With the start of summer, there came ‘the call of the wild’

Date Published: 09-Jun-2011

How is it that I keep on running into people in shops who tell me there is a long-range forceast that June and July will break all records for sunshine and temperatures . . . but I can’t quite track down the origin of the reports.

While I have nothing but respect for some postman who apparently predicted those past two Winters with frost that killed hedges and trees all over the place, I tend to go with ‘science’ and the forecasts which can point to something other than the way the birds are behaving.

We had a touch of Summer at the weekend, but there was a time when the end of May and beginning of June were sure to mean that, suddenly, I felt the call of the wild . . . we might be heading into the Summer holidays, but I couldn’t wait for all that.

Maybe it’s a bit fanciful to believe that, like the dog in Jack London’s marvellous book The Call Of The Wild, I had some kind of ancient yen to be out in the countryside and it would not be denied . . . especially when it came to Summer, good weather, and endless hours of dreaming.

If there were Irish mitching championships, there is little doubt that I could have represented my country. For, when I was just 10 years old, I was the most incorrigible truant . . . and I think the only one ever to have the cops out searching for him!

I was in Fourth Class in primary school at the time. I simply hated school, I was terrified of the wallopings with the leather which were liberally dished-out, maybe I was a bit lazy, and ‘doing my own thing’ wandering abroad had become my way of life.

Endless days stretched before me of chasing that single indifferent brown trout that seemed to inhabit the river at the bottom of Tuam Racecourse. Or with a jampot, I went fishing for ‘pinkeens’ or ‘jarogs’, which I brought home in jamjars.

Then there were the endless hours sitting on the riverbank reading, or marvelling at the tracery of the sheeptracks which criss-crossed the fields.

Had I been of a poetic leaning, perhaps I might have been a bit of a Wordsworth, but, for me, the joy of the days spent wandering was the pleasure of doing just that – wandering. I kept my ear cocked for the ‘town clock’ so that I would have some idea of when to appear back at home again, but, for the rest, I was a free spirit.

Like all ‘school days’, I do not remember a single wet day! In the morning I packed my schoolbag with The Readers Digest, which was my staple diet when it arrived in the post once a month, or I nicked a copy of Great Expectations or Oliver Twist from the sittingroom ‘collection’.

I don’t remember that I particularly cared for Dickens – there were too many descriptive passages for my liking – but I read the books like adventure novels to be enjoyed, and lightly skipped over the lengthier descriptive passages to get back into the storyline once more.

For more, read this week’s Galway City Tribune.