Happy New Year!

One of the good things about having an allotment in a town where, even after a year, we know relatively few people is that other plot holders stop when they pass and discuss important things, like when to plant cauliflowers, whether the air is still enough to have a bonfire, and the ongoing problems caused by last summer's 'drought'.

One man stops quite frequently to pass the time of day. We still don't know his name but we know where he lives in the town and that he used to live in the Fens area. He is one of several people we've talked to recently who have bemoaned....

....the dearth of small birds. Although we have both seed and peanut feeders hanging under the pear tree in the allotment, the birds just aren't there to use them - any more than we're seeing them in our back garden. In fact, the only small bird we see on our plot these days is this robin who arrives very promptly to avail himself of the worms and insects we disturb as we go about our allotment business. He did thank us this morning by singing beautifully before he went off to find a quiet place to digest his meal, a timely move as, a couple of minutes later, a sparrow hawk passed by.

So, in wishing the Memory Wanderer's readers a very happy, healthy and prosperous 2019, I would like to wish the local small birds an especially good year.

The New World

The first sight of a new land from the sea, the way it was experienced by the earliest European explorers - perhaps, in this case, the Vikings - is a very special moment. This is the 24th September 2008, on our second visit to Canada, when we crossed a rather stormy Atlantic and our first port of call in the New World was....

....the spectacular little city of St John's, Newfoundland. This is the entrance to its harbour which must be one of the most perfectly protected anchorages on earth: our cruise ship could only just squeeze through the entrance into the elongate cove.

We only had a few hours in port so we walked around the north side of the harbour to the headland below Signal Hill....

....enjoying the views of the masses of close-packed wooden houses clinging to the cliffs. Once back in town we stopped for lunch in a small cafe which served a superb fish chowder, the first we had ever had.

When we came to depart our ship only just had enough room to turn round but the manoeuvre gave us a chance to view part of Canada's growing Coastguard fleet. This is a country which, as global warming melts the Arctic ice, suddenly has to patrol hundreds of extra miles of coastline which it didn't know it had.

The Silver Salver

This silver salver was presented to my father at a dinner in London after he retired from East Africa in 1961.

It came from the directors of the Liverpool-based shipping line Thomas & James Harrison. Ernest, my father's father, had been a captain in the Harrison Line and it was through him that my father got a post with a ships' agent in Port Sudan in the early 1920s. In the years between then and his retirement, he had looked after Harrison ships in Port Sudan, Beira, Zanzibar, Dar-es-Salaam and Mombasa.

My father was immensely proud of the salver, as he was of all his work as a ships' agent. However, what made the presentation particularly moving for him was the inclusion in the inscription of the word 'friend'.

Over the years my father met many of Harrison's directors and several stayed with my parents in Mombasa and Dar-es-Salaam when they were on tour. Mark Graham, whose signature is seen here, was Harrison's first representative on the East Coast and worked with my father in Mombasa, where they became close friends. He later became a director, and when I was looking for a way to get out to Southern Rhodesia in 1963, my father approached Mark Graham who offered me passage to Cape Town as a 'supernumery' on Harrison's Arbitrator.

While my parents were in Mombasa, Colonel and Mrs. Harrison - his signature is also on the salver -  stayed with them for a few days. My mother writes, "He was very lame and couldn’t walk far so the ship had a sedan chair arrangement into which he got and was then hoisted by a crane and lowered on to the dock."

Life at 10 Fountain Lane

From the photographs in our album anyone would have thought that our lives in Hockley were spent almost entirely in a sunny garden. Memory plays tricks but, thinking back, we did get our moneysworth from the garden, which was ideal for our needs. This picture shows Lizzie and Katy with their cousins, Ben and Giselle.

Friends seemed to drop by and assist on special occasions. This is Katy's 6th birthday party in 1980, when Ann Campos, a colleague of ours at Chalvedon, came round to help. Ann taught in the Home Economics department while her husband, Dave, was head of science. He and I spent many hours playing with the school's first computer, a Research Machines 380Z. It had a massive 56KB of user RAM and sold at an equally massive price, something over £1,000. We spent hours programming it but I can't remember anything useful every resulting.

I have no memory of this occasion but it shows Lizzie and Katy with their friend Annabel in fancy dress - Gill kept a bag of oddments for this purpose. Again, we knew Annabel through Chalvedon, her father John having the unenviable job of being in charge of the school's 'sin bin' - though we weren't allowed to call it that. Note that Lizzie is wearing her mother's shoes.

This is a portrait, probably taken in the autumn of 1979, by our friend Rick Canton who taught with us in Jamaica and who now lived with his family to the north of London. We had kept in touch and they....

....visited us and we drove across to their house. Irene is holding David with their son Christian to their right, while Rick sits with their daughter Rachel.

