A Life in Music

I started this blog with music, so it's about time I wrote about it again. Heavy sessions on YouTube, making up playlists of my favourite songs, got me thinking about the part music has played in my life.

Up until the age of twelve, my musical tastes were pretty much conditioned by my parents. My mother had a fondness for musicals and Nat King Cole and Cole Porter, my father for classical music, especially Mozart. Both of them liked Chopin. In the early 60s, living near the east coast of Suffolk, we didn't get any opportunity to listen to pop. The BBC Light Programme broadcast about half an hour a week, and Radio Luxemberg had awful reception. I knew all the tunes and lyrics of 'My Fair Lady' by heart, and nothing by the Beatles.

With pirate radio, all that changed virtually overnight. You could go to Felixstowe beach and see the ships anchored three miles offshore: the DJs travelled there via Ipswich station, and fans used to go and meet them (including my sister and I). Once we had tried to listen to music that sounded as though it was being played in cottonwool in someone's bathroom two miles away: now, the signals were so loud and clear that the DJs, and the records, seemed to be right there in our bedrooms. The film 'The Boat that Rocked' got mediocre reviews, but I loved it for the memories it brought back, the excitement of those early days, when everyone seemed to listen to the same things and we were a community of fans in a new and magical world of music.

It all changed, of course, as different genres fragmented. I remember thinking about a bloke I loathed, 'How can he like Bridge over Troubled Water when I love it so much?' People were judged according to what music they favoured, and of course it changed over time. I started out a Beatles girl and switched to the Stones because their rebelliousness struck a chord - plus, they were so good to dance to. I usually tell people that the first single I ever bought was Sounds of Silence - but actually it was Dominique, by the Singing Nun - excruciatingly awful to me now, but then I was only eleven or so, before the days of the pirates, and the Simon and Garfunkel song is a much more accurate indicator of what my adult tastes would be. On the other hand, things that passed me by at the time - Tamla Motown, for example - resonate quite differently now, and I recently added a compilation album to my collection.

As a teenager, my records fell into two categories. There were stars I liked because I fancied them - the Monkees, the Beatles, the Walker Brothers - and those whose music I loved - the Stones, Simon and Garfunkel, Joan Baez, Dylan, Mamas and Papas. The West Coast sound of 1967/8 gave way to British folk/rock: I acquired albums by Pentangle, Fairport Convention and Steeleye Span, and quietly hid my Monkees LPs. I was hooked by the historical bombast of the Strawbs, whom my sister and I went to see at the Royal Albert Hall, one of our first gigs, but the band I most regret never seeing live (too young, too far, my parents wouldn't let us go) was the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band, of late and much lamented memory. Through all this I was learning to play guitar, just enough chords to accompany my erratic singing, and gleaning new songs from folk clubs and the radio.

I went to university, and after the sleepy backwater of Ipswich, Brighton felt like the hub of the universe. I saw the Strawbs (for the third time), Bowie, the Stones, at last, and many other bands. Certain songs still have the power to bring back those times: Samba pa ti, by Santana, Auntie Aviator by John and Beverley Martin, the music from Clockwork Orange, pretty much all of After the Goldrush by Neil Young. Everyone was into 'prog rock', and the guy who liked Slade and Abba was mercilessly mocked. Then Punk burst on the scene and was universally derided - it was the first time, but not the last, that I was too old to like or even appreciate a new musical phenomenon. The 80s brought the New Romantics - a lot of posturing, an awful lot of awful hair, and some good tunes, even if, as Not the Nine O'Clock News pointed out, most of the time it was a case of 'Nice video, shame about the song'. It also brought a new favourite band for me - Dire Straits. I don't care that they grew far too popular too quickly, and therefore became desperately uncool: that man could play guitar all night and I'd listen to every note with rapt attention. The final guitar solo to Tunnel of Love is, as far as I'm concerned, one of the greatest of all, and still has the power to move me to tears. Grace, passion, consummate musicianship, a glorious tune: what's not to like, indeed to love?

