The Day Gone By Read Free Page A

didn’t know that then. I just felt it was beautiful - so vigorous and clear – and nothing to interrupt or stop it. But those are words, too. Cheating.
    Another special flower - a wild flower, this time - was the orange hawkweed (‘Grim the Collier’ or ‘Fox and Cubs’). It’s not very common, but, like many wild flowers, where you do come across it, it’s usually fairly profuse. It flowered here and there in the long grass by the rhododendrons, between the Spanish chestnut and the swing. It’s a dandelion type of flower
(composita).
The clustered blooms, deep orange, are at the top of a stalk about as tall as a milk bottle, and are not large - perhaps each as broad as an adult’s little finger nail. This was my own, secret flower. I knew that even my father didn’t know it was there; or if he did, he’d never spoken of it. I loved its colour and vaguely knew it to be a shade uncommon, for you never seemed to find it anywhere else. In my imagination I attributed magical properties to it, though these I never put to the test. To this day I love to come upon one.
    The insects continually fascinated me. There were huge slugs – yes, I know they’re not insects – bigger than my thumb, some of them. They didn’t disgust me, though naturally I preferred the snails. If you put them on a sheet of glass you could watch the pulsation along the base of their bodies, a regular alternation of colours as they slid along. I liked the earwigs, too, that fell out of the dahlias; and the woodlice which curled up defensively when you came upon them under bark or in old boxes in the potting-shed. But best of all were the centipedes and millipedes. For these you had to dig with a trowel - usually in the Wild Wood. The centipedes, bright chestnut, dashed away at speed, articulated and wriggling all ways. The millipedes - barely an inch long – shammed death, curling up like woodlice. But if you put them in a jam-jar and waited, after a while they would uncurl and start going round and round, with their wonderful, undulant motion on innumerable, fluent, flexible legs. The motion of these legs was weirdly smooth, as they followed one another down the length of the body. In the jam-jar the millipedes had a peculiar smell, not very pleasant. It occurs to me now that this may be a natural deterrent reaction against enemies.
    The only insects we killed were - apart from greenfly - ants and wasps. The tile-floored verandah harboured colonies of black ants. When they flew, it was a sight to see. The air was filled with them. They could bite sharply, but as a rule they didn’t hurt you if you didn’t provoke them. Sometimes, however, they became so numerous that my mother would decide that they must be reduced. (I don’t think total extermination would have been practicable — not in those days.) The job was done with relays of kettles of boiling water, which percolated through the long, thin cracks in the tiles. This never seemed to create any panic among the ants. Those who died, died at once, of course. Those who didn’t simply carried on. I don’t think these onslaughts really had much effect. They certainly had no long-term effect. Anyway, my father rather condoned the ants, because they kept down the greenfly on the climbing roses growing up the fluted wooden pillars of the verandah. Lovely roses they were: I can smell them now, and remember their names, too: Lady Hillingdon (yellow): Clos Vougeot (dark red); Madame Butterfly (pink); and the little, thornless yellow Banksia rose, which grew right up to the bedroom windows and flowered so profusely that you were allowed to pick a bloom or two if you wanted. At one end of the verandah was a white, scented jasmine and at the other end a ceanothus, whose blunt, smoky-blue cones of bloom I then thought rather dull. In those days I wanted all flowers to be fragrant (that was the only thing wrong with the