The Day Gone By (3 page)

The other insects that got killed were wasps; and this was serious stuff. By August they had nearly always become a nasty nuisance. The lesser part of the campaign consisted of the cook - no, I must say ‘Cook', for she was never called anything else and to this day I don't know her name - resorting to the traditional wasp-trap of jam and diluted beer in glass jars hung up outside the back door. Into these the wasps fell, struggled and drowned. I thought it cruel then and I think so now; the wasps swam a long time. Anyway, I believe the traps attracted more wasps than would otherwise have come to the kitchen. ‘But what else you goin' to do, Mas' Richard?'

There was a lot. My father was a nailer at tracking down wasps' nests. In the evening he would wander round the garden, or stand quietly about until he had detected the general flight-line of passing, homeward-bound wasps. This he would patiently follow up. Or he would stroll in the lane beyond the paddock, observing the verges and banks, with occasional forays into the great harvest-field opposite. I have known him find six nests in an evening.

The crunch came later, after sunset and at a time when I was always in bed. My father, accompanied by the gardener, Thorn, would set out again for his quarry. Being a doctor, he had access to poisons, and the poison he used was the deadly potassium cyanide. One sniff kills you in a second, or so I've always understood. The jar was kept locked up. I never even saw it: the idea alone frightened me. Arrived at the nest, Thorn would clear away round the entrance, and then my father would put in the cyanide with a teaspoon lashed to a longish stick. On these raids they quite often got stung, and for this the palliative was bicarbonate of soda. (Milton hadn't yet been invented. It's enormously effective: on the aforementioned trip to Martock in 1962, four-year-old Juliet was stung by a bee in the churchyard. Elizabeth, my wife, applied Milton at once and Juliet didn't even cry.) I recall being taken to see a poisoned nest the morning after. Each wasp, as it flew over the cyanide, dropped dead instantly.

We always had plenty of apples, and stored them through the winter in a special room in the stable, equipped with what I can only describe as big chests of drawers, made of plain, unvarnished wood, each drawer slatted and open to the air. Every few days you inspected them and took out any gone-rotten ones. Stewed apple and custard was pudding every day throughout the winter. It must have saved a lot of money. I never got tired of it: it was delicious with cream.

My father must have spent more than he could afford on the conservatory, which was quite big and opened off the drawing-room by glass double-doors. It was heated by a coke stove and hot-water pipes, and all winter was as warm as in summer. Always, there was a melange of fragrances in the air. In those days, cyclamen had a characteristic, singular scent which went all up your nose. Its pungency made you jerk back your head. They've lost it now, for some reason. There were brilliant purple cinerarias, pink primulas and mop-headed chrysanthemums taller than I was, crisply viscid and smelling like pine and cedar-oil.

During the winter these splendid pot-plants used to be brought in relays into the drawing-room: all but the arum lilies. Nurses, throughout the profession, are superstitious, and none of their superstitions is stronger than the tabu on lilies in a ward or a house. However, I can't remember my mother observing any other superstitions. I'm sure my father wouldn't have liked it. He might even have uttered his characteristic dismissal, ‘Pooh! Silly, I call that!' He was by no means an assertive man — rather the reverse — yet somehow what he said carried authority.

The water-butt in the conservatory was a fine plaything. It was not quite as high as my shoulders - or that's how I remember it - a convenient height for leaning over. You could, of course, sail toy boats on it, but once again reality was more absorbing. In summer it was full of little larvae, which hung suspended, head downward, their tails held by the surface tension. If you startled them by a bang on the tank they went jerking and wriggling away, but soon returned to their motionless suspension. They had tiny hairs on their bodies and a broad thoracic region, a slightly bulbous section (for they were segmented) behind the head. These, of course, were the larvae of the culicine mosquito. I didn't know that then, but I knew well enough that they were bound to turn into something or other, as tadpoles turned into frogs. I hated mosquitoes. They really go for children – I suppose the blood's sweeter than adults' – and I could never let the bites alone, but scratched and scratched them till they bled. However, the larvae in the tank I didn't regard as enemies.

The upper end of the tank lay immediately below a glass pane at one end of the drawing-room, and in sunny weather the water-reflections would spangle and glitter elastically, flashing back and forth across the white ceiling above the piano. My brother played well, and to watch the dancing, glinting ceiling while he played Chopin was another of those unselfconscious delights of childhood whose worth is not realized until years afterwards. I was lucky to have that as a start to the pleasure of music.

