My Love To the Beaks and Tails

Readers Union, 1976. Hardcover. Very Good/Very Good. h/b 187 pages condition is very good, the spine of the DJ is faded. Legs and Hullo live in an old stone cottage in the Lake District. Legs is an insatiable collector of small furred and feathered waifs and strays while Hullo, her husband, taking the rising tide of non-paying guests very much in his stride, moves over to make room. lt all begins with George Blake and Alfred Hinds, a pair of tiny striped squirrels acquired along with the groceries in Leeds market, in brazen defiance of their names, they produce four bumble-bee sized babies and the ensuing saga of their domestic entanglements is told with no holds barred! The squirrels are closely followed by an equally fertile pair of doves - Lily the Pink and Baldy. After this the ornithological flood gates open wide and from Australia to the Barbary Coast, the birds home in: a thrush, a rook, diamond doves, martins, swifts and even a kestrel; the supply is as constant and varied as the seasons. As a background to the idiosyncratic behaviour of her household, the author paints an authentic and disturbing picture of the changing life of the Lake District communities, deeply rooted in tradition and now beginning to wither before the onslaughts of mass tourism and commercial exploitation. In describing the delights of that life - bathing in flooded rivers, rambling over the fells, foraging for the autumnal harvest of wild fruits and fungi, the nine days of the northern Christmas - she records a disappearing paradise.