Car Boot Sale, Blarney,. Bank Holiday Monday

Car Boot Sale Blarney, Bank Holiday Monday, the GAA pitch, I had walked the line the night before, from 2.30 onwards into the a.m. so was in no fit state, I could only look for books, or maybe plates and glasses. The complete works of Henry Williamson, for example. I should have bought Tarka the Otter, and The Beautiful Years, I loved them when I was twelve or thirteen. Henry Williamson's daughter cut my hair around then. There were beautiful years if you were this deep in the countryside. There was more than one copy of Akenfield. Plus Urn Burial by Sir Thomas Browne. Which house clearance did this come from, I wondered. Who were these readers?  These owners? I was in no fit state to ask.

I bought Gilbert White's Natural History of Selborne, a 1970s Penguin edited by Richard Mabey; as you turn the pages there's a strong smell of mothballs. And a Mason's blue Regency dinner plate. Pete bought a cement White Rabbit in a red and black waistcoat, for his next performance. A girl with false eyelashes held a ruched pale blue satin against her thin body. It's a bit long, she said. It rides up when you walk, said the vendor, the vendeuse.

Gilbert White had the living of Selborne, as they used to say. His house was called The Wakes.You were left alone to be awake, to observe, if you were a parson in an English village in the mid-eighteenth century, you wrote letters full of your observations and queries. The beautiful years, indeed. Giving names to birds and listening to their song, imagining their migration. 

I met Davina the window cleaner in Ballincollig this morning, outside the Quay Coop. She had been at the Car Boot Sale. I told her about the blue silk dress riding up and she liked that. Her brother and sister-in-law had pitches there. Home made cakes and bric-à-brac, old tools, you know. 

Alison Uttley, Mary Webb, Henry Williamson

This week I bought a Peacock Edition from 1963 of Alison Uttley's The Country Child. The writer and her book are one in my memory, in the same cloth bag as Henry Williamson and his Tarka the Otter, and Salar the Salmon. I was a country child too, a generation later than Alison Uttley. As she read Robinson Crusoe and Swiss Family Robinson, I read Alison Uttley, Henry Williamson, and Mary Webb's Gone to Earth and Precious Bane. My rural life was coloured by theirs. They deepened the view, lived in the thickets, trod the corn, knew the lairs, named the animals and the birds and lengthened my childhood.

Alison Uttley's country child is nine. Was that the age of romance in literary children then? The age when you might want to hide in a glade or join the circus? The age, too, that her country child started school. Helping on the farm, lying out on the fields on sunny days, counting stars at night, reading two or three books over and over, is school enough till then and possibly for ever.

Talk about the last child in the wood.

Now Alison Uttley feels like a stilted read. I shouldn't have read her Wikipedia entry, which was enough to stilt the most resilient writer. She was a controlling woman, not at all charming, it seems, one of a covey of children's writers that included Enid Blyton and Beatrix Potter. I don't think Enid Blyton was charming either. Alison Uttley was only the second female graduate from Manchester university. That's what going to school was for.

I try to read her as I would have when I was nine. Talk about walking with ghosts. The walk, as I think of it now, begins at the end of Downs Road where our hairdresser, the daughter of Henry Williamson, lived. That was already ghostly and thrilling, the daughter of a writer whose books I had read. She, the hairdresser, paid it no heed. I was already miles away along the river bank.