The Pigeon Post

Part One · The Late Bird

Teo's grandmother kept her pigeons in a loft at the bottom of her garden, a timber shed on stilts that had been painted, many years earlier, a peculiar shade of blue that nobody had chosen on purpose. Grandpa Ray had bought the tin of paint at a closing-down sale, she said, because it was cheap, and then discovered that it was the exact color of a swimming pool. The pigeons did not seem to mind. Every afternoon of the summer holidays Teo cycled the four streets to her house, scraped the droppings off the loft floor, and refilled the water fountains. Then he sat on an upturned bucket while forty birds walked over his shoes, muttering, as if he were a piece of furniture they had grown fond of.

The youngest bird was Biscuit, a slate-gray male with two black bars across each wing and an expression of permanent astonishment. He had hatched in April, and he had earned his name at the age of five weeks. Teo was eating lunch on the bucket when a small gray head appeared over his knee and removed half a ginger biscuit from his fingers with tremendous confidence. Teo's grandmother said that she had never seen a squab do that in fifty years of keeping birds. She said it the way other people say that a baby is remarkably advanced for its age, and from that afternoon onward the youngster had his own name painted on the end of his perch.

Teo wanted one thing that summer, and it was to see Biscuit fly in the young bird race on the second Saturday of September. A homing pigeon, his grandmother explained, does not find its way by luck. It reads the angle of the sun, it senses the magnetic field of the earth, which people cannot feel at all, and near home it watches for landmarks it remembers, such as a church spire, a reservoir, or a row of chimneys. But a young bird has to be taught where home is from farther and farther away, so they trained the youngsters by driving them out in a wicker basket and letting them go, first one mile from the loft, then two, then five. Biscuit was perfect at one mile and perfect at two, and at five miles he began to go missing.

The first time, released from the lay-by on the far side of Wexley, the rest of the young birds were home in twelve minutes. Biscuit came in an hour and ten minutes later, cheerful and unhurried, with a smear of dark compost on one pink foot. It happened again on Thursday, and again the following Monday. On the drive back from the third toss, Teo looked up through the van window as they waited at the lights on Hatch Street and spotted a gray pigeon on the parapet of a rooftop above the bakery, surrounded by tomato plants, surveying the traffic. It wore a green ring on its leg. His grandmother said, very quietly, that a bird who stops cannot race.

Part Two · The Roof on Hatch Street

Teo had a theory, and the theory was that Biscuit was simply young and needed a sensible companion to follow. The steadiest bird in the loft was a veteran blue hen called Captain, who had flown home from two hundred miles away in her time and had never once been late for anything. So on the next training morning Teo put Captain and Biscuit into the basket together. When his grandmother opened the lid in the lay-by, he watched them rise side by side, circle twice to take their bearings, and set off toward town in a disciplined pair, wingtip to wingtip. Captain was home in eleven minutes. Biscuit arrived fifty minutes after her, alone, and sauntered straight to his water, like a customer returning from the shops.

Teo sat on the upturned bucket for a long time that afternoon and did not speak to anybody, including the pigeons. He had been so confident. His grandmother said that perhaps Biscuit would grow out of it, and perhaps he would not, and that some birds were simply better at staying home than going home. She was not unkind about it, but she had started to talk about Biscuit as a stock bird, which meant a bird who never raced and lived out his life in the loft. Teo thought about the compost on the pink foot, and about the tomato plants, and about the rooftop above the bakery. Then he asked his grandmother whether she would come with him to Hatch Street and knock on a door.

The building above the bakery had once been a button factory, and it still had the words painted on its bricks, faded to the color of weak tea. The man who lived on the top floor was called Mr. Fennimore. He opened the door in a cardigan and gardening gloves, listened to Teo's explanation with his head tilted, rather like a pigeon himself, and then said they had better come up. There were five flights of stairs and a sixth that was more of a ladder, with a rail on both sides, and Teo's grandmother climbed it deliberately and told him to go ahead. At the top was a door painted the same peculiar swimming-pool blue as the loft.

