A longed for book; a medical worry results in an unquiet week; Gran gets her Smew; a bike is mislaid; flower paintings for friends; Tussock Corner; did Kew get it wrong? Oppressed by the London Underground; Roman Snails and a kind gesture.
On February 10th 1955 Gran is in Southampton. She has an appointment there for a chest X-Ray but does not enlarge upon this, preferring to record that:
I had drawn an unexpected fifteen shillings overtime for Christmas week, and, having also a book token to spend, I went to Smith’s bookshop and gave myself a book for which I had longed for many months. It was “Wild Orchids of Britain”, by Summerhayes, of Kew, and I also bought the latest edition of “Hampshire Review”, in which an article of Barry’s on birds of the coast appears. It is a good article and reveals depths in Barry’s character, which may not be apparent to those who only know him superficially.
She has little to note the following day, except for the result of a whist drive she attended in Bassett:
I think it almost worth recording that I won the first prize at the Whist Drive with a score of one hundred and eighty-eight, scoring a phenomenal one hundred and four in the second half!
On the 12th:
The doctor came today to overhaul me. The result of the X-Ray was not altogether satisfactory so I am to have another taken. It showed a shadow at the base of the right lung but Doctor was not unduly disturbed and could find nothing much wrong. A slight infection of respiratory organs for which he has given me medicine. There was some talk about a specialist for the headaches but nothing definite. A cock Bullfinch this morning was turning his attention to our apple trees so I bade farewell in advance to our apple crop!
Typically, Gran is just as keen to relate the doings of birds in her garden as she is to record a potentially serious ailment, but she is clearly a little worried by the result of her chest X-Ray, as she writes a few days later:
This had been a slightly unquiet week since the doctor told me of the doubts about the lung, but after the first day or two I had managed to view it dispassionately and had even mentally arranged to receive my Communion at home in the event of a long illness and to try to arrange for my funeral to take place at Compton, which is so tranquil and peaceful a place.
“Well”, she continues later, having been to the hospital for the result of the second X-Ray, “Jane comes home tomorrow and I do not have to give her upsetting news. There is nothing wrong with my lungs, and Dr Beck told me to come home and not worry about anything.”
Most of Gran’s daily entries in her journal are shorter these days than of late, partly because the natural world is quieter in the winter but also because Barry and Jane are away from Chandler’s Ford living their own lives. So she is pleased whenever news from either of them gives her something to record, such as the following:
Last Saturday, Barry went alone to Brent (Reservoir) and counted one hundred and eighteen Smew! On Sunday he went to Barn Elms Reservoir at Hammersmith and saw, at last, his first Scaup – two drakes and a duck.
Barn Elms Reservoir is now the site of the London Wetland Centre, the last major conservation project devised by Sir Peter Scott, which came to fruition shortly after he died.
Gran lists many other birds that Dad sees there, and ends her account:
When he returned to get his bicycle and go home, he found the bicycle gone!! Imagine his horror! He reported his loss to the Police and they gave him four shillings to get home. Yesterday, happily, a phone call informed him that it was at Hammersmith Police Station, whence an enthusiastic citizen, full of a sense of duty, had taken it, thinking it had been stolen and abandoned! Not a dull moment in the life of a wandering naturalist! Ricky had smiled for the first time yesterday.
Gran adds a new bird, a Water Rail, to her life list, during a Southampton Natural History Society outing to Nursling on February 26th.
Book 49
On March 4th Gran begins a flower picture for Mary Harding’s birthday: “anemones in a stone ginger-jar”, she says, “which proved to be a perfect foil for the brilliant colours of the flowers”. It is not quite finished after six hours of work, and two days later she makes a start on another flower picture, “a mixed bouquet, for another birthday on the 18th”. After finishing it, Gran has a dilemma: “…now I do not know which one to give to Mary. I shall let her choose for herself”.
Dad appears not to have removed all his belongings from The Ridge yet, as on the 8th, Gran records the following:
One of Barry’s caterpillars, which I am still looking after for him, has pupated and I know this will please him, because normally they hibernate during the Winter and feed again in Spring. Consequently they are difficult to rear, but these we have kept in the warm kitchen, thus preventing hibernation, and have fed them on Carrot instead of Dandelion, which they were having during the late Summer.
