August 28, 2019
My father was once woken up in the middle of the night by a vivid dream in which my mother was pressing half a peach against his cheek. The moist side of the peach, that is. According to Mum, he thought, ‘Something’s not right here’, and woke himself up. When he put his hand to his cheek, he found a cold, damp object. He brushed it off and when he turned on the light, he discovered it was a frog. It must have climbed the wall of the house and entered their bedroom through the narrow window above their bed.
‘But that’s not all,’ said Mum. ‘Once we were woken up by Tiger (our old cat) trying to climb through the same bloody window with an entire pheasant in his mouth.’
Then, of course, there was the time our neighbour Reg Barker woke them up by shoving a bugle through the window and blowing it above their heads. Reg was on horseback. He thought it was a great joke, which it was. Country life.