Live Aid - which Steve and I watched on TV, desperately envious of Chris and Maureen who were actually there - introduced me to U2, whom I've loved ever since, my favourite album being the spine-tingling Joshua Tree: The Edge, like Johnny B. Good, 'plays guitar like the ringing of bells'. Old bands faded away, new ones took their place. I rediscovered folk - Kate Rusby, Maddie Prior, Cara Dillon, Seth Lakeman - but a lot of the music of the 90s and Noughties seemed too slick and manufactured. I picked out individual songs to delight in, but there were no more 'favourite bands'. My CD collection is an eclectic mix of the last 45 years of pop and rock, from the Stones to the Killers, from Dusty Springfield to Dido, but it seems as if everything 'new' has in fact been done before, sometime, somewhere.

And so the wheel comes full circle, for my sons have discovered the music of my youth, largely thanks to Live8, which introduced them, amongst others, to Clapton, the Who and Pink Floyd. Patrick loves the Beatles, and has all their albums on his MP3 player. They have fifty years of music to plunder. When I was their age, any music made more than 20 years previously was likely to be by Glenn Miller or Vera Lynn. They haven't got the wonderful sense of newness, of freshness, that characterised the music of the 60s, as people like Lennon and Macartney, Dylan and Jagger and Brian Wilson took it to places it had never been before. But oh boy, have they got some fabulous old songs in their headphones.

Lefties, Southpaws and Cack-handies

I'm right-handed, and so is Steve, and it was therefore rather a shock to find out that both our sons were left-handed. We knew straight away with Hugh, as he sucked his left thumb almost from birth: Patrick was not a thumb-sucker, but when he began to feed himself, always picked up his spoon in his left hand. Apparently only two per cent of left-handers are born to entirely right-handed parents, so it got me thinking: how come?

One pointer is that Steve's mother is left-handed. Her mother was a formidable character, and went down to the school to tell them, in no uncertain terms, that her daughter was to be allowed to use her left hand. This was very enlightened for the 1930s. However, both my mother-in-law's two sons use the right hand, and so do my brother-in-law's three children. Left-handedness has only come to my two boys.

There's a leftie on my side of the family too - my first cousin Jonathan. He's a surgeon, and when he started operating, in the 60s, he had to have all his instruments specially made. So if left-handedness was down in part to a recessive gene, this would make sense. Interestingly, one of the few things I know about my (and Jonathan's) grandfather is that he had a bad stammer. And stammering can be a sign that a left-handed child has been forced to use his or her right hand. We'll never know, but that's my gut instinct, and again it makes sense.

Even in this day and age, left-handedness isn't all plain sailing. Of course my sons were never forced to use their right hand, but a lot of people don't use their eyes and just assume that the child is 'normal'. So at nursery school, both of them used scissors in their right hands because that's what they'd been shown how to do. When I bought them a special pair of left-handed ones, at first they didn't get on with them. Once they were writing, of course, it became more obvious.

Writing's hard for a southpaw, and neither of them found this easy. Sport was also tricky. I always said, 'Use whichever hand you find most comfortable and which works best.' And both of them bat with the right hand and bowl with the left. It's a positive advantage being a leftie in many sports, cricket being one of them. Some of the greatest of all tennis players, including Laver and McEnroe, have been left-handed. Nadal is a natural right-hander, but has been coached to play with the left because it gives him such a huge advantage.

I was well aware that the boys needed positive information about left-handedness, and bought several books aimed at children and young people, extolling the numerous special attributes of left-handed people. There were lots of examples of famous artists, writers and entertainers of all kinds, including Leonardo, Marilyn Monroe and Bob Dylan, and explanations of why the left-handed brain is different, and quite possibly superior, to us boring right-handers. Hugh said that these books had really helped when he was young, and made him proud to be a leftie, standing out from the crowd. He has several left-handed guitars, and Patrick asked me the other day whether it was possible to get a left-handed piano. Yes, at a (considerable) price! Much cheaper, apparently, to get an electronic keyboard - you just change the chip.

There's a place online, 'anythinglefthanded', where you can buy all sorts of useful things oriented to the southpaw, from tin openers to scissors to pens with special nibs. But mostly my lads make do with whatever's around them, and just get on with being sinisters in a dexter world. Apparently only ten per cent of the population is left-handed, but that ten per cent is over-represented in all sorts of areas. Many of the Apollo astronauts: US Presidents: actors and musicians. No doubt, left-handers tend to be creative and interesting people who relish their difference, as Hugh and Patrick do. It makes me wish I was one too!

