Review: Vivien Horler

Swift – A memoir, by Melinda Ferguson (Ride or Die, an imprint of Melinda Ferguson Books)

When you get to the last line in this memoir, it’s hard not to weep.

The story catches us up in a desperate attempt to save a baby bird. Most of us have tried to do that at some stage – haven’t we? – finding a baby bird fallen out of a nest, putting it in a box with some water or even milk, and waking in the morning to find it dead.

This isn’t that story.

It’s about the courageous rescue of a Little Swift, a bird that, like some swifts, flies for up to two years without landing; eating, sleeping and even mating on the wing, and nesting only to breed. If you’ve seen a swift on a perch or a phone wire, chances are it’s a swallow.

But the story of Swifty is only one strand of Melinda Ferguson’s heart-wrenching memoir – it is also about the sudden death of her partner Mat, and her determination to save the bird so that it can carry Mat’s soul on.

Do not be put off at this point. This isn’t a woo-woo book, it’s a story of a desperate quest written by a woman in the throes of grief.

In her foreword, Ferguson says in certain cultures swifts are regarded as harbingers of death, while in others they are seen as symbols of freedom, “regarded as messengers from the other side. Of the soul untethered from the ground”.

The swift came into the lives of Mat and Ferguson a week before Mat, whom the writer describes as her “beautiful soulmate”, suddenly and inexplicably dies, on November 23, 2025.

It’s pretty unheard of for a book to be written, edited and published in less than five months, although I presume it does help if you’re the publisher. It was written in just six weeks, “in a dark tunnel of sorrow and madness”.

Part one is a love story – the story of the couple’s meeting after both swiping right on Tinder, and then spending 11 tumultuous, often stormy and utterly devoted years together.

They live in Cape Town with their rescue dog Joe, but also buy a cabin in the mountains near Villiersdorp. Ferguson and Mat have different ways of coping with life, and both need solitude. The cabin becomes Ferguson’s hideaway, her escape hatch “from the madness that has beset our world. And each other”.

Just days before Mat’s unexpected death, Ferguson plans to go to the cabin with a friend, but she and Mat have a furious fight. The next day, as she’s about to leave, she gets a WhatsApp message from the Breerivier community group near the cabin. Someone has found a baby bird on the ground. Can anyone help?

Despite being “beyond clueless” about bird rescue, for complicated reasons to do with her rage at Mat, she volunteers.

The chick is tiny, scrawny and appears to have no eyes – or perhaps they are sunken from dehydration. At the cabin she feeds it with some crushed seed and water, using a syringe, entirely unaware swifts eat insects. However, the swift’s throat makes tiny gulping movements – something went down.

A few days later Ferguson is home, and she and Mat are speaking. She shows him the bird, and he swiftly (sorry) researches swifts on the internet.

Mat tells her to go to a pet shop in Parow to buy insects: crickets, mealworms, termites. Using a stick blender he mashes them up with a drop of water and offers it to the bird. “It eats. And eats. And eats.”

Three days later, Ferguson takes Swifty back to the cabin, leaving Mat behind. She kisses him goodbye, for what turns out to be the last time.

She makes internet contact with a British woman called Hannah who has raised swifts before and becomes a font of information about the birds – and a lifeline for Swifty.

But Mat isn’t answering his phone or reading her messages. She becomes increasingly worried, and decides to go home, her “heart thudding with dread”.

They find him in the spare room bed, apparently asleep. But the stench in the house tells another story. Ferguson crumples.

The business of death intervenes. The mortuary, identifying the body, cleaning up. And then Ferguson hears, from the little box next to her bed, a chirp. The bird is hungry. He needs to be fed.

British Hannah steps up. She tells Ferguson a Little Swift needs to put on weight, because just before it is ready to fly, it will start refusing food.

“Leave it too late and the weight will drop too much for it to be able to fly, but it won’t know this, so it will continue to refuse food and eventually starve itself to death.”

She adds that saving the bird will eternally connect Ferguson to Mat.

Ferguson says: “All I know is that I need to do whatever I humanly can, in order to get this bird to fly.”

The story becomes nail-biting. And the little bird, cheerful, doing its press-ups, preening its feathers, does what it is supposed to do.

At first, I thought the premise of the memoir – saving Swifty so he can help free Mat’s soul – was a bit daft. But then I got caught up in the fight for Swifty’s life. Even typing this gives me a lump in my throat.