It was my father who taught me to recognize and love the birds. That half-wild, wooded and lawned garden was full of them. (Many birds love a lawn; even those, like nuthatches and swallows, who don't alight are attracted by the insects flying over it.) Thrushes, blackbirds, starlings, sparrows, chaffinches, greenfinches and robins came and went continually and tussled over the food my mother put out for them. (‘The rats' dinner', my father sardonically called it, but in fact we didn't seem to suffer from rats – or very little.) Bones and half-coconuts were hung up in the verandah, just outside the dining-room window. Anyone spotting a blue tit or a great tit would call out ‘Tit on bone!' and others would come to have a look at close quarters. Coal tits we didn't seem to get; I don't know why. (They prefer conifers?) In spring black-and-white house martins built their mud nests under the eaves, and I loved to watch them coming and going. You could see the fledglings looking out of the nests, and hear them squeaking with excitement. The swallows and swifts swooped, hunting, over the lawn. You could set a fair idea of coming weather from observing how high or low they were – which was how high or low the flies were, of course. To this day the screaming of swifts in a clear sky recalls Oakdene – the pointed, back-swept wings of the fleet birds black against the blue. I love swifts.

In wet weather particularly, pied wagtails would quarter the lawn, their long tails bobbing as they ran about in short sprints. I liked their vigour and energy and their dipping, flirting flight all mixed up with the running. Wash Common is high up, a hilly watershed between the Kennet and the Enborne, so during my infancy I never saw a grey wagtail, that riverside dweller. As for yellow wagtails, it wasn't until, in my thirties, I visited Connemara that I saw one at all. They're common enough there.

In spring and summer my father often used to sit on the lawn in a deck-chair, the newspaper a mere pretence folded across his knee. He was not only watching the birds: he was listening to those he couldn't necessarily see. His particular aversion was to the bullfinches which used to pick the buds off the prunus tree. This they commonly did round about March.
‘Look
at the blighter!' he would say, pointing at it angrily. Yet he never did anything about it. There wasn't really much you could do, short of shooting it with a catapult, perhaps. But that wouldn't have been what Harry Wharton & Co. used to call ‘the proper caper'.

As he sat in the deck-chair in May or June, my father would locate the song-posts of the various summer visitors to the garden, particularly the warblers. As I grew older he taught me to recognize their songs - blackcap, chiff-chaff and willow warbler (which he always called a willow-wren: I don't know why). Since then I have read in certain bird books that the songs of the blackcap and the garden warbler are virtually indistinguishable. I can't agree. They are fairly plainly distinguishable. Both, certainly, are similar and arresting, but the garden warbler's song is more contralto, sustained and unpausing, while the blackcap's is higher and broken up into particular phrases that one can learn to recognize. With the dying fall of the willow warbler I soon became familiar; and I noticed, too, that when a robin is singing he is almost always asserting himself against another robin a little distance off. He will sing a few phrases, then stop and listen, and if you listen too you can generally hear the other robin answering. Robins are aggressive and fight for territory. In autumn, as the summer visitors depart, they lay claim to the wider, less insect-filled territory they are going to need for the winter.

Spotted flycatchers used to build on projecting ledges of the verandah or the stable, and sit conspicuously on the netting round the tennis court, fluttering away and back in their hunting. The few conifers - there were only three or four - on the west side of the garden attracted both nuthatches and tree-creepers. The nuthatches would come for nuts to the bird-table, but I don't recall that tree-creepers ever came. Occasionally a green woodpecker would visit the garden, but never seemed to stay. As a child, I never saw the greater spotted.

One summer afternoon we were having tea on the verandah when suddenly there came the sound of a fairly heavy blow on a pane of the glass at the far end. Though loud enough to be startling, it was a kind of padded thump, as though the glass had been struck by the soft knob at the top of the stick of a gong. We went down to have a look. A lesser spotted woodpecker had flown full tilt against the glass, and now lay, plainly injured, in the flowerbed at its foot. My father picked it up. It was a male, with a red crown to its head, a buff-coloured breast and black-and-white speckled wings. It died a few moments later in his hand. I've never seen one since, though I have heard them drumming. (They drum shorter and faster than the greater spotted.)

