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Summer days, and the flat water meadows and the blue hills in the distance, and the willows up the backwater and the pools underneath like a kind of deep green glass. Summer evenings, the fish breaking the water, the nightjars hawking round your head, the smell of nightstocks and latakia. Don__ mistake what I__ talking about. It__ not that I__ trying to put across any of that poetry of childhood stuff. I know that__ all baloney. Old Porteous (a friend of mine, a retired schoolmaster, I__l tell you about him later) is great on the poetry of childhood. Sometimes he reads me stuff about it out of books. Wordsworth. Lucy Gray. There was a time when meadow, grove, and all that. Needless to say he__ got no kids of his own. The truth is that kids aren__ in any way poetic, they__e merely savage little animals, except that no animal is a quarter as selfish.A boy isn__ interested in meadows, groves, and so forth. He never looks at a landscape, doesn__give a damn for flowers, and unless they affect him in some way, such as being good to eat, he doesn__ know one plant from another. Killing things - that__ about as near to poetry as a boy gets. And yet all the while there__ that peculiar intensity, the power of longing for things as you can__ long when you__e grown up, and the feeling that time stretches out and out in front of you and that whatever you__e doing you could go on for ever.