by A J Selby

Spring, being a tough act to follow, God created June

JUST before I hit my teenage years, the Government gave the British public a wonderful gift in the form of extra evening daylight.

Between 1968 and 1971 the clocks were permanently one hour forward in winter with an extra hour for the summer. This meant the onset of darkness in June and July arriving at about 11pm, which was fantastic for adults and older kids alike, and the current midsummer 3.30/4am sunrise which benefits but a very small minority, started an hour later.

A repeat of this experiment has been mooted in Parliament over the years but due to objections from the north of Scotland there appears little chance of it being adopted. It seems a little bizarre that 67% of the British public want to change the summer clocks but can’t, whereas 51% wanted to come out of Europe and we did – as they say, ‘go figure’.

I recently had a conversation with a fellow dog walker on a sunny morning and we discussed how fulsome was the may blossom this year – did the late spring hold it back so that it all burst out together? The best may blossom year that I can ever remember was 1975. It preceded a lovely summer and looking out across the fields from the garden it was as though a blanket of snow had fallen on the hedgerows, so dense were the flowers that year.

I love evening walks in the warm air at this time of year as you can take in the heady scents of the may blossom and cow parsley assailing your nostrils as bats flit around in the darkening sky silhouetted against the stars. Get out close to midnight around the time of the full moon on those special evenings when the residual warmth of a hot day permeates into the night and you can just drink in the countryside as the birds go to roost and the nocturnal life ventures abroad.

The cow parsley, of course, can be enjoyed during the daytime whether walking or driving. The hedgerows are blanketed white with their umbelliferous flower heads and they make quite a spectacle. It’s related to the carrot and, of course, the herb parsley, and has many regional names such as fairy lace, Spanish lace, badman’s oatmeal, Queen Anne’s lace and mother die! It’s thought that this last name refers to its similarity with the poisonous hemlock – which has black blotches on its stems – and hogweed – a much larger and stouter plant – a warning to treat unidentified plants with caution.

Still no cuckoos again this year. Hearing one has become something of a rarity for this bird, which is firmly ensconced on the red list of endangered species. Years ago, The Times would receive letters in late March or early April with news of the first cuckoo ringing out its eponymous song. The bird could be heard all over England every spring and summer but now it’s become a worrying rarity, like many of our formerly common birds.

Hereabouts the once ubiquitous rabbit seems in decline again – it’s a cycle of population growth, decimation by myxy and then a slow climb in numbers, and we seem to be at the bottom of the curve at present. Of course, myxomatosis left a scar that put people off eating rabbit, seeing the poor creatures suffering a lingering death as the infectious virus spread.

However, go back to wartime and many a family was more than grateful for rabbit on the menu, and to country people, it was often their main source of protein. I recall old Albert Poole from my youth telling me how his father taught him to knock over a rabbit with a heavy stick weighted at one end like a Penang Lawyer. He said his family would have gone hungry in the 1930s and 1940s but for his bit of poaching. This was repeated all over the countryside during those years of austerity and ingenious ways of trapping and catching them were employed.

So next time you throw meat into the bin or let it go off in the fridge, remember that just a couple of generations ago, to do so would have been unthinkable.

As my dear old Dad used to say of the ‘modern’ generations – the trouble is lad, they have never gone hungry!