Joe Bennett: Sparrow’s significance in Paris for Edith Piaf and for us

It’s the house sparrow that hops across your cafe table, intent on the crumbs. Photo / NZME

OPINION

Consider the sparrow. The house sparrow, that is, not the hedge sparrow. The hedge sparrow is a furtive creature, solitary, skulking on the edge of things.

Not so the house sparrow which is gregarious, noisy, ubiquitous. It’s the house sparrow that hops across your cafe table, intent on the crumbs.

It’s the house sparrow that flits about the beams in the airport terminal. It’s the house sparrow that you find in every city you can fly to. For wherever we go the house sparrow goes too. The house sparrow is our spirit bird.

My French teacher, Bill Bone, was brought up in inner London. As a kid he knew of only two types of bird - big ones and small ones. Big ones were pigeons, small ones sparrows. Sparrows are urban, like us.

I have just watched a female house sparrow with two fledglings. Wherever she hopped they hopped after her.

Wherever she flew, they flew after her. Whenever she stopped to peck at something, they fluttered their wings and opened their beaks. She fed them seeds, insects, invisible scraps. In a few days the young ones will be feeding themselves. And that’ll be two more sparrows in the world.

Sparrows are birds for whom the word dowdy might have been coined. No twitcher ever trains the glasses on a sparrow. No documentarist points the lens at it. But to a sparrow a sparrow’s life is everything. A sparrow shows the same fierce devotion to its own survival as do all living creatures. The mother feeding the young is an image that doesn’t need a commentary.

Being tiny and numerous, sparrows have been seen as symbols of insignificance. ‘Are not two sparrows sold for a farthing?’ says the Bible. But it goes on to add that God sees the sparrow, and God knows its fate.

Hamlet picked up on the biblical reference. “There is special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, ‘tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come - the readiness is all.”

In other words, fate happens one way or another and in God’s good time. Wisdom comes from acknowledging that. We are no more in charge of our destiny than the sparrow is.

In the 1950s the Chinese Communist Party launched The Great Leap Forward. Part of that programme was the mass destruction of pests and among those pests was the sparrow, which was thought to eat too much of the annual grain crop. The Chinese went at the slaughter with a will.

More than a billion sparrows died. The result was a plague of locusts, whose young the sparrows usually ate. The locusts ate the crops and caused a famine. The sparrow cull was called off. Today China abounds in sparrows, as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be. Sparrows endure.

Edith Giovanna Gassion was born in Paris during the World War I and abandoned by her mother at birth. She spent most of her childhood in a brothel, where the prostitutes mothered her. In her early teens she became a street singer to earn a little money and it was there that she was discovered.

She was just 142cm tall, but she had a strength of voice and character that belied her size. As a performer she took the name Piaf. Piaf is Parisian slang for sparrow. She identified with the bird’s tiny resilience. And she regretted nothing.

But perhaps the most famous sparrow of all is an imaginary one conjured up by an Anglo-Saxon monk some 1300 years ago.

Bede was an historian, a philosopher and a poet. In his parable of the sparrow he describes a feasting hall in winter, full of thanes and carls and light and heat and noise, while beyond the walls a storm rages in the darkness.

Then in through a door flies a tiny sparrow, out of the storm and into the light and warmth. It flits briefly through the hall then flies out again through another door. “Even so,” wrote Bede, “is the life of man upon Earth... he appears for a little while out of the darkness, but of what is to follow and of what went before, he knows nothing at all”.

Consider the sparrow. We are kin.