The Times - UK (2020-09-05)

28 1GM Saturday September 5 2020 | the times

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Seeing my son in his scratchy new uniform took me back to 1975 and a final big corduroy hug at the gate with my dad

I’m knee-high and have first day at school nerves

I would be heading back home

after drop-off, to file copy to a

newspaper headquartered at London

Bridge, which would be edited

remotely from a spare bedroom in

Camden, printed God knows where,

and increasingly read online. So I’m

just in jeans and a T-shirt for the big

day. Though I have more hair than

he did.

I thought of the 1965 Mercedes

220SE that he used to drive me to

school in, its smell of five-star petrol

and waxed leather, the throaty roar

of an engine developed by Hitler’s

war machine, as I pressed the start

button on my own, fully electric

vehicle and slid silently out into the

road. My father used to light a fag at

that point. I... didn’t.

In 1975, when my dad turned on

the radio, twiddling the Bakelite

button on the walnut dash, it would

always be in time to hear the

“Order!” of Selwyn Lloyd on Radio 4

longwave, Commons Speaker at the

time, but foreign secretary during the

relatively recent Suez Crisis (recent

as Blair’s second general election

victory is today). When I brushed the

“media” icon on my car’s control

panel on Thursday, I got Aasmah

Mir on Times Radio. But I turned

her off again immediately (sorry,

Aasmah) because Sam was

demanding “questions”, just as I used

to.

So I asked him the same questions

that my dad used to ask me, and Sam

answered, “Boris Johnson” where I

would have said “Harold Wilson”,

“Sunak” instead of “Healey”, and

made a loud fart noise to the answer

that I would have given as “Gerald

Ford”. Then “Harare”, “Beijing” and

when Sam came down and put it all

on, all that grey, with the flash of

pink, already somehow scruffy,

untucked and with pockets full of

conkers, he was me.

And I was my Dad. And it was

September 3, 1975. And we were late.

“Come on, son, we’ve got to go,” I

said, as Sam finished off his Coco

Pops, which in my case, back in ’75,

would still have been Coco Krispies,

and I hoiked on my battered old

Converse, which in my Dad’s case

would have been shiny brown

slip-ons with a Cuban heel to

match his brown corduroy suit,

yellow shirt and fatly knotted

woollen tie. Because he had a job to

go to, in Fleet Street, where the

buildings shook to the hum of the

presses in the afternoon. Whereas

My itchy Viyella school shirt and fiddly

tie are happily things of the past now

O

n Thursday morning, for

the first time in a very

long time, I woke up with

butterflies. I’m not

talking about your

common-or-garden anxiety, of the

type I have been waking up with

every morning for the last six

months (along with everybody else)

about pretty much everything — the

virus, the climate, the economy, the

culture — but just plain, old-

fashioned, event-specific butterflies.

Flutter, flutter, flutter.

You know why? Because on

Thursday I started at my new school.

I had to put on my scratchy new

uniform, tie my tie and, even more

complicatedly, my shoelaces. I had to

be on time. I had to remember my

bag. And then I had to find my

classroom, all on my own, where I

wouldn’t know a soul. And they

might all laugh at me. Or ask me the

square root of eight.

Worst of all, after a long summer

at home with my family, I would

disappear up the stone steps, through

the big double doors, and never see

them again. Or at least not until 3.45,

which comes to the same thing.

Except, of course, that it wasn’t me

who started a new school on

Thursday, it was my seven-year-old

son, Sam. But I hope you will forgive

me for projecting, for it was at my

old school that Sammy started. The

same one into which I first walked 45

years ago, in September 1975 — as

long ago, now, as the second

premiership of Ramsay MacDonald

and the reign of King George V

were then.

He’s in there as I write. Or try to

write. I waved him off at the gate

about an hour ago and walked away.

But I can’t seem to set my mind to

anything. There’s a knot in my

stomach that tells me I am in there

with him, knee-high, surrounded by

strangers, wondering what on earth

my parents have done to me.

It’s like one of those sentimental

Hollywood body-swap movies (Big

or Freaky Friday): when I came

downstairs to make my wife a cup

of tea and saw the grey shorts,

grey socks, black shoes and grey

V-neck with its pink trim, all laid

out on the sofa, it was all I could do

not to put them on myself.

The uniform has changed a little

since my day. Sam’s shoes are not

lace-up leather ones but Velcro-

fastened, rubber-soled things (will his

shoes always be Velcro-fastened now,

and for the rest of his life? For who

would voluntarily move on to the

hassle of laces?). The shirt was not

itchy Viyella but a short-sleeved

polo, and there was no tie. Nor was

there any sign of the once-

compulsory blazer and cap (what on

earth will the mean kids rip off his

head and throw under a bus?). But

I asked Sam the same

questions that my old

man used to ask me

Giles

Coren

Matthew Oates Nature Notebook

Woodpecker

spotting on

a trip down

memory lane

N

ature can suddenly grab

you and transport you

into wonderland. It is

scarcely possible to have a

more vivid experience of a

rare bird than my encounter with a

male lesser spotted woodpecker

along a wooded lane in the Low

Weald, one morning during the

midsummer heatwave. If this proves,

as I fear, to be my final encounter

with this rapidly declining

species, then I went

out on an

all-time

high.

