by David Corke
This is me, age nine in Coronation year 1953.
I was foster mother for a couple of orphan rabbits. I had the orphans because Ronnie King, a 13-year-old from across the road whom I hero worshipped, had let me tag along on one of his hunting trips in Hawk Wood at the top of our road: Hawkwood Crescent. Ronnie’s dog had dug up a doe’s breeding stop and killed the mother. The dead rabbit went with Ronnie to be cooked and eaten and I took the two rabbit kittens home a see if I could rear them.
Like many of the natives of that part of Chingford, Ronnie and his brothers were country kids at heart. Technically, Chingford was then still part of Essex but what really mattered was that Epping Forest stopped London spreading out to the north and engulfing Chingford in the big city.
It wasn’t just Ronnie and I who saw ourselves as rural peasants: Ronnie had almost a small holding in his back garden. I, and lots of other boys of my age, gathered sacks of acorns which we sold for a few pennies pocket money to the Sewardstone Road pig farm.
Every day, I’d venture into the Forest to gather a sack of grass and dandelions for my pet rabbits and, at the right season, gather dried bracken for the rabbits’ winter bedding. There was just one place in Hawk Wood, close to what the map now calls Daisy Plain, where a big patch of bracken grew. I don’t think it’s there any more.
I arrived in Chingford age six and it may just have been that I was gaining my freedom to roam that made Chingford feel like the countryside, while my native Torquay had been a big town where the only approach to countryside was a manicured public garden with greenhouses. The greenhouse plants were infested with stick insects that the gardeners let me take home as pets.
But is wasn’t just gaining the freedom to play out with my friends. By the time I had children of the age I was in 1953, I lived in the “real countryside” – Wimbish in NW Essex. Wall-to-wall arable farmland with less than ten acres of land in the whole parish that the public have free access to – not just on public footpaths, but full access like in Epping Forest. Ten acres : two little nature reserves and a bit of common land not a single wood that isn’t private.
So, for the gang of nine-year olds that I was part of, our world consisted of Hawk Wood, Pole Hill, Yardley Hill and the golf course. That was the area we lived in every fine day. Sometimes we would venture as far as the Butler’s Retreat pond which had a large population of sticklebacks that could be trawled for using a sack held by two boys. Connaught Water, further from home still, was worth a visit to wade in and find the freshwater mussels.
So almost all the open countryside within walking distance of my house was full public access land. What a contrast to today’s north-west Essex where I live now.
Never content with only doing what the rules allowed, our favourite bit of open countryside, just at the top of Hawkwood Crescent and adjacent to our school playing field, was the grounds of Hawkswood House. The house had been destroyed by soldiers (our soldiers) during the war. It belonged to the Chingford Council but I didn’t know that at the time. It had a brilliant pond where you could catch newts and what we all called salamanders (great crested newts). The meadowland was richer in flowers than the Forest proper. The scrubby areas had more, and more easily found, birds’ nests. Around the ruins of he house where the best conker trees I’d ever seen. No one waited for the ripe conkers to fall when you could knock them down with thrown sticks or climb up and get them. We all wanted the “cheesers”: twin conkers in one shell so they had one side flat and were believed to be better for conker fights.
Much of our time was spent in the Hawkswood House land: no one ever stopped us or chased us away but we called it “The Private” because that is what it said on the fence we climbed through to get in.
There was an interesting, in retrospect, social division between the groups of kids who played together. It did not matter at all whether you lived on the Antlers Hill Council Estate, the prefab huts on one side of Hawkwood Crescent or a 1930s semi-detached villa. What mattered was which class you were in at school. By the age of seven we were firmly split into the A-streamers who would have a fair chance of passing the 11-plus and the B-stream who might one-day learn to read and write properly. I never thought about it at the time but all the boys (and it was only boys) with whom I hunted in the Forest were A-streamers. Eric, my next-door neighbour of exactly my age, was a B-streamer and we never even played together indoors when it was raining.