Helmets

These are helmets, members of the family Cassidae, from two different parts of the world. The larger one on the right comes from Jamaica, from Blue Mahoe to be precise - see earlier post here. This was towards the end of our stay there, so it would have been 1975.

I spotted it one evening in the shallows close to where the two game fishing boats were tied up, and waded round to collect it.

It's about 160mm long. I think it's Cassis tuberosa, a species which is common in the shallow waters of the Western Atlantic and Caribbean - link here.

As with all shells, there was an animal inside, a snail, which had to be removed without damaging the shell. The easiest way to do this was to bury the shell in shallow, sandy earth and leave the ants to do the job.

The smaller shell - I think it's Cassis madagascariensis, link here - is about 110mm long, much more robustly built, and comes from the coast near Mombasa. I have no recollection of where I collected it - I may have bought it - but I do know that it's travelled with me for most of my life, having spent a fair share of its time in the little brown suitcase.

Times have changed. These days, with tropical reefs being stripped of anything that will sell to the tourist, I would have left those two old shells in peace, as we did with this beauty which we found grazing in the sea grass on a reef at Ras Kutani, south of Dar-es-Salaam, in 2011. We might as well have taken it....

....as we weren't the only people on the reef that morning. The man seen in this picture, who had obviously been watching us, hurried over as soon as we left the shell and picked it up.

Pictures of the huge range of species in the Cassidae family can be seen here.

Narrow-Boat Holiday

In the summer of 1979, when David was five months old, our family joined Hilary, Tony, their daughter Catherine and my mother for a week's holiday on a narrow boat. We got the boat cheap because it belonged to Gill's Aunt Margaret, who lived near Gloucester, but it was managed by a company which kept the boat at Tewksbury, where we boarded the Gloucester Rose.

It was a super holiday. Even the weather was kind as we steamed gently up the Avon towards Stratford. Since the maximum speed was 4mph we didn't get far and, surrounded as we were with gentle English countryside, it really didn't matter. It would have been a totally relaxing holiday but for the state of the boat. The company which managed the Rose for Margaret had neglected her maintenance, so most of the utilities, including the toilet, didn't work properly. Worse, she took on water steadily, which didn't matter during the day as the bilge pumps cleared it, but I had to manually pump the water out at least once each night otherwise we'd have ended up sitting on the bottom of the river. Tony, being practical, did a great job in keeping everything else going.

In some ways it might not have seemed an ideal holiday for four small children but they were very good, and there were plenty of adults to take turns in keeping an eye on them. We also didn't hurry, so we stopped often to take walks along the towpath and to local villages, and we had the occasional pint in some very picturesque pubs.

My mother fitted in very well, doing her fair share of the chores, amusing the children, and sitting in the sun knitting. Tank tops were always one of her specialities.

At one point she went off by herself 'scrumping' - collecting fallen apples in a farmer's orchard. What she didn't reveal was that, in crossing the gangplank back onto the boat, she had fallen and injured her side. In fact, she had broken a rib. Later, my mother being a very strong Christian, we used to joke that it had been Divine punishment.

David slept in a travel cot on the floor by Gill's bunk and, considering he was in such strange surroundings, he behaved very well.

After we had tied up each night, Tony and I did a bit of gentle fishing off the boat, with a beer at our elbow.

We all got on with each other and it was a thoroughly enjoyable holiday. As a result, we planned further holidays together.

Season's Greetings

Local Wildlife Report

We've lived in this house now for just over a year and one of the saddest things about our time here has been witnessing the local wildlife's struggle for survival. The raptors, which include buzzards, sparrowhawks and this almost-tame kestrel which lives not far from our house, don't seem to be doing too badly, but....

....while there is a variety of waterfowl down on the marshes along the River Deben, including these brent geese, egrets, and a number of....

....swans, the numbers seem to be lower than last year; and we have yet to spot the kingfisher we saw last winter.

The situation with small birds is, however, serious. On a typical day in our garden, where a variety of tasty bird foods are in constant and generous supply, we are lucky to see a couple of dunnocks, a robin, and two or three blackbirds. A neighbour who has lived here for over twenty years says that he thinks there has been an eighty percent decline in garden birds over recent years.

Although we did see two groups of long-tailed tits passing through the garden last winter, we have to walk a couple of miles to....

....this woodland - called The Wilderness - to see them in any numbers. It's also home to blue and great tits and, in warmer weather, a wide variety of dragonflies.

The local mammal population suffers grievously from contact with humanity. This fox was obviously killed by a passing vehicle but lies on the verge with a smile on its face.

The fox may have died accidentally but the recent appearance of these yellow signs in several places along our walks suggests that one countryside sport is on the increase, at a time when hares are also suffering from a return of myxomatosis which threatens a species which has declined by 80% over the last century.

We dread the day when not a single small bird visits our garden.

