Living with a View - 3

Early in 1996 we moved from Essex to a small crofting community in western Scotland to take over the village shop. The house on the left of this picture came with the business so we lived not only surrounded by spectacular scenery but also with....

....a view which, although a little restricted by the petrol station office and a small bothy called Shore Cottage, was spectacular. To the left lay Kilchoan Bay with Ben Hiant rising behind it, while....

....to the right we looked across the Sound of Mull to the island of Mull.

We were working hard so had too little time to appreciate how fortunate we were, although when we built the new petrol station we added a small area to its right where we could take our evening drink and sit on a swing chair and enjoy the view.

But perhaps the best time to appreciate our good fortune was first thing in the morning when I went out to open up the shop and prepare the mail to go out on the bus, and could find a few moments to listen to the silence and watch in wonder as the sun rose across the mountains of Morvern and Mull.

A Moment's Happiness

Yesterday we walked the sea wall that twists and turns along the edge of the marsh that bounds the Deben Estuary looking for....

....migrants, like these brent geese, that use the pools to rest and fuel up for their journey, and were remembering that it was at....

....this point, over a year ago, that we first saw....

....a Suffolk kingfisher. Shortly afterwards, as we walked beside a fleet that parallels the Tomline Wall, one of the old flood defence dykes that divides the local golf club's land in half, we spotted one.

This land is loosing its birds. We've walked miles in the last few weeks and haven't seen a single yellowhammer or chaffinch, yet the fields of harvested wheat and barley are so covered with spilled grain which they should be enjoying that the hoards of pigeons, crows and gulls can't cope with the feast. The food is there. Where have the small birds gone?

It's depressing, so thank you to this one, bright little bird which gave us a moment's happiness.

Qualified Teachers

One of the bonuses of going through old files preparatory to moving is finding documents which I had forgotten I had. A small brown envelope with 'D.E.S.' written on the front contains this, a letter  dated August 10th 1970 giving me qualified teacher status. This followed my appointment to my first post in England, as teacher in charge of Geology at Ludlow Grammar School in Shropshire.

It notes that my first year will be a probationary year: I remember being visited briefly, once, during a geology class by one of the local authority officers, after which I was signed off.

As if the letter wasn't quite enough, I also received this, the size of a postcard, Form 33 TT, which repeats my DES number which, the letter urges, "....should be carefully noted." I checked on the latest missive from Teacher Pensions and am pleased to note, at the top right hand corner, that my TP reference is 7085717 - the / seems to have been lost.

In the same envelope is Gill's card which is much more specific and firm about the use of her number. It starts with 68/ so it followed completion of her first teaching appointment, at a convent in Stone, Staffordshire, in the year 1966/67, while I was finishing my degree at Keele. The reason that it followed her first year, while mine was issued at the start of my year, is that she had not completed a year's teacher training and joined the profession as a graduate.

When I think of the prolonged and difficult probation which Rachael went through to gain her qualified status in Scotland a year or so ago, we had it very easy. But then, in those good old days, we still had the cane, so students were much better behaved, and the policy was that a teacher was king/queen in his/her classroom and no-one ever disturbed him/her, not even if a riot was going on.

Living with a View - 2

Our Suffolk view, which consists of a lot of sky, made us realise that a good view isn't simply about looking a distance, nor are slow, colourful sunsets sufficient: a view has to have life beyond flights of crows and pigeons.

The first house I lived in which had a living view was the Hoey house on the coast north of Mombasa. Across its wide lawn, through the obstruction of several trees, we glimpsed the colour patterns of a distant tropical ocean. As small boys that view wasn't something which we sat and looked at, it beckoned us, so we were forever running across the lawn and straight out onto the heat of a coral white beach, where we spent every moment of our day.

That view lived, in that it changed with the time of day, as the trade winds brought sharp showers and, every now and then, when it really came alive as brilliant yellow weaver birds visited the birdbath, when monkeys moved through it and, although I never saw them, when the Nyali buffalo herd paid a visit.

The first view I just sat and watched for hours at a time was this one, from the next house we had, at the end of Cliffe Avenue in Mombasa. Not only did it look out across the Indian Ocean, with its reefs, rolling seas and changing skyscapes, it oversaw a steady procession of ships, from cargo, passenger and warship to the various Swahili and Arab sailing boats - jahazi, mashua, ngalowa and dhow. We also watched a procession of humans - golfers, people enjoying a slow drive along Azania Avenue, the Indian community which came by car to stop and mingle and talk on a Sunday evening - and wildlife, including the brown kites which swooped to snatch the golf balls, perhaps thinking they were spare eggs.

