MORNING SERIAL
WITH so much at stake, each successful hit was greeted with howls of victory.
Bottles were best, yes, but tin cans would do and could be swamped by a near miss or struck full-on with a satisfying ‘dink.’ Failing that, cardboard boxes could be commandeered into the enemy fleet. They soaked up loads of damage before they sank, like battling old Dreadnoughts.
When all other options were exhausted, we’d make do with water borne branches and sticks, but that really was scraping the barrel – after all they were a bugger to hit and wouldn’t sink at all.
On late summer afternoons we would switch targets. This was because, as the days of summer wore on, the river attracted great swarms of midges that drifted like clouds of smoke above the water. These midges, in turn, attracted the swifts. So dark as to appear almost black, the swifts were mute boomerang shapes of pure momentum. Blurred embodiments of speed, they darted and flicked along the line of the river, feeding on the wing. My Book of British Birds, bought for me by my grandmother from WHSmith’s in Merthyr Tydfil, told me that the common swift spent more time on the wing than any other bird in the world, and that they hunted, fed and drank and even slept in flight, touching down only to care for their chicks in their nests.
They flew relentlessly, scores of them, banking sharply, up and down this narrow strip of water, between the Riverstones and the tiny remnant of the Wildwood on its leg-breakingly steep bank on the other shore, gobbling down thousands of midges between them while still in mid-air.
They formed an aerobatic mass just above our heads, never seeming to tire, or to be in any way concerned by our human presence. Sometimes they flew so close to us that we could have reached out and touched them, if only they hadn’t been moving so blindingly fast.
The whole set-up crystallised in my childish imagination as being exactly like the climactic scene of the movie 633 Squadron – a favourite of mine which had thrilled me, as a squadron of De Havilland Mosquito bombers ran the gauntlet of furious Nazi ack-ack, constrained in their manoeuvrings by a narrow Norwegian Fjord, fighting their way to destroy a factory vital to the enemy war effort.