When I wasn’t at the chemist’s I was playing the fiddle in the garden to an audience of cuckoos. They had come again from Africa, a return so welcomed by the old people that it wasn’t until I grew to this age that I fully understood it: it was the signal you had survived another winter. In the song of the cuckoo was embedded the simple joy of existence and because the bird was unseen and the song’s two notes travelling from treetops it had the air of nature’s telegraph.