My Daily Deer

I've always loved deer. As a child, passionate about wildlife, I used to stalk them, creeping through the woods early in the morning, moving as lightly as I could, my eyes scanning the undergrowth for any sign of movement. There was quite a large herd in the park: they were Fallow, the darker kind that have brown and grey coats all year round, and presumably the descendants of those animals posed delightfully in the foreground of old engravings of the house. Over the course of two or three years, I got to know them well, their habits and favourite places. No two bucks had identical antlers, so I could recognise some individuals and give them names, usually culled from whatever literature I was keen on at the time: one was called Aiken, I seem to remember, and another, very distinctive with a deformed antler, Shenandoah. Sometimes I had Perdy with me, and had to keep her on a lead because she loved chasing them, and was quite capable of vanishing for hours in pursuit: but mostly I went out at dawn, on my own. The woods, which only cover about a dozen acres, were magical at that hour, wreathed in golden mist, birds singing, dew on the ground: it seemed as if I were the only person in the world, and the deer, slipping through the greenery like wraiths, were creatures of fantasy and enchantment.

Of course to the adults they were a pest. One winter I was horrified to learn that someone was coming to cull them. He was, so I was told, a 'real cowboy' from the USA. I could not bear the thought of anyone, even such a glamorous figure, killing 'my' deer: I came, after all, from the generation that had watched Bambi at a very impressionable age. The thought of offering my services (I don't suppose even at the age of ten or eleven that anyone knew more about the habits of the Orwell deer than I did) didn't occur to me: it would have been the worst sort of betrayal. I took real satisfaction from the fact that this supposed 'expert' had absolutely no success during the week or so that he was trying to shoot my friends.

Inevitably, as I grew older, my interest waned: pop music and other distractions took over, and besides I began to feel it was rather a strange thing for a teenage girl to do. Occasionally I'd see them while walking the dog, or one would be caught up in the football nets, a regular occurrence unfortunately. It was still a thrill to encounter them, though I never went seeking them deliberately. Long after I left home, my father told me that there was a white buck now with the herd: he saw it several times, and I really wished that I had done too. Apparently they are quite common amongst Fallow deer, and the originals of all those 'White Hart' pubs. Alas, that one met a dismal end in a football net, strangling itself in its panic before anyone had the chance to cut it free, and Dad was quite upset about it. But my favourite memory of the Orwell deer is quite recent: coming back to my parents from my sister's house at midnight, we drove up to the main gates of the big house, and saw, there on the lawn in front of the grand north entrance, perhaps a dozen or more quietly grazing deer, lit amber and gold in the rich glow of the floodlights, as beautiful and magical as their ancestors had been, when I was a child.

There are many deer here too, but they're Roe, not Fallow, and have quite different habits: they appear singly, or in small groups, rather than in a herd of a dozen or more, and they're small and very shy. A couple of times, though, we've actually seen them close to the house. Last winter one took up residence in our garden for a few days, feeding off the fallen apples which were a good source of nourishment in snowy weather. They might have fermented while on the ground, which would explain why the deer had considerable difficulty jumping the fence when I came out to have a closer look!

Once more I have a dog who loves to chase them: in her salad days, Rowan would roar off after them like a greyhound in pursuit of a hare, and follow flat out for half a mile or more: I remember seeing her once, from the long Abbotswood field, right across the valley and almost at the pig farm the other side. What she thought she'd do if she actually caught one, I have no idea! Of course she never had a hope: the buck or doe would go leaping like a gazelle over the grass, switching to a higher gear if the labouring Rowan seemed to be getting too close. Even now, an (almost) staid lady of nearly eight, she'll still give it a go, but stops after fifty yards or so, much to my relief: nothing is more humiliating, or futile, than standing in the middle of a field bellowing the name of a dog which has vanished five minutes ago, and you've no idea where they've got to.

Last year, Phil planted a wide strip of wheat all the way round the edge of the Far Ridge, as we call the belt of trees, last remnants of the original Abbot's Wood, which covers the steep ground between the upper plateau and the gentler slopes of the valley. I assume it was for fodder, as there wasn't very much of it. Or maybe he had another motive, for the grain proved irresistible to the local deer, and while they were feasting on it, they weren't molesting his brussels sprouts or carrots. Almost every evening, when I walked that way with Rowan, I would see at least one, standing in the middle of the wheat, munching. There was a buck - I knew it was always the same one because his antlers were slightly asymmetrical - and several females, including some young ones. They caused tremendous damage, trampling the crop down in many places, and eating much of it. In the evening sunlight, though, they were a lovely sight with their rich red summer coats, springing away from us with those huge leaps into the safety of the trees. It was noticeable that before their flight, it was the dog they watched, not me: quite sensible, given that it was always the dog that chased them!

