The Day Gone By Read Free

fledglings, all brown feathers and glum beaks turned down at the corners, would come out to fly. I would catch caterpillars off the leaves, put them down in the open and see how close a blackbird was ready to come to take them. (They never came to the hand, though.) Once, I fabricated a nest and brought my sister to see it, claiming to have found it. It didn’t deceive her and I’m glad she didn’t pretend it did. I hated being condescended to, and in fact I can’t remember that anyone in the family ever did condescend to me, though sometimes they grew evasive. (‘When you’re older . . .’)
    Bull Banks extended almost to the kitchen windows on the east side of the house, ending in a great bush of bay, the kitchen fence, a bed of wallflowers and on the house wall a wistaria. On the other side - the sunset side — of the house stood the conservatory and beyond that, in another wide patch of rough ground, the hazelnut trees, the swing and the rhododendrons. There were two great clumps of rhododendrons, one red and one mauve. When I was small, these affected me more deeply than any other flowers in the garden - more even than the roses or the dwarf begonias. I can remember once, after a shower of rain, standing on tiptoe and thrusting my head and shoulders up through the dripping branches and foliage to come face-to-face with a great cluster of blooms, covered with drops, glowing fresh, their brilliantly coloured trumpet mouths all maculate within, the whole bigger than my own face. In early childhood, I believe, awareness works on two levels at once: there is a paradox. Wonderful things are often apprehended composedly (after all, they’re tangibly there), while ordinary things can seem miraculous in a way in which they never do again. I remember feeling soaking wet - including my feet, which I hated - and at the same time recognizing a kind of abasement before the rhododendrons: that is, there was nothing I could do, adequately to respond to something so beautiful. They were beautiful beyond comprehension, beyond assimilation. You would never be able to say ‘Well, now I’ve seen them.’ You felt you ought to look at them for ever. They were beyond anything one could have expected or imagined. Saying even this much is really cheating - bringing in hindsight and words to try to express a child’s incoherent, inarticulate sense of being utterly bowled over.
    Nothing else in the garden affected me like the rhododendrons - which also, of course, provided caves, hiding-places and the dwellings of my imaginary friends. (I had plenty of those, as well as real ones.) But the dwarf begonias ran them pretty close. There is still, sixty years later, no garden flower with richer colours. I used to be allowed to gather up the fallen ones and float them in shallow bowls of water, and this gave me enormous pleasure. They were mine - mine! If only they had lasted a bit longer. One day I had an idea. I picked one or two
unfallen
ones on the sly. No one noticed. I believe this was the start of a certain unscrupulous streak in small matters which has remained with me all my life. It never got as far as pinching shirts, like Dylan Thomas; but by and large I believe it’s done me more harm than good. I’m sorry I got away with those unfallen begonias.
    My earliest memories are, first, of making my way through the paddock, among the long grass of June, with the sorrel and moon-daisies taller than my own head. I was perhaps three. The moon-daisies, if you gripped four or five stalks, would actually support your weight as you leaned backwards. Secondly, I remember lying in bed in the morning - my mother already up and gone - listening to a bird singing in the dew-glittering silver birch on the edge of the lawn. The bird sang ‘Bringing it! Bringing it! Bringing it! Marguerite! Marguerite! Knee–deep! Knee-deep! Wait! Wait! Wait! Wait!’ It was, of course, a song-thrush, but I