Will’s World: My new rewilding idea is for the crater good
© Richard Stanton One of my new year’s resolutions for last year was to read more books. I set myself the heady target of one a month – and smashed it by ending up with a grand total of 13 for the year, which I was very pleased with.
This year I’m going for 20, which feels like a stretch, given my busy schedule, but aim high and all that.
It was only when I counted last year’s books that I realised well over half of them were either about, or indirectly linked to, the Second World War. This shouldn’t have come as a surprise, given that I’m a tragic middle-aged male nerd on the subject, as regular readers of this column will know.
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A few days before Christmas I even dragged the present Mrs Evans and our numerous daughters to London to once again visit that famously festive experience, HMS Belfast.
And yes, as always, I did sit in the captain’s chair on the bridge and pretend I was looking out for U-boats on an Arctic convoy, complete with barked instructions to the navigator in clipped BBC English, much to the collective delight (and total non-embarrassment) of the teenagers among us.
Time bomb
Carrying on from 2024, the book I’m currently finding impossible to put down is The Splendid and the Vile, by Erik Larson.
It’s about Winston Churchill’s first few tumultuous months in power, from the dark days of May 1940, when the very real threat of Nazi invasion hung over Britain, and he managed to bind the country together with his powerful oratory and extraordinary leadership.
It’s an incredibly gripping read, and each page crackles with the tension that must have hung in the air during that time.
On the back of it I’ve resolved that our next educational family trip will be to the Cabinet War Rooms, perhaps with a detour to Bletchley Park on the way. How excited they’ll all be when I tell them!
Anyway, this isn’t Second World War Nerds Weekly, so why am I banging on about it again?
Well, it has reminded me that right here on our farm in the sleepy Welsh borders we have a piece of world history from that time – a bomb crater.
In the summer of 1940, when the Luftwaffe was relentlessly targeting Liverpool, they’d fling out random bombs along the flight path to try to further demoralise the populace, and one of them fell right here on the farm.
Glass wear
Ten years later, when my grandparents moved in, the windows on one side of the house were still sheeted with rusty corrugated iron where the explosion had blown out the glass.
I say we have a bomb crater. What I really mean is we had a bomb crater – the old man filled it in sometime in the late 1980s, much to Granddad’s (and my) great displeasure.
I’d spent half my childhood until that point scrabbling around in it looking for bomb fragments. But I’m sure it seemed the right thing to do back then.
It occurs to me that times have changed and we’re looking for ways to enhance the environment on the farm – and hopefully be financially rewarded for doing so. Perhaps it’s time to dig it out again and make it into a pond.
I reckon turning something that was a symbol of a fanatical desire for the death and destruction of our way of life into a calm and peaceful haven for wildlife has a nice sense of poetic justice to it.