Union Work

Over the years in Essex I became increasingly involved with my union, the National Association of Schoolmasters and Union of Women Teachers - NAS/UWT. At a local level I became County Secretary, which involved time at County Hall negotiating with Education Department officials on behalf of our members. For example, during my time as secretary, all the secondary schools in Harlow, which were 11-18 comprehensives, were closed so the County could reorganise them into 11-16 schools with a tertiary college, which meant that all the teachers were technically redundant, though very few ended up without a job.

Alan Bilby, the head at The Plume School, was very good about the 'time off' I was allocated by the County for union work - effectively two days of the working week. I also had weekend meetings. For example, the body to which I was responsible, the Essex Federation of the NAS/UWT, met on a Saturday morning once a month. I also met regularly with the little committee which ran the Federation - Cliff was one of its members.

Through the Federation I was appointed to various bodies. I was on Essex Education Committee as a teacher representative for some time, and on the governing body of Writtle Agricultural College, but my biggest involvement was with examination boards - the only photo I have of my years of work with the union is this one, at an exam board meeting in London. There was no remuneration for this work but my fares were paid and the London GCSE board always gave us an excellent lunch. I thoroughly enjoyed this work: my favourite meeting was the Disciplinary Committee, where we decided what should be done when schools or teachers were caught breaking the rules - like opening the exam papers a couple of days early and coaching their students ready for the exam.

As well as being time-consuming, the union work was very stressful so, after three years as secretary, I gave up Federation work, though I continued with the exam board until I left teaching.

The Ivory Trail

'The Ivory Trail' is another book which dates back to my schooldays in England and my need to remember the African wilderness where I wished that I could be. Sadly, this isn't my original copy, which was lost upon the way, but one I bought while I lived in Scotland. It's a first edition, 1954, with its cover largely intact, and was rather expensive.

It's a biography of the hunter S C Barnard, known by the local people as Bvekenya, 'he who swaggers as he walks'. The son of a poor South African farmer, he took to the veld at the turn of the 19th/20th centuries, to make his fortune from the illegal hunting of elephants, not only for their tusks but also for their hides, which he made into whips.

The area in which Bvekenya operated his poaching business was to the north and south of the Limpopo River, centred on a village called Crook's Corner, where three countries met: Southern Rhodesia, South Africa's Transvaal, and Portuguese East. This meant that, when police came looking for one of its residents from, say, Rhodesia, he could simply move camp a few yards and be safely in Portuguese East.

While much of the book is about hunting it also contains stories of the animals that inhabited this almost untouched bush country - like the day that Bvekenya observed a confrontation between an elephant and a honey badger, both of whom laid claim to a small waterhole: the honey badger won.

One of the joys of T V Bulpin's book is that it is illustrated with line drawings by C T Astley Maberley, several of them designed to fit around the text.

Another thing I like about the story is the development of Bvekenya's relationship with the local people, a tribe called the Shangane, who more than once saved his life. He, in return, ensured that, when he had shot an animal, the local people benefitted from the meat.

This did not prevent Bvekenya becoming a 'blackbirder', a recruiting agent for the South African mines. It was his job to persuade men to leave their village, for months and years at a time, to walk south to work in the gold and diamond mines.

Bvekenya's story is typical of the old white hunters. Having shot hundreds of elephants, enough to buy himself a farm in South Africa, he became so sickened by the killing that, when he finally tracked down Dhlulamithi, the greatest of all the elephants, despite his magnificent ivory, he found he could not shoot him.

Spring Wildlife

Spring has passed the point where it's unusual to see a butterfly: now we have at least three species on the flutter, peacocks, tortoiseshells and one of the whites. The peacocks are regularly in our garden and seem to particularly enjoy the aubretia.

We have an unusual problem with our resident mice - I think they're wood mice - which are intent on committing suicide in our little pond. This is the second in a few days, despite the carefully constructed ramp which is supposed to allow them to climb out. Maybe these mice are just being good-hearted, having seen....

....that our tadpoles are beginning to appear and will need feeding. These days writers on the internet favour raising tadpoles as vegetarians, so cucumber and boiled lettuce are recommended, but in the good old days they seemed to thrive on bits of bacon.

With blue skies forecast all day today, we walked across miles of Suffolk countryside. During the two and a half hours we were out we met one man on a bicycle and two couples walking but, as we crossed this little footbridge over the King's Fleet, we also met....

....a strange creature which was sitting on the mass of dead vegetation which has become caught up under the footbridge. It's about 80mm long and very much resembles an aquatic stick insect. Having spent a good hour trying to find something resembling it on the internet I gave up and, in the hope that it might be a dragonfly nymph, sent this picture to the British Dragonfly Society to see if they could help.

