Whaup Letter

by Chris Arthur

(i) Uncertainty about the addressee

Dear – well, for the moment, Question Mark –

I’m not sure to whom this letter should be addressed. Initially, I thought “The Rector”. But my image of him reading it to a hushed assembly lost credibility as I imagined the scene. He’d not allow pupils to listen to the words of a stranger, especially given what they say. Parents would complain about their children being exposed to unsettling ideas. In any case, do schools still have assemblies? And, if they do, would an out-of-the-blue reading of a letter hold anyone’s attention?      

I’m sure there’s a “Letters from Loonies” file in the Rector’s office, even if it has a less derisory label. My missive would probably end up there, after acknowledgement via some bland pro forma that thanks me (insincerely) for my interest in the school. Or, more likely, there’d be no response at all. My letter would be glanced at and then binned.

So I scored out “Dear Rector” and thought again. In fact, the letter’s intended more for pupils than for him. But in an age made so alert to protecting children by so many failures to do so, writing directly to schoolkids would invite suspicion. And, even if I could reach them, how would they view a letter? Too long to hold their attention, alien to the easy instantaneousness of their image-fed electronic consciousness, it would be dismissed as weird, some kind of outmoded artefact beyond the pale of their day-to-day preoccupations.

So I scored out “Dear Pupil” too. What about “Dear Council”, since they’re responsible for schools? The more I thought about the addressee the more unsure I grew. Maybe the letter’s meant not just for the Rector, or the pupils, or the council, but “The Community” in which the school is based. Of course that includes me too, so maybe, in part, I’m writing to myself. But that sounds close to crazy, nor is “The Community” unproblematic. Once you examine it, its cosy resonances of cooperation and togetherness unravel into the disparate units in which we live our lives, without, in truth, much concern for anyone outside our own immediate circles.

So “Dear Community” was also ditched, at which point “To Whom It May Concern” began to beckon. But apart from sounding stilted, it allows too easy an opting out – recipients could decide without reflection that it doesn’t concern them, therefore there’s no need to read it. “To Whom It May Concern” also seems too similar to that desperate attempt at inclusion, “Dear All”, which is a bit like saying “Dear No One”. It casts the net so wide it risks catching nothing.

“Dear Question Mark” is just to get things underway – an (admittedly unattractive) expedient to move past a stalled beginning. And rather than sending it direct to any addressee, I’ve decided on a more roundabout – but I hope in the end a more effective – approach. If I send it to a magazine like Northwords Now, the Rector, teachers, pupils, council, the community…everyone/anyone might see it, read it, take it more seriously. Carrying the imprimatur of publication should widen its audience and give it more persuasive power than any simple letter on its own could hope for.

(ii) Uncertainty about what I want to say

My second problem, more serious than uncertainty about the addressee, is that I’m not sure what I want to say. When I started to write, I knew exactly what I wanted this letter to convey. Part protest, part lament, part plea, it was intended to speak out on behalf of the whaups. (“Whaup”, in case you don’t know, is another name for curlew. The word is used in Scotland and the north of England.) But once I started writing, it became clear that my concerns went beyond these beautiful birds, our largest wader and a species in worrying decline. When I realized I was writing not just about whaups but about, well, education, I almost stopped. Isn’t that something best left to experts?

Yet, despite my hesitation, false starts, and lack of confidence, I still felt impelled to write. So this is my Whaup Letter to “Dear Question Mark” sent, message-in-a-bottle style, via Northwords Now.

One thing’s easy to explain – what made me want to write. The impetus came from the building of a new school ten minutes’ walk from where I live. Now, lest anything I say suggests otherwise, let me stress that this is something I welcome. What’s more important than our children? And after loving, feeding, clothing, and sheltering them, what’s more important than their education? A school is a tangible symbol of our hope for the future. It expresses our wish to enrich the lives of those who come next, to encourage them to fulfil whatever potential they possess. It shows concern for others, a wish for betterment. As we were blessed by previous generations passing on their knowledge, so we in turn pass on what was entrusted to us and what we’ve added to it. A school is like a reservoir, built to hold and channel the quicksilver of a culture. It serves as an aqueduct between the generations, allowing the water of experience and knowledge safe passage.

As I compose these metaphors, I’m taken back to my imagined assembly. I can see raised eyebrows, exchanged glances, stifled giggles as the ideals of education and the day-to-day realities of schooling grate and bump together (cue sniggering). As they collide, they can seem more like antagonists than twins. Yet, really, under all the shoddy ordinariness, the daily low-key battles for attention, doesn’t what happens in a classroom show us at our best? Unlike, say, a prison, or a battery farm, or a storage facility for toxic waste, or a munitions factory, a new school being built is something overwhelmingly positive, a cause for celebration not regret.

