Free The Day Gone By by Richard Adams

stand clear, I want to feel sure that there aren’t any five-year-olds loose in the vicinity.) Mr Behrend’s fireworks were spectacular and he presented them really well, with one thing following another in ascending order (or orders) of effect. The vocal response of his audience was what might be expected. I remember one or two children becoming so much excited that they had to be calmed by being embraced by adults or sitting on their knees. I suppose the whole thing probably didn’t take more than half an hour, but it wound the children up to fever-pitch with its sudden outbursts of coloured fire, gushing spouts of sparks interspersed with the ‘Pouf!’ of red or green or purple globules of light, and the hissing uprush of rockets which seemed to disappear into the sky for seconds before exploding into screaming tadpoles or pendent, incandescent parasols hanging motionless, going out only as they at last began to fall.
    At the end Mr Behrend, a shadowy figure in the dark, would take off his hat and bow to us - a convenient signal, I suppose, to the grown-ups, who now had on their hands about fifty children wrought to the highest pitch of excitement. I can remember feeling exhausted, although I’d done nothing but watch.
    What has been said so far of my father, that silent, reticent, undemonstrative man, who was fifty when I was born and whose life bore a heavy burden of bereavement (of which I knew nothing) may have left a reader wondering how on earth he and I came to be so close. The first characteristic of our relationship - and of this I was unconsciously aware before I could formulate thoughts at all — was that my father spoke to me and treated me to a large extent as though I were grown up and an equal. He didn’t go in for stories of the past or for memories, but he would answer questions truthfully and impassively, even to the point where a lot of people nowadays, I suppose, might hesitate or take refuge in euphemism. For example, I remember once asking him by what means the Philistines ‘put out’ Samson’s eyes. ‘I expect they burnt them out with red-hot irons,’ replied my father, in the straightforward and emotionless tone in which he answered all questions, whether from the servants, my mother or us children. I cried out in horror and began to weep; but my father let this run its course, until after a little a natural opportunity arose to change the subject. I knew that my father could always be relied upon to tell me the truth.
    A second characteristic was that he genuinely enjoyed my company and would seek it out, with the suggestion that we might go for a walk (usually with a specific object - always a sensible idea with a child), play cards, or that he might read to me. Sometimes he would ask me to come with him to look at some particular shrub or group of flowers in the garden which had just come into bloom. In this way I learned by degrees the names of all the trees and flowers we grew, and would speak of them unselfconsciously. Eschscholzia, convallaria and coreopsis presented no difficulty to me, because it had never occurred to me that they might. I learned, too, the names of all the roses - not only the ones along the verandah posts - and, as I grew older, was sometimes able to steal a march on my father by coming and asking him whether he knew that the ipomoea on the kitchen garden pergola had put out its first bloom, or that the collinsia was coming out?
    My father would not allow you, without mockery of some kind or another, to talk about a ‘bird’. If you did, he would put on the falsetto voice of a silly woman, and say ‘Oh, Dr Adams, do look at that
funny
bird!’ You had to refer to the bird by name. So the Marguerite bird became a song-thrush, and soon I could identify the wren I couldn’t see in the bushes by its characteristic, long, sustained trill.
    Although he was so familiar with the inland birds of the south