long it’s been since I did any drawing. I’m very out of practice. But it’s me. Dear Dani. It’s been a long time. I’m cancelling out that long time by writing something of the time down, on paper which, you will be interested to know, I’ve very neatly torn, without hurting the book, out of the back of a copy of Gide’s Prometheus.

Dani, when I think of you it’s of us sitting saying our something and our nothing in the sunlight, and I’ve always got one of my arms slung round your shoulders, at least in my imagination if not in actuality because I know how hard you’d punch my arm if I did it in real life.

I often think of the care you always take with me. Your kindness in putting up with my bluntness and my snobberies, your taking such real pains, and it was, I’m sure, very much a pain! to have to listen and try to understand me, but you always did, you always do try, with such good grace putting up with even my most impenetrable and argumentative and obtuse demands on you.

We said we’d write and we’d burn what we wrote. You remember?

The heat that will come off this note when I burn it will alter the balance of heat and cold in the world in its own way.

That energy I send your way.

Look at me. Hopeless. It’s like I can’t help but be grandiose in English.

So I will say it plainly.

I think of you.

I think of father.

I hope he’s not too ill and his spirit not too low, and not making your own spirit go low.

I will see you after this is all over.

I’m looking forward to that.

Here’s my news.

I have a child now.

!

She looks like her father, who was a good friend to me.

She also looks, in certain light, quite like you.

For me this is a good sign! The days when I see my brother in her make me wildly happy.

I don’t know that I believe in gods enough to ask of them. But if they exist and I might be so bold as to say, excuse me, if you’re there can you please make that sunlit summer day longer and these dark days shorter –

remember the story mother used to tell us? well she definitely told me at least, about the summer day and the gods, and she used to list the gods? I realize now that what she was doing was teaching me gods, since nothing was ever not a bit prussian and instructive one way or another with our fine mother. Well.

The good gods, I ask them all in all their guises, the whole panoply of Pans, and Zeuses, and Dianas, and Floras and Poseidons and Persephones, and Brighids and Maeves, and Apollos and Athenas and Minervas and Marses and Odins and Thors, and Mercurys and Hermeses and Baldurs and Plutos and Demeters and Neptunes and Venuses, and Bacchuses and Bentens and Kores and Kalis, and Gamas, and Artemises, the Gods and the Allahs and Buddhas, all the other ancients, the ones whose names I don’t have in my head right now, hope they’ll forgive me, there are so many – most of all the Jupiters, above all I ask the Jupiters

that my girl will grow up

and that time will be kind to her.

Those bloody gods are laughing already. I can hear them.

God-laughter sounds like, well, right now, bullets hitting stone.

But they’d better not cross me on this.

You know she reminds me of us both.

She is so small and new but already she is quick, sensitive, argumentative (me), slow to anger (you), she sleeps like she’s a bearcub in hibernation (you), she doesn’t like the taste of turnip (us both, if I remember rightly, and a small daily disappointment given that there’s not much else to eat most days), she loves to be told a story (me), she is keen, from some inner stillness I have never had, to do right by people (you) and be good mannered and polite (definitely you), she is loyal (us both), she is soulful (you), also a laugher at everything, she finds unfunny things very funny (me, I think).

The other day she slid her foot under a pillow on the bed and then called me over to her as if to tell me something of great import to all the world’s nations. She flourished her arm in the air over her leg (with its foot under the pillow) and said like a little circus magician, Foot gone!

Then she pulled her foot out from under the pillow and said, with the same flourish, Look! Foot!

But most of all, I have never met anyone like her.

She is herself.

A child hardly formed, hardly speaking, and yet she is so much an assured and completed self already in some ways that she is often a puzzle to me and clearly regards me as a puzzle too, sometimes looks at me very questioningly.

I said to her one day when she was looking at me, who do you think you’re looking at? She replied, with real seriousness, you.

One other thing. She can sing, already, tunefully, and she knows without being told how to make up harmonies, and does them naturally.

She sits and sings to herself and I have heard her sing too with the lady who keeps the room we live in. Now this talent is definitely not one of ours.

It must come from her father.

In fact I owe to her harmony, dear Dani, what I thought tonight lying next to her as she fell asleep.

It’s that the foulness happening every day round us is a growth without roots. Goodness is more like turnip!

The foulness just wants one thing, more of its self. It wants self self self self nothing but self over and over again. I begin to realize that this makes it very like the blowaway moss that spreads fast across everything but can easily be kicked away because its grip is only about surface.

