I can remember it clearly. I was going through the lower shelves in my father’s study - the only shelves my 7 year old hands could reach. It was a Monday afternoon in the Vicarage, which happened to be one of the only afternoons when my father had time to paint with any regularity. On the canvas in front of him another harbour scene was forming - recalled from his memory of the previous summer when we had spent a few precious days on the Kent coast. I didn’t know then that the book I would find that day would still be part of my intellectual landscape, or how much more I would treasure those seaside walks with my father now almost three decades later, though the later for far more emotional reasons.
Even at the age of seven I was keenly interested in the natural world. While with the exception of cricket - another passion shared with my Dad - I rarely watched any of the television shows my school friends obsessed over - I would watch any nature documentary broadcast on the four available TV channels. I took some intellectual inspiration from Gerald Durrell, and the curiosity for the natural world that spilled out throughout his works - audiobooks of which I borrowed from the local library whenever they were available. So on that Monday I was drawn as always to the nature books on those lower shelves. I would learn, twenty years later, that their location was no mere quirk of my father’s extremely eccentric shelving system. I would find a scrap of paper with a note to himself to leave a particular volume on the shelves I could reach. The note was undated but it’s timing was given away by his handwriting’s neat legibility - something which would fade rapidly in the years that followed.
Having temporarily exhausted my interest in a book detailing broadleaved trees of northern Europe, my hands next found a thick hardback volume wreathed in a paper dust jacket. Like so many of the books in my father’s library the flyleaf bore a pencil annotation giving the date it had been added to his collection. April 1970. Whether it was first or second hand was unclear. The title seemed odd to me - and while on that day I would only examine the images it held, I would return to it again four years later after a casual throwaway remark in a history lesson. The teacher’s words brought the strange title back into my mind and I felt the same curiosity as when i had first slipped it from its place amongst my father’s books. It was still there on the dust jacket, and in an old fashioned serif printing on the title page - Culpeper’s Complete Herbal.