So we sat with our friends on the downstairs veranda, sipping drinks, eating roasted cashews and raisins, and watching the slow unfolding of this view while we listened to records played on my father's HMV deck in the sitting room behind us - Scheherazade, The New World, Elvis, The Everly Brothers, Connie Francis.

It took me over thirty years to find the equal of that view.

Late October Wildlife

After a gloomy and chilly month so far the sun has returned to the Suffolk countryside, bringing out the last of the insects.

Red admirals seem to hang on long after the other butterfly species have given up for the year, feeding on the ivy, and, much to our surprise....

....there are still dragonflies to be seen. As far as we could tell they are all common darters, which arrive late on the scene each year and hang on grimly into the early part of winter, but....

....we didn't expect to see them mating this late. This pair in tandem are making use of the Gulpher Road pond which was so badly polluted but which, following recent heavy rain, must have freshened up enough for them to believe their young have a chance of surviving in it.

We were welcomed by this toad the other day when we went to the allotment to pick up some produce. He should be doing well as there are worms near the surface for the first time in ages, the slugs are in their element, and the caterpillars which have been having a late meal on our broccoli and brussels have probably been frozen off their perches and landed on the ground near him.

The Mikumi Elephants

This picture was taken in Mikumi National Park, Tanzania, in 2011. It's one of my favourite photos and is used as the background on one of my desktops.

The elephants may have arranged themselves perfectly for the shot but that's not the only reason I like it so much. For a start, like all good pictures, it required patience. When we first saw the herd they were away to our right, resting from the heat in the shade of a large tree, but we knew that they would come down to the water, which was to our left - it was simply a question of how long we had to wait.

In the event it wasn't long, but what made the picture was that, as the small herd crossed the road, one of the cows - I assume the matriarch - turned and threatened us. It wasn't a serious threat but what it showed was the sad state of the herd. She's a young cow to be a matriarch; she's lost a tusk; the herd in general is young; and none has good ivory.

Mikumi's elephants, like so many all over Africa, have been severely poached. They seem to be recovering but it may be years before the park once again sees herds with old matriarchs with big ivory. So this picture sums up the state of African elephants while, at the same time, offering hope.

Alone, or Different?

Over the last couple of years I have gone through the family albums, scanning pictures and uploading them for this blog, but this one sticks in my mind. I used it in a post about Fatuma, our ayah in Dar-es-Salaam - here - and under it I wrote, "This is the Crole Rees' birthday party on the beach. I am at right, separate from the other children. There are several later photos of me slightly to one side of everyone. At that stage I don't think I wanted to be antisocial, I just felt.... shy."

I don't think I was shy. Had I been, I would have been hanging off my mother's skirts - she's visible amongst the adults in the middle of the picture - but I'm out front, looking at whoever is taking the photo. I'm not shy, I'm asserting that I'm not one of the crowd. I'm different. I'm not necessarily going to do what everyone else is doing. In fact, I'm going to relish being different.

So in due course I'm going to hang my thumb out on the side of a road and hitch thousands of miles across Africa. I'm going to marry an adventurous girl and together we're going to work in a school in the middle of the African bush. When others are settling down to their first child and a mortgage, we're going to uproot our family and take it to a tropical island. When other teachers are working out their last years towards a secure pension, we're going to pack up teaching and a lovely Victorian family home to buy a shop in a distant corner of Scotland. And now, in our mid-seventies, we're selling a nice bungalow in a nice English seaside resort, a house which we've spent months altering so it's perfect for our declining years, and going to live in NE Scotland, almost as far north as John o' Groats.

I'm glad that small boy decided to squat on the sand of that East African beach away from all the others.

Living with a View - 1

We came to this Suffolk town with the hope of buying a house with a sea view but found that what few came onto the market were way out of our price. We also realised that a view of the North Sea in this part of the world isn't very exciting and certainly not worth the premium it attracted.

We did find, however, that an inland view could be interesting and might make a good alternative. The one above is on a footpath which we often walk, and we have stopped many times to wish that we could build a house on the spot where we stood.

One of the reasons we bought the house we did was that, while it had no view, a view could easily be opened up simply by....

