Bluebells
The bluebells are ringing in my garden! I have one naturalised clump of them, nestled beneath the beech hedge, and they are now in full bloom. The upright Spanish variety, rather than the drooping English bluebells of childhood memory, they nonetheless transport me back in time… Until I was nine years old, we lived in an unprepossessing 1960s semi at the end of a cul-de-sac. How I LOVED that house. My heart expands as I think of it now. The garden backed onto the sprawling woodland in which I spent most of my days; these were the 1970s and, as long as we were back for lunch and dinner, we were left to roam freely. Those woods were our domain, from the roly-poly tree just over the wall (so-named because of one low-set branch that was the perfect height for forward rolls) to the strangeness of the remote bomb hole around which a halo of gnarly trees stood sentry. This grassy bowl was blasted out, the grown-ups told us, during World War II. By the time it had become our [...]