Bringing up Benzene: Charlie Gilmour adopts a magpie

One day a baby bird falls from its nest into an oily scrapyard in Bermondsey, south London and seems unlikely to survive. As the writer Charlie Gilmour and his set-designer fiancée Janina (Yana) find themselves scrutinised by the tiny creature’s ‘gemstone eyes’ they become caught up in an unexpected urge to save the fledgling’s life. As part of the unglamorous, much maligned, even feared Corvid species, Charlie’s foundling magpie, with its sinister ‘undertaker tails’ is not an obvious pet. And yet Charlie has ‘never felt so seen by an animal’. Growing out of this strange first encounter is a magical book of exhilarating complexity, the story of blood, bird shit, tears and hope.

They name the bird Benzene, after the iridescent blue and gold coat that is reminiscent of the petrochemicals into which it had originally tumbled. And when its instinct to nest-build asserts itself, Charlie and Yana realise that the magpie is female. Nursed to health by her two rescuers, she secures her hold on the couple’s heart and home, hesitating on the rim of a shallow dish of water like an apprehensive child, hiding scraps of food in the fold of a sock and in the curl of Charlie’s hair, sharing Charlie’s bath, alternating between savagery and affection. As Benzene settles into her life, the tenderness both given and received between man and bird is transformative. Within days of their meeting Charlie senses that Benzene is ‘waiting to show him how to be’.

Most popular

Matthew Parris

What if Trump is just bonkers?

Running concurrent with the magpie story is the author’s own struggle to take flight. When Charlie was two, his father, Heathcote Williams, poet, magician, alcoholic, maverick and charmer, upped and left Charlie’s mother Polly in the middle of the night. Finding a semi-permanent sanctuary in a Cornish stately (whose aristocratic owner has ‘a face like a carelessly carved joint of beef’), Williams does not see his son for more than a decade.