Landscape and Memory [antikvár]

Introduction It was only when I got to secondary school that I realized I wasn't supposed to like Rudyard Kipling. This was a blow. Not that I much minded leaving Kim and Mowgh behind. But Puck of Pook's Hill was a different stor)^—my favorite story, in fact, ever since I had been given the book for my eighth birthday. For a small boy with his head in the past, Kipling's fantasy was potent magic. Apparently, there were some places in England where, if you were a child (in this case Dan or Una), people who had stood on the same spot centuries before would suddenly and inexplicably materialize. With Puck's help you could time-travel by standing still. On Pock's Hill, lucky Dan and Una got to chat with Vildng warriors, Roman centurions, Norman Icnights, and then went home for tea. I had no hill, but I did have the Thames. It was not the upstream river that the poets in my Palgrave claimed burbled betwixt mossy banks. Nor was it even the wide, olive-drab road dividing London. It was the low, gull-swept estuary, the marriage bed of salt and fresh water, stretching as far as I could see from my northern Essex bank, toward a thin black horizon on the otlier side. That would be Kent, the sinister enemy who always seemed to beat us in the County Cricket Championship. On most days the winds brought us a mixed draught