A Cold May

It's been so cold for May that some of the early insects haven't been able to cope. This peacock butterfly lay collapsed on a grass verge but....

....recovered a little in the warmth of my hand.

Despite the cold some species are appearing. This is the first brimstone moth I have ever seen, hiding under an overhang of the sea wall as if it knew that....

....one of the heavy thundershowers that are due to bring an improvement to the current temperatures was about to burst around us.

For some, cold or rain, the business of attracting a mate and setting up home has to continue. This reed bunting was singing from a vantage point above one of the fleets that drain the local marshes.

Edith Haylett

Ernest married Edith King who came from Winterton in Norfolk. This picture of Edith must have been very special as it was the one Ernest kept in his wallet, which my father gave to me, and it was also....

....used in a pair of small paintings of her and Ernest, done on ivory in 1956, long after Ernest was dead.

The only pub in Winterton today is this one, The Fisherman's Return, so perhaps Edith worked here.

Edith and Ernest had five children. Frank was the oldest, and my father Cecil was followed by Kenneth, Dorothy and Hilda. The family lived in Leytonstone, East London, where Cecil and the younger children were born, but when Ernest became master of his own ship....

....they moved to a much bigger house, 57 Belgrave Road, in Wanstead. My father said that he could remember a zeppelin coming over the Wanstead house, picked out by searchlights, during the First World War.

In this picture, I don't know who the two ladies are in dark clothes but Dorothy (Dolly) is at left, Hilda is sitting, Edith is at centre back, and the lady at right is Ernest's sister, Katie.

In Cecil's ‘Life’ which my mother wrote, she describes the undercurrents in this household in detail. Edith had a hard time controlling five children when Ernest was away at sea for weeks at a time, with Kenneth the most difficult. I think these prolonged absences of his father's was one reason why my father was so against my going to sea.

To give some idea of the regime, at mealtimes Edith would sit at the head of the table with a cane at her right hand. Their plates had to be cleared otherwise they weren’t allowed to get down from table. Serious transgressions, which mainly involved Kenneth, were reported to Ernest when he came home. Picture shows Edith with Dolly, right, and Hilda. It was taken in June 1919, in their garden in Wanstead.

Cecil seems to have got on well with Frank but had a particular affection for Hilda who was, physically, very similar to him. I remember Hilda well. She was a lovely lady, very elegant and always smiling. She is seen here at right, with her mother Edith. She worked in the same company as her oldest brother Frank, the Prudential. Sadly, she died at a relatively early age, of cancer.

While I do not remember my grandfather, I do my grandmother. She lived her last years with her oldest son Frank and his wife Grace (above, with Edith) in their flat at Rivermead Court in Fulham.

The Rhiwbach Slate Quarry

The Rhiwbach slate quarry at Cwm Penmachno in Conway lies at the head of the Machno valley. A few miles away lies Betwys-y-Coed. It was a sunny bank holiday Monday when we visited and Betwys was crowded. In the hours we explored the area round the mine we saw five other people.

It's another of those places I loved exploring. There are some 200 years of visible history here, and many more probably buried, so it's rich ground for a fertile imagination.

The most evident sign of the mining are the thousands of tonnes of spoil which are piled across several hillsides. If this is the spoil, one wonders how much finished slate went away to market.

The mine goes down some eight levels underground, most of it now flooded after being abandoned in the 1950s.

Slate must be an almost unique product in that it can also be used to construct a high proportion of the factory buildings where it was cut. As can be seen, the works site is extensive. The engine house in the foreground powered the slate wagons, and the finished slate was taken out by the Rhiwbach Tramway to the Ffestiniog Railway at Blaenau Ffestiniog from where it travelled to a wharf at Porthmadog. From there, I would imagine, it went across the world.

Because the works was so remote the men and their families lived on site, in some of the buildings seen in the background. There was a school and a shop. Sitting in the buildings one could see them all occupied. The day e were  there their occupant was a female hen harrier.

Many thanks to Rachael for taking us there. There's more about the Rhiwbach site here.

The Summers of 1992 - 1994

My children will have to correct me if I have some of my dates wrong but it seems to me that a great deal happened in the summers of 1992-4. For a start, Elizabeth graduated from Cambridge having read architecture at Sidney Sussex - the picture shows her at the graduation ceremony which took place in beautiful weather.

Katy took her A levels in 1992 and, although she had the option of going up to university, chose to go into industry, accepting a job at the French chemical company Rhone-Poulenc. Picture shows her in 1994.

David, who had followed Katy to our local comprehensive, The Plume, won an assisted place at Felsted, a public school in north Essex.

Rachael continued to demonstrate how a modern young lady dressed both formally and....

....informally.

The headmaster at The Plume had asked me to introduce geology at 'A' level so at the end of the 1993 summer holidays Gill and I spent a couple of nights in an hotel in Swanage while I collected fossils for the new geology collection.

Aberporth

I know my memory is fading but a recent visit to Aberporth, a small and very pretty village on Cardigan Bay in Ceredigion, gave me a fright. My companions insisted I had been there with them before. They pointed to railway carriages converted into holiday homes which, surely, I couldn't have forgotten, and to a grassy patch on top of a spectacular cliff where - surely I remembered? - we had enjoyed a picnic. My recall, which is usually good for places, was blank.

Never mind. I'll remember Aberporth in future, not only for the village and the pleasant stroll along the clifftop but also for a linnet which sang to us and for....

....the first wild orchids I have seen in two years, in this case early purple orchids flowering amongst the bluebells, and for....

....good company the second time around.

Ernest Haylett's Model Ships

Like many mariners, Ernest Haylett had a hobby: he made beautifully detailed models of ships. These were so good that some of them were displayed in Liverpool Museum and at least one other was in the Liverpool offices of the shipping company for which Ernest worked, T&J Harrison. Those in the city museum were lost when it was bombed during the Second World War, but one model in Harrisons’ offices, of one of the company's early ships, Warrior, above, was still there in 1993.

They were full working models. This clipping from the Natal Mercury shows Ernest Haylett’s model of the square-rigged Hesperus, in which he served in 1894, sailing in Durban harbour.

This photograph shows Ernest's family with his model of a Yarmouth steam drifter. My father told me that his mother Edith would not keep Ernest's models in the house, so they were all given away.

Ernest’s third son Kenneth, who also went to sea, inherited this talent. This photo shows one of his locomotives in Singapore. It is raised up on blocks and running on steam.

This is probably one of the last models Ernest made, of the ship on which he died, Harrison Line's steam ship Defender. Sadly, I have no record of where the picture came from nor of where the model now is.

Surf School

We spotted a pair of greylag geese with their three young on the beach at Southwold on Tuesday, strutting around and looking rather pleased with themselves, for reasons which became apparent when....

....a second family, this time with seven goslings, arrived off the beach and began looking for the perfect wave on which to surf in.

They missed the first one....

....but, staying tightly together, caught the second....

....which picked them up and, with Mum and Dad showing the kids what to do....

....brought them rapidly to all the way to the shore.

Some time later, with surf school over, we saw the two families heading off down the coast.

Reckon some human surfers could learn a lesson or two from these greylags.