The Ravenmaster. Christopher Skaife

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      5

       Bird Life

      Having met the ravens, you’ll probably be wanting to get a sense of their living arrangements.

      It’s perhaps easiest to visualise where we all live at the Tower if you imagine a series of concentric circles. Right in the centre is the ancient White Tower; and then there’s the Inner Ward, which is enclosed by a massive wall with thirteen towers; and then there’s the narrow Outer Ward, protected by a second wall with six towers facing the river and two bastions on the north front. And then there’s the moat, which is now a dry moat. There’s no water in the moat. Most of us Yeoman Warders live right on the edge, facing the moat, but the ravens are slap-bang in the middle of things. They’re based in a purpose-built, state-of-the-art enclosure on the south side of Tower Green, in the Inner Ward. It is the perfect spot, sheltered but warm and sunny, at the centre of the life of the Tower but just tucked away enough to give them some privacy. It’s on the site of what was once the Grand Hall, which we think was probably where Anne Boleyn was imprisoned before her execution in 1536.

      Living here at the Tower, for both the birds and the Yeoman Warders, is just like living anywhere else – apart from the fact that we have arrow slits for windows, our walls are forty feet high, and we’re locked in at night.

      I suppose I’m used to this sort of thing. I lived in some pretty unusual places during my time in the army. I spent plenty of nights bivouacked in the jungle, and under the stars in the fields of South Armagh. I lived in Cyprus, among the orange trees and the olive groves, and up high in the mountains in the Balkans. When you’re a soldier you get used to roughing it – you’re at home everywhere and nowhere. The Tower is as peculiar and unexpected a place to live as anywhere.

      There are about 140 residents here at the Tower. As well as the Yeoman Warders and their families, the Constable of the Tower lives here, the Resident Governor and Deputy Governor, the chaplain, the doctor, the Operations Manager, the Chief Warden, the head of Visitor Services, and the manager of the Fusilier Museum. We may share our home with millions of visitors every year, but we’re a little community just like any other. We even have our own club, the Yeoman Warders Club, the Keys, which must be one of the most exclusive clubs in the world since it’s only open to Tower residents, staff and invited guests.

      Some people would find living in the Tower intolerable. You’re basically living in the middle of London, in a prime tourist destination, with the public continually passing through. It’s like a fishbowl. It’s certainly not for everyone. But for me, from the moment I arrived, it felt like coming home.

      When I was young we lived in the shadow of Dover Castle. Dover sits facing France across the Channel, and is the traditional entry point for visitors from abroad. Home of the famous White Cliffs, Dover is what some people like to think of as the back door into England. I like to think of it as more of a grand entrance. Who knows how much I might have been influenced as a child, looking up at the old Norman castle, floodlit at night, the trains fuming into the station, the endless comings and goings of the ferries? Growing up in Dover I became accustomed to living in a place where people were continually passing through, tourists and travellers on their way in and out of England, and maybe I even had a dim sense of living in a place of great historic importance. I may have come a long way from Dover, but in some ways I haven’t come far at all.

      As I have mentioned, most of us Yeoman Warders live in the walls on the outskirts of the Tower, in the Casemates, the outer battlements. The ravens live in the very shadow of the White Tower, a building that dominates the whole of the Tower of London even today, a symbol as much as it is a building, built centuries before the ‘starchitects’ and their skyscrapers that surround us now. Decades in construction, the White Tower was begun by William the Conqueror around the late 1070s, with the object of protecting London and impressing the populace, as well as controlling the approach to the City by river. Work on the White Tower was continued by William’s son William Rufus, and was eventually finished by Henry I around 1100, at which point Henry promptly imprisoned his chief minister, Ranulf Flambard, in the newly completed building, though Flambard soon escaped, climbing down a rope having plied his guards with drink. You can certainly СКАЧАТЬ