Review - "George: A Magpie Memoir," Frieda Hughes

 

Sydney M. Williams

 

Burrowing into Books

George: A Magpie Memoir, Frieda Hughes

July 19, 2023

 

“I had finally found a house I could grow into, develop,

reorganize, paint and write in, garden for and fill with PETS.”

                                                                                                                                Frieda Hughes (1960-)

                                                                                                                                George: A Magpie Memoir, 2023

 

Frieda Hughes, writer, poet, and artist is the only surviving child of American poet Sylvia Plath and British Poet Laurette Ted Hughes. This book is more than a simple memoir of a delightful, intelligent, and spirited magpie (a symbol of good luck); it is told with empathy, humor, and love. And it is about motherhood – that the most important job for a mother (and a father) is to teach offspring to survive on their own – the heart-breaking releasing of one loved and nurtured since infancy, no matter if a baby or a chick.

 

After Hughes’ mother’s death, her father had difficulty settling down. At age thirteen, she wrote, “I had, by my count, been to twelve schools.” Animals and birds, along with plants, became a passion: “I identified with them. I felt I could trust them the way I did not feel I could trust human beings.” 

 

In 2004, Frieda Hughes returned to Britain from Australia, with her husband, identified only as “the Ex.” Childless, they moved to Wales and settled into a “very large, semi-detached ‘fixer-upper.’” Her diary begins three years later, while still working on the house and gardens. A storm had destroyed a nest being built by a pair of magpies, vermin, as they were called by farmers and friends. But one egg survived and hatched. “There is nothing’” she wrote, “so effective in taking one’s mind off the practical concerns of our lives as a living creature that needs immediate care without which it will die…” Her diary begins Saturday, 19 May 2007: “I hoped he would be alive in the morning.” He was and so George entered her life.

 

The magpie gained weight, and with natural curiosity he kept the author amused. After taking a bath in the dogs’ water bowl, “…he clambered out and realized he couldn’t fly, so now he couldn’t escape the dogs. He ran around the floor with his wings sticking out like wet, dripping sticks, with Widget and Snickers after him…their little tongues were hanging out and they lapped at him as they slid over the wet, slippery floorboards behind him.” As George grew and learned to fly he could become destructive, but, as Hughes writes, he made her laugh daily: “George landed on the large, round, varnished kitchen table, skidded off the opposite edge feet first, wings flapping for balance like the flailing arms of a novice skater…”

 

She knew that George one day would return to the wild, and that she had to let him go. Diary entry for Saturday, October 20: “George didn’t come back that night, or the night after, or the night after that…I had truly fallen in love with my little magpie.” Her job was done. George was on his own. But she was not.

 

Other avians needing care came her way – infant crows named Oscar and Oscar 2; one infant duck named Demelza and two others, Samson and Delilah; Arthur, a Bengal eagle owl, and others. They all became, she wrote, “a source of joy and equilibrium…[and] all because of a magpie called George.” The author’s pencil sketches illustrate this short, fun story – a pleasant summer read.