Coot and Hern by F E Arbuthnot

Title: Coot and Hern

Author: F E Arbuthnot 

Publisher: Not known 

Source book: Private Enterprise by Angela Thirkell

Mr and Mrs Noel Merton’s agent Mr Wickham, a keen birdwatcher, is astonished to come across a copy of Coot and Hern at the Red Cross Hospital Bookbinding Exhibition. It consists of articles which had appeared in Country Life magazine, which he had much enjoyed.

Unbeknownst to Mr Wickham, he actually knows the author. It’s Miss Effie Arbuthnot (F for Florence). Mr Wickham and Miss Arbuthnot go birdwatching together, but disagree over bird calls such as that of the golden crested mippet: the one thinking it’s too-too-quobble-too-quit-quit, the other determined it should be too-who-wobble-too-quit-whit. Apparently it’s important to get it right.

Just as they are getting along nicely discussing the Vicious Stengah and the Whisky-Soda Bird (both found in India), they fall out over the nesting habits of the Broad-tailed Gallows Bird and the Lesser Gallows Bird. Also to be discussed, Handrails and Spottletoes, and (from Western Australia) the Great Kitchen Skewer.

Mr Wickham discovers that Effie also paints fine, rather stylised, watercolours of birds with a deep sympathy for the glitter of a bird’s eye, the rounded hardness of its shoulders , the grip of its feet on the twig, and the delicate shading of its feathers. He secures a contract with his uncle, Mr Johns of Johns and Fairfield for her to illustrate a series of wildlife books which will give her a comfortable and steady income.

And, good news for all Effie’s well-wishers, she becomes engaged to the new vicar, a widower of some years: Colonel Edward Crofts (who already owns one of her bird paintings; a present from his grown up sons in India).

I took these photos at The Wallace Collection in London