Today’s children, and their parents, will find it hard to believe the amount of freedom we had to venture a mile or so from home into Forest lands. From about eight up, any boy might knock on my door and ask “can David play out” and we’d disappear with the rest of the gang to no known destination and stay away from home until we were hungry.
I don’t think the Forest was any less dangerous then than it is now. You were just as likely to get murdered, abducted or raped then as now: and that is very unlikely. Parents had no mobile phones or other means of tracking their free-range kids. Were they bad parents? Or did the think a small risk was worth it in return for having healthy kids who didn’t need to be kept amused all the time indoors.
Most of the gang I was part of were tolerably good naturalists but it was Peter Read who was the real expert especially as regards birds, finding nests and collecting eggs. My forte was (and still is) caterpillars. I had begged a good moth and caterpillar book as my Sunday School prize and was soon recognised as the kid to ask when you wanted to know the name of a caterpillar you had found and what you should give it to eat.
One day Mum left the dinner table to answer the door. She returned to announce “It’s Terry knocking on the door with a caterpillar”. My kid sister pointed out that it must be difficult to make that loud a knock with a caterpillar.
Terry’s caterpillar was a Lackey moth which did not surprise me at all. They live in groups in spun webs on any one of many different shrubs or trees. They are slightly furry and have striking colours of red white and blue stripes. They were really common in 1953 so we called them “Coronation caterpillars”.
Our school was ruled over by a frighteningly severe headmistress who clearly was not at all fond of children and wielded the cane with skill (but only for us boys). But the ordinary teachers were nice and two in particular fostered my love of wildlife
Mr McWilliam took our class when we were nine. The classroom was in an overspill wooden building right next to the fence surrounding the “Private”. It was easy to get distracted from your sums by watching the squirrels chase each other around the trees. Sometimes Mr McWilliam told me I’d been neglecting my duties for ten minutes and I must stay behind after school to make up for my squirrel-watching break.
Mr McWilliam was obviously a naturalist himself: his national service had been in Singapore and he had brought home a collection of butterflies. He gave me some of them one term when, following an illness, I had recovered from being bottom of the class to somewhere in the middle. The prize was for “making the best progress”: easily done when you start last.
I treasured those butterflies and a year later I went (just with Andrew, a friend of my own age) by bus, trolleybus and tube to the Natural History Museum. The behind-the-scenes butterfly experts were surprisingly willing to help two ten-year-olds identify my little collection.
After I moved on to secondary school I never saw Mr McWilliam again but decades later I was engaged on a project to try and re-establish the Pearl-bordered Fritillary in central Essex. The People’s Trust for Endangered Species was raising money for the project and forwarded me a letter from Mr McWilliam, now retired and living in the Isle-of-Wight, enclosing a donation of £25. His letter explained that he had happy memories as his time teaching me and Peter Read and reading of our involvement with nature conservation as adults. Peter had remained in Chingford and led the campaign to stop the local council destroying the pond in the “Private” and he is the main reason that part of our childhood realm is now a nature reserve. The rest of the Private is now a splendid organic market garden which involves many local people as helpers
While I was still at primary school I would sometimes see Fred Speakman leading groups of children from more inner-city schools on nature study walks. I was very jealous. Much later, when I was teaching undergraduate ecologists I would take them to Suntrap where Ken Hoy (Fred Speakman’s successor) let my students help with, and learn from, his groups of eleven-year olds.
The late Ken Hoy and I were good friends and it was at the celebration of his life that I met Peter Read (also a good friend of Ken and much involved with the Friends of Epping Forest) for the first time since we were eleven and had ended up going to different secondary schools.
In my final year at primary school, Mrs Llewellyn organised a long-term nature competition that did a lot for my flower identification skills.
Between very early spring and the start of the summer holidays we each had to find new wildflowers : you got a point if you were the first to bring in a new species and (I think) you got an extra point if you knew what it was.
