We’ve been in this house seven springs, now. And in seven springs I have intended to, and failed to, slip out into the woods, in May, while the rest of the household sleeps, to hear the dawn chorus in full voice. Small children, little bodies, shallow breath, insomniac husband, precious settled quiet in the house, everyone asleep.  The idea of shattering the quiet by removing my presence, even for one morning, seems too risky.  But the dawn chorus has come to us, instead. Tendrils of love songs have floated in through slightly-ajar windows, filling the corners of the bedrooms with notes and trills, sneaking in round the edges of the blackout blinds to dance giddily around mouths-slightly-open, plump cheeks, a foot escaped from a quilt.

It is four forty three am.  Murdo appears in my bedroom, bleary eyed.  I had heard him coming down the corridor, fast flat footsteps, hurrying from duvet to duvet. He has his little torch on, but he doesn’t need it, he can see well enough in the slightly-hazy curtain-filtered buttery-grey dawn. This is not the first morning that he has arrived through from his room to mine at around this time. It must be the birds that wake him. And sure enough, now that I’m awake too, I can hear that it is an absolute jangle out there, on the other side of the curtains, in our back garden: clanging notes, a tangle of quavers and semiquavers.  The birds are forgetting themselves in song in the low first light of the day; boasting and defending and declaring true love. I mumble a greeting to Murdo and he climbs into bed beside me. The little torch is switched off. It takes him a while to drift back to sleep; I can feel his restlessness.  I’m in a half-sleep myself; not dreaming, but dreamlike.  I am hearing the dawn chorus as a basket being woven. Strands of song are going over then under and over again. Another bird-voice, clear and true, is a different strand running straight through, creating the spokes. My dream-brain sees the strands of song becoming a vessel – basket, bowl, nest – rounded and continual. I imagine holding the bowl of song, as small as a beech nut shell, in the palm of my hand.  I cup the other hand over the little bowl and the song fades away, muffled.  Perhaps I am drifting back to sleep.

The half-awake part of my brain is trying to tease out the threads of garden-song. I’ve been trying to learn more birdsong recently, with the help of an app on my phone. I hear the wistful voice of the robin; and there’s something that sounds like a creaky mattress being jumped on, I don’t know that one; and there’s the deep undertones of the woodpigeon (woodpigeons always sound far away, don’t they, a constant vocal backdrop, so omnipresent I often fail to hear it at all). A chiff-chaff-chiff-chaff-chiff-chaff, that one I know. TINGALINGATINGALINGALING – that’s the wren. A gurglier bubblier song, maybe a warbler of some sort? The dawn chorus sounds like overstimulation – a class full of four-year-olds all playing musical instruments at once, as loudly as possible.  There is a teacher (the blackbird) who has given up trying to get the class to play in tune and has resorted to singing loudly and clearly above the din, hoping to elevate the whole thing to a polished performance.  I try to hold each voice separately, like holding strands of thread between spread fingers when you are making a friendship bracelet, but in my sleepiness I lose my grip on the song-strands and they tangle again into one sound-wall.

My little girl is asleep on the other side of me, all eyelashes and wrist creases, pixelated in the scattered grey light. She briefly wakes and says “Mummy, what’s the ee-oo-ee-oo-ee-oo one?” and I say “great tit, I think, babe” and she drops back into sleep.  It is the great tit that I am blaming for waking her big brother. It has always been the formidable tones of the great tit that cuts through, changing the dawn chorus from a background soundscape to something that demands alert and attention. Years ago, when Murdo was a baby, I was frazzled and worn thin by sleep deprivation. The situation was desperate: I was ill with exhaustion. There was a great tit who started it’s day on the gutter outside Murdo’s bedroom window, shouting tea-cher-tea-cher-tea-cher-tea to the gathering dawn, slicing through the efforts of our workhorse of a white noise machine and reminding my baby son, recently re-settled, that sleep is not safe after all. The cycle of tears and soothing and pleading would begin again, bringing up feelings of anger and despair that I had never imagined to be part of motherhood. Reader, I could have shot that great tit.

But there have been countless more dawn choruses that we have slept through: outbursts of song that happen while we sleep; old favourites sung in full voice into the still air; arias muffled by sheets and pillows. And in this brand new morning, my own pillow is puffy and lovely under my head.  Heavy eyelids.  I picture the birds singing, beaks open and tilted up (in song, not yawn), chins soft with downy feather. I sink to sleep again, one child on each side of me, for another hour or so of rest before our day begins.