When
I was a child we regularly took family holidays on the Cumberland
coast. Initially, my parents rented an elderly static
caravan sited on a farm. It
was a working farm, reached via a long dusty track (the summers were far
hotter for far longer in those days).
The caravan had an outside toilet, housed in a draughty old stone byre and
must have dated back for centuries. The
‘loo’ itself was simply a hole in a plank positioned over a drop into
a stream. There was no light
and the building was full of cobwebs and vaguely discernible scratchings
and rustlings. It was not a
place in which to linger long.
The Romans used to have communal lavataria with many positions, allowing
conversational discourse during the morning’s ablutions, and I recall a
friend’s farm having a two-station affair, but our holiday facilities
were not as sociable--just a dirty smelly hole-in-the ground with a
draughty, ill-fitting door.
The farm was home to a number of largely untamed collie dogs that were
sometimes attached by lengths of rusty heavy-duty chain to buildings or to
various bits of farm machinery. Sometimes
they were not attached, or had become dis-attached, and would take great
delight in chasing small boys!
Each evening, at dusk, a great white barn owl would perch atop the telegraph
pole and survey its realm as I peered out from behind caravan curtains,
marveling at its ability to seemingly rotate its head through a full 360
degrees.
In subsequent years we took a cottage a little closer to the sea, and on
the outskirts of a small village. The
cottage was remarkab--serving to hold up one corner of the
veranda was a fully carved and gaudily painted ship’s figurehead in the
form of a mermaid: brassy, buxom and thoroughly mesmerizing to a small
boy.
Each morning we would pack sufficient rations for the day: soggy ham-and-tomato sandwiches; hard-boiled eggs (with a screw of
salt), meat pies and
sausage rolls and gallons of coffee in flasks and bottles of pop. All were packed safely into duffel bags with towels, groundsheets,
windbreaks, cricket gear, water and bowl for the dog--all of life’s
necessities for a day at the beach.
Then we would follow the track, over the level crossing, calling hello to
the signalman. If we were
especially fortunate there would be a train in the offing and we would
wait for it to thunder frighteningly through belching fire and brimstone
and scattering small stones in its monstrous wake.
On then we'd go, past Tommy the cow, wishing him (her!) a good morning, too,
and continue to process through general heathland to the dunes and
finally, the beach.
What a beach it was--absolutely devoid of any other living sole for
miles in any direction. We became quite proprietorial over
our beach and would jealously resent
anybody else who dared to invade it. My
father, never one to over-exert himself, especially when holidaying,
devised a system to entertain the children and exercise the dog at the
same time, without any physical involvement of his own. He launched the kite (easily done in the updraft of the dunes),
tied it to the dog’s collar, paid out sufficient line for it to fly and
sat back with his pipe. Result:
happy children, happy parents, somewhat confused but not unhappy dog.
The dog, an Elkhound, was in fact very pleased with itself and
would promenade around the family group, head held erect by the up-draught
of the kite and with an expression of sublime self-importance on its face
for hours at a time.
In the early stages of one of these flights I was looking up at the kite
and not down into a rock pool when a flying creature about as large as a
barn door showed itself briefly above the near horizon of the dunes on its
quest for rabbits. Shock!
Terror! Excitement! A Golden Eagle!
Did
such wondrous birds really live in England? I'd thought
they were confined to rocky crags in the distant Scottish highlands. But
later in the week we were to hear on the wireless that indeed there was a
resident golden eagle and that holidaymakers were reporting sightings from
all over the Lakes. Indeed a
few days later a further, longer sighting through binoculars was made
possible from "The Ratty"--that marvelous narrow gauge railway that
still runs from the ancient Roman port
of Ravenglass
up through the hills to Eskdale.
The long days passed. Few, if
any people intruded upon our tranquility and often we would have sole use
of the baking sands all day until a herd of cows would amble down, late
afternoon, to drink from a fresh water outlet that cut its way through the
foreshore to the distant sea. Cows, albeit gentle creatures are also
extremely curious and the sight of a large hairy dog flying a kite would
offend their sensibilities to such a degree that they would quicken their
pace and canter towards us en masse in order to get a closer view of the
phenomenon.
This was generally our cue to pack up and begin the homeward trek.
Three or four decades on, I can still visualize that road with its dusty
meanderings and the ever present, bubbling calls of skylarks high above
the sandy scrub.
Upon either side of, and intruding onto, the road were gorse bushes, in
full bright yellow blossom. Flitting with rapid wing beats and a jerky
flight between and amongst them was a small, largely brown bird searching
for insects or spiders. It perched perkily on the top of one of the bushes and,
as it did so, allowed
sight of its black cheeks, striking white eye-stripe and white sides to
its short tail. It had warm
buff underparts and was calling in a persistent, strident, fashion.
"What’s that?" I asked of my father.
"A whinchat."
"Why?"
(What an annoying
child I must have been.)
"Because it is sitting on top of a whin bush, which is what they call
gorse up here, and it is making a chatting noise."
Well, that seemed to be eminently sensible.
Whin bush plus chatting equals Whinchat.
Thus, I was hooked on birdwatching. I
still am.
