I decided upon policy number order, since that seemed most sensible and because I had by then had some experience with dealing with numbers. For several months I continued, carefully arranging the forms in stacks by numbers, placing each in its right place. It was good work, a good life. It suited me. I was happy. Until the day came when I discovered that I was plying into the last box. The job was all but done.  I trembled at the thought.

Presently the tapping came again, this time more forceful, more insistent, and now his wife woke at the sound, and turning in the bed said to him. “See to that window, Nat, it’s rattling.”
“I’ve already seen to it,” he told her. “there’s some bird out there, trying to get in. Can’t you hear the wind? It’s blowing from the east, driving the birds to shelter.”
“Send them away,” she said. “I can’t sleep with that noise.”
  He went to the window for a second time, and now when he opened it there was not one bird upon the sill but half-a-dozen; they flew straight into his face, attacking him.
He shouted, striking out at them with his arms, scattering them; like the first one, they flew over the roof and disappeared.

Quickly he let the window fall and latched it.
“Did you hear that?” he said. “They went for me. Tried to peck my eyes.” He stood by the window, peering into the darkness, and could see nothing. His wife, heavy with sleep, murmured from the bed.
“I’m not making it up,” he said, angry at her suggestion. “I tell you the birds were on the sill, trying to get into the room.”
  Suddenly a frightened cry came from the room across the passage where the children slept.
“It’s Jill,” said his wife, roused at the sound, sitting up in bed. “Go to her, see what’s the matter.”
  Nat lit the candle, but when he opened the bedroom door to cross the passage the draught blew out the flame.
  There came a second cry of terror, this time from both children, and stumbling into their room he felt the beating of wings about him in the darkness. The window was wide open. Through it came the birds, hitting first the ceiling and the wall, then swerving in mid-flight, turning to the children in their beds…
  The hint here is that the birds are taking revenge for, or else have been unbalanced by, all that nuclear fall-out, the same sort of effect that caused retro-evolved dinosaurs to attack cities in those 1950s monster movies. I’ve never really trusted birds—there is a coldness in their eyes that I find unnerving—and their beaks always look so malevolent. When Alfred Hitchcock made the movie that confirmed these fears, I was even more wary of them. When, twenty years later, it was discovered that birds were actually descended from the dinosaurs, it didn’t surprise me in the least.   They are the true monsters and dragons of the earth. When the great extinctions of the late Cretaceous Period wiped out the big dinosaurs, many of those that survived did so by turning their scales into feathers and taking to the skies.

  Hailed as one of Hitchcock’s masterpieces by some and despised by others, The Birds is certainly among the director’s more complex and fascinating works. Volumes have been written about the film, with each writer picking it apart scene by scene in order to prove his or her particular critical theory—mostly of the psychoanalytic variety. Be that as it may, even those who grow impatient with the slow build-up or occasional dramatic lapses cannot deny the terrifying power of many of the film’s haunting images: the bird point-of-view shot of Bodega Bay, the birds slowly gathering on the playground monkey bars, the attack on the children’s birthday party, Melanie trapped in the attic, and the final ambiguous shot of the defeated humans leaving Bodega Bay while the thousands of triumphant birds gathered on the ground watch them go. There is not one note of music in the film anywhere, which makes the bird-calls all the more harrowing.

  Whatever it’s artistic merits might or might not be, it certainly did the job on me. That grey day I walked out of the cinema and there were some seagulls hanging about a rubbish bin at the corner of Flinders and Russell streets. I stopped. They looked at me and I looked at them. And then I wilted and backed away and went off in the opposite direction. I had to walk all the way around the block to get to the station.

  I remain wary of them to this day. When they fly about in flocks, I have to see where they are going. I still wither under their cold malevolent gaze. The movie did this, I am sure, but my mother disagrees. She remembers an occasion when I was very small and how everyone got a good laugh from the way I was chased all around the yard by a chook. In my father’s version of the same story, the chook had just been deprived of its head. In either case, although it was the chook that ended up in the cooking pot, I apparently never got over it. But I blame Hitchcock. Chooks ain’t anywhere near as scary as seagulls.

  Daphne Du Maurier wrote two short stories—both in her Echoes from the Macabre collection—which were turned into truly great movies—The Birds in 1963, and Don’t Look Now in 1966. Alas, I read them all and poor Daf was no match for Alfred Hitchcock and Nicholas Roeg, but I didn’t know that her best was already behind her. For Daphne du Maurier took a long time to reveal herself as a writer of pulp fiction. Rebecca, The Birds, Don’t Look Now, the quite average Jamaica Inn, from which Hitchcock made one of his more average films, and finally My Cousin Rachel—all of which stood in the way of her decline to mediocrity, but with the last mentioned work, the warning signs were in place. A good tale, a mystery, but just not in the class of those other works.