Damson picking

As an undergraduate in the early 'Sixties, I spent weeks picking damsons for Henry Usborne at Totterdown on the left bank of the Avon just above Evesham. On my first morning up the ladder, someone walked along and addressed the picker in the next tree: he answered, and it was the unmistakeable voice of Richard Grey, but what was he doing in Worcestershire?

One and threepence a basket was the pay rate, hardly sufficient for a minimum wage, but worth it to be part of a youth scene that I sadly lacked at home at Arrow, 45 minutes away by bus. I frequently slept over, and we would sit in the loft listening to Cliff Richard singing Living Doll. One evening Julian drove us in the Land Rover to the Oxford Playhouse to see John Osborne's Epitaph for George Dillon, and another day we bumped along the track from Seven Springs to visit Little Needlehole: he was a friend of Caspar John's family, who rented it.

This afternoon, Caroline and I drove to Duntisbourne Leer for some lower-level damson picking, and we were allowed to give the mulberry tree a gentle shake too.

Needlehole

It was time to do some more serious walking, in preparation for my early May fortnight on the GR65 - only a week to go: help! Caroline was driving that way, so I cadged a lift to the Frogmill Inn. Hoisting a full rucksack onto my back - the first time in two years - I set off up the Gloucestershire Way. The rain began just as I was leaving Foxcote, and - with little let-up - continued till I reached home: eight miles in all. So, it's off to the shops today to buy a waterproof jacket: though my cycling trousers did a great job down below, my mac is useless I discovered. When I bought it, it needed marking for some reason: as the only name tapes we had were Leo's. Caroline duly sewed one on, in the certainty that the mac would never be thought of as his: after all, he was barely more than half my height. That shows how old it is.

More nostalgia: my photograph was taken on the now largely tarmaced drive up from Hilcot to Needlehole. This place, when I was a teenager, I knew, having rattled up there in the back of the Usbornes' Land Rover, not from Hilcot but along a mile of rough track from Seven Springs. It was the most romantic situation you could imagine - high, remote, silent, without electricity. The lease was with Caspar John and family: "When they come down from London, for weekends or holidays, it is as though the Genie of Soho or Fulham Road had suddenly popped the cork." So wrote Annette Macarthur-Onslow, in her charming memoir of the early 'Sixties, "Round House". It ends sadly: "I would, if I could, have stopped time then in that climatic autumn of the third year... The desire to view the landscape from every crest... Now came a new pattern... And over all there strode the pylons, whose grasping shadows cast by steel fretwork, encased smaller checks within the chequerboard of fields. The pylons... erect but not proud, were strange in the habit of strangers who are conquerors rather than friends." Now, Needlehole and Little Needlehole are all tarted up of course, security lights bristling, and completely overshadowed by those power lines.