Walking in bright sunshine, I felt the pulse of spring through all the white flowers around me. Something drew me to take a closer look at a white deadnettle on a hedge bank and I could see into the throats of its flower arranged like a circle of speakers as if broadcasting music. Then the song pulled me up. It was clear and close and came from somewhere between the hazy distance and the bee-buzzing, butterfly-flitting, blackthorn-blooming present I sauntered through.
The morning belonged to charmed days, as glorious a spring as any could remember. For a while, the blackthorn winter at the end of March threatened to be real winter with a return to cold grey weather but then this – hot and dazzling sunshine, bright blue skies with high, smoky swirls – spring exploded in flower, leaf and wing. As the season roared across the land, the songs of birds gathered into it: chiff-chaffs and blackcaps came back – I didn't know if they'd flown all the way from Africa or just been hiding around the corner waiting for the weather to change, but here they were, joining the thrushes, robins, blackbirds and skylarks in a wild community singing.
But it was a particular song in a particular place that stopped me in my tracks. The notes were higher and more fluid than the background sounds, more plaintive and loaded with a sweet melancholy, but sharp, as if pouring from a crack in the fabric of the spring. Like a poem which suddenly makes sense because of the way it's spoken and where it's heard, that one song shot through me. Above the white deadnettle, from a branch of flowering blackthorn, almost out of sight, a whitethroat sang. It was only for a moment but that voice seemed to sing for the scattering of my mother's ashes on the hill yesterday and for the world's sadness with a burst of joy.