The Darkness ~

The Venerable Bede once described life as being like a sparrow, which flies through an open door from the darkness into a warm, lighted room, flutters round confused for a few minutes, and then flies out into the darkness again. I like that. I think I am a sparrow. I can see, I'm confused, and I'm getting near that door again.
I flew in in 1941. Big things were afoot in 1941. I was born, and Hitler was making plans to invade England, although I don't think the two events were directly connected. My father worked hard running our farm and my mother was kept busy looking after me, the noisiest, muckiest member of the family, plus her aged parents-in-law, several dogs, various cats, a flocks of chickens, ducks and geese, any sick farm animals that happened to be using our kitchen as a convalescent ward, and a large vegetable plot. In her spare time she dealt with the travelling shops which used to call regularly at the farm, including the butcher, the baker, the green grocer, the ironmonger, some I have forgotten, and a wonderfully exotic gentleman salesman from India. More of him later.
My earliest memory is from when I was three years old and on my way, with a lovely old collie dog called Tuscan, to fetch the cows in for milking. It suddenly occurred to me that I was little, and cows were big. And there were a lot of them. They could bring serious harm to a young lad like me, not yet in his prime. I was puzzled, yet confident that they would obey me and head for the milking sheds because that's what they did, every time. Years later I realised the truth. It was Tuscan they were wary of, not me. Tuscan knew where they had to go and how to get them there. I was just along for the ride. Dad knew that Tuscan would do the job and also look after me. He was a wonderful dog.