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the yellowhammer. He loved the brightness of the yellow on the throat and belly of the male; the female was duller. The yellow was brightest of all in the older males. He had one of the eggs in his pocket and one in each hand when his father saw what he was up to and told him to put them back. And Lewis did put them back, even the one he had in his pocket, but as they walked on, his father said to him, ‘The mother will probably reject them now.’ Lewis, lying in bed that night, worried about these eggs and whether they really would be rejected by the mother bird, even though he had only touched them.
    At school, there was an art teacher who walked around the dinner hall saying to one pupil, ‘Your mother loves you,’ and to another, ‘Your mother doesn’t love you,’ as if he alone knew, or as if, by saying it, he made it so. Either way, if he came to a stop behind you, leaned over your red-jumpered shoulder and said, ‘Your mother doesn’t love you,’ as he did one day to Lewis, who had until that moment been loved, you knew suddenly, certainly, with disappointment, in silent agony with your mouth still full of tomato-damp sandwich, that it was true, that something you had done, or something about you, had negated that vital love.
    You don’t see yellow buntings these days. What he remembers of the yellow bunting, aside from its yellow underparts and the abandoned eggs, are his father’s demonstrations of the bird’s song. ‘Tit, tit, tit, tit, tit, tit, tee ,’ he chanted as they walked along, ‘tit, tit, tit, tit, tit, tit, tee .’ Lewis, staring at the ground, concentrating on snakes, found it alarming. Years later, when Lewis was eighteen or nineteen, he saw his father with The Trial of Lady Chatterley in his hands, breaking the book open and reading aloud, ‘The word “fuck” or “fucking” occurs no less than thirty times. I have added them up . . . “Cunt” fourteen times; “balls” thirteen times; “shit” and “arse” six times apiece.’ The unsettling effect of witnessing this language coming from his father’s mouth was much the same as hearing his attempt at the yellow bunting’s song.
    They would come home from their rambles and cover the kitchen table with fistfuls of wilting wild flowers and jars containing creatures that Lewis always hoped – when they looked through his father’s books – would prove to be something rare, but he was always disappointed. They once caught a snake but it was only a grass snake. He wanted to go to the jungle. He wanted to travel to the North Pole. He wanted to fly to the moon. (He wanted, really, to visit the sun but that was further away, and if you made it that far you’d get burnt and you’d never come back.)
    Lewis grew up to become an RE teacher at the local secondary school, the same school he had attended as a boy and at which his father taught English. (The art teacher was still there, and Lewis saw him in the dinner hall saying to the pupils who had brown-bread sandwiches, ‘Your mother loves you,’ and to those with white-bread sandwiches, ‘Your mother doesn’t love you.’) Lewis and his father, each a Mr Sullivan, were often confused in paperwork, ‘Mr Sullivan’ being taken to mean his father, Lawrence. In later decades, when Lawrence was no longer teaching there, Lewis ceased to be a Mr Sullivan at all and instead the children called him by his first name as if he were one of them. He had never liked being Lewis Sullivan because of the way the consonants ran together in the middle so that his edges disappeared.
    As a young man, Lewis, daydreaming about his future, had pictured himself visiting his elderly mother in a bungalow. He imagined doing her shopping for her, putting up shelves, fetching things down from her loft. Instead, as it turned out, it was his father who remained in