Richard Bell's nature sketchbook since 1998
I’m afraid it’s that time of year again when I have to briefly disturb our resident toad in the greenhouse. He or she isn’t too pleased about it but I make sure there’s a quiet corner under a plant tray available as I continue moving pots and pulling up spurge, chickweed and dandelion.
This spider with a plump abdomen is the most common beneath trays and plant pots. This is the male, the one with the ‘boxing glove’ pedipalps.
Aged just six, George came up with a story about a boy called ‘Firefeet’. During a family party, I illustrated it as he told me the tale line by line. I was so impressed that I did a printed, colour, version of it from memory when I got home.
For his latest birthday, yesterday, I thought it was time to catch up with his incendiary character.
Resting on the wheelie bin by the hedge what looks like the Large Rose Sawfly, Arge pagana. The females have ‘saws’ to cut into plants when laying eggs. There’s a self-seeded rose growing up in the beech hedge right next to the bins.
Drawn in Procreate, using my homemade ‘worn nib’ brush for the line work.
Happy birthday yesterday to Sarah.
And to my DIY-mad best man Matthew.
A common blue on birdsfoot trefoil at the grassy edge of the track on the far side of RSPB St Aidans this morning.
Happy birthday to James (you’ve got to be moo-sical to understand this one).
Going back to dip pen and ink – in this case De Atramentis – and watercolour for this drawing of my Lowe Alpine haversack and Merrell trainers.
Happy birthday to Best Boy Dylan . . . although I seem him as a natural to be a foley artist.
I never met my Uncle Maurice and Aunt Florence, pictured here at my mum and dad’s wedding, and my mum hardly knew them either because, following some family falling out, he left home when my mum was still a toddler. He and my grandad never spoke to each other and, as she grew up, my mum realised that she’d be in trouble if she ever contacted him.
“I don’t know how you put up with him,” said Maurice, on a rare occasion when he saw her walking home from school and pulled up in his car. My mum looked around nervously, hoping that no one would spot her speaking to her banished brother and relay the news back to her father.
As I’ve explained previously, it didn’t help that my uncle, Maurice T Swift, set up a rival funeral directors business to his father’s and, as he had the same name, there was then confusion about which business was which.
The rivalry extends into the 1939 telephone directory with Maurice T’s listing dwarfed by a masthead banner from his father insisting that ’85, Headford Street’ is the ‘ONLY ADDRESS’ for Swift & Goodinson’s complete funeral furnishers.
The 1939 survey, the nearest we have to a wartime census, provides a valuable snapshot of my long lost uncle’s life.
He a ‘Coffin maker, own a/c’ and Florence, ‘Shroud maker’ are living at 54 Hereford Street, not far from The Moor in the centre of Sheffield.
They’ve got lodgers; a family of variety artists, the Crerars: Peter and Elizabeth Crerar, aged 52 and 42, and their children, James, 21, Peter, 19 and Katherine, 17, all listed as variety artists, and Alexander, aged 10, who is still at school.
In the 1939 survey James and Peter have taken jobs in the steel industry and Katherine is a glazing machinist.
I’ve been unable to find any reference to members of the family on the variety circuit.
A year in December, 1940, James has enlisted but, along with a fellow soldier, Samuel Reynolds, aged 27, he’s remanded in custody in Rochdale Magistrates Court, charged with ‘having had carnal knowledge of a girl aged 15 years’.
Peter also enlisted as a gunner with the Royal Artillery. On 8th October 1941 he is listed as a casualty in the ‘Middle East’.
We opted for 2 x 99s (not sure what that is in hexadecimal). Thanks Arden, and happy birthday (again, not sure what that is in hexadecimal).