In that inconceivable yet inevitable war still to come—Teddy’s war—Alouette was the name of 425 Squadron, the French Canadians. In February of ’44, not long before his last flight, Teddy made an emergency landing at their base at Tholthorpe, two engines on fire, shot up as they crossed the Channel. The Quebecers gave his crew brandy, rough stuff that they were nonetheless grateful for. Their squadron badges showed a swallow above the motto Je te plumerai and he had thought about this day with Izzie. It was a memory that seemed to belong to someone else.
Izzie did a pirouette. “What larks!” she said, laughing. Was this, he wondered, what his father meant when he said Izzie was “ludicrously unstable”?
“Pardon me?”
“What larks,” Izzie repeated. “Great Expectations. Haven’t you read it?” For a surprising moment she sounded like his mother. “But, of course, I was making a joke. Because there isn’t one any longer. The lark, I mean. Flown orf. Gorn,” she said in a silly cockney accent. “I’ve eaten lark,” she added in an offhand way. “In Italy. They’re considered a delicacy over there. There’s not much eating on a lark, of course. No more than a mouthful really.”
Teddy shuddered. The idea of the sublime little bird being plucked from the sky, of its exquisite song being interrupted in full flight, was horrible to him. Many, many years later, in the early Seventies, Viola discovered Emily Dickinson in an American Studies course that was part of her degree. In her scrawly, untamed hand she copied down the first verse of a poem she thought her father would like (too lazy to transcribe the whole of the short poem). “Split the Lark—and you’ll find the Music, Bulb after Bulb, in Silver rolled.” He was surprised she had thought of him. She rarely did. He supposed literature was one of the few things they held in common even though they rarely, if ever, discussed it. He considered sending her something in return—a poem, even a few choice lines—as a means of communicating with her. “Hail to thee, blithe spirit! Bird thou never wert” or “Hark, how the cheerful birds do chaunt their lays, and carol of love’s praise” or “Ethereal Minstrel! Pilgrim of the sky! Dost thou despise the earth where cares abound?” (Was there a poet who hadn’t written about skylarks?) He supposed his daughter would think he was patronizing her in some way. She had an aversion to learning anything from him, possibly from anyone, and so in the end he simply wrote back, “Thank you, very thoughtful of you.”
Before he could stop himself—the armour of good manners falling away—he said, “It’s disgusting to eat a lark, Aunt Izzie.”
“Why is it disgusting? You eat chicken and so on, don’t you? What’s the difference, after all?” Izzie had driven an ambulance in the Great War. Dead poultry could do little to ruffle her emotions.
A world of difference, Teddy thought, although he couldn’t help but wonder what a lark would taste like. Thankfully, he was distracted from this thought by Trixie barking extravagantly at something. He bent down to investigate. “Oh, look, a slow worm,” he said appreciatively to himself, the lark temporarily forgotten. He picked it up gently in both hands and displayed it to Izzie.
“A snake?” she said, grimacing, snakes apparently having no charms for her.
“No, a slow worm,” Teddy said. “Not a snake. Not a worm either. It’s a lizard actually.” Its bronze-gold-lustred scales gleamed in the sun. This was beauty too. Was there anything in nature that wasn’t? Even a slug demanded a certain salutation, although not from his mother.
“What a funny little boy you are,” Izzie said.
Teddy didn’t consider himself to be a “little” boy. He supposed his aunt—his father’s youngest sister—knew less about children than she did about animals. He had no idea why she had kidnapped him. It was a Saturday, after lunch, and he had been mooching around in the garden, making paper planes with Jimmy, when Izzie had swooped on him and cajoled him into going for a walk with her in “the countryside,” by which she seemed to mean the lane that ran from Fox Corner to the railway station, hardly nature wild in rock and river. “A little adventure. And a chat. Wouldn’t that be fun?” Now he found himself hostage to her whims as she wandered along, asking him strange questions—“Have you ever eaten a worm? Do you play at cowboys and Indians? What do you want to be when you grow up?” (No. Yes. A train driver.)
Carefully, he placed the slow worm back in the grass and to make up for her failure with the skylark he offered Izzie the bluebells. “We have to cross the field to get to the wood,” he said, looking doubtfully at her shoes. They appeared to be made of alligator skin and were dyed a rather lurid green that no self-respecting alligator would have admitted to. They were brand new and clearly not meant for tramping across fields. It was late afternoon and the dairy herd, whose field it was, was mercifully absent. The cows, huge baggy things with soft inquisitive eyes, would not have known what to make of Izzie.