Just like that long ago time, a man arrived with permission to shoot them. I encountered him and his companion a couple of times, and didn't like the look of him much: nor did one of my friends, who also met him. It certainly casts a blight on your evening walks when you know there's a character roaming your route armed with a high-powered rifle. He also had a Range Rover with an array of headlights on the roof, which made me instantly suspicious: it's illegal to shoot deer after dark, a practice known as 'lamping' and most often practised by poachers. And although he claimed to have permission to shoot on Bernie's land as well, when I asked Bernie's son, he said he didn't. Anyway, he didn't have any luck: the fact that I was walking with my dog around the fields and (deliberately) scaring the deer away might have had something to do with it. Lack of skill might also have played its part: if I'd gone out every evening with a rifle, even taking the dog, I'd have bagged at least one deer every night. Standing on top of a huge 4 x 4 on the edge of the field and waiting for them to come to you is not the way to do it. He hasn't been back this year, and I'm glad. The buck is still able to enjoy the grain and the discarded carrots and parsnips, and there are two does, one with a single fawn, one with twins. I see one or more of them almost every day at this time of year, and always with a smile. Nearly fifty years after those golden mornings in the Orwell woods, I am still delighted by their grace and beauty, and it's still a pleasure to meet my 'daily deer'.

Widespread and Heavy

I've written about Perdy, probably the nicest dog I've ever known, with the exception of Rowan: today I thought I'd pay tribute to our nicest cat.

If I'd only ever known my aunt's horrible Burmese, who used to bite and scratch without warning or provocation, I'd never have considered getting one. But Pushka, who belonged to my friend Maureen, changed my mind. I had her granddaughter, Bastis, a chunky brown cat with attitude in spades, who came for walks with us and terrorised the dog. Amongst her numerous sons and (rather fewer) daughters, her third litter stands out. There were five of them: the blue boys Monet and Merlin: Suko, the intelligent, gentle chocolate girl: Mogwai (so called because of his weird ears), who was always a bit of a loser and lost his second fight with a car: and Frost.

Frost was the eldest, a big lilac boy with buckets of charisma. Like Perdy, he was always getting into trouble. As a kitten, he and Suko climbed to the very top of the tallest tree in the garden and had to be rescued. He tried to walk on the waterlilies on the pond, with inevitable consequences. He jumped onto the top of a half-empty bag of compost, thinking it was solid: the expression on his face when I peered down into the depths, seeing him covered in peat, was priceless. We used to joke about plant pots that were labelled 'frost-proof' - no, they weren't! And mention of 'widespread heavy frost' on the weather forecast always raised a smile, especially if he was widespread heavily on a lap at the time.

For fun, Maureen and I decided to show Frost and Suko (who had gone to be a companion to her great-granny Pushka). Suko was a wow in the cage - she played, she purred, she posed - but the judges didn't like her. Frost, by comparison, hid under the blanket but got stacks of rosettes. I entered him for three shows, he did really well in all of them, and qualified for the Supreme (the feline equivalent of Crufts). There, of course, he came up against serious show cats, and finished last in his class. The judge's comment was, 'A lovely-natured boy who needs time to mature.' To which my response was, 'If he matures much more we won't be able to lift him!' By that time he was a year old and weighed nearly a stone.

I should have hung a notice on his cage at the shows saying 'I'd much rather be out catching rabbits!' Frost, like all his family, was a notable hunter and preferred big game. He worked his way through the white doves which we'd inherited with the house, had a couple of racing pigeons in passing, and then decided to roam further afield in search of prey. We had a call from a farm half a mile away: 'Is that your big grey cat sitting on an old nest in our barn?' It was. He was presumably waiting for the birds to return, a trick he'd also tried (to no effect) with the doves' nest box. Then he turned his attention to rabbits, of which there were huge numbers down by the little branch line that ran to Melksham. Once I went down to the bridge over the railway and called him. To my astonishment, he answered from almost under my feet, in the grass beside the road. For an instant I feared he might have been run over, but he was fine: he had just made a cosy nest in the undergrowth, quite unfazed by the traffic passing a few inches away.