And she receives a letter from Barry in which he describes a “marvellous day he spent at Bradwell, in Essex, with Haberdashers’ School Natural History Society”. He sees his first ever Short-eared Owl there.
On March 9th, in need of fresh air, Gran cycles as far as Flexford Bridge. She notes on her way back along Baddesley Road, that:
Jays were screeching in the wood, which we know as “Tussock Corner”. Incidentally, Brother and I named this wood Tussock Corner when we were children, about thirty-eight years ago, when we found our first Pale Tussock moth at rest there on a Hazel tree. How time flies!
Mary Harding, on her birthday, March 10th, chooses as her present, the mixed bouquet that Gran painted, rather than the potted anemones, Gran saying, “the Iris, I think, tipping the balance in favour of that one”.
Gardening for Tommy and Bob Fowler on the 18th, Gran’s confidence in the ability of Kew to correctly identify botanical samples she sends there is somewhat dented. She writes:
During last year’s cold spell, Fieldfares dropped seeds on the snow in the garden and neither Barry nor I could identify them. We were much shaken when Kew informed us they were hawthorn – since we both thought that hawthorn berries contained a small stone like a cherry. Today, in Fowlers’ garden, I found masses of fallen berries beneath a hawthorn tree, and – they contained small stones…! Yet I find it difficult to believe that Kew gave me a wrong identification!
I wonder if the Fieldfares had been feeding on the berries of a different species, the Midland Hawthorn, each of which contains two seeds different in shape from those of the Common Hawthorn.
There is work for Gran at the Fowlers’ florists shop too. On the 19th, she is kept busy with arrangements for Mothering Sunday but particularly with the organising of the:
…rounds for the two men – no easy task, since they ranged from Totton, to Bursledon and Netley, taking in Shirley, Maybush, Nursling, Bitterne, Portswood, Swaythling, Bassett, Woolston and Sholing, besides many nearer the shop.
Arriving home at the end of that day, she:
…was happy to find a beautiful card from Jane for me for tomorrow, “to the best of Mothers” – one of Vernon Ward’s, a pair of Swans and their cygnets on a quiet lake. Now it is late and I am tired, but I look forward to a B.E.N.A. outing to Langrish tomorrow and on Monday, D.V., I go to Mill Hill to see my precious little family…
She writes next day that “I made a bad start”:
…shutting myself out before I had unlocked the garage in which I hide the key, but a neighbour with a ladder came to the rescue and still gave me time in which to catch my bus. I picked up Diana in Southampton…
The coach trip takes in Bishop’s Waltham, Droxford, Swanmore, Corhampton and East Meon, Gran noting the early signs of Spring as they go. She is pleased that only three other members join the outing at Langrish, preferring a small group, where they explore the Beech Hanger. It is cold. There has been much snow lately and some is still lying, and water in deep cart tracks is frozen.
Mill Hill is her destination the following day. She travels by non-stop train to Waterloo from Winchester, noting that “the sun was obscured at Waterloo by London’s usual smoke-screen”. She doesn’t like the City, nor “the Tube”:
I took the underground to Mill Hill, and I must confess that I did not like it and felt most oppressed until the train once more emerged into the daylight at Finchley. However, Mill Hill is pleasant compared with London and the sun shone bravely as I walked eagerly to Barry’s new home.
She is delighted by her reception there, especially by the evident pleasure of Julian at her arrival – “What a charming little boy he is!” – she writes, and:
Ricky has grown tremendously and is now nearly three months old. He has enormous dark grey eyes, which, I think, will eventually be like Jock’s, and has retained all his very dark hair. He is a good baby and smiles readily now.