I thought I’d be the first to get a point because it was February and I knew where there were some flowering Celandines. Only they were Aconites – so only one point.
The Aconites were from the “Private” and it was interesting how much better it was for wildflowers than Epping Forest proper. The Private had bluebells and wood anemones under the trees and ox-eye daisies in the fields.
Was our teacher wrong to encourage picking wildflowers? It amuses me, when I encourage the my local nature reserve “Wild Child” kids to pick one of the abundant bindweed flowers to study a flowers structure, I get told by the children that picking flowers is wrong.
One of my most memorable expeditions into the Forest was on the afternoon of my tenth birthday. I’d begged for a camera so I could imitate Dad’s skill as a photographer. I really wanted to take my camera off to the Forest and do some wildlife photography with the twelve shots on my only roll of film. Mum and Dad said I couldn’t take the camera without Dad to show me how it worked so I’d have to wait until Saturday. I left my new (second-hand) camera at home and summoned a gang of friends.
The nearest thing to a river close to Hawkwood Crescent is the Yardley Lane ditch which flows out of the Forest, along the Yardley Lane wooded strip beside the road and disappears for ever into a drain near the one entrance to our school.
We decided that the ditch, like the Nile, must have a source and it was time some intrepid explorers discovered it.
The Yardley Lane stretch was familiar ground as was the end of the lane where the Forest proper started and the ditch flowed as the divide between Yardley Hill to the north and what is now called Daisy Plain. It didn’t have a name as far as we knew and we never invented one. At the time of our expedition it was a flowery meadow with only minor scrub invasion and, in summer, it had long grass and a good population of blue butterflies and burnet moths. There was a curious strip between it and the boundary of “The Private” which people said had been given to the Forest to make up for a bit of Forest taken by the council for road building.
Some years after our expedition Daisy Plain and the lower reaches of Yardley Hill were taken over by the golf course and ruined for wildlife as they became mown manicured grass. I mounted my regard action against this by filling in the hole at the centre of the tee and hiding the flag every evening that I took my dog for a walk that way. Eventually the golf course abandoned the Daisy Plain tee. I don’t know why.
Yardley Hill was always a tempting destination to be explored. The dense thorn scrub jungle called Jay Wood was great for “hide and seek” type games. And the summit not only had great views across the Lea Valley but it seemed to have a different type of soil with its own special flowers. You could usually find Field Scabious but they were never found anywhere else.
Then we continued along the stream with Hawk Wood on our right and what is now Yates Meadow on the left. Yates Meadow is part of the Forest now but the in was still a working farm and I remember seeing the farmer use horse-drawn machinery and trailers.
As we got closer to Sewardstonebury village, the main part of the turned left along a hedge and fence in a private field. The field had some friendly ponies that would sometimes tolerate bare-back riding but today we were nearing the source of the ditch. It flowed out from a small sewage farm and we soon found a gap in the fence intended to keep us out.
For naturalists there is a lot to be said for sewage farms: especially the massive expanse of well fertilised nettle beds that are the best place to track down Tortoiseshell, Peacock, Red Admiral and Comma caterpillars. But on that day there was something even more exciting: a grass-snake warming itself in the sun and not quick enough of the mark when I grasped it.
Frightened grass snakes don’t bite. Instead they release a stinking white liquid from their cloaca which gets on all your clothes and makes you completely socially unacceptable. At the same time that the snake got its revenge on me, my dog fell in the settling tank and swam to the other side where she emerged covered in semi-liquid poo.
We all decided that the expedition had achieved its objective and headed for home. My dog spent half an hour being hosed down in the garden and then bathed in the bathroom. Then it was my turn.
I was allowed to keep my grass snake until the next day and then Dad showed me how to use my camera to take its picture before we took it back to its home and let it go.
Here’s its picture.
My first effort at wildlife photography.
Photos © David Corke