Magical Wonderful Natural World

I was born between Brixton and Clapham in South London. 3 stories up in a house with no garden. There was a tiny yard where my mother used to hang the washing on Mondays.

Everywhere around Bedford Road and Ferndale Road was brick and tarmac. The nearest greenery was Clapham Common some miles away. Hazzlerigge School was a walk away, a Victorian red-brick monstrosity with outside toilets; tarmac playground surrounded by tall vertical brick walls and a sign which said Mixed Infants under which I went. I was watching Superman and Waggon-Train on my parents first television at about the age of 5. I remember agonising and agonising over my lack of ability to fly like Superman. Why him, not me. I can't let this pass without telling you that I was the fastest runner in Hazzlerigge Infant School 1955!!

Nowadays they would not allow you to run helter-skelter, flat-out towards a brick wall!!!!! Health and Safety has put an end to that.

So at the age of 5 or 6 we moved out of London to Harlow New Town. And a whole new world of East Anglian rural life opened up before me. I can't begin to tell you !!!! New Town, modern little house but just 100 yards away was an old agricultural landscape of barley, corn-fields, ditches, dew ponds, barns, duck-ponds, woodland, canals, locks, the River Stort, Roach, Perch, Pike, Chubb and Gudgeon and plus plus and plus the numerous birds that populated the landscape and I made it a project. Boy did I make it a project!! To know just where every nest was...............made by every bird in the neighbourhood. Watched every inward flight to possible nests, watched every bird with twig or worm in it's beak for hours if not days at a time over acres of Essex countryside. The meadow pippet's ground-nest, the Bullfinch and Chaffinch nests of soft feathers, the egg decorative definition of bleeding purples, mauves, squiggles spots against a pinky creamy grey-blue background to the eggs surface made it the most tantalising and rewarding child-like pursuit of unimaginable beauty. The eggs were just so so exquisitely beautiful. Obviously now egg collecting has had its cummuppence. But when I now watch from my study window.... a bird building it's nest.....to lay it's beautiful eggs,...in a nest that it has not been taught to make....I feel a little magic of pro-creation going on here. I love it, I love it and I love it some more..................................................................