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the
Jungle Books
are not (or not quite). For example, the White Mouse knows what grand opera is, and Too-Too the owl can do arithmetic. But Lofting wrote with warmth and humour, and again, the characters are likeable and well-drawn. In the best of the books the narrative grip is powerful. Above all, the author obviously felt real compassion for animals. If I am up to the neck in the animal rights movement today, Dr Dolittle must answer for it.
    Here are some lines from a poem I wrote at the age of sixteen, remembering those early days.
    â€˜I remember all my road, the tiny lanes
Running between the honeysuckled hedges;
The streams, and moorhens twining through the sedges;
The snails upon the shining hornbeam leaves,
And glow-worms in the evening grass.
I remember how that Childhood used to pass;
The great red moon, the scent of August phlox,
Grasshoppers in the fields, the chiming clocks
Scarce audible from the far town below;
The yellow corn-sheaves and the sky above;
All simple things, Memories that all men know,
The earliest foundations of this love.’

Chapter II
    In those days, Wash Common was still a village a good mile or more outside Newbury, up Wash Hill on the Andover Road. Its population would have been a few hundred, I suppose, and there was open country between it and Newbury. Newbury really began (conveniently for my father) at the hospital, a mile down the hill from our gate.
    The first battle of Newbury, at which Lord Falkland, a leading cavalier, was killed (some say suicidally), was fought on 22 September 1643 at Wash Common and on the lower land lying between Wash Common and Newbury. In my day this was something which every Wash Commoner knew and could talk about with at least a smattering of local topographical knowledge. (‘Ah, that’s where they put the guns, see?’)
    The Royalist army, under the King and his nephew Prince Rupert, had been besieging Gloucester. Gloucester was defended for the Roundheads by the gallant young Colonel Massey, and Parliament, determined to relieve him, had sent an army from London, commanded by the Earl of Essex. The siege was raised and Essex duly set out to march back to London. If he couldn’t get there his army would disintegrate for lack of supplies. Rupert was eager to outstrip Essex and put the King’s army between him and London. To this end he urged the King to push on hard, by way of Marlborough and Hungerford, to the town of Newbury on the river Kennet.
    Essex, also hoping to outstrip the enemy, was moving by a more southerly route, and approached Newbury south of the Kennet, via Kintbury and Enborne. Near Enborne you can still see ‘Essex’s Cottage’, where he slept (briefly) the night before the battle.
    The Royalist army reached Newbury first, and since any manoeuvre to the north was blocked by the Kennet, Essex had no alternative but to fight for his disputed course eastward. On the morning of the 22nd, the Royalist army came up Wash Hill and took position on Wash Common. Essex perforce attacked them.
    Compared with other battles of the Civil War, relatively little is known about First Newbury; though everyone knows that Falkland (who was very much undecided about the rights and wrongs of the whole business) said to someone that morning that he would ‘be out of it all by nightfall’; and later rode, as it seemed deliberately, into a gap covered by a Parliament gun. He died of wounds in a house still called Falkland Lodge. (Everything’s ‘Falkland’ on Wash Common. The cricket team’s always been called Falkland, for instance - though no pub bears the name.)
    Some maintain that most of the fighting must have taken place north of Wash Common, down below the plateau and south of the Kennet, on ground east of the village of Enborne and west of what is now the Comprehensive School. I don’t subscribe to this view for two reasons. First, the vital road which Essex needed, if he was going to by-pass