Mrs Ockleton's Rainbow Kite and Other Tales by Garry Burnett

Author:Garry Burnett [Garry Burnett]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781845908485
Publisher: Crown House Publishing
Published: 2012-05-15T00:00:00+00:00

6

Egging

Fair seed time had my soul, and I grew up

Fostered alike by beauty and by fear

WILLIAM WORDSWORTH, The Prelude, Book 1

What with all of the different collecting ‘crazes’ I went through as a child, it’s a wonder I could keep a track of myself – PG Tips tea cards, football stickers, Dinky toy cars, Thunderbirds, football, conkers, ‘Billy the Cat’ Dandy comics, roller skates, Captain Scarlet figures. Oh I could go on and on. Hardly a day went by when somebody didn’t bring their unwanted ‘doubles’ to school to swap and you would see large gatherings at playtime in the bike sheds as people traded or made up sets in the playground mini market place.

My cousin Terry and I collected birds’ eggs, which we kept in old biscuit tins half-filled with sawdust, hollowing out little beds in order to tuck them carefully into neat rows of descending size or colour. We never placed the egg straight in of course – it had to be ‘blown’ first in order to remove the contents. This meant taking a sharp pin and ever so delicately making a little hole in the shell, perforating the skin at each end to release the albumen and allow the egg debris to salivate from the shell. Sometimes, if there were the early stages of growth, it might need a little extra encouragement in the form of a gentle blow, but we had usually detected this already, either by floating the egg in a cup of water or holding it to a bright light to ‘x-ray’ it for shadows.

Then, when the egg had been drained and any crusted yolk or fragments of shell swabbed and removed, it could finally take its place in the collection.

There was never any fun in swapping eggs though, which makes me think that probably the most important part of the whole exercise was the thrill of locating and securing the prize and not the static assortment of hollow coloured shells in the box.

It was around March that we began our ritualistic trawls, peering into the thickening hedgerows for tell-tale black clots in the veiny branches that gave away the locations of nests, or a dark fan of tail-feathers poking over the edge of the nest which betrayed the mother bird cosseting a clutch of eggs beneath.

We were intrepid in our pursuit of them, braving all perils of height and weather, so that for the spring months our hands were scratched raw by hawthorn spikes as a result of reaching through the many-tangled branches, our fingers full of spells from splintered barbs and sharp needles of thistles and bramble thorns. It never occurred to us that we might be doing anything wrong and when my parents tried to appeal to our consciences by saying things like ‘How would you like it if somebody had come along and taken you away from your mum and dad?’, it never really had any effect.

So, as the season progressed, our collections grew. Dunnock’s eggs, like shiny turquoise sugar

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