At first glance, Blackie & Co.: Blackbirds in My Garden, by the English writer Hockley Clarke, is quite unsurprisingly a nice little book about blackbirds. Namely, two birds, father and son, whose relationship with Clarke began one bitter night in 1962. It was Europe’s coldest winter in 80 years, and, to give the bird a better chance of seeing it through, Clarke and his dutiful wife fed the bird some sultanas and cheese, and arranged the tree he had nested in to provide him a bit more cover. Water immediately froze, so the bird was thirsty. To overcome this, Clarke filled a flowerpot with nightlights and rested the vessel of water on top, keeping it from icing over. Thus began Blackie’s decadelong residency in Clarke’s garden. This 1978 book has just been reissued by Marginalian Editions.
But alongside the main protagonists, including Blackie II — who came along soon after his father’s untimely death by car, upon hearing of a vacancy — there is, quite hilariously, almost as much mention of the dastardly neighborhood cats. Clarke detests them. He makes that extremely clear. As early as the second chapter, he writes of his solace when he saw his neighbor’s cat, who, being a cat, was causing Blackie I some trouble, “at the side of the road, dead, having been run over by a car. It lay there, its head crushed, in a pool of blood. I was sorry for it, of course, but my sorrow was tempered by a feeling of relief that a burden had been lifted.” In fairness to Clarke, he was spending an inordinate amount of time shooing it away — a task so crucial to the social harmony of the garden that it was undertaken in shifts by Clarke and his wife. “Now my wife and I seldom went out together, feeling that one or the other had to remain at home to keep watch,” he writes. Blackie would notify the pair when he needed help by clacking at the window.
