Find The Fault No 47

I must apologise for the poor quality of this image. I snapped it last night, and it looks like I did it by candlelight. So you'll have to puzzle over it very carefully. I note that the number plate says the car was apparently registered in the North Riding of Yorkshire, but I wouldn't mind betting the letters are the artist's initials. When I worked in what was then called 'commercial art' we were always doing things like that. Hiding questionable details in silhouettes of trees or clouds, putting spurious headlines on newsvendor's placards and our girlfriend's or wives' names above shop fronts. Sometimes both.

Buttonholed

I can't remember another year when the wearing of a poppy has been so intensively debated. All last week the papers had letters from Tunbridge Wells wondering whether the BBC had bought in a job lot from the British Legion, such was the proliferation. We expect newsreaders to start wearing them in September, but when I saw every member of every band on Jools Holland with one, I waited for the Blue Peter dog to run on with a poppy in its collar. It seemed as though everyone was trying to outdo each other in the remembrance stakes. Last night in the Royal Albert Hall Her Majesty appeared to be wearing six and a stray Duke standing behind her had such an enormous papaver somniferum on his coat I waited to see if it would squirt water like a clown's buttonhole. So it came with great relief yesterday to discover this little understated enamel badge on a lapel. And if Wartime Housewife will forgive me for nicking her Sunday Poem idea, here's a little understatement from Edward Thomas, who really knew about these things:

A Private

This ploughman dead in battle slept out of doors

Many a frozen night, and merrily

Answered staid drinkers, good bedmen, and all bores:

'At Mrs. Greenland's Hawthorn Bush', said he,

'I slept'. None knew which bush. Above the town,

Beyond 'The Drover', a hundred spot the down

In Wiltshire. And where now at last he sleeps

More sound in France- that, too, he secret keeps.

Corner of a Foreign Field

A German military ambulance in Unmitigated England? Mein Gott! But it was at this year's English Heritage Festival of History. And I liked the photograph of it against a very English summer sky. OK, that's enough excuses. I leave it to my engineering-inclined commentators to discuss the various merits of the Opel Blitz as opposed to the Opel Blitzkreig, but I think what appeals is that it's over here at all. In a parade ground full of Roman legionaries, American troop carriers and ATS girls, this beautifully restored vehicle really stood out. It's driver was fully kitted-out in a feldgrau ambulance driver's uniform and The Boys used the back as a high vantage point to watch fighter planes helping out at a Normandy beach head. Who knows what terrible scenes this vehicle attended, but it's very presence in an English field says so much about how far we've come in our acceptance of the background details of history. The mists of over sixty years perhaps hide some of the horrors of war, but let us never forget the sacrifices that were made on both sides by air raid wardens, nurses, field cooks and, of course,ambulance drivers.

Find The Fault No 46

I wonder what it would be like to live in Find The Fault Land? Permanently committing gross errors and never having to worry about having any rearlights. Still, here we are, out for yet another run in the pastel-coloured countryside. Perhaps it's Buckinghamshire with that pale yellow road surface. I always remember the colour changing quite dramatically when entering from surrounding counties in the 1950s and early 60s, as evidenced by numerous films shot on the roads during this period. James Robertson Justice hooting along in a Rolls-Royce, Stanley Baxter falling off his bike under Chiltern beech ridges. Carry on.

Pumpkin Heads & Tales

Concerned about some American cultural imports, the trick 'n' treating aspect of Halloween has never really appealed. All those old ladies keeling over at the sight of the undead beckoning to them with bony fingers, and those rubber masks- not too keen on masks either. So it was with dismay that I saw The Boys arrive yesterday in black velvet cloaks. "Take those masks off boys" I said, "You know I don't like them." "We haven't got them on yet Dad". Ghoulish laughter all round. Youngest Son had his cloak on all day, staring out of the kitchen window waiting for dark. Older Boy started on a Convincing Argument, and said if anyone wanted a trick he'd do one with his playing cards. He practised well, and Mr.Curmudgeon let them go round the village after he'd nearly ended-up in casualty making the pumpkin heads. I said why don't they go and hide in the churchyard and then I'd not come and find them. But what a good time they had. The village must be used to it, they came back with a big bag full of goodies and had been made very welcome in houses, along with other children who continually knocked on my door until I ran out of the pennies I'd heated up on the stove. No sign of any conversion to Satanism, we sat down by candlelight to a fabulous pumpkin soup. I said "What was the best bit?", and they replied that one house was in complete darkness and a loud voice had shouted out gutterally "What do you want?" and then the door had been flung open by a neighbour dressed as the Grim Reaper. I like that, it's given me an idea for next year...

Frontispiece

Over in Norfolk I came across this shed, looking very appealing with its red trailer parked-up inside. A typical corrugated iron structure, but it was the frontage that caught my eye. The ends of sheds like this are usually finished-off with just plain timber doors or infilled with bricks, but often the iron curves were deemed just a bit too prosaic, and so were screened with slightly more upmarket facades. This one in Wereham looks like it was probably once a garage, decorated with petrol signs and the ubiquitous M.O.T triangles. The curved top echoes what lies behind, but two little wings were added to make it 'just that little bit different'. More often we will see crow-stepped gables, painted or rendered to give the illusion of a much larger building behind. Very pre-war, very much a fashion. And of course once you start looking, you see them everywhere. Workshops, factories, cafes; sometimes extended out from the workaday end to form offices with Crittall metal windows. I once went to a cinema in Suffolk that had an art deco facade hiding a corrugated iron-roofed auditorium. Which was fine until a prolonged storm broke out over the town and the noise of hailstones hitting the roof completely obliterated the soundtrack of Witchfinder General. (Screams, noisy dismemberments, Vincent Price's accent.)

Lancashire Hotspot

Early last August a friend and I found ourselves in the Forest of Bowland, by the simple expedient of following a little road out of the back of Lancaster, under the M6 and up over Appletree Fell. After passing a little observation tower erected for Queen Victoria's Jubilee, from where it was possible to see just about everything westwards from Blackpool Tower to the far side of Morecambe Bay, we descended into the valley of the Marsh Wyre at Abbeystead. The Forest of Bowland, composed of high moorland and deep valleys, is one of the most beautiful, remote and relatively unvisited areas in England, although Lancashire industrial towns are never far away. Much of it belongs to the Duchy of Lancaster, and the Duke, oddly enough Our Queen, has I believe said that if she wasn't obliged to live in a succession of royal palaces then she quite fancied a house here. On leaving the wonderfully compact and quiet estate village of Abbeystead, the road soon starts to follow the river until a bend reveals a superb little building (above) standing alone above the rushing waters of the Wyre. This is Tower Lodge, where first a lane and then a footpath leads up on to White Moor. Our road continued into the Trough of Bowland and over to Dunsop Bridge, but not before we found refreshment at Annie's snack trailer with chairs set out under sighing firs. I wonder if Her Majesty would come down here in her headscarf for a bacon sandwich.