Just the act of thinking this kicks it loose and blows it away.

Big thoughts. You know me. I won’t spare you from them.

When I was a callow schoolgirl full of my own cleverness (yes all right dearest Dani I still am – at least the latter, if well past the former) I thought such a load of rot about things.

I really believed I could hold all the knowledge in me, all the narratives, all the poems, all the art, all the learning – and that this gathering and holding of all of these things meant I now owned these things and that to do this was the reason for living.

These days what do I know?

Close to nothing.

But one thing I do know now is that I don’t hold any of those things I thought I owned.

Instead, all those things hold me. They hold us all under the sky.

I’m about to burn this. Like we said we would.

I wonder if you’ve remembered?

Not that I doubt you. I never will.

Its warmth will reach you one way or another so rest assured

your autumn sister

sends it with love

to her summer brother.

15 June 2020

—

Dear Hero,

—

We haven’t yet met, and if you didn’t get my last letter you will wonder why someone you don’t know is writing to you. Suffice to say I am a friend and I am writing to send friendly wishes.

How are you?

I really hope you are well.

I’m sending this letter via our friends’ email this time so they will forward it to you wherever you are.

I’ve been doing some online studies into your name. It is an every day kind of thing to you, but believe me to the rest of us it is a pretty amazing thing to be called. First I looked up the Greek inventor and maths genius Hero, who pretty much invented the wind farm, was one of the first people to realize human beings can harness the wind for power, plus he invented the first engine powered by hot water and a very early form of self powering fountain. Apparently he was an atomist. I just shouted through to my little brother Robert who thinks he is teaching himself to play a violin in the next room, in other words he is making an appalling noise, and asked him about the atomists, and he tells me atomists believed that individuals are complete indivisible atoms, separate from each other, and if you take an atomist view then you are looking at separate parts of an idea or a subject rather than all the things that go to make up the whole thing. The good thing is, me asking him stopped him making that noise with the violin. But he has started again now.

I also found in folklore a female character called Hero – and the fact that it can also be a girl’s name really pleased me. Hero, the girl, was a Mythical Figure who was in love with Leander, a boy who would swim every night to Hero’s tower, lit up like a lighthouse. In the end though of course this turns into a tragic story. One night at the end of their summer of love a sea storm blew Hero’s tower’s light out and Leander got lost in the waves and drowned.

Well some old stories are like that!

I suppose this is so that we can deal with the sad things that happen to us.

Anyway the poet John Keats wrote a version of this story saying that Leander pretty much gets drowned by the light of Hero’s beauty. Like she

was the lighthouse. It seemed a bit sexist to me, so I made up my own poem: In the waves Leander

Went for a meander

Hit a spot of bother

And now he is quite other

Dear oh dear oh

Don’t worry Hero

Hero don’t cry

Love wil never die

Hope you don’t think it too cheeky. But I wanted to change an old hopeless story to something a bit funnier. I have really had enough of sadness.

There is so much this year. And we are lucky. None of us have been ill. But an old lady from across the road who went into a home last year, I don’t want to key in the word died, but she did, she died. So did twelve other people in the home she was in, over one weekend, and a careworker, and the healthworker who saw the careworker, who had symptoms. And one of the teachers from the primary school down the road from here. And an NHS

nurse my mother knew.

It is so sad.

Our postman is brilliant. His name is Sam and he works so hard it’s like encountering a small dynamo. He thinks he probably had it in March but he never had a test and still hasn’t been able to get one. It means he can’t go and see his family. His parents are elderly and miles away from here, in Blackpool. We also know more than fifty people in all who have had what sounds like it symptom-wise, but couldn’t get tested by anyone. So they don’t know, and they were really ill at home, like Sam, and scared, and no one helped them, and no official body has listed them in any statistics. A lot of my friends know a lot of people this happened to. Now the government wants them for antibodies and plasma but then nobody wanted to know, they were just left on their own thinking they were dying. And some of them did die.

My father’s business is garrotted. Right now we’d have no money for anything if it wasn’t for his partner Ashley, who is generously paying the bills and buying food not just for him but for us too, till my father can get any money out of the government, who keep saying he’s not valid for any.

Personally I had so many plans that now have had to be chucked out of the window that I am determined to make something better out of this time.

These teenage years are supposed to be amazing. I’m 16 and the highlight of my last three months has been watching crap movies on Netflix party with my friends.