The lane and I have

known each other for 50

years. Miraculously, it has

scarcely been discovered by

vehicles. I drive it guiltily, in

second gear, windows open. I’d

rather cycle.

That morning, I was in super-slow

mode, sensing magic in the air. Sure

enough, on the rise by Newbuildings

corners, spiderweb tangles and

their debris of body parts, dead

houseflies, hoverflies and curled-up

worker wasps from windowsills,

and deceased craneflies that

persist, often legless, within

lampshades.

The latter we see less of year by

year. They (or more accurately it, for

“it”consists almost invariably of the

once-ubiquitous autumn cranefly —

Tipula paludosa) seem to be going

the way of the dung beetles that used

to bumble into open windows on

warm late summer nights, bash

themselves senseless against the

ceiling, before cutting engines, and

randomly crash landing.

If you look closely, there are more

of these home invaders to be found,

for nature gets everywhere, whether

we like it or not.

The smallest are the thunderbugs,

or thrips, that squeeze between the

picture and the glass during

thundery weather, though why they

should bother is beyond any of us.

There they persist, self-squashed, as

memories of long forgotten

heatwaves. Naturam expellas furca,

tamen usque recurret.

Matthew Oates’s latest book is His

Imperial Majesty, a natural history of

the Purple Emperor

they exhibit in their Mediterranean

homelands, were completely Awol.

Best of all was the hornet

robberfly, our largest predatory fly,

which is normally encountered

crunching up grasshoppers along

arid paths. This giant was found head

down on the shady side of the birch

trunk, comatose.

“Cowards, the lot of them,” I

muttered, and drove off into the fiery

furnace of West Sussex, where the

bracken and honeysuckle had

browned off, and hazels, birches and

maples were shedding leaves in

abject surrender.

House invaders

S

oon, some of us will hoover up

summer’s bits: long-limbed

harvestmen spiders from ceiling

The predatory hornet robberfly

Place, where the nature writer and

ornithologist WH Hudson (1841-

1922) used to stay, a diminutive

barred bird, sparrow-sized, dipped

over the hedge and flew ahead of me.

“Lesser spot!” I purred, and thought

of Hudson.

For a quarter of a mile, past

outgrown hedge, uncut verge and

veteran oak, I followed, suitably

distanced, repeatedly checking for

the white undertail that separates

this from its common, larger cousin,

the great spotted woodpecker. Then,

where Marlpost Road bends acutely,

my bird flew straight on, vanishing

into oaks and field maples, where I

could not follow.

Lesser spotted woodpeckers, below,

had nested as recently as 2010 in a

dead tree in the gloriously-named

Dogbarking Wood, a mile or so

north. But the rate of decline of this

largely insectivorous

bird is so great that

now seems an

age ago. Until

these last few years I

used to see them, and

hear them in early

spring, in the

ancient forest of

Savernake in Wiltshire,

another of my

heartlands that

Hudson once

haunted.

The causes of

this woodpecker’s decline are poorly

understood. A study found that

parent birds are rearing smaller

broods, with high rates of chick

starvation, which may be associated

with earlier, warmer springs. It is

hard to care for what we do not

understand.

No-flying zone

T

he early August heatwave lured

some of us out in mad-dog-

and-Englishmen mode. I for

one refuse to waste a second of such

time, not knowing when it will come

again. At the zenith of the hottest

afternoon of the hottest day I

stopped off at Magdalen Hill Down,

a south-facing chalk downland slope

near Winchester, cared for as a

nature reserve by Butterfly

Conservation. My car thermometer

suggested 36C. The blast of hot air

from vehicles hurrying by, windows

up, air-con on, suggested more.

The down’s winged insect

population seemed absent without

leave. Nothing was flying over the

flowery slopes. The chalk hill blue

colony was discovered hunkered

down around a patch of marjoram in

heavy shade beneath a silver birch.

The meadow browns and

gatekeepers were hiding deep in the

shade of a belt of hawthorn and

privet scrub. The clouded yellows,

which should have been zapping over

the short turf with the carefreeness

th

h

@matthewoates76

“Berlin”. No points this morning for

“Salisbury”, “Peking” or “Bonn”.

It was only a ten-minute run and

I parked round the corner, using

the Ringo app, where my old man

used to just haul up onto the kerb

outside the school, where all the

hysterical signage, zigzags and zebras

are now.

At the point when my father used

to envelop me in a big corduroy hug

that smelt of Brilliantine and

Rothmans, and shout “Red light on!

Green light on! Go! Go! Go!” I led

Sam to the teacher in charge of

hand-sanitising, who showed him to

his bubble.

I remembered how much I had

not wanted to be left on that first

day. How I sat down and told the

boy next to me (Pritchard, J) that

“I’m not cut out for school” and he

said “I am!” and how I knew then

that I’d never fit in anywhere and

that life would be one, long,

miserable...

But Sam was gone, off with his

new mates like Mowgli at the end of

The Jungle Book, laughing and

talking and being completely

different from me (when I asked him

if he had butterflies, he said, “Yes, but

they’re good butterflies”), which is

why I hope he might be happy here.

And on Earth generally.

Have a good time, kid. Do it better

than I did. And one day, when you’re

much, much older, spare a thought

for your old, dead dad.

Listen to Giles Coren

every Friday, 1pm to 4pm