We moved from Broughton Gifford to our present house in July, 1991. About a fortnight before we were due to go, Frost went AWOL. I visited all his usual haunts, but there was no sign. In desperation I printed out a 'lost' notice and delivered it to all the houses within a two mile radius. A man called to say he'd seen him a few days previously, very early in the morning, down on the main road between Melksham and Holt: he'd thought it was some kind of fox in the dawn light. Then to my utter relief, there was a call from the chicken farm down on that same road, about a mile away from us. He'd been hanging round their outbuildings for some time. I went down and called him: no reply. But a couple of days later it was raining hard, and we tried again. Bingo! He emerged from the barn looking superb: heavyweight, muscular, fighting fit and absolutely covered in rabbit fleas. Thankfully we bundled him into the basket, thanked the farmer, and took him home. He wasn't allowed out again until we moved, and it took an hour or more to get the fleas off his ears and paws with a pair of tweezers. We'd had plenty of practice during his show career: I kept thinking of him as the subject of a Ralph Bateman cartoon. 'The cat ejected from the Supreme Show for having fleas!'

Frost quickly settled into his new home and never wandered off again. Probably he found ample prey close enough to hand: our chickens soon attracted rats, and he was kept busy earning his Iams. Once I opened the front door in the morning to collect the milk, and found a dead rat laid out on its back beside the bottles, stiff and stark: I often wonder what the milkman must have thought (funny kind of Christmas box!). He did catch the occasional rabbit, and my mother-in-law on one memorable occasion went up for a bath and found a pair of 'rabbit trousers' in the bathroom. I speculated that the local wildlife called him 'The Grey Death'. But to people he was gentleness itself. You could hold him in your arms on his back like a baby, and he had the loudest purr in the world. When they had a pet day at Hugh's nursery school, I took him along. Twenty small children sat down in a circle on the carpet, and Frost strolled round, quite at home, pleased to be stroked and patted. I can't remember him ever scratching or biting. He was the perfect all-rounder - a success on the show bench, a loving, laid-back family pet, and an efficient hunter of vermin. Everyone loved him, and he repaid our love with ample interest, over sixteen glorious years.

Eventually, of course, middle age turned to old age. Aged fourteen, he caught a liver complaint, probably from one of his rats, and was badly jaundiced: even his fur had a yellowish tinge, poor boy. He did recover, but he was never the same again. He caught his last prey the following year, climbing onto the ivy-clad roof of the old barn next door, and taking a succession of pigeon squabs out of their nests: easy pickings, and delicious! His last illness happened quickly, and he died at home in his sleep, before we could get him to the vet. Like all the cats, he was buried under one of the trees in the garden, and I made a pottery model of him to go on his grave, but it did not do justice to his looks, nor to his personality. All our cats are special, but our darling Frostle was the most special of all, and remembered with much love by all who knew him. This is the couplet I put at the end of his mother's obituary in the Burmese Cat Club News, but it will serve for his epitaph as well, and for all our cats:

'A kind hand and a warm fire
Is all the Heaven I desire'.

An Ethel By Any Other Name ...

I find names fascinating, and when the lists of the most popular are published every year, I always take a look at the statistics charting current fashions. When I was teaching, more than twenty years ago, half the school seemed to be called either Mark or Vicki: now, it's Jack and Olivia. But the top 100 won't tell you the really interesting things: the uncommon, the unusual and the downright weird.

All a matter of fashion, of course: sixty or seventy years ago, the name 'Hugh' featured in the lists, now it's so rare he's the only one at his school. 'Patrick' is a bit more common - and of course very common in certain areas, Ireland and Scotland for instance. Some of the names current in late Victorian times are gaining popularity - Daisy, Maisie, Ruby, and sturdy traditional boys' names like Edward, Thomas and, yes, Jack. My second and third names are in honour of my grandmothers - Dorothy (not back in) and Alice (very trendy now). I've always thanked God that my mother's mother was Alice Bertha and not the other way about. Being called Dotty Alice at school was bad enough.