....cutting down the conifers at the bottom of the garden, removing the so-called summer house and replacing part of the fence with two sections of latticework so that, even from the conservatory, we looked out across a mile or two of albeit flat countryside.

It was a huge improvement but one of the things we have on our wish-list for our next home is, once again, a good view.

A Child Again

One of the great advantages of having small children is that one can do things which, without them, would be quite impossible. What would a stranger walking along this beach at Long Bay in Jamaica have thought if I had been busy constructing this grand castle without Elizabeth there as an excuse?

Jamaica has some terrific beaches - this in Boston Bay on the island's east coast - and their sands are perfect for castle building. One of the things that surprised me was that the coastline had a small tidal range so there was plenty of time to build a castle before the exciting bit - when the tide came in and the waves attacked it.

I love beaches but the best ones are tropical, with coral sand, gentle breezes, palm trees, and water as warm as soup. To these I would add having a child along, not only so I can make castles but also so we can wander together along the high tide mark discovering the things that have been washed up. On one of these Jamaican beaches we found hundreds of small balls, about the size of a ping-pong ball but heavier: they were for roll-on deodorants and had probably escaped from a wrecked container.

This is Boston Bay again, during the grandmothers' visit, with the beginnings of another castle. Jamaica had it's tough side but, looking at these pictures, I wish I were back on those beaches except, now, it would have to be with our youngest grand-daughter to provide the excuses.

A Rainy Day by the Seaside

There is something singularly depressing about a wet day at a seaside resort. A few weeks ago the place was busy with people enjoying the sun, relaxing, laughing. Today the sands were deserted; the beach huts have been turned sideways against the incoming weather; puddles collect along the promenade.

The one inch of rain that fell in the last twelve hours reminded me of a good day in the Highlands. The difference here is that we don't get prolonged periods of it: one friend who came to stay in Kilchoan never saw the sun in a week and promised that he wouldn't be bothering to return to Scotland any day soon.

The rain even drove the most hardy of the dog-walkers off the promenade; the drains in the streets couldn't cope so anyone walking the pavements was soaked not only by the rain from above but also from the side by the passing cars hitting the puddles; but it was a good day to go shopping as the stores were deserted.

I didn't mind walking in the rain today. I'm well equipped to stay dry and it suited my mood. And I'm used to it.

'The Wilderness'

The Wilderness is a strip of woodland just under a kilometre long and only fifty metres or so wide which is one of the places I will remember long after we have left Suffolk for the pleasure it has given us. There are plenty of similar little areas of woodland surrounded by large, intensive farmed fields, but this one, for reasons that aren't apparent, has more than its fair share of wildlife.

We usually approach it from the eastern end through a patch of stinging nettles and other weeds. This has been one of the best places locally for spotting dragon- and damselflies. They may favour it because it's sunny, close to several ditches and protected from the wind.

This section of the path which runs the length of the wood seems to specialise in tits - blue, great and long-tailed - which may congregate here because it surrounds....

....the larger of two ponds within the wood. Both are infested with chickweed but this one used to have a population of dragonflies - they've disappeared this year. The mass of chickweed is probably encouraged by the fertilizers which are washed off the fields which surround it.

Near its western end The Wilderness is cut by a track which splits into four on the south side and into three on the north, so we know the point as 'Seven Tracks'. Much of this field has been planted with native trees so, were we to return to The Wilderness in years to come, it would be much more extensive.

This often sunny spot is one of the places we stop and sit for coffee not least because....

....dragon- and damselflies congregate here, some basking on the warm sand of the tracks, others resting in the weeds that fringe the woodland.

The farmer raises pheasants in the area just beyond where Gill is seen looking for dragonflies, which may be why The Wilderness has been left wild. It do hope it stays this way so that this little oasis of wildlife continues to survive and, hopefully, thrive.

Swimming with Inner Tubes

The first new friends my parents made when they moved from Zanzibar to Dar-es-Salaam in 1943 were Martin and Ruth Lux. Being very short-staffed, my father found himself having to deal with the African Mercantile's trade in hides and skins which, in war time, were an important commodity but about which he knew nothing. Martin was manager of the rival Old East African Trading Co., which also dealt in hides and skins, but was very helpful.

Martin and his wife Ruth (left, with my mother) had a banda - a small, palm-thatched house - on the coast to the south of Dar and our family went over by ferry several times to spend the weekend with them, bathing and relaxing.

