My father had the illustrated bird literature. As each volume was published, he bought the first edition of The Handbook of British Birds. Also on the shelves were T E Coward’s three volumes and two Birds of India, including that of Salim Ali, who later took me bird watching from Bombay. The gem was a beautiful edition of Audubon’s prints of Birds of America, a wartime gift to my father from an American officer. The Handbook, remembered smart in its original dust-covers, now shabby and bare from constant use, still graces my bookshelf. I passed Audubon, too smart for caravan life, to Anthony’s son, David.
My teenage years were full of birds, but they have now become part of the landscape, no longer an obsession. Only the auks – Guillemots, Razorbills and Puffins – remain special. Naturally, new or unusual birds don’t pass unnoticed. Several years ago, White-Tailed Sea Eagles, hunted to extinction in Victorian Britain, were re-introduced, firstly to the Scottish coast, then to the Isle of Wight. Largest of European eagles, I look out for them ever since, but have only managed to see a pair a decade ago high above the Scottish coast. That didn’t really count. It needed to be here, in Purbeck. A distant one pointed out at nearby Middlebere didn’t count, either. I wanted my own eagles.
Last week, as so often, I walked to Chapmans Pool, a tight bay facing south-west into the prevailing winds. Things wash up there; not just firewood, bright plastic, dead creatures - dolphins, deer, cattle, a 15 metre Fin Whale, people, even. A consignment of cigarettes, packed for the Chinese market appeared, a mass of bottles of shampoo, the brand a neighbour preferred, plentiful ointment guaranteed to restore my youth and beauty (it didn’t work!). I have a dinghy there, too, which needs checking after harsh weather. This outing brought no surprises. Turning homewards, a Raven called loudly, flying by with some delicacy in its claws. Behind it, in fast pursuit, talons outstretched to seize, were two Sea Eagles. The Raven dropped its load in terror. The eagles stalled. The treasure fell towards the beach, where someone was walking. That discouraged them and they wheeled up into the sky.
How did this blog wander into The Netherlands? Robert, a friend since school, returned from a visit to his daughter in Brisbane where both he and my younger brother, Charlie, used to live. He handed me a battered children’s book (not intended for battered children, but battered by them) found amongst possessions he’d left there. A Dutch story, The Wheel on the School, its cover bearing a flying stork: careless editing – it was the wrong species. Why give me that? ‘Look inside.’ There, in my mother’s hand, was ‘C A Cooper, Tanglin Cottage, Swanage’, our home, which Charlie left for Australia in 1969. Robert couldn’t remember how it had come to him. Probably, Charlie passed it to a secondhand shop and he, browsing there, had put it aside to show me, then forgotten it.
After Robert had gone, confined by a wet day, I set to reading it. The author had moved to America in the 1920s and there become a writer of children’s books based on his Dutch childhood. This story told how he and fellow kids (all in their wooden clogs) enticed storks to nest on their school roof. I’d long known about Dutch wooden clogs. Those family ‘wetties’ often followed Darky Lane. (There was a recent threat to rename that lane as unwoke, offensive to darker folk and blind to the darkness caused by trees meeting above it.) Darky Lane passed a stone cottage called De Klomp, The Clog, its door-knocker a yellow wooden clog. That’s how I learned about Dutch footwear and was prepared, when travelling towards Austria in 1951, to pass through a clogged land.
My grandmother had taken me to London, where buildings celebrated The Festival of Britain and King George still reigned. Ruins remained where Germans had dropped their bombs, a light massacre compared with how it is done in Gaza. Why is the world still powerless to defend folk from destructive bullies? Is it because the world’s policeman is the same fellow who beat the original Americans into submission? It would be hypocritical for them to help Palestinians settle back in their homeland.
At King’s Cross station, I was passed to staff in charge of The Medlock, the train taking schoolkids to their army-occupation parents in postwar Austria. Apparently, a Mr Medlock used to drive the train from King’s Cross to Harwich, but had nothing to do with the journey across Europe. Once on board the ferry, we slept until marched into great sheds at The Hook of Holland, where the neon tubes turned breakfast eggs pale green. We were too hungry to care. The next train crossed flat land where folk cycled, some in clogs, and herons, hoping for fish, froze beside channels. The next train, its upper berths accessed by crimson rope, clattered across flat, unthrilling farmland into Germany, where Koln had been more effectively blitzed than London. I was eight, remember ragged children living in smashed houses, washing lines hung across what had been rooms. When the media tell us that so-and-so is described as a terrorist outfit by the government, they ignore that all armies are terrorists to the terrified.
My elder brother, Anthony, joined us that Christmas. His return journey in January left a deep impression. His ferry to Harwich was required to stand by that beautiful sailing vessel, The Pamir, manned by sea cadets, which was threatened by a fearsome storm. In those days, boys knew of The Pamir, forgotten now. It was one of the last, most beautiful sailing ships. Google its image! Last windjammer to carry cargo round Cape Horn, it slices through the ocean in glorious full sail. A clip of grey newsreel, shot from the air, reveals it, sails furled, in those rough seas of 1952. (Five years later, only six men survived its disastrous end) Anthony came through that storm without sea-sickness, unfazed. They say that drew him to the navy.