We've had a lot about rooks here recently. Hard to get away from them, even in suburban Dublin. For, opening the door shortly after half past three, there was a clamour from a nearby group of beech trees, as the birds prepared to settle for the night. They have been resident there for long. A famous book about country life in Suffolk, England, in the 1920s was Corduroy by Adrian Bell.
This was when land was cultivated by muscle - human and horse - long before mechanisation and the new farming. Adrian Bell, from a literary family, was apprenticed to a fine, understanding yeoman farmer, as he was termed, a standing that was recognised in the then society as being one step below gentleman, but a man of substance and habit. Adrian Bell, who later went on to farm on his own, wrote other successful books about the countryside, tells us that he spent "considerable time and ingenuity in ambushing rooks". They haunted newly-sown fields and would rise, all right, at a shout from a bird-scarer, but were difficult to shoot. For they always posted a sentry on a tree to give the warning signal at any approach. "They can smell a gun" was a popular saying. They would fearlessly follow behind a plough or harrow and wouldn't stir far until shouted at. But if a man was walking nearby with a gun, they rose before he was a field from them.
Bell could lie in a ditch waiting for them to come, and they would cross the ditch fifty yards away. He changed to that spot and, of course, they passed over his original spot. But one day they came over against the wind and he shot several. He mounted them on stakes in the barley fields, scattering their feathers, and tells us that rooks will never land where there is evidence of a dead one of their kind. They are not to be fooled, for in one place the remains of a black hen killed by a fox was put up - it had no effect.
This book Corduroy was first published in 1930, later by Penguin and, in wartime, it is said, was read by English soldiers abroad, as a dear reminder of their homeland. The class structure as represented by Bell's Mr Colville, the yeoman farmer, and his team of servants and labourers is fascinating. But it was already dying - quite gone, it is said, by the early to middle 'Thirties.
Adrian Bell's son, Martin Bell you will remember as the fine foreign correspondent who always wore a white suit on TV, is now an MP. He writes in the introduction: "There is nothing in my life in which I take more pride than being the son of the author of Corduroy." It has recently been republished by Penguin.