It may be that Martin (top picture) introduced me to the joys of swimming with an old inner tube. If so, I am eternally grateful for....

....it was something my brother and I enjoyed for years, whenever we had the chance. This picture was taken at the Swimming Club in Mombasa, with me proudly holding my tube. In the background are the Swimming Club's rafts and, on the other side of the Old Port, the Old Town and, to the left, Fort Jesus.

In this picture, taken at the Hoey house on the beach at Nyali, I was twelve. Richard and I had a wonderful holiday there, spending every moment we could on the beach below the house, exploring the rock pools which stretched out towards the reef when the tide was low, but....

....revelling in the excitement of paddling over sometimes quite vicious breakers when the tide was high and the sea a little rough.

Once, when we were swimming on just such a day, my mother screamed at us to come in - she had seen the dorsal fin of a shark. It was the flipper of a large turtle.

Breathing Deep

I'm not at home in woodlands, even if they have relatively open areas, nor do I subscribe to the idea that....

....the best views are those encountered suddenly when the trees draw back to reveal them.

No, I'm happiest when the woodland thins and an increasingly big sky is revealed, even more so when....

....the last trees are left behind and I can breathe deeply.

Pictures taken on Ben Bhraggie, Sutherland.

A Use for Chestnuts

Gill and I were like small children the other day, out collecting horse chestnuts from under the trees along the back of the seafront. Not that we were planning to use them for playing conkers but because our neighbour wanted some to put in the corners of his rooms - to keep them free of spiders.

We had never heard of this but, being of scientific bent, we collected a few extra and tried it out in our house....

....with mixed success. The spider which had been sitting in the small toilet for several days decamped but the chestnut in the bedroom didn't prevent this spider from moving in.

We continue to monitor the situation in a scientific way but early results from our experiment are not promising.

The Front Drive

This picture of my mother and father was taken at the last house we had in Mombasa, the big house towards the end of Cliffe Avenue which overlooked the entrance to Kilindini harbour. It was taken some time between 1959 and 1961, when they left Mombasa, and it was a Saturday or Sunday as those were the only days when my father wore shorts. On a Saturday he might go in to the office for an hour or two before progressing to the Sports Club where, if he wasn't umpiring one of the cricket matches, he would enjoy a beer or two before lunch. My mother is wearing one of her signature frocks and a pair of low-heeled shoes. The dog is Susie, a rough-haired dachshund, Richard's dog, the slayer of deadly green mambas - see earlier post here. Since she doesn't look too decrepit in the picture I would think this is nearer 1959 than 1961.

Whoever took the picture - and it wasn't any of us as we didn't have a colour camera - has their back to the house and the sea. The houses on the other side of Cliffe Avenue can be seen. Mlalo, the garden 'boy', had his bonfire under the tree to the left of my father. The tree with the red flower is a Uganda (or Nandi) flame. Out of sight to the right of the photographer is a group of frangipani trees from which, each morning, Saidi the 'head boy' would pick one of the delicate flowers which he floated in a bowl of water and place it in the middle of the breakfast table.

I do wish I had more photos of this house. It was such a happy place. On a typical day for Richard and I our friends would ride up that drive and walk round to the front of the house to sit on the veranda with us and look out at the view while we decided what to do that day.

Homes

We were counting up the number of different dwellings in which we had lived during the 50+ years we have been married, and came up with eleven that we occupied for more than a few weeks. Our first home was the flat in Stone, Staffordshire, above, followed by....

....the bungalow at Bernard Mizeki College in Rhodesia, the ground-floor flat in Bristol, the small dormer-bungalow in Ludlow, bungalow number 1 at Excelsior College in Kingston, Jamaica, the Development Corporation house in Basildon, the house in Hockley, Essex....

....the lovely Victorian red-brick house in Maldon, Essex, the house attached to the Ferry Stores in Kilchoan, Matenderere in Kilchoan, and our present bungalow.

To this, I have to add, from the years before we were married, two houses in Dar-es-Salaam, four houses in Mombasa, including the beautiful beach-front Hoey house at Nyali, above, and three houses my parents had while I finished school and moved on to university in the UK.

I would like to think that we left the houses we've owned in better condition than when we entered them. Building our own house in Kilchoan was something I wouldn't have missed, particularly as, with the design done by our daughter and son-in-law, we managed to capitalise on the site's position, and we are certainly leaving our present little bungalow in a much better state than when we found it.