The garden on the roof was astonishing. There were tomatoes growing in old paint tins and runner beans climbing a frame of broom handles and a lemon tree in an enamel bathtub, and in the middle of it all stood a deck chair, a small table, and a teapot in a knitted cozy. Mr. Fennimore said that he came up every morning at eleven for his tea. About three weeks ago, he said, a very courteous gray bird had started joining him. It stood on the edge of the table and waited, and it did not snatch. He had been giving it half his biscuit. He reached for a tin on the table, and Teo's grandmother put her hand over her eyes and began to laugh.

Part Three · Straight Home

She explained it to Mr. Fennimore on the way down, and to Teo at greater length in the van. A racing pigeon flies home because home is where its food is, and its water, and its mate, and so on training days the birds were fed lightly the night before, to give them an incentive to hurry. Biscuit had been released hungry from five miles away, at eleven in the morning, and halfway across town he had discovered a café. From his point of view, she said, he was not being lazy at all. He was being extremely sensible. Teo remarked that the door at the top of the stairs was painted the same blue as the loft. His grandmother said that was probably a coincidence, and then she was quiet for a moment.

She said that the button factory had held its closing-down sale about thirty years ago. Teo asked whether pigeons noticed colors, and she said that they noticed everything, and that a young bird looking for familiar landmarks might well have been pleased to see a familiar door. So the problem had two halves, and Teo worked out a plan for both of them that evening at the kitchen table, with the van keys and the salt cellar standing in for buildings. Mr. Fennimore would postpone his tea until four o'clock on training days. In exchange Teo would bring him to the loft on the second Saturday in September, to watch the race birds come home, and there would be ginger biscuits.

The other half was the loft. If Biscuit liked to be rewarded halfway, Teo decided, then the reward would have to be moved to the end. After every toss he kept a crumb of plain biscuit in his pocket and held it out on his palm in the doorway of the blue shed, and Biscuit understood the arrangement precisely within two days. On the first test morning they released him from the lay-by alone. Teo waited by the loft with his grandmother's stopwatch, and at seven minutes the telephone rang in the kitchen, and it was Mr. Fennimore, calling from the roof, to report that a gray bird had gone over the tomatoes like a shot and had not so much as glanced down.

After that Biscuit came straight home from ten miles, and from twenty, and from the fifty-mile toss at the end of August, when the whole loft went out together in the big basket and came back in a long undulating ribbon across the sky. Teo's grandmother took his name off the list of stock birds without saying anything about it. She simply crossed it through one evening with her pencil and wrote it on the other list, and Teo noticed, and did not say anything either, because there are some things that are better left exactly as they are. That evening Teo copied the times neatly into the logbook, and for three weeks running not one of them was longer than fourteen minutes.

On the second Saturday in September the young birds were released from a field a hundred miles to the north, and Teo waited in the garden with his grandmother and Mr. Fennimore, who had brought a tin of ginger biscuits and his own deck chair. The first birds were due in an hour. Then the sky above the town went wrong. A dark shape dropped out of the clouds, narrow-winged and fast, with a hooked, ruthless profile that every pigeon man knows in his sleep. His grandmother said one word, very quietly, and the word was peregrine. A falcon was hunting the racing birds as they crossed the rooftops of Hatch Street.

Teo saw a single gray bird below the falcon, flying low, fast and alone, and he knew it by the two black bars on its wings. Biscuit did not run for the loft. He banked sharply, dropped over the button factory, and vanished into the green jungle of the roof, under the leaves of the lemon tree in the bathtub. Up on the roof, Mr. Fennimore's empty deck chair rocked in the wind, and the falcon circled once, twice, a hundred feet above the tomatoes, and found nothing to catch but leaves. Teo, standing in the garden, could not breathe. On the pavement beside him, the telephone began to ring through the kitchen window.

It was Mr. Fennimore's neighbor, who had seen everything and had phoned to say that the bird was safe. Ten minutes later the falcon gave up and sailed away east, and a gray head poked out from under a tomato plant, blinking, with an expression of permanent astonishment. Biscuit waited exactly one minute more, which was careful, and then he lifted off the roof and flew home over the blue shed. He was not the first bird, nor the second, nor even the fourth, but he folded his wings, plummeted onto the landing board, and walked straight into the loft. Teo held out a crumb. His hand was shaking only slightly. Mr. Fennimore said, a little wistfully, that he supposed he would never see the bird again. Biscuit looked at him, and then at the tin.