'There are some names that'll never come back into fashion,' said one of my colleagues the other day, looking at the library ticket of a borrower called Norman. I think the Tory party, circa 1985, killed that one off for good. We had fun making a list: Ethel, Doris, Herbert, Ernest, once the names of proud young people fighting World Wars, now probably attached to someone in a nursing home. 'Bruce,' someone said, though I think there may be quite a few still in Scotland, and possibly Australia. In fact, a recent survey lamented the disappearance of such 'traditional' names as Walter, Percy (no surprise why that one has fallen out of favour), Clifford, Arnold and Leonard and, for the girls, Gertrude, Edna, Olive and Agnes. Apparently Elsie is also in danger (a surprise, as I know several) Sidney (there was one at the village school) and Florence (also becoming more popular). There is a family locally with children called Florence, Wilfrid and Stanley - what a name to be saddled with!

When we were thinking of names for our children we spent a lot of time agonising over it. Some are good in both long and short forms (Alexander, for instance) while others are fine until you remember how they're usually abbreviated. One of my teaching colleagues called her son Gary because it didn't have a shortening, only to find he was 'Gaz' to his school friends. Teachers find it difficult anyway, because lots of possibles have to be discarded because of their connotations. I never taught an Andrew who wasn't a problem, for example, and Daniels weren't far behind. There was a girl called Krishna, from a white British family: rather like a Hindu couple naming their daughter Jesus, I thought. Her brothers were Zachary and Isaac. I could never understand why Bryan Ferry called his eldest son after a lift, until I realised that Otis Redding was being honoured (and presumably, for the next son, Isaac Hayes). Some names are really hard to bear, which is why we gave our boys fairly ordinary second names (Nicholas and Luke respectively) so that they could change if they wanted. My sister, fed up with being called Penny at school, became Vicki when she went to college. I'd have changed mine if I'd had a reasonable alternative, but Dotty Alice was even worse than what everyone already knew me as. At least I was born female: if a boy, I'd have been called Rupert. Much as I love Rupert of the Rhine, that would have been truly awful.

In the course of library work, I come across quite a few kids with unusual and often rather nice names. There are quite a few Freys and Freyas (we had a cat called Freya), a Raven, several Kais, Rowan (a boy), Phoebe, brothers called Thorfinn and Magnus (with no Norse connection) and a family with boys called Dylan, Donovan and Rafferty (I asked her if she was int0 60s and 70s folk-rock, and she looked at me in bewilderment). The traditional names of Scotland, Ireland and Wales always prove a fertile hunting ground for people looking for something a bit different. Though 'Kevin' appears to have a rather higher status in the US (think Costner and Kline) than it does here (think footballer and Harry Enfield).

The US sends names back to us, of course, and some of them seem to be given to children without any thought as to what they actually mean. Do parents really want to call their son after someone who fixes the roof (Tyler) or their daughter after the man who makes suits (Taylor)? Or the stony field (Stanley) or a wagon (Wayne)? How about the fastest-rising name, Riley (as in life of)? Mind you, good meanings don't always make for good names: Ethel is the Anglo-Saxon for 'noble'. I was amused that when Tom Stoppard wrote the screenplay for 'Shakespeare in Love' (one of my favourite films) he made the original title of one of Shakespeare's most famous plays 'Romeo and Ethel the Pirate's Daughter'. In that case, an Ethel by any other name (except possibly Gertrude) would be sweeter.

Unspeakable

Yes, unfortunately, it's that time of year again. I was warned last week that they were meeting in the village, so the dog was walked earlier than usual so we wouldn't encounter them. From now on, I shall have to be careful every Saturday, listen out for signs of disturbance, and avoid going anywhere near them if I think they might be around.

Who are these hooligans terrorising the countryside? Why, the local hunt, of course.

I have to confess: I went hunting, or beagling rather. Once. I was ten, and my mother and uncle thought it would be a good idea to run around the fog-bound Essex countryside following a pack of dogs we had long ago lost sight of, with a huge lump of thick red clay adhering to each wellie so that after half an hour we could barely lug our own feet after us. Never, ever again. Of all the pointless exercises, I thought at the time, that takes the biscuit. My mother wasn't keen either, but I think she went along for her brother's sake. She had gone hunting as a child, and been blooded, a horrible experience for someone so squeamish, and had never forgotten the gleeful expressions on the faces of the farmers as the fox was torn to pieces. It was bloodlust, pure and simple, that had attracted them, and it repelled my mother.