Robert Louis Stevenson was right.

‘And does it not seem hard to you
When all the sky is clear and blue,
And I should like so much to play,
To have to go to bed by day?'

On summer nights it
was
hard to lie down and go to sleep. Mosquitoes or no mosquitoes, the thing was to get out of bed, stand in the twilight and look out of the open window. Immediately below was the wistaria, which covered half the upper storey of the long south wall. Sometimes you could actually lean out, lift up a raceme in your hand and smell it: nothing smells more beautiful. From beyond drifted the smell of night-scented stock or, later in the summer, of the tobacco-plants (nicotianas). There were moths, and bats would be hunting them silently, flitter and gone. Half-way down the paddock, on the left, eastern side, stood a big oak tree, and behind this, in season, the full moon would rise, magnified and brumously honey-coloured in the horizon haze, then turning to clear silver as it climbed above the oak. As often as not, this would reveal a hedgehog grubbing about the lawn or having a go at the left-out remains of the rats' dinner. Beyond the prunus the dark cone of the cypress tree, from grass to pointed peak, rose still as moss. The tawny owls set out, calling to one another as they went - the first call of four notes, a pause and then the second call of six. I don't remember that we were ever visited by a barn owl.

In August the stubbled cornfield would be dotted, in regular symmetry, with the dark humps of the wheat-sheaves piled together in shocks. The oak trees might be rustling, the clouds might be moving, but the sheaves stood completely motionless. Ten years or so later, when I first came across A. E. Housman's lyric ‘Tell me not now, it needs not saying', I was at once struck by the lines

‘Or marshalled under moons of harvest,
Stand still all night the sheaves.'

I drew it to the attention of my father. ‘Pooh!' he said. ‘What d'you expect them to do - run about?' It didn't hurt my feelings. He loved poetry. I felt he had a point; but I felt Housman had one, too. I knew exactly what he meant.

‘Here, you ought to be in bed, my boy! You'll be no good in the morning.' Or perhaps it would be my mother, a little more plaintive. ‘Oh, Dicky, I thought you'd be
asleep
!' And soon I would be.

They were indulgent, of course, because of the child they'd lost. But I wasn't to know that. I was spoilt, really: all on account of poor Robert.

On fine summer mornings, about eight o'clock, there would be ‘pyjama walking', a splendid institution invented by my father. Bare-footed in our pyjamas, we would walk about the lawn and grass paths of the garden looking at butterflies, flowers - whatever there was to be seen. Ever since, I've felt that at this time of day a garden is at its best. How the dew shines! Sometimes my father would bring secateurs and we would cut any particularly good roses we fancied. I learned how to cut a rose - just above the point on the stalk where there is an outward-pointing shoot-bud. Or again, he might bring a stubby little broken knife and we would cut stalks of asparagus, if any were ready. But more often we were content simply to walk about, admire the zinnias, the snapdragons or the asters and then hobble back across the gravel to the verandah, wipe our feet and go upstairs to clean them off in the bath. I loved pyjama walking, partly because my elder brother and sister never went in for it. It remained something between my father and myself.

Perhaps my greatest excitement came from climbing trees. Heaven knows there were plenty to climb: but I had my favourites. Pines I learnt to distrust and dislike. They were dirty – gummy – and the dry branches were brittle and unreliable. One day a pine branch from which I was hanging by both arms (no footholds) broke. I fell, suffering nothing worse than a nasty thump on the back. But I knew I'd had a lucky escape and after that avoided pines.

Limes were all right, but again tended to be powdery, sticky and dirty. Not much latitude, either. You just went up – and came down. Dull. The child tree-climber wants to get
about
in a tree; not just up it. We had no beeches, and it was only later that I discovered the joys of climbing this particular tree. But the horse chestnuts were good, and so was the Spanish chestnut. For some reason the Spanish chestnut had been pollarded, but quite high up – maybe twenty feet – so you could climb to the top and then sit on a kind of flat throne, surrounded by upward-slanting boughs - a bower, in fact. I loved the smell of the Spanish chestnut and delighted in its lanceolate, alternate leaves with their saw-edged ‘teeth'. The round, green, softly-prickly husks of the fruit were pleasant to handle, too: but you couldn't eat the nuts, whatever people said. They never really filled out and ripened. They don't, much, in England.