Free The Day Gone By by Richard Adams Page A

country, my father had never gone out of his way to seek out birds of other terrains. I have often wondered why. For example, on his own admission he knew little or nothing of sea-birds - one of the most rewarding of all branches of ornithology - though he knew a certain amount about birds of bog and moorland from younger days in Somerset, when he used to go shooting; and he had sometimes been to Scotland as a shooting and fishing guest. The snipe and the wheatear he certainly knew, but I wonder whether he would have recognized a greenshank: not, I am virtually certain, a red-throated diver. I suppose he simply observed the birds that came in his way. Well, it was no matter. Through him I learned to admire and respect birds and to want to know more about them. Years after his death I was to find the Isle of Man a maritime bird Utopia, watching the fulmars gliding up to the cliff-face and turning away without a single beat of the wing, the guillemots racing out across the sea, and the kittiwakes, marble-white heads and shoulders, feeding their young on the ledges. I wish my father could have sailed with me through the Antarctic, to see the Wilson’s petrels, the skuas, sheathbills, king penguins and the great albatrosses. Well, it all started in the garden at Oakdene. ‘Look at that splendid chap!’ he would say, as the spotted flycatcher darted from its nest to its hunting-post on the tennis netting. And in time I became able, now and then, to anticipate him, pointing out a blackcap or a bullfinch.
    My father, although he did not play bridge (or cribbage), enjoyed a light-hearted game of cards and I believe now, in retrospect, that he considered cards a good way of sharpening children’s wits. (He taught me draughts, halma and chess, too.) Cards began when I was still quite small, by playing two-handed, five-card German whist with my mother. From this I at least learned what a trick was, what a trump was and about following suit. Soon afterwards my father introduced me to bézique. Two-handed bézique is a dull enough game for adults, but I can still remember its excitement and fascination for me as a child. In the first place, it was all new. I was entering upon a novel form of experience and learning and practising a hitherto unexperienced kind of skill. The game seemed so romantic and colourful, with its strange oddities. Why should the tens be worth more than everything but the aces? Why should you get forty for the queen of spades and the jack of diamonds? What did ‘bézique’ mean, anyway? I can still recall the excitement of realizing that I held four kings or four aces, and the splendid moment when you won a trick, laid them down on the table and clocked up the score on your marker.
    But there was a degree of strain in bézique, too. An adult naturally sees so simple a game as a mere way of passing the time, and also knows how much luck there is in it. A child takes it seriously, for to him it is something not yet rooted in experience. It involves decisions. Bézique was for me the first business in which I had to make decisions — decisions which would affect the outcome of the game. ‘I’m holding two kings and three queens. They can’t all stay. Shall I discard the queens, four of which score only sixty, and trust to getting four kings (eighty)? Or on the other hand, would it be better to play safe and go for the queens?’ And you could be disastrously wrong, as I learned in good time. You could spend the whole hand saving for a sequence, only to find that your opponent had been craftily holding both the queens of trumps all the time. Then there was the agony of having acquired something really good — a sequence or even double bézique — when there were only two or three tricks left to play, none of which you could win. I used to get tense and very much involved with the game, occasionally to the point of tears. I think my father sometimes pulled his