Gran, sitting in the garden and later, walking by Hendon Golf Course, notes with some surprise, a range of countryside birds, including Great Spotted Woodpecker, and, incredibly by today’s standards, also a Lesser Spotted Woodpecker. Dad comes home from work at tea-time and is keen to show Gran all those Smew at the Welsh Harp Reservoir (named after an adjacent pub) at Brent, so, Gran writes that borrowing a bicycle the following day:
I set out for Brent Reservoir, where Barry hoped to show me the Smew. Barry had drawn a map for my direction, since he was meeting me from School, and, as I negotiated the roundabouts amid the bewildering array of London traffic, in a now thick drizzle of rain which half obscured my vision, I wondered if Barry had realized how much he was asking of his now no longer young mother! However, when it comes to Nature Study, no doubt he correctly estimated my enthusiasm and determination, and I reached our appointed meeting-place five minutes before time.
We met in the forecourt of the Old Welsh Harp, and Brent Reservoir is near at hand. We pushed our cycles along a track well-worn by frequent bird-watchers…
Gran is especially pleased to see four pairs of Great Crested Grebe among a range of other waterbirds, and:
Suddenly Barry said excitedly, “there are your Smew Mother!” and handing me the binoculars, gave me my first glimpse of them – a pair. How lovely they were! The drake was most conspicuous, his plumage pure white, with a black patch on his face and a black band from eye to nape. The duck, too, was quite characteristic, with pure white throat and cheeks, contrasted with the chestnut of the rest of the head.
Gran continues that she much enjoyed seeing far more birdlife than she expected, on “the rather short and hasty visit – short and hasty because it was Barry’s dinner hour and he had to be at Haberdashers’ Playing Fields for athletics just before two o’clock”. Later that evening, she departs for Kingston upon Thames, to visit Adrian’s Mother, “Barry and Julian coming to see me off at the station”.
We get a rather lovely insight into Gran’s character while she is as Kingston. As usual, she takes flowers to Adrian’s grave: “It brought a breath of Spring for him who so loved it”, she writes, and then adds:
I re-arranged a bowl of flowers on an adjoining grave which had been completely emptied by the wind, though, from the freshness of the flowers, it could not have been long placed there. Lovely Tulips, Daffodils and Anemones lay scattered on the ground and I could not bear to leave them there to die, so I put the rearranged bowl down in the grass beside the grave, protected by the headstone and surround. I sincerely hope those who tend it will not misunderstand my motives.
A few days after returning from Kingston to Chandler’s Ford, Gran tells us that while away, she “started to read the Life of the great naturalist, John Ray, and was interested in some of his discoveries”. She continues:
Whilst in Lombardy, in 1665, he found large, pale brown edible snails and in his notes later wrote that they were Helix pomatia, which he had previously found on the chalk hills near Dorking, in Surrey. It intrigued and amazed me to realize that these same snails are to be found there now, almost three hundred years later, for Diana Fowler and I found them last year on White Down, near Wisley, which is not far from Dorking. It made me wonder if they were introduced here by the Romans! How very small and insignificant such a thought makes one feel.
The Cunard liner Queen Elizabeth is due to sail for the first time since her Winter overhaul on the last day of March, and Gran is called urgently by the Fowlers to help with the many flower orders for her. One order, Gran is horrified to note, costs ten guineas! Wonderful though it is, she says:
…one felt that for so much money something more lasting than flowers might have been more practical…personally, I would have preferred a smaller arrangement and, maybe, a book as well. And so much could be done for someone unfortunate with ten pounds!
