My playground was Combe Woods and it was here that birdsong was most intoxicating, especially in May, that most colourful and bonny of all months, the month that I still believe is mine, by birthright. I could not imagine that the most talented symphony orchestra in all the land could come close to matching the melodies my friend Sarah Slatterley and I heard above us in the infinite emerald canopy as we amused ourselves on those stretchable afternoons. Sarah was possessed of a singing voice as pure and life-affirming as a blackbird, and, while I fail pitifully now in trying to recollect the voice she spoke with, the melodies that issued from her mouth are as fresh in my mind as they would be if I’d seen her just yesterday. Sarah was always in charge of the games we played in the woods, one of her favourites being Black Pig, in which I would hide behind one of the many large boulders in the woods and it would be Sarah’s task to find me before I leapt out, making tusks with my hands, running at her and shrieking ‘Black pig! Black pig!’ In her other favourite game, which she called Little Meg, it would be my job to build a bridge across the river for Sarah at one of its shallower points, using whatever material – rocks and branches, usually – was not too heavy to carry. I would place a chain of dog daisies around her neck and Sarah, being Queen of the River, would then stand on the platform I had constructed for her and wave to Her People, who I always imagined were Lilliputian and not completely of this earth. I do not know why the game was called what it was called, other than it was also the name of an old song Sarah used to sing very sweetly. One day, when we were out in the trees, she asked me, ‘Doodle, will you call me Meg, but only when we are here?’ so, because I would have sawed off my own right foot clean at the ankle if Sarah had asked me to, that was what I did, and it became one of the many little secrets we stored in the trees. Maybugs were often around as we lolled on the grass in Riddlefoot Meadow and we laughed at the noise they made, so loud and impolite that it seemed to come from the century ahead of us, or maybe that is just how I now think of it, now I am in that century. Billywitches, my father called them. Sometimes, as an evening chill stalked through the tussocks and raised pimples on our bare arms, Sarah pressed up close to me, and I felt a feeling I didn’t understand that was like syrup pulsing through me and that, while only being a foreshadow of a feeling I would feel as a fully developed man, was no less potent for it.