(iii) Wonder, privilege, finitude

But (inevitably after this encomium) it all depends on the sort of education that’s being fostered. I’m sure the Rector and his staff are competent professionals. Under their tutelage all sorts of advancements in learning will happen on a daily basis – and that is truly wonderful. I, for one, applaud it. I’m no expert in what a curriculum should cover, but I hope that as well as the subject-specifics they study, pupils will acquire a sense of wonder, privilege, and finitude.

Wonder because of the incredible nature of existence (it’s oddly easy not to see this). We are life-forms evolved over precarious aeons, birthed on a spinning planet that’s orbiting a burning star set in a galaxy that’s one of trillions in an expanding universe we’ve yet to fathom. The chances against any individual coming into being are enormous. Each birth is improbable, unique, and precious.

Privilege because, for the nearly 8 billion of us living on planet Earth, education is by no means a universal given. According to UNESCO’s Institute of Statistics, there are 773 million adults who cannot read or write. The education that delivers and hones literacy may sometimes seem a chore, but it is in fact something to be treasured. Instead of taking it for granted, we should feel privileged to be among those who receive it.

Finitude because it focuses the mind to know how short a time it has to savour living. We’re not here for long, however endless tedious lessons can make a day feel. Our transience comes into usefully dwarfing focus when we bring to mind the Earth’s age (4.5 billion years). Set beside that, an individual’s lifespan is indeed ephemeral.

Despite their obviousness, this essential trinity of awareness can be slow to form. It’s thwarted if education shrinks to training, plodding through an inflexible curriculum whose only vision is to turn out cogs that fit into the machine of commerce. Education fails when conformity is put to the fore instead of creativity, when the needs of employment eclipse the nurturing of individuals who can think and question for themselves.

(iv) Remembering what was lost

Coming last to what was first in terms of prompting this letter, namely my concern for whaups. Somewhere in the education that teachers are busy providing day by day, I hope note will be taken of what was lost on account of the new school being built. Perhaps this could become part of a lesson about the consequences of actions, or about environmental ethics, or simply noticing history as it unfurls at our feet, rather than treating it as a subject that only concerns other times and places. I want to flag up the fact that where today there are classrooms, astro-turfed football pitches, car parks, roads, there used to be fields. And every winter they were favoured as a feeding ground by whaup. I used to see flocks of nearly a hundred birds probing the ground for worms with their long curved beaks.

I know an environmental impact assessment will have been carried out before building was allowed to start. But did it, I wonder, take note of all the things I’ve seen in years spent walking in this place, and did it take proper cognizance of their nature? As well as whaups there were redwings, fieldfares, oystercatchers, tawny owls, goldfinches – and a host of other birds. This was also the haunt of hares and foxes, badgers and weasels. There was an abundance of wildflowers that, every summer, attracted swarms of insects. Sometimes, when I walk past the school these days, I imagine the fields’ former denizens haunting the classrooms. Was that a draft from the open windows or the whiffle of wind from a ghost-hare speeding past the rows of desks in a French lesson? Perhaps the lapse in concentration during a chemistry experiment wasn’t due to teenage hormones but the phantom fluttering of butterflies that used to occupy the lab space. Do the echoes of vanished owls’ hoo-hooings merge secretly with the canteen’s babble of noises? Can you hear the sound of paws skittering their subtle percussion as fox-spectres trot down corridors? I imagine the earth that’s now locked beneath an armour of concrete, tarmac, and astro-turf veined with a honeycomb of shafts from years of whaups’ beak-probings.

I count myself lucky that birds have been important to me from an early age. They still delight me. For as long as I can recall, I’ve been susceptible to their beauty. Seeing a kingfisher or a goldcrest, a sparrowhawk or a dipper, a waxwing or an oystercatcher, makes a day special. But I know not everyone shares this interest and that many would dismiss my concern for whaups as eccentric, as investing too much concern in what’s easily dismissed as “just some birds”. As a response to such an outlook, I’d ask you to look beyond the individual birds we see and consider what they really are. Each droplet of life that is a curlew is weighted with a story that, for me, belies the easy dismissal of them as “just some birds”. If you think of their beginnings, a new tonnage shunts into the picture, laden with an altogether different gravity of meaning.

