I grew up in Winterborne Kingston, just south of Blandford, in a bungalow where we grew much of our own food and were surrounded by that pale-green chalk downland that always felt like a thin too-tight-fitting jumper. Spring meant walking up the old Roman Road to the site of an old cob cottage, looking for the first snowdrops, remnants of a once-loved garden mixed back into the wood. School holidays meant fishing for sticklebacks with my brother at Winterborne Stickland or swimming at Moreton Ford, running barefoot across the footbridge with rubber rings as bare feet slapped hot concrete.
Clouds of blue butterflies rose up as I scuffed my way up the chalk verge to my best friend’s house on the hill to ride the travellers’ ponies bareback. We sat on the massive remains of recently felled elms and just kicked our heels or plotted the next adventure. We made grass dens amongst the ragwort and collected the Dennis the Menace striped caterpillars of cinnabar moths, keeping them in jam jars on a bedroom windowsill. At one point, there were definitely pet newts in a tank outside, who finally made a successful bid for freedom.
My mother, who had famously had a pet owl as a child (named Solly, he rode around on the handlebars of her tricycle in Cheshire), revelled in all this. There was one road to Wareham where, if we persuaded her to drive fast enough, the car took off at the peak of each rise in the road, us shrieking in the back and roaring her on. I remember her solemnly telling me always to ignore ‘No Trespassing’ signs, particularly those placed at the start of interesting-looking paths into the woods.
We sledged down hillforts in the snow, made snow caves when the drifts were big and fossil hunted for ammonites and belemnites, cracking rocks on the beach. In winter, we took a frying pan and sausages to Ringstead and cooked lunch on a driftwood fire. In summer, we walked the dry winterbourne stream bed for miles out of the village, like a secret escape route, finding frogs loitering in the last damp spots beneath the bridges.
With Dad, it was often camping, swimming, fishing, messing about in the blow-up dinghy off Studland, Brownsea or Lulworth. We would camp somewhere in north-west Dorset each Easter, waking up to the crack of frost on the canvas and surrounded by puzzled sheep. We walked the army range paths, explored the sad quiet of Tyneham, swam at Dancing Ledge and slid down to Winspit and that magical strip lynchet framed ‘V’ with the glimmer of bright sea caught in its cup. I gazed through the hedge at the smoke from isolated Winspit cottage and dreamed of the life I would lead once I grew up and lived there, sustained of course only by the pasties of The Square & Compass.
There was a memorable holiday spent all sleeping illicitly in a friend’s hut on Portland Bill on camp beds, where we smoked out sea lice and used them as bait as we fished for wrasse, bought crabs from the fishermen for supper and snorkelled until we turned blue with cold. I fell hook, line and sinker for Dad’s wild story of how conger eels all came out of the sea and walked across the Bill on midsummer’s eve. My lucky, lucky childhood is the peel of too-hot plastic car seats on the backs of legs, the smell of chalk dust and wildflowers from the side of the road as we sat in yet another queue for Studland, seeing the starlings descend on the remains of the roast out on the lawn and a packet of crisps and a bottle of pop and a firm instruction to sit outside the pub and wait while my parents escaped us for an hour.
Later, I can remember my haphazard driving lessons with a brave family friend in an ancient black Austin A35 named Jane. As I wrestled with double declutching yet again, I barely registered the gorgeous climb up through the Purbeck Hills and the views beyond the quarries and back to Corfe Castle, like a rotting tooth in a gappy mouth. I complained about all the double declutching to Mum (even I knew that modern cars didn’t require it) and was told that she herself had been taught to drive by a fire engine driver. Which explained a lot! Much later, my parents moved to live at the bottom of Hod Hill in Stourpaine and I would come back to visit. When my brother and I walked up there to scatter some of my dad’s ashes six years ago, we were greeted by a singing yellowhammer (‘A little bit of bread and no chee-eese’) and the waves of cowslips my mum had always loved.
For my 50th birthday, I walked the length of the River Stour with a friend over five days, starting at the river’s origins in a puddle in a field at Stourhead and ending with a final swim amongst the ice creams and boats at Christchurch. There were otters and kingfishers along the way and a bucolic Sunday morning of echoing church bells as we tramped across water meadows.
But the thing that most recently took my breath away was returning on the ferry from a week on Alderney. On a perfect golden evening, the full glory of Poole Harbour gradually opened before us with RSPB Arne off to one side. It was like sailing into a slice of heaven. I didn’t see the white tailed eagle which has been known to visit from the Isle of Wight, but I knew it was there.
And I suppose that is what matters to me most now – that it still be there, or as much of it as we can hang on to or bring back. The abundance, the birds, the simple sheer joy of being in it and of it..