David's Arrival

After several weeks Gill recovered from the morning sickness and thrived through the rest of the pregnancy, continuing to do supply teaching at Chalvedon almost up to the day David was born, on 21st March 1979. He arrived in our local hospital, Rochford, in crowded circumstances: the staff were terribly busy and the standards of care were, through no fault of theirs, rather poor, so it was good to get him home and into the care of his two big sisters.

David was my parents' first grandson - Gill's already had three.

He fitted in very quickly to our now rather crowded home, the girls making themselves very useful in looking after him. He seemed to have a relatively trouble-free start to life, perhaps helped by the fact that his early months were during the summer - this picture was taken in the garden at 10 Fountain Lane.

It wasn't long before we took him down to Hastings. At that time we had a Mini 850 to which we attached a roof rack, so fitting in the five of us was quite a squeeze. Gill's father wasn't very happy with this so helped us buy a brand new, very smart silver Ford Escort estate. It was a good car but it was what is known as a 'Friday car', coming off the assembly line last thing on a Friday when quality control wasn't at its best, so it leaked oil, a fault that the local garage didn't seem to be able to rectify.

The Inhabitants of Echo Beach

"Echo Beach," the advertisement says, "is a small, boutique style hotel, on the south east coast of Zanzibar, sitting right on top of a stunning beach." Truly, it is a lovely beach, full of interest, and the water is clean, warm and inviting. Despite this, the hotel has its own private pool, so few people venture into the sea which, as with many East African beaches, has seaweed and other flotsam floating in it which, when it accumulates overnight on the beaches, is carefully raked up.

Yet the lagoon which stretches out in front of the hotel is an underwater paradise. At low tide it's possible to walk out across it to the fringing reef, less than a mile out, and watch the millions of brilliantly coloured and patterned small fish that flit between the branches of corals and soft sponges, while....

....heads of living corals, of many species, grow in the warm water.

There are shells to be found, like this giant clam, and cowries, tops, murexes, spider shells, and many more, although most of the best shells have been pillaged for sale to tourists - so those precious few that remain should not be disturbed.

Walking out across the lagoon and wandering round the reef is absorbing, but beware: wear tough shoes as every crack in the dead coral which forms the reef is inhabited, often by sea urchins whose spines easily pierce skin, break off and, unless rapidly extracted using a needle, will go spetic.

Other, even nastier characters inhabit the lagoon, including this lion (or devil) fish, Pterois miles, whose fin spines are highly venomous, and striped sea snakes whose bite is even more lethal.

The Mahogany Table

In the list my mother made of all her possessions in the last flat she had in Hastings before she went in to Old Hastings House, she described this as a 'mahogany occasional table' and that it was valued by Sotheby's some time in the 1980s at £80. She writes that she acquired it from her cousin, Helen Liddell, known to us as 'Cousin Bay', when the old lady died. Sadly, she doesn't say where Bay got it from so I can only speculate.

Bay was on the staff of the Institute of International Affairs (Chatham House) where she was their expert on German affairs so I don't think she travelled to the far east, where this table is most likely to have been made.

It's intricately carved and would be a fine piece except for the crude way in which four large screws are inserted into the table top to hold on the legs.

There's a possibility that it wasn't originally Bay's. This is supported by evidence from another list my mother made where she wrote, "1 side table ex Uncle Stanley". Perhaps Bay inherited it from Sir Stanley Reed when he died.

It's exactly the sort of item that my great uncle Stanley, who was owner and editor of the Times of India, would have had. He had married Lillian Humphreys, my mother's mother's sister, and my mother inherited both money and furniture from him.

I'm not at all sure what the things are at the bottom of the legs. They might be dragon's heads or they could be the ends of an elephant's trunk with eyes added.

None of this really matters. The table doesn't need a history. I like it for what it is.

Holidays in Hastings & Newport

We went down to Hastings fairly often, staying with my parents. My mother loved having the children: she took them to local castles like Pevensea and amused them in the evening with card games like pelmanism and sevens. My father could manage the invasion as long as they didn't intrude too much. Even when the temperature wasn't too warm, we still spent time on Hastings' shingle beach, which often had tar on it.

We also drove east along the coast a few miles and walked down Fairlight Glen to the small beach there, which was usually deserted and had a little more personality than Hastings beach. This beach later became one of England's first nudist beaches.

By the summer of 1978 we had a little more money so had a 'proper' holiday, taking a caravan near Newport in South Wales. My mother came with us having had holidays in Newport when she was young, while my father stayed at home. We spent hours on sandy beaches with the two girls but we also....

....walked miles along the cliff tops, the caravan site being situated on the coast path.

While everyone else enjoyed themselves Gill felt rotten, at times having to stay in the caravan while we went out. This time it didn't need a doctor to diagnose the problem: we knew she was pregnant.