HOWZAT

Nevertheless, I was racked with guilt; I didn’t want to put George into a cage, no matter how big. Not when he had the whole sky to play in. If I called him he would fly from over the fields and swoop to my shoulder. But his head-bouncing couldn’t continue. He even head-bounced the carpenter who came to build the pergola.

The carpenter could only work two days a week, which suited me because it delayed George’s upcoming incarceration. George, however, knew nothing of this but played with me day after day as I dug shallow trenches for the concrete footing of the flowerbeds in and around the aviary. He ate the worms I turned up, nibbled my ears, picked pebbles out of the wet concrete in my wheelbarrow, danced in it, and flew off with my gardening gloves.

The aviary flowerbeds necessitated the purchase of more rocks to make more flowerbed walls, and more plants to fill them. I wanted the work to go on forever, so I could always be plotting new arrangements and George would never have to be a prisoner. But everything I did, from choosing red-berried bushes to installing three stone fountains, I did with George in mind. This was going to be a paradise of a prison.

The flowerbeds fill the aviary and continue outside it, so it appears the structure is built into them. Clematis will turn the wire into walls of green in time; it is a mesh room, contained, yet open to the elements.

George watched all this with interest, sitting on my knee or the back of my bench whenever I took a break from working. Then, one night last October, he didn’t come home. He was back, thankfully, the day after that. Two weeks later the same thing happened. At least, I consoled myself, I know he’s unlikely to have been shot or run over, since he’s returned before. But the third time he left he didn’t return.

I left food out for him for days, and called for him every evening as usual. For weeks I went everywhere with a pocket full of his favourite doggy HiLife nibbles, just in case. I cried often, and left the kitchen window open every day until, at last, the plummeting winter temperatures defeated me.

“What are you going to do with the aviary now?” Laszlo asked. “Do you still think it needs the wire?” Oh yes, for all the clematis, akebias and passion flowers, I told him.

Robins and sparrows fly freely in and out of the mesh although it would contain a bigger bird. The aviary is going to be a real, live “green room” and, when I’ve finished digging the koi pond, the three koi in the fishtank in my studio will be let loose in it. They’ll be safe from herons and, one day, there might even be another magpie (or crow or jackdaw) that needs somewhere to convalesce.

In the meantime, during another visit to the Derwen Garden Centre last week I bought a fabulous outdoor benches-and-table affair, set in a circular structure. It’s like sitting inside a wooden wheel over which one can grow honeysuckle. I am going to place it on a platform over the koi pond in the aviary when it’s finished. George would have loved it.

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