The sight of hunt and hounds in full cry is spectacular (but then so is bull fighting). The first time we came to our village, house hunting, we saw them streaming across a distant field, traditional England in all its glory. The reality, of course, is rather different:

• Hounds being exercised down a local lane, defecating in all the gardens, and no attempt made to clear up after them
• Trying to negotiate the cars of 'followers' parked in gateways, on verges, on bends, blocking the road while they peer at the action half a mile away through their binoculars
• Walking along a public footpath with several 4x4s full of hunt supporters trying to elbow their way past
• Being nearly run down by a huntsman who came at full gallop within touching distance of my dog
• Coming across the hunt unexpectedly on one of our walks, having the hounds set off in full cry after my dog, with the huntsman bellowing in pursuit cracking his whip: poor Rowan ran half a mile home in terror. Needless to say, no apology or expression of concern
• Badgers' setts regularly blocked up even though now, with actual hunting of foxes supposed to be illegal, there is no lawful justification for it
• Crops trampled over and fields invaded without permission
• The note I found once, listing all the hounds by name, with their ages. Only two were as old as seven. In the absence of any rehoming/rescuing organisations for foxhounds, I leave it to your imagination as to what happens to them once they get to six or so.
• And above all, feeling (because of other incidents) that you can't complain because if you do you might get a dead fox hung over your gate.

All of these things I've witnessed myself, or spoken to other people who have. It's amazing the number of people in this conservative, rural place who loathe the hunt and all they stand for: not so much for the killing of foxes (though that does count for quite a lot), but for their sheer arrogance, and their assumption that only they can speak for and represent the 'true countryside'. Bollocks, to coin a phrase. So is their assertion that hunting is not the preserve of the wealthy. Well, I don't think keeping a huge £5,000 horse eating its head off all winter, plus tack, horsebox, vet's bills and paddock and stable rent can be done on the average wage, somehow. The fact that most of the hunt people I speak to (when I can't avoid it) sound excruciatingly posh is a bit of a give-away, too. I do have a friend who hunts, but she says it's more for the social life and the riding than anything else - she's much more ambivalent about the killing aspect. I shall have to give her Masefield's 'Reynard the Fox' to read. That did it for me, in my childhood, as did 'Tarka the Otter'. Fortunately otter hunting is now banned, but just as reprehensible is hare hunting, and if the Tories get in next year it'll be back again, for no valid reason at all bar the 'chase'. There are hares here, but not many, and there'll be even less if the beagles return.

When we first moved here the hunt met in the village only occasionally - perhaps twice in a season. Then, around eight years ago, the big dairy farmer near us retired, and the farm was rented by a couple who are keen hunters and use the land for livery and a cross-country jumping course. And now we have the Avon Vale Hooligans every few weeks, truly the Unspeakable in full cry after the uneatable. You have to be very careful walking the dog on a Saturday afternoon, and there are one or two evening meets early in the season (which is when Rowan got chased). It disrupts our pleasant weekend routine, and it happens far too often. What's more, it's daft. In a village which grows so many vegetables, rabbits are such a serious pest that the parish council paid someone to cull them a few years ago. And what is the chief predator of rabbits? Brer Fox, of course. Mind you, I saw a letter from a member of the Countryside Alliance in the local press a couple of years ago, claiming (amongst other things) that foxes didn't kill rabbits, it was all a myth put about by anti-hunting people. Which only went to show how little he knew about the ecology of the countryside he was claiming to represent and protect. It's all one with the 'evil cruel fox who kills for pleasure and deserves to die' slander. Yes, foxes do kill chickens (we've lost loads to them over the years, mostly because I forgot to shut them up before darkness fell), but if they kill a lot, it's to feed their cubs, and they'll take the corpses away and stash them somewhere for later. One buried my neighbour's ducks all over my garden one night in St. Albans long ago. Foxes are opportunists, if they didn't kill they'd die of starvation, and to attribute human vices to them is naive at best, ignorant and malicious at worst. Better a quick death from Reynard than the torture of being skinned alive by a rogue Jack Russell (which happened to 19 of our hens a few years back).