Fishing

Tony and I had fished together in Jamaica, off Palisadoes, and in several of the rivers and carp ponds of the Welsh Borderlands, and when he and his family came to visit us at Lodge Road we thrashed the waters of the local Chelmer and Blackwater canal. To catch pike we first had to land enough live bait, usually small perch or rudd, but our efforts were rewarded when Tony landed this monster, which was duly cooked and eaten.

With Glenn, a local friend with whom I went fishing, we explored the possibilities of the Norfolk Broads. Tony and I are in the boat, picture taken by Glenn. I can't remember our catching very much on that occasion but Glenn and I did have some good fishing together, including nights out after bream.

David's seen here in fisherman's gear at Rushes lock on the  Chelmer and Blackwater canal in 1990. He seems to be enjoying the experience but I don't think he ever really took to the sport.

The Saadani Hide

My favourite way of watching Africa's game is from a hide. The one I have most enjoyed is at Saadani Lodge on the coast of Tanzania - the hide, raised well above the ground, can be seen in the background of this picture, overlooking a small artificial waterhole.

The lodge is in the Saadani Game reserve but the hide is just at the back of the lodge's restaurant and within a stone's throw of the main office and car park, so when I first sat in it I wasn't too optimistic that any of the larger game would visit the waterhole, particularly during the day.

How wrong I was! The variety of game that came to it was staggering, and it was also good for the local bird population. Warthog were frequent visitors, as were several types of buck, and I also saw....

....three species of mongoose, including this family of banded mongoose.

Sitting in comfort was ideal for photography as the game was only about thirty metres away but sometimes....

....it came a little too close for comfort. The occasional vervet monkey wasn't too bad but I sat and prayed whenever....

....baboons came to drink, which they did frequently, as they could easily have climbed the rather rickety structure.

I spent hours at the hide, often sitting there after lunch during the heat of the day, when animals aren't supposed to be active. That an old male buffalo came to drink was exciting, especially when the managers at the lodge couldn't believe that I had seen one, but my best sighting was of an African bush pig - see post here.

On the Allotment

Allotments aren't just for growing useful things like fruit and veg, they're places to meet people - like the old man this morning who told Gill all about the good old days when people kept pigs on their allotment - and for....

....being quiet and contemplating the deeper things in life.

One of the miracles of our allotment is that the shed, whose tongue-and-groove walls are now paper thin, is still vertical after the recent gales. Each time we leave we ritually lock it but anyone who wanted to could simply push it over and help themselves to the worthless things which we so punctiliously lock away.

The only thing that's cropping at the moment is kale but the local pigeons, having left it alone for months, have suddenly attacked it, though they generously left us enough leaves for this evening's meal.

We planted out some chard this morning, and we have broad beans, onions and garlic growing, along with a number of fruits beginning to shoot, including raspberries, strawberries, redcurrants, blackcurrants, gooseberries and the pear tree beside the shed. All the beds are now dug over ready for the other crops, though we had to buy compost as our two bins haven't yet produced anything.

There are more ladybirds around than any other insect. Although we saw a butterfly, a couple of large bumblebees, some wasps, and miscellaneous small flies, the insects aren't out in force yet. The small birds too are in short supply: a robin joined us briefly to enjoy the worms which we dug up, and a blue tit and a warbler were calling in the nearby trees.

The Family 1990

This post is little more than an excuse to put up a few pictures of the family in 1990. By this time Lizzie was at Cambridge, Katy at The Plume, David at All Saints Primary, and we'd just put Rachael down for Eton. Katy looks as if she's recovering from a heavy night but....

 ....this is a lovely picture of our three girls in the new conservatory.

Rachael is seen here with her two grandmothers, my mother Helen on the left and Gill's mother Bea on the right, while Gill seems to have dyed her hair a rather startling copper colour.

While this is a happy picture of me with Rachael it's here to remind me of the amount of work we put in to the back garden. As well as the flowers we had a thriving vegetable garden with a small greenhouse - just visible at right - which was packed full of tomatoes.

Lodge Road was a very happy house but, with so many responsibilities, little wonder my hair was turning grey.

Sunday Walk

We walked for over two hours to the west of the town today through soft Suffolk farmland, enjoying blue skies and....

....more of the signs of oncoming spring, including....

....frogs spawning on an almost industrial scale in one of the two small ponds in the little strip of woodland called The Wilderness, where we also heard a chiffchaff and a willow warbler.

