The Day Gone By by Richard Adams Page A

and I don’t really know that she deserved it. I have often felt, since, that it was a pity that this exploit did work. It would have been better if I had been blamed and punished, for as things turned out they only served to confirm the fancy-dress party behaviour pattern. The best I can plead is that my sister had been exceptionally contemptuous and cutting. My over-reaction, however, had been a general surprise, and not least to me.
    The Enborne brook, two miles or so east of the ruined Falkland mill, winds along the southern edge of what used to be Greenham Common - or below it. There were woods and copses all along the left bank, and one of these was known in our family as ‘Miss Tull’s Wood’. I don’t really know who Miss Tull was, but one of my father’s patients - and later, a good friend to me - was Mr Bertie Tull, a wealthy landowner with a big house on the northern side of the Common; so I suppose there was some connection. Miss Tull’s Wood was the place for primroses. We used to go there with my father in the car - bringing a picnic if the day was warm enough - down the rather steep and narrow lane leading off the Common to the ford. (There were several fords along the length of the Enborne then, and fewer bridges.) The wood was full of primroses. A hundred people could have picked them for an hour and there would still have been masses. We would pick a flat basketful, so that the top was a cushion of primroses packed tight, and then dip the bottom in the shallow river to keep them fresh. I can remember pressing my face into them. Today, their cool softness and scent always recall Miss Tull’s Wood. When we were tired of picking primroses we would sit on the bank and watch the stream go by.
    One April afternoon my sister and I had been sitting silent and more or less motionless for some time, when from the field beyond a rabbit came loping up to the opposite bank of the river and without hesitation, as though it were in the habit of it, plunged in and swam across, shook itself and disappeared along our bank downstream. I know that all wild animals can swim if they’re put to it, but I have never since seen a rabbit swimming.
    One day in June, when I was about five or six, my father took me out in the car, through Newbury and westward along the Bath Road -Jane Austen’s Bath Road (the A4). There wasn’t a great deal of traffic in those days of the ‘twenties. It must be borne in mind, too, how much slower cars went and how relatively limited their range was. My father seldom drove much over thirty m.p.h., and when, later, my sister drove at forty, it seemed frighteningly fast. From our Newbury home, Winchester, Pangbourne or Reading were virtually our limit: never London.
    Along the Bath Road we went, a matter of a good five miles. Here there is a pub. called The Halfway (halfway between Newbury and Hungerford), and opposite the pub. a little lane. This lane runs for perhaps three or four hundred yards between hedges covered with honeysuckle and dog rose, and at its foot lies the broad Kennet, spanned by a plank footbridge. We had come to what is still known as The Wilderness.
    The reaction of a simple creature - or a child - on first seeing a true river has already been unforgettably expressed by Kenneth Grahame at the opening of
The Wind in the Willows.
I certainly felt everything that the Mole felt and was carried away with delight as I held my father’s hand across the plank bridge. What Kenneth Grahame’s description doesn’t include, however, is any birds or animals (except, of course, the Water Rat). As we stepped off the plank bridge and began strolling up the right bank, almost the first thing I saw was a kingfisher flying past us fast and low on the other side of the river.
    This certainly was - and still is - a true wilderness, of a kind almost as different from Greenham Common as the Amazon from the Oklahoma plains. All along its course, from