With his swashbuckling gait, ominous associations and garrulous demeanour, the magpie is the dandified razor boy of our avifauna and provokes ambivalent feelings (the ‘pie’ part signifies many a mixture). His pilfering reputation has inspired work from Rossini to the prog-rock band Marillion, and in lab tests he’s one of the few creatures brainy enough to recognise his own image in a mirror – even some Marillion fans can’t do that. But it’s hard to see how this corvid could be truly lovable.
The artist and poet Frieda Hughes, however, fell for a little foundling Pica pica back in May 2007 when she was refurbishing her ramshackle new home. He was an unloved, unfledged orphan, and adopting him changed her life. George is a diary-based record of the sprightly saga that ensued.
In an intriguing prologue, Hughes describes a peripatetic childhood: her mother Sylvia had killed herself before Frieda was three, and she followed her father Ted rootlessly for years. She attended 13 different schools (‘forever an oddity, not belonging’) and had no toys or proper friends. There was the occasional pet, including a badger called Bess – ‘I found ways through marzipan and sliced cow-lungs to befriend her’ – but not once a ‘forever home’. After years in Australia, she finally settles in Wales with her third husband (retrospectively dubbed ‘the Ex’) and seems to find the place she has always needed.
Although Hughes comes to adore and indulge him, George, the foster bird, proves troublesome from the start. There are serious problems with projectile excrement and kleptomania, and he develops a penchant for caching doggie doo and light bulbs. He attacks the heads of visitors, and grows into wayward adolescence. Still, his ‘surrogate mother’ finds him ‘a magical creature’.
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