But I believe one good thing that will come out of this is that my already trampled on generation will be evermore resilient. We will be aware of how lucky we are to spend time with our friends because we will know what it’s like to live without them. And by God we will treasure our freedoms and we will fight for them in the name of all that is good.

I also feel like we are shortchanging the thousands and thousands of people who have died – just by still being alive.

My brother Robert is holding out for medical geniuses to invent a vaccine. I am holding out for the geniuses who invent the vaccine to also be climate change geniuses.

Then we might have a future.

It is why, Hero, you along with all the key workers in the NHS and the people working so hard keeping things going, like Sam, are my heroes, along with the people fighting to protect climate, and every single person protesting what happened to George Floyd.

I have a vision that the modern sense of being a hero is like shining a bright light on things that need to be seen. I guess that if someone does this it brings its own consequences. For instance if you are a bright light on social media, then people get quite angry and will attack you equally as much as they are drawn like moths to your flame.

But now maybe we will realize that we have to stop being poisonous to each other and the world. I know how naive that is, because poisonous stuff has never stopped happening. Our history class on zoom was zoombombed with a porn image which we all saw, for example. But I guess there will always be porn and poison, and human beings will always have to decide whether to be poisonous to others or not, whether we are in a pandemic or not.

I suppose what has happened here and all over the world in these few months with the lockdown has given us all a very mild dose of what it is like every day for you. I know it is not at all the same, nothing like being kept in prison conditions – and this when you are not a criminal.

It is also amazing to me that you might now not be in detention any more and might be homeless with nobody knowing where you are. Our friend wrote and told us that people in detention have just quietly been getting released but with nowhere to go or to stay and no money to survive on.

Dear Hero, I hope you are okay. I have to say it is amazing to me that the thing that gets people let out of illegal indefinite detention when they are

innocent in the first place is a virus – not a more kindly human nature, or understanding, or a good law. I’m also quite worried for someone else I know, who is homeless. The news says homeless people have been give rooms in hotels. I’ve no idea if he got one or not. Why would we do these things for people only when there is a virus and not all the time?

But these are not the only reason I am writing.

I am writing again because the swifts came back! I was shouting with happiness in the street when I saw them in the sky. There aren’t as many as last year apparently, but all the same they are here.

I’ve just realized, if you didn’t get my last letter you won’t know what I’m talking about. In it I wrote at length about my favourite birds – the swifts.

They always come back to the same nesting place they left last year if they can, so long as it hasn’t been renovated and made into an AirBnB – which no one except swifts can stay at now anyway because of the virus! I can’t help but find that funny though I know a lot of people will be angry about it.

The swifts have come across the world singly not with their mate. They meet up when they get back to the nesting place. They stay together for life when it comes to having their babies here. Then when they’ve had them they split up till they meet again next year for more mating. It seems to me it might save a few marriages if human beings did this too for 3/4 of the year.

The nests they have are like small flat rings made of feathers and paper or stuff they collect in the air. They glue it all together with their saliva in a little ring shape or shallow bowl or cup shape that will hold the eggs in place. Then they take turns incubating or keeping the eggs warm. Their babies hatch out with a day between each one so that it’s not too full on for the parent swifts. Nature is so intelligent.

In pictures of what their babies look like right now they’re nothing like swifts yet, more like grotesque pink skin bags with no feathers, huge heads that look heavy to lift, eyes that can’t yet see.

But nature’s so clever that the babies can go into a kind of comatose state if the parents for some reason don’t come back with food, and can last quite a long time in case of misfortune to a parent or bad weather.

Even without misfortune the parents have to work pretty hard collecting something like 1,000 flies and insects each and every time they go out, which they keep in pouches in their throats rolled together into a food ball and deliver on their return to their baby swifts.

So if you see or hear them now above you, you can be pretty sure what they are doing is collecting food. Soon their babies will be doing push ups in the nesting place with their wings, strengthening themselves for the long flight back to Africa. What is really astounding is that when they fledge and leave the nest it’s the first time that they actually fly anywhere, and as soon as they hit the air they won’t touch down again for at least a year, more usually a couple of years.

Six weeks or so from now, that’s when they’ll leave.

‘That’s the summer over’ my mother will say when we look up at a swiftless sky.

But not yet!

There are still some weeks left.

Whenever you hear them above you, remember they also bring friendly greetings from me.

Best wishes and good health to you.

I hope you get this letter,

with warm wishes

from your friend

Sacha

(Greenlaw)