By thinking of beginnings, I don’t mean how they start as eggs, held in a shallow nest of dried grass on the ground. The algorithms that govern individual lives are amazing – mating adults, egg laying, incubation, embryonic development, hatching, fledging, flying, pairing, dying – but these stages of existence are expressions of a yet more astonishing story. Trace the thread of their existence back in time, beyond the truncation of any single life, and it connects to an ancient bloodline of being. Every curlew is a constituent part of a nerve that runs from the skin of the present far into the body of the past. Where did it start? Follow it back through the aeons and you can see it buckle and torque into different forms. Go back far enough and you’ll come to Archaeopteryx. Whatever entity is considered to be the first true bird, it will, in its turn, have emerged from more archaic forms. Like every one of the more than 10,000 avian species now existing in the world, curlews evolved from a single ancestral species. Their lineage stretches back through time until eventually, like all living creatures, the curlew’s heritage touches the spark of life’s first shimmer and glint some four billion years ago. Like every multi-cellular creature on the planet, they emerged from unicellular forbears. Like every member of the animal kingdom, whaups were forged and tempered from the ore of a long-vanished primordial creature.

            And if, as well as thinking about beginnings, you simply reflect on where they are, the coordinates that emerge are likewise spurs to wonder and reminders of how much our usual reference points are only abbreviations, fictions, practical conveniences. Pinpointing where I saw the whaups may seem simple – they were there in the fields on which the school’s now built. But that location is held within town, county, country, hemisphere and planet, and beyond that within galaxy and universe. Like us, the whaups occupy a planet in a solar system that’s in the Milky Way, one of the trillions of galaxies thought to exist. The Milky Way’s nearest galactic neighbour, Andromeda, is 2.15 million light years away. The furthest galaxy yet detected is 32 billion light years from Earth. The whaups’ true coordinates, the temporal and spatial beat of the rhythms that animate their existence, challenge efforts to express them and make a “just some birds” attitude seem woefully uneducated.

As a handy reminder of how much we tend to miss in the way we look at whaups, I like to bring to mind a sentence from Sankar Chatterjee’s 225 Million Years of Evolution: The Rise of Birds: “Modern crocodiles are the closest relatives to living birds and share a common ancestry.” Putting a whaup in the same conceptual breath as a crocodile makes for a welcome disruption of assumptions. It’s a good way of remembering the extraordinariness of their story, of keeping in mind the fact that there’s so much more to them than is apparent at first sight, it points back to their dinosaur ancestry, to the long millennia it has taken to sculpt them into the form in which we now encounter them. The evanescence and fragility of a single bird obscures the ancientness and durability of the bloodline they’re part of.

The mismatch between how we talk about things and what is actually there before us in the world is astonishing. By “literal description” people usually mean choosing words that innocuously fit the fictions of our labels, concentrating on what’s immediately evident to sight and affixing names according to accepted conventions. Increasingly, I’ve come to think that a truly literal description would be a lifetime’s work and that even then it would, inevitably, remain fractional and unfinished, daunted by the reality of what it’s faced with. How should we live in that reality? How should we treat the incredible manifestations of life that share this planet with us? If education works, should it not bring pupils face to face with such questions?

(v) Signing off

I’m not suggesting that the school shouldn’t have been built. Education is a priority. It’s worth sacrificing a lot to have it. All I’m asking is that whatever is done here is worthy of what was lost to enable it to happen, and that what was lost is seen for what it is. I hope that this will be a happy place where friendships are forged, good memories laid down, understanding taken forward, individual intelligences honed and tempered – that the new school will, in short, provide an experience worth losing whaups for. To have disrupted the nature of this place for anything less would, I think, be shameful.

If I were wealthy, I’d abandon letter writing and instead commission an artist to make a tapestry of the fields, a giant square of cloth peppered with multiple holes to represent the whaups’ bill-piercings. This could be hung in the atrium of the building whose presence now prevents such feeding, a tangible reminder of what the physical fabric of the school has covered over.

I’ve said enough. I don’t want this letter to morph into some sort of tract or sermon – it’s just a plea for whaup-worthy education. Beyond a certain point, I know, even the most eloquent letter won’t be read, let alone one so unsure of itself that it doesn’t know who it’s addressed to. Whatever you make of what I’ve said, the next time you hear a curlew’s cry (one of the most hauntingly evocative sounds I know), please stop and think about the sort of education that you’re getting/giving/supporting. Is it good enough? Or, since not hearing whaups is more likely in these bleak days of the Anthropocene, ask the same question in the growing bird-silence that surrounds us.

Whatever uncertainties still attend the addressee, at least the sign-off’s easy –

Best wishes, yours sincerely, kind regards – take your pick, it doesn’t matter,

Chris