Despite her reputation as a "romantic novelist", a label the author herself always chafed against, Daphne du Maurier wrote two of the most menacing tales of 20th-century fiction – The Birds and Don't Look Now. Bearing out the perceived wisdom that short stories – in particular, scary stories – make the best films, these short masterpieces are better-known today as the movies they inspired: Hitchcock's infamous 1963 avian thriller and Nicholas Roeg's darkly erotic 1973 Don't Look Now. (Du Maurier hated the former, apparently, disapproving of the many liberties Hitchcock took, but gave her blessing to Roeg's more faithful version of her later story). Deeply unsettling as these films are (a line of birds on a climbing frame, or a glimpse of a little girl's red coat), the stories can be equally chilling on the page – if not more so.
Du Maurier's are not supernatural tales (she doesn't do real ghosts, so to speak); what could be more unnerving than nature behaving unnaturally? Not in the form of apocalyptic diseases, or storms and floods, but wreaking havoc through something as everyday and unthreatening as hedgerow birds. Environment is everything in Du Maurier's fiction, from the sinister alleyways of Venice in Don't Look Now, to the wilderness of her beloved Cornwall, where, like nearly all her most famous work, The Birds is set. In transposing the action to the tamer shores of northern California (no wonder Du Maurier was miffed), the film loses some of the elemental potency of the tale. And there is no place for the icily immaculate Tippi Hedren, fresh from the city, in Du Maurier's vision: as in Don't Look Now, the story is narrated entirely from the perspective of the male father figure – both stories deliberately set the rationality of their outlook against the irrational goings-on around them.
The story starts quietly enough. Nat Hocken, a part-time farm labourer, is eating his lunch (a pasty, naturally) on a cliff on the Cornish peninsula, watching the restless birds gathering in the autumnal skies above him and enjoying the last glow of the sun. "No wind, and the grey sea calm and full. Campion in bloom yet in the hedges, and the air mild." But Hocken, a man of the soil, alive to the fickleness of nature, senses that the weather is about to turn, that winter is coming and that it will be a hard, black one. "Make haste, make speed, hurry and begone," he thinks to the birds, in an ominous line straight out of a Grimms' fairytale.
Later that evening, tucked up in bed next to his sleeping wife (nameless throughout), he is filled with a sense of apprehension and foreboding, like John at the beginning of Don't Look Now, suddenly "aware of misgiving without cause". The tension, like the birds' presence, is masterfully built through careful accretion. There is a tapping on the window (that ghost story staple!) and when Nat goes to investigate a bird nips him on the knuckles, but he goes back to bed without giving it a second thought. The tapping returns, this time more forcefully, waking his wife. Now there is not one bird on the sill but half a dozen. This time when he tries to shoo them away they attack him, pecking at his eyes. In a pattern that is repeated throughout the story, his wife doesn't believe him at first.
Then there is a terrified cry from their children's bedroom. The room is full of birds, and Nat feels "the beating of wings about him in the darkness" (just reading it makes you inwardly flail and cower) as he beats the birds to death with a blanket. In the "cold, grey morning light" the floor is strewn with the tiny corpses of almost 50 birds, all small species – "robins, finches, sparrows, blue tits, larks and bramblings, birds that by nature's law kept to their own flock and their own territory". Nature's law has been broken and Nat immediately divines some sort of intelligence or purpose among the birds in their "battle" against people.
Over the next 30 or so pages the birds continue to multiply, by the hundreds and thousands until the sky is black with them, and the species grow in size and malevolence: first small garden birds, then rooks, crows, jackdaws, magpies, jays; then gulls and gannets; finally, and most horribly, the birds of prey – accompanied by the ever-increasing sounds of tapping, stabbing, scratching, rasping, tearing, shuffling and beating. The sickening cacophony of the birds in attack is starkly contrasted with the eerie silence of them in abeyance, as Nat, a country man, is quick to link their sorties with the turns of the tide. During these brief respites, he must survey the damage and shore up the house against the inevitable next attack.
This is the story of one man trying to protect his family from the external world as he barricades every window, doorway and chimney. The sense of nature being turned upside down is made clear when the little boy remarks that it is night-time at two o'clock in the afternoon, so dark is it in their stone cottage. The only other characters are a neighbouring farmer, his wife and a farmhand – all gruesomely punished for their flippancy towards the birds.
The film doesn't quite capture the same palpable sense of isolation and claustrophobia. The homeliness of the interior – "the cups and saucers neatly stacked upon the dresser… his wife's roll of knitting on her basket chair, the children's toys in a corner cupboard" – and their comforting everyday meals – tea and cocoa, toasted cheese and soup – serve only to heighten the sense of chaos and danger outside. Nat's attempt to disguise his own fear and create some semblance of order – add to the terror. "Manners Johnny", reproaches the little boy's sister one mealtime, even as the birds begin to thud against the windowpane with renewed urgency.
"Someone should know of this… They ought to do something" is a refrain that echoes throughout the story. Perhaps the most chilling moments of all are those when we realise that people in authority do know, and "they" are doing something – but that all attempts are futile. You know you are in trouble when even the BBC goes silent – something, Nat observes, that didn't even happen during the war.
Du Maurier passes no opportunity to mention the war: Nat banks up the house like an air-raid shelter; fighter planes set off across the channel to be tragically outnumbered and end in burning heaps on the cliff tops, and the birds flying "in formation" towards land. In a nod to the Cold War era in which it was written: "The Russians have poisoned the birds," reports the neighbouring farmer's wife of the town's gossip.
There is no explanation for the nightmarish events, not why the birds began their own merciless war, or when, if or how it might end. It's an unconsoling ambiguity that Hitchcock, apparently after some indecision, did not attempt to resolve in the film, to chilling effect. Like Don't Look Now, the story closes with terrible banality.
If you only know the film version, track down a copy of Du Maurier's collected stories. And if you are already familiar with the story itself, dig it out again. What better time to reread it than just as the weather has turned arctic, and the promise of a hard, black winter is upon us?
