August was always the holiday month. "Has the climate changed since before the second World War?" asks a friend. There are photographs of a bunch of young ones dressing and undressing on the beach under blue school waterproofs. This comes to mind on reading a hand-written essay of long ago, possibly an article for the school magazine and rejected or never submitted by the writer.
It came to light in a trunk full of miscellanea which has been carried from house to house for decades. Apart from the imperative daily swim there was the nightly ritual of mushroom-gathering. All this was in pre-spray days, and you would go out after sundown with an enamel bucket and fill it in one circuit of a big field with mushrooms of all sizes. In fact, if you took your time, and sat for a while gazing at the lights across in Scotland (this was in Antrim), you could make a second circuit and find that the smaller ones you had rejected first time round were now of a respectable size. Honest. Maybe that's why his article didn't make the pages of the school magazine. Nobody believed it.
Too early for the blackberries that no one else seemed to want. You came back for a weekend late in September and made the jam or jelly in a relative's house and he, having a car, would ferry it to your home. Hares were remarkably numerous. At night it was not unusual for the uncle to kill one inadvertently as the creature got blinded in the headlights. Jugged hare for the driver's family.
Fish, of course, gets some space in this article. Apparently a couple of the young people would go out in a punt with long lines of baited hooks which they trailed behind or, when fish were taking, stopped and fished and fished. They were after what was locally known as blocken and lythe: i.e., coalfish and pollack. Sometimes, too, they ran into a school of mackerel. Distributing about 150 of these which, they claim, was a fair night's work, ended only with darkness. Sometimes the boat was just drawn up on the shore beside its owner's house and the remainder was left for anyone in the area who wanted to partake.
The hare population, it was later reported (this naturally didn't get into the essay but comes from another source), was almost wiped out during the war by soldiers encamped nearby, one heard later from the writer of the article.