Boys Own.

 I was lucky enough as a boy to have been bought up in green and verdant England. Largely due to my father's  job in the Air Ministry, which involved him travelling around some of the RAF bases in the west of England (in those days there was no cosmetic and lying labelling such as, "The Ministry of a Defence"  whose major role since it was given that title has been to blow up and dismember Wogs, Arabs, Kenyans, Argentinians and Afghans - indeed anyone as long as they live overseas and are not Protestant or White) who alongside The War Office and The Admiralty were responsible for administering the defence of the realm wherever it existed in far flung tracts of the
empire.
 Anyway dear reader, as usual I digress so let us return to the subject in hand - that magical, awakening and innocent period of ones life called boyhood. What memories of the smells, the fishing, tramping through gorse and chalk land, exploring in the woods and playing cowboys and indians ( my particular hero, who flickered on the black and white and spidery screen from Hancock's projector at the YMCA hut in Wootton Bassett was Johnny McBrown - long since forgotten as are Hopalong Cassidy and Gabby Hayes) , and taking those first tentative steps onto the ice of the Kennett and Avon canal, in winter, to see if it really would hold our weight, where only a few months earlier we were skimming stones off of its surface. My playgrounds ranged from the Malvern Hills,in Worcestershire, to the chalk downs of Wiltshire through to exploring the byways of The Forest of Dean. Long ago sadly those days were lost, like innocence, or as A. E. Housman gloriously portrayed it:-

INTO my heart on air that kills
From yon far country blows:
What are those blue remembered hills,
What spires, what farms are those?
That is the land of lost content,	5
I see it shining plain,
The happy highways where I went
And cannot come again

 Much later the awakening of other thought as I begun to wonder what really was under Jackie Slater's blue knickers, and some boys paid her a sixpence to have a look. That lost age is summed up for me in the following two quite different songs which both, however, lament the glorious past.