Those were the days.

When at the age of ten and nine months,I was sent from my primary school to my secondary school,I palled up with another new boy named Tony. We helped each other face up to would be bullies and were soon left alone by the older boys. Tony invited me to his home one weekend. He
lived a couple of miles away from me,further out in the countryside . He lived near the far end of a roughly surfaced lane which for the most part was rutted sandy soil. I rode there on my ex post office cycle and found his bungalow easily enough and the back door was opened by his Welsh mum, dressed as always in a wrap around pinafore , her hair in curlers under a hair net , a bit like Hilda Ogden the Coronation Street Character.

That day was the start of a new life for me. We walked up the lane to a poultry farm and
"called for" another boy named Brian and the three of us wandered down a narrow path to a magical place called Juniper Valley. I was introduced to wide expanses of bracken, silver birch trees, moss and deer. On one side was a large hazel wood where the ground was a carpet of bluebells in the spring . Squirrels scrambled from tree to tree chattering angrilly at our presence. The hazels, growing on the hillside,leant out at an angle and we could climb from one to another with ease and travel , like clumsy Tarzans, for considerable distances without touching the ground.
In certain secret places, known only to us of course, primroses flourished among the patches of rabbit mown grass.
When tired of climbing, we would make our way to the other side where bracken grew much
taller than we were in our pre teen years. We would find flattened places beneath fallen trees
where deer slept at night . We discovered fox holes and badger setts and we had an area of moss , like a soft mattress where we performed hand springs and forward rolls with no fear of injury
and when weary, we would lay in the dappled sunlight and talk "boy" things like girls we liked, fights we'd had, teachers we hated, the cane bicycles and food.
We spent all our spare time in these woods or at a nearby lake , swimming in our ungainly fashions in hand knitted trunks which, when wet , afforded us much amusement.