Buzzards are the most common raptors here and, like their brothers and sisters elsewhere, suffer from the attention of the local gulls.

Once beyond the lane that borders the west of the town we saw no-one except a farm worker in a tractor dragging a spraying machine, who stopped spraying until we had safely passed.

Land Rover or Land Cruiser?

The 'normal' way for tourists to encounter African game is from the relative safety of a vehicle. For reasons I don't understand, in a vehicle one can approach very close to most animals, including lions, without them being at all bothered, though the same is not as true of elephant and, in particular, rhino.

The people who run safaris are divided into two tribes, the wa-LandRover and the wa-LandCruiser. The simple version of what is now called the Land Rover Defender has been a staple of safari companies for decades: it's rugged, its engineering is pretty basic so it can be easily repaired, and...

....it will go practically anywhere, though to drive up and down dunes the tyres are deflated to about half normal pressure.

That the newer Defenders started to be more complex was a bit of a disaster for the waLandRover as these machines are too complex for easy repair and require spare parts which might be a thousand miles away.

The Toyota Land Cruiser has all the features of a Land Rover Defender but has the huge advantage of being rather more reliable though....

 ....it, just like the Defender, is prone to break down practically anywhere.

I have to admit that I am prejudiced, and have always loved Land Rovers since my days of safaris in Kenya as a boy, and from the fact that my first car was a short wheelbase ex-War Department Land Rover - even though it was horrendously unreliable.

Personally, I would far rather not bother with a vehicle at all and go looking for game on foot. This is at the superb Etendeka Camp in Namibia where our guide, Dennis - with the binoculars - has just pointed out very fresh leopard spoor.

The Office - 2

Thank you Katy for sending another picture of the office particularly as it shows me in one of my favourite t-shirts. On the front it had a picture of a sable antelope with the caption MalaMala. It took me some time to discover - in the days before the internet - that MalaMala was the name of one of the earliest private game reserves, located in South Africa - link here.

It also shows some of my music cassettes with colour-coded spines, the colour indicating the artist/group, and the mass of ornaments I kept on the shelves, some of which I still have and some of which have been lost along the way.

The large photo seen in front of the computer, of a palm tree leaning out over a tropical beach, came, I think, from a calendar and I kept it because it so reminded me of a palm tree leaning in exactly the same way over the beach at Nyali. It was near the Hoey House (link to blog entry here), in which my parents were living in 1957 when Richard and I flew out for an idyllic holiday in a lovely bungalow right on the beach. I later framed it and it sits on my desk in front of me now.

The Office

The front room at 4 Lodge Road had several uses - as the dining room, the music room, and my office  - but it was rarely used as a dining room mostly because the office steadily took over. My 'work station' started with the big pedestal desk which I bought while we were at Hockley. At the time we had a Mini 850 with a roof rack and I brought the whole desk home in one go, with the drawers in the back of the car and the desk upside down on the roof, through a thunderstorm.

Once at Lodge Road, the shelves around the desk steadily grew and grew. To my right I had the computer, an Amstrad 6128, hooked up to an electric typewriter which belonged to the NAS/UWT but which also printed Gill's 'Sunflower' catalogue. To my left I had my music: the cassettes were in rows right in front of me, the cassette player and amplifier were to the left above them, and the two speakers were on the shelf above. Finally, the most-used reference books - among them a dictionary and a thesaurus - were straight in front of me.

In the left foreground is a piano stool. Our piano was a good one, a Bechstein, which came from my uncle Frank, my father's eldest brother, who was a FRCO. The three older children all had piano lessons.

At my desk I did much of my union work, I did all my lesson preparation and marking of exercise books, and I began to write short stories and completed my first novel.

I produced huge amounts of teaching materials, particularly worksheets, booklets and overhead projector slides. I kept 'masters' of all this material and took them up to Scotland with me as an insurance policy: if the shop didn't work out, I could always go back to teaching.

One of the features of the room was the original tiled fireplace which had a red marble surround and mantelpiece - I think the marble came from somewhere in the west country. When we bought the house this had been covered with several layers of white gloss paint which I steadily removed.

Living With Us

The wildlife keeps adapting to life in our very human-dominated environment. This kestrel uses the top of a catamaran's mast as a lookout point but he's also obviously....

....a regular at the local pub.

A footpath runs along the back of our houses and something has, for some time, been trying to dig its way under the fences to get into the gardens. At first we thought it was rabbits but....

....from the scat that's deposited in some of the excavations, we're now fairly sure it's badgers.

Meanwhile, with spring in the air, we're very pleased to see that our little plastic-lined pond is hosting a frog's hopes for the next generation.