MORNING SERIAL

ALL the while the aircrews knew that the chances of success and survival were slimmer than slim. (My grandparents had recently acquired a black and white TV with big clunking push buttons to change the channel, and this film became an immediate Sunday afternoon favourite of mine. I revelled in the movie’s story of striving on against hopeless odds, like Horatius on the bridge, as I suppose most small boys do.)

So, there we were, combatants in a narrow strip of airspace; the swifts as the Mosquito Squadron, and Bryan and I as the ack-ack crews. We put up a frenzied barrage of pebbles, thrown three at a time, straight into the aerial wizardry of the speeding birds. We learned that since the swifts were so fast, one had to aim just ahead of the target to have any chance of coming close. We must have launched tens of thousands of pebbles in all those summer evenings, and we carried on throwing until our arms and shoulders ached with effort and we were clammy with sweat, until we were finally defeated by the encroaching darkness.

There were thrilling near misses as the birds swirled about our heads, showing no fear, jinking and turning on a sixpence.

But though we must have launched ten thousand little stones at those birds over those summer evenings, and kept on trying three or four summers in a row, these swifts, who after all could catch a tiny insect in midair, had no trouble dodging our clumsy efforts. There was never a single casualty. And thank heaven for it, for I don’t know what we would have done, save panic, if faced with a dead or dying bird.

Indeed, the pair of us were proved to be cowards the day we stumbled upon, whilst playing on the Riverstones, a bag of drowned puppies someone had hurled over the river wall by means of disposal.

We stared, horrified, for a long time, not wanting to get too close but unable to look away. These were the first sentient things I had ever seen dead. Bryan grabbed a stick.

‘Go on, you do it,’ he said. ‘Go on mun.’