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a riot of battles and conquests and exploration, totally isolated in a landscape all our own. In all that time we saw not another human being until we got back to Mr Lewis. His had been a good fishing day and I returned home quite late at night with a few fat, speckled trout for my mother.
I have fond memories of boating on the river. We children could rarely afford the cost of hiring a boat so we had to find other means. We would go into the boat shed while the proprietor was busy elsewhere and put a few rowlocks (pronounced "rollucks") in a pocket. Then we would volunteer to take a boat out to look for rowlocks which were often lost by inexperienced hirers. Finding missing rowlocks was valuable to the boatman as they were hard to come by in war time so he would inevitably let us take a boat out. We would spend a blissful evening on the river returning late with our find of two or three rowlocks and a pocketful of golf balls from the golf course on Newton Farm. Over several summers we pulled this deceit and he never failed to fall for it. However, to be fair we did actually find, dive for and recover a very reasonable number of rowlocks. The ones secreted in our pockets were insurance in case we failed to find any.
© A Jones 2000
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