Article series
- Forty Years in Chandler’s Ford – a Journal (Part 1)
- Forty Years in Chandler’s Ford – a Journal (Part 2)
- Forty Years in Chandler’s Ford – a Journal (Part 3)
- Forty Years in Chandler’s Ford – a Journal (Part 4)
- Forty Years in Chandler’s Ford – a Journal (Part 5)
- Forty Years in Chandler’s Ford – a Journal (Part 6)
- Forty Years in Chandler’s Ford – a Journal (Part 7)
- Forty Years in Chandler’s Ford – a Journal (Part 8)
- Forty Years in Chandler’s Ford – a Journal (Part 9)
- Forty Years in Chandler’s Ford – a Journal (Part 10)
- Forty Years in Chandler’s Ford – a Journal (Part 11)
- Forty Years in Chandler’s Ford – a Journal (Part 12)
- Forty Years in Chandler’s Ford – a Journal (Part 13)
- Forty Years in Chandler’s Ford – a Journal (Part 14)
- Forty Years in Chandler’s Ford – a Journal (Part 15)
- Forty Years in Chandler’s Ford – a Journal (Part 16)
- Forty Years in Chandler’s Ford – a Journal (Part 17)
- Forty Years in Chandler’s Ford – a Journal (Part 18)
- Forty Years in Chandler’s Ford – a Journal (Part 19)
- Forty Years in Chandler’s Ford – a Journal (Part 20)
- Forty Years in Chandler’s Ford – a Journal (Part 21)
- Forty Years in Chandler’s Ford – a Journal (Part 22)
- Forty Years in Chandler’s Ford – a Journal (Part 23)
- Forty Years in Chandler’s Ford – a Journal (Part 24)
- Forty Years in Chandler’s Ford – a Journal (Part 25)
- Forty Years in Chandler’s Ford – a Journal (Part 26)
- Forty Years in Chandler’s Ford – a Journal (Part 27)
- Forty Years in Chandler’s Ford – a Journal (Part 28)
- Forty Years in Chandler’s Ford – a Journal (Part 29)
- Forty Years in Chandler’s Ford – a Journal (Part 30)
- Forty Years in Chandler’s Ford – a Journal (Part 31)
- Forty Years in Chandler’s Ford – a Journal (Part 32)
- Forty Years in Chandler’s Ford – a Journal (Part 33)
- Forty Years in Chandler’s Ford – a Journal (Part 34)
- Forty Years in Chandler’s Ford – a Journal (Part 35)
- Forty Years in Chandler’s Ford – a Journal (Part 36)
- Forty Years in Chandler’s Ford – a Journal (Part 37)
- Forty Years in Chandler’s Ford – a Journal (Part 38)
- Forty Years in Chandler’s Ford – a Journal (Part 39)
- Forty Years in Chandler’s Ford – a Journal (Part 40)
- Forty Years in Chandler’s Ford – a Journal (Part 41)
- Forty Years in Chandler’s Ford – a Journal (Part 42)
- Forty Years in Chandler’s Ford – a Journal (Part 43)
- Forty Years in Chandler’s Ford – a Journal (Part 44)
- Forty Years in Chandler’s Ford – a Journal (Part 45)
- Forty Years in Chandler’s Ford – a Journal (Part 46)
- Forty Years in Chandler’s Ford – a Journal (Part 47)
- Forty Years in Chandler’s Ford – a Journal (Part 48)
- Forty Years in Chandler’s Ford – a Journal (Part 49)
- Forty Years in Chandler’s Ford – a Journal (Part 50)
- Forty Years in Chandler’s Ford – a Journal (Part 51)
- Forty Years in Chandler’s Ford – a Journal (Part 52)
- Forty Years in Chandler’s Ford – a Journal (Part 53)
- Forty Years in Chandler’s Ford – a Journal (Part 54)
- Forty Years in Chandler’s Ford – a Journal (Part 55)
- Forty Years in Chandler’s Ford – a Journal (Part 56)
- Forty Years in Chandler’s Ford – a Journal (Part 57)
- Forty Years in Chandler’s Ford – a Journal (Part 58)
- Forty Years in Chandler’s Ford – a Journal (Part 59)
- Forty Years in Chandler’s Ford – a Journal (Part 60)
- Forty Years in Chandler’s Ford – a Journal (Part 61)
- Forty Years in Chandler’s Ford – a Journal (Part 62)
- Forty Years in Chandler’s Ford – a Journal (Part 63)
- Forty Years in Chandler’s Ford – a Journal (Part 64)
- Forty Years in Chandler’s Ford – a Journal (Part 65)
- Forty Years in Chandler’s Ford – a Journal (Part 66)
- Forty Years in Chandler’s Ford – a Journal (Part 67)
- Forty Years in Chandler’s Ford – a Journal (Part 68)
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