“You’d think a cemetery would be a quiet place, a place for reflection. Not
with these magpies around. This morning they’re making more noise than ever.”
These are the opening lines from ‘I am the Enemy’ and it’s from this Victorian
cemetery, amongst the squabbling magpies, where Chris, the narrator, recounts
his physical and psychological journey through life. The fighting magpies in
the cemetery are a feature in the book as Chris ponders the significance of
their feud as well as their number. He remembers his father telling him that
the symbolic meanings of the magpie rhyme were a load of old nonsense but that
didn’t stop his father from reciting the line from the rhyme that related to the
appropriate number each time he came across the flutter of the distinctive
black and white wings.
This is what author Barnaby Rogerson says on the subject in his book The
Meaning of Numbers. ’It is tempting to see the counting of magpies, and the
chanting of verses about what the number of birds might mean, as a tenuous but
still active strand of traditional lore that links us directly to the ancient
art of divination by watching the flight of birds. We know that priests
throughout the ancient world attempted to read the future by watching the
passage of birds pass some sacred feature, such as a temple sanctuary, a
headland or the gates of a city. The direction of their flight, their species,
their number, the month, the hour and the shape of the flocks must all have had
a significance that is now lost to us. One has only to think of the shapes
formed by starlings at dusk, the vast squadrons of migrating geese or gulls
returning every night to the sea, to touch upon the complexities of this art,
let alone what the chance sighting of an erratic bird might mean.
The counting of magpies encountered on an English pathway drops us into a
more homely version of this lost science, concerned with the fate of an
immediate family. As with any ancient oral tradition, there is a considerable
variety after the first two lines. The most popular version in use today stops
at seven. It is also worth noting that the magpie is a meat-eating corvid, and
that the British have always tended to weave gloomy references around magpies
and their bigger cousins, such as crows and most especially the raven. All
these birds would have been seen to feed off the dead of the battlefield, or
those left swinging on the gallows, exhibited on the gibbet or impaled on a
pike.’
Folklore, superstition, call it what you like, the magpie
still has the power to make us pause for thought.