So, I'm with the foxes. They're only trying to scrape a living in a hostile world, against huge odds, and succeeding remarkably well, considering. And if you've ever stopped your car, as I have, and stared into the golden, intelligent eyes of a fox pausing on the verge in the evening sunlight, and felt a shiver of some visceral, animal connection ... I think you would be on the fox's side, too, when the Unspeakable come riding.

Back to School!

How I used to hate that phrase when I was teaching! It seemed that scarcely before you'd waved the little darlings off on their summer holidays (and heaved a huge sigh of relief that one of your colleagues would have the benefit of educating psychopathic Johnny or precociously obnoxious Joan next term), the signs would go up in the Woolies window: 'Back to School!' The shelves would fill with cheap pens, pencils, maths sets and calculators, and suddenly the six glorious empty weeks in front of you seemed less of an eternity, more a few seconds' respite from the chalk face.

Later, of course, when I became a parent of school-age children, 'Back to School' became a promise rather than a threat. Dearly though I love my boys, when they were younger keeping them from murdering each other was a constant task, made worse by the long, unregulated days of the summer holidays. I've never been one of those mums who thinks her children need to be busy, busy, busy all day long - French after school, gym on Friday, tennis at the weekend, charts and structure and educational 'play'. Much of my own free time as a child had been just that - free, freedom to read or walk or draw or just dream without adults poking their noses in - and one of the reasons for moving to the country had been to give our children the sort of childhood where they could go out on their bikes, meet friends, explore, build dens or dams and generally (in a phrase not current when I was ten or eleven) 'chill out'. However, no responsible parent, however relaxed, is going to allow a six or seven year old out alone and unsupervised, and I was no exception. So they were confined to the garden, and all too often my parental role became that of referee, when I was not in goal, fielding, or suggesting that the Lego which seemed to spread of its own accord all over the house should be put back in its box before it was lost, or maimed someone unwary enough to tread on a piece barefoot.

By design, our summer holidays were carefully broken up: a week away (the Forest of Dean, Wales, Devon, Cornwall and Swanage all feature heavily in our holiday snaps), plus five days or so visiting Granny and Grandad in Suffolk. There were huge advantages to this: it was free, in the lovely setting of my own childhood, there was a pool, tennis courts, cricket pitches, even an assault course, and the whole park with its woods and grounds to explore. The downside was that my parents, well into their seventies when the boys were born, were not used to their boisterous behaviour and still less to the four-letter words which every modern schoolchild knows from Reception onwards. Despite drumming into them at every visit the importance of behaving nicely and not swearing, one or two choice epithets did emerge, and Dad in particular was worried by Patrick's temper and Hugh's cheek. I was always sorry to leave - when your parents are elderly, you always wonder if that's the last time you'll see one of them - but at the same time relieved that we were going home where the boys could let off steam without causing tension. Mind you, when I think back to what my sister and I did to each other - she broke my finger stamping on it, I punched one of her wobbly teeth down her throat and put a spider in her hair (she's arachnophobic) - Hugh's and Patrick's spats seem mild by comparison. We ended up good friends, and I'm pleased to report that my own lads have done the same. Although the three years between them mean they don't go out much together, they talk enthusiastically about bands, music and sport, and I can't remember the last time they had a serious argument (touch wood!).

Those six weeks always seemed to go on for ever, until at last the great day arrived: the alarm set, the uniforms ready, holiday work collected, and off we would go. When they were still at the primary school, there would be the pleasure, for me, of chatting to the other mums, finding out what everyone had been doing, hearing news, exchanging opinions and gossip. My social life always leapt up in September, as our breakfast group started again, and people who'd been away for much of the summer returned to our orbit. Between the hours of nine and three, every weekday, my time was suddenly my own, to write, do my pottery class, seeing friends, shopping forays to Bath or even London. 'Back to School' meant parental freedom, and after an exhausting summer it was very, very welcome.

Strange, after nearly fifteen years of slavery to the academic year, that it won't be long now until 'Back to School' no longer resonates in our household. Hugh is off to Uni in a few weeks, Patrick is just starting in the sixth form. I'll miss the days of their childhood, I love having them around, but there's one thing I'll be looking forward to this autumn when they've both gone 'Back to School' - at last, unrestricted access to my laptop!