Sorry, but I feel an episode of navel-gazing coming on. This is because I am in the throes of transcribing my early nature diaries into a form that hopefully Jane and Dave can bully the computer into accepting. I started with the year 1958 and am currently working through 1964.
At that time I was living only about four miles from where we now are. I had served my two years compulsory stint (1953-1955) in the Royal Air Force, as a National Serviceman. Apart from the free time that I spent, away from camp, in Germany, getting the know the wildlife and the wonderful people there, I think the RAF was as glad to see the back of me as I was to be free of them. In this respect it was two wasted years of my life.
I had not long been married, and Jane had just about made it into this world, preceded by her two brothers, while Diane was nowhere to be seen. We were a struggling family financially (nothing has changed there, then), yet I still managed my regular escapes into the real world, the wild world around me. Looking back, I reflect, it has been this that has sustained me over the ensuing five decades.
Earning a precarious living as a bus driver just about kept us afloat, and the roads of that time were quiet enough for me to make observations of the more prominent plants and animals to be seen from the cab of my double-decker. I shall never forget, for example, the night when I was returning from a late night run, when a barn owl flew into the recess between the cab and the top deck. For a split second we were eye-to eye before it recovered its senses and freed itself. Or when I halted my bus in a quiet country lane to allow a mallard and her brood of fluffy ducklings to cross in safety.
But my real purpose this month is to remind myself, and you, I hope, of what we have lost in the name of progress in the last half-century. The big town, Northampton, had even then swallowed up the suburb, the ancient village of Kingsthorpe, where I lived. But only seconds from my home I could climb a five-barred gate to wander around a field yellow with buttercups and other wild flowers. In summer butterflies and other insects crowded around me in animated hordes, while a sinuous trail through the grass marked the passage of a grass snake. All gone as this is now the site of the primary school!
A minute away the lane ended abruptly, giving way to well-tended orchards and allotments. This was a place of bird song in spring- and summer-time, where even the uncommon lesser-spotted woodpecker had its home. Then the arrow-straight footpath led to a double hedgerow, where I found my first young cuckoo, an incongruous monster, having already outgrown its nest, an insatiable conveyor-belt which two diminutive hedge sparrow foster-parents struggled to keep supplied with food. On one side was the barley field, where partridges roamed; on the other an abandoned shrub and tree nursery. Here I encountered whitethroats and greenfinches, and sought out the sci-fi caterpillar of the puss moth, which reared up to reveal a purple face with staring ‘eyes’ while lashing its whip-like tail to scare me off.
Through another field with a tiny stream talking its way through it, and more allotments, over the railway line, and a mile from my home I finally reached the river and the old stone mill. Here I could chat to the miller, if he was not too busy, while two great shire horses sought to join in the conversation.
Sadly all has now been covered with bricks and concrete, and for another mile beyond as the great maw of the town has engulfed everything that stood in its path. Still not satisfied yet more houses, 1,500 are promised, once the recession relaxes its grip. Even the mill and the railway line have gone, the latter still providing something of a life-line as a footpath and cycleway out of the town. Even here, the last time I walked it, I noted with great sadness that some adjoining property-owners were using it as a convenient dumping ground for garden and household waste.