The Morning My Pigeons Got a Better House Than the Dog

A man needs a shed, my father used to say

I worked on the railways for thirty-one years, mostly around Germiston, in the yards where the wind comes through in winter like it has a personal grudge. When I retired, my wife Elsie was quietly worried, and she was right to be. A man who has woken at half past four every morning of his adult life does not suddenly learn to sleep in. I was up at dawn with nothing to do, rearranging the tools in the garage so many times that she started hiding the good screwdriver just to give me a reason to look for it.

My father kept racing pigeons. I had sworn, as a younger man, that I would never do the same, because I remembered the smell and the early mornings and the way he loved those birds in a way he struggled to show the rest of us. Of course, the thing you swear off at twenty is the thing that finds you at sixty-two. A neighbour two streets over was giving up the sport, his knees gone, and he offered me six young birds and an old wicker basket. I took them to be polite. Within a month I was lost to it completely.

The lean-to that was never going to last

The trouble was housing them. I started with a sorry contraption against the back wall, pallets and chicken wire and an old door, a thing my son-in-law generously called a lean-to and Elsie less generously called an eyesore. The flat bit of roof I nailed on top leaked at the first proper Highveld storm, and I stood out there at eleven at night in my pyjamas with a torch in my mouth, trying to keep six confused pigeons dry, while Elsie watched from the kitchen window with her arms folded in a way that said everything.

The birds deserved better. That is the thing people who do not keep animals never understand. It is not sentiment. A wet, cold bird is a sick bird, and a sick bird does not race, and more to the point it suffers, and I did not take up this foolishness in order to make small creatures suffer under a leaking door.

So I started pricing proper structures. I am a careful man with money, railway people usually are, and my first instinct was to build it all myself. I even drew plans on the back of an old roster pad. But Elsie, who has watched me build things for forty years, pointed out gently that my bookshelf still leans and that the birds might prefer something square. That was how I came to be looking at a wendy house instead of trying to do the whole thing with my own fading carpentry.

Why a little wooden house made sense

Now, you must understand, I had always thought of these as places for a domestic worker's quarters or a child's playhouse. It had never occurred to me that one would make a near perfect loft. But the more I looked, the more sense it made. Proper timber, a real pitched roof that sheds the rain, a door and windows where I wanted them, and a floor off the ground so the damp does not come up. I could line it, fit the perches and nest boxes myself, cut a landing board and a trap for the birds, and let somebody who actually knows how to build a square structure handle the square structure.

I spent a good while comparing the different wendy houses on offer, measuring my patch of garden three times, arguing with myself about sizes. Too small and the birds are cramped. Too big and Elsie loses half her washing line and I lose the argument before it starts. I settled on a modest size, two by three metres, which left her the lemon tree and the rotary line and left me just enough room to stand up inside and talk nonsense to the birds, which I do, though I will deny it.

The day it arrived

The delivery was a small event in our street. A bakkie, two young men, and a flat-packed little building that they put together in the corner of my garden faster than I could make coffee. I stood there with my hands in my pockets feeling slightly useless, which is a hard feeling for a man who spent three decades being useful for a living.

Then they left, and it was mine, and the real work began, which was the work I actually wanted. I spent the better part of two weeks fitting it out. I built the nest boxes from pine, sanded every edge so no bird would catch a wing, fitted a proper trap door with the bobs so they can come in but not out, and ran a thin layer of shavings on the floor. I cut a window on the east side so the morning sun comes in, because birds, like railwaymen, do better when they wake with the light.

Elsie came out on the last afternoon with two cups of tea and sat on an upturned crate watching me fuss. She looked at the loft, freshly painted a green that she chose, and then she looked at the dog, who lives in a plastic kennel that has seen better decades, and she said, you do realise those birds now have a better house than Bruno. I said Bruno had never won me a thing. She laughed. We sat there a long time, not saying much, the way you can after forty years.

What the birds gave back

That first morning I moved them in, I did not sleep much, the way you do not sleep before something you care about. I was out there at first light, which my body still finds all on its own. I opened the trap and the first young hen stepped out onto the landing board, had a long look at the sky she was going to have to learn, and then settled on the edge in the sun, utterly content, the way an animal is content when it is warm and dry and safe.

I stood in my own garden with a cup of tea going cold in my hand and felt something I had not felt since my last day in the yards. Purpose. A small one, bird sized, but real. A reason to get up, which I was always going to do anyway, and now something to get up for.

My grandson, who is nine, is fascinated by the loft. He calls it the bird flat. He helps me clean it on a Saturday, and he has learned, from me, that you do a job properly or you do not do it at all, a thing my own father taught me in a language of silence and early mornings. The other week he asked whether his guinea pig could also have a little wooden house, and I found myself, that very evening, looking up whether there was a smaller wendy house for sale that a boy and his grandfather could put together as a project of their own.

I think that is really the whole story. A man who did not know what to do with his retirement built a small, square, honest thing in the corner of his garden, filled it with living creatures, and in doing so quietly built himself a reason to keep going. The birds race now, and sometimes they even win, and when they circle the house in the late afternoon before coming in to the warm, I watch them from my crate and I think my father would have understood every bit of it, probably without a single word.