Featherhood cover art

Featherhood

On Birds and Fathers

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Featherhood

By: Charlie Gilmour
Narrated by: Charlie Gilmour
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About this listen

 'INCREDIBLY MOVING' ELTON JOHN

'A SOARING DEBUT' SUNDAY TIMES

'WONDERFUL' HELEN MACDONALD

'DAZZLING' TELEGRAPH

This is a story about birds and fathers.

About the young magpie that fell from its nest in a Bermondsey junkyard into Charlie Gilmour's life - and swiftly changed it. Demanding worms around the clock, riffling through his wallet, sharing his baths and roosting in his hair . . .

About the jackdaw kept at a Cornish stately home by Heathcote Williams, anarchist, poet, magician, stealer of Christmas, and Charlie's biological father who vanished from his life in the dead of night.

It is a story about repetition across generations and birds that run in the blood; about a terror of repeating the sins of the father and a desire to build a nest of one's own.

It is a story about change - from wild to tame; from sanity to madness; from life to death to birth; from freedom to captivity and back again, via an insane asylum, a prison and a magpie's nest.

And ultimately, it is the story of a love affair between a man and a magpie.©2019 Charlie Gilmour (P)2020 Orion Publishing Group Animals Biological Sciences Birds Birdwatching Outdoors & Nature Parenting & Families Parents & Adult Children Pets & Animal Care Science

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All stars
Most relevant
This is the most beautiful and moving biography not only of a bird but of two men, father and son and their struggle to find each other.

So beautiful!

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Heartfelt, messy and magical. The writing is crisp and vivid. The best book I’ve read in years!

A magical memoir

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One cannot help but feel rather sorry for Charlie Gilmour in his relentless search for meaning in the enigma of his biological father’s absence. Articulate, intimate and introverted, this autobiography and account of an improbable relationship with a young abandoned magpie is as enigmatic as Gilmour’s missing parent, the writer Heathcote Williams. The narrative makes at times for excruciating listening and Gilmour’s forensic critique of his father’s life and character reveals a side of Gilmour’s own character which is similarly self-absorbed and at times self-destructive. And yet, the joy and intimacy of parenthood for a young father is ultimately the event which breaks the toxic spell. The beauty of new life, as natural and ordered as the disappearance of the befriended magpie, leads the narrator on a distinct, different and hopeful path from that taken by Williams in his eccentric isolation.
Charlie Gilmour is undoubtedly an accomplished and engaging writer. Whilst intensely personal in content, those looking for contrition in this book about his infamous 2010 Cenotaph incident will be disappointed. Gilmour always seemed an unlikely crime-wave but his account of that phase in his life is introspective and unapologetic.

Searching for meaning in absence

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This is a stunning, beautifully read memoir in the powerful and damaging eccentricity of 30 year-old Charlie Gilmour's biological father, in the sheer beauty of Charlie's writing - and in his life with his adopted magpie.
Charlie Gilmour is the adopted son of David Gilmour (goodness personified) and biological son of Heathcote Williams, poet, anarchist, magician (and much more) who abandoned his mother Polly Samson and six month-old Charlie overnight, having previously (unknown to Polly) abandoned two daughters and another 'wife'. Heathcote was clearly at times clinically insane as well as an alcoholic. He lived holed up in the wing of a grand house in Cornwall belonging to his long-suffering old Etonian school friend, living in squalor and pissing into whatever brimming receptacle came to hand.
The memoir is partly a cathartic account - insightful and unsparing - of Heathcote's cruel failings and of Charlie's own struggles with drugs and mania, sanity being 'a membrane through which it would be all to easy to fall'. It was in one of his self-destructive phases that Charlie climbed the Cenotaph and served 4 fearful months in prison.
The nurturing of Benzine the injured baby magpie by Charlie and his fiancee Yana is the thread weaving all these elements together. More destructive than either a baby or a puppy, Benzine needs feeding insects, grubs and home-assembled meat balls every 20 minutes, hiding bits of these meals in Charlie's hair (and everywhere else) for later or just for keeps; rips up Yana's orchids and much else; defecates liberally all over everything - and whips a contact lends out of a visitor's eye. As the months pass, Heathcote dies (graphically), Benzine flourishes, Charlie and Yana marry and Charlie learns to come to terms with the past - and to roost.
I can only hint at the depth and detail of this astonishing memoir. Charlie's language is a joy: Benzine's feathering can flash 'blue and gold like an alchemist's fire'; the bird's eyes are the 'mineral blue of a slate mine'; Heathcote's squalid unwashed sheets are 'treasure map yellow''.
The book ends with the flight of Benzine and the birth of Yana and Charlie's baby daughter (if you're planning a peaceful water birth at home, skip this bit!). Marvelling at the 'ghost prints' in his baby, Charlie knows he will never fly away, but will be the father that featherhood with Benzine somehow prepared him for. I wish them joy.

Not flying away: from featherhood to fatherhood

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Beautifully written a story of missing love from his father. The feeling of being alone and unloved when one parent is missing from your life.

Growing up without a father

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