Road to a Nightingale
I bet John Keats never had to negotiate the Brentwood by-pass ro get to hear his ‘light-winged Dryad of the trees’. His nightingale obligingly perched a few yards away in a nearby tree on Hampstead Heath before singing ‘in full-throated ease’. Our melancholy young Cockney medic probably didn’t even have to stir from the comfort of his leather armchair. All he had to do was sit back and listen as the bird’s ‘plaintive anthem’ poured in through the open French windows of his north London gaff.
We, on the other hand, to hear our nightingale, left east London by car on a Friday afternoon. Within minutes we hit an end-of-the-week and end of Covid restrictions snarl-up on the A12, just beyond the Redbridge roundabout. We were heading for the Fingringhoe bird reserve on a raised area of wild land above the banks of the Colne Estuary.
The traffic jams continued for miles, and it was two and a half hours before we made our destination. A helpful couple out walking their dog directed us down the narrow lane and confirmed the reserve’s pledge that the birds were singing by assuring us they had stopped to listen to them just 30 minutes before.
The reserve had closed at 5pm, but we parked on a convenient patch of bare ground next to the padlocked gates, ate our sandwiches and sipped tea from our thermos flask. Here, all around us, were plenty of ‘melodious plots of beechen green and shadows numberless’ — just the kind of landscape that nightingales like.
We locked the car and ducked under the wooden fence. There was no one else about: we had 200 acres to ourselves. Essex, as we all know, gets a bad press. White stilettoes, fake tans, chavs. You know the kind of thing. The expectations of visitors to this much ridiculed county are consequently low. Long may it remain so because it means the area’s finest spots are largely untouched and are, for an otherwise densely populated region, unknown. That’s particularly true of its far-flung mud flats and creeks. Have you, for instance, ever heard of these unsung villages that we encountered on our route: Woodham Walter, Tolleshunt D’Arcy, Paternoster Heath, Layer-de-la-Haye?
Within minutes of our foray into the low-lying scrubland, pitted with disused quarries, we heard what we’d come for. Complex, creative, crazy warbling took our breath away. The nightingale’s song is an assault on the senses and keeps you tense as you wait for an unexpected modulation just as you do with a late Romantic symphony. A pause. Then a shrill explosion of notes thrown to the sky and a hopefully appreciative female mate.
We walked on and our movement caused it to fly off deeper into the undergrowth, where it commenced another recital, sotto voce this time. We spotted it, fleetingly. The nightingale is small and brown, unremarkable in every way except for its song.
As we walked further into the reserve, we heard others, perhaps three or four. It was impossible to tell, of course. Sue took out her phone and started recording, a memento of our evening which was beginning to turn into something wonderful. We had escaped the drone of traffic completely. The nightingales were accompanied by blackbirds, chaffinches, linnets and their singing increased as the light faded. Being held up on our journey was not such a misfortune after all.
We found a seat overlooking a glade — yes, it really was a glade — and sat still for half an hour. We were rewarded with a nightingale coming close and singing uninterrupted for ten minutes. Later we listened back to the recording during which, from time to time, we could hear our low mutterings: ‘Oh my god! Wow!’ We acknowledged that reliving our magical evening was only possible because of technology, something Keats had been without.
The journey back to east London was, of course, troublesome. Moments before we hit the A12, 48-hour repairs kicked off and we were diverted on to the A120 and a 30-mile detour via Stansted Airport.
We shrugged our shoulders and turned on the recording, luxuriating in the liquid sound of our lovely Essex nightingales. As we lay in bed later, we listened again. As Keats has it: ‘Was it a vision, or a waking dream? Fled is that music: Do I wake or sleep?’