translated the motto as ‘Get proper knotted with your tiara’. Hitch was no scholar and knew no Latin, so he did not know that Pliny, the Roman naturalist, had met some of his ancestors as much as two thousand years ago. He remembered clearly though, the tales his Granny had told him of escapes from being rolled up in clay to be baked and then eaten by gypsies. She had known all sorts of weird and wonderful things too—how to make the milk curdle to make cheese using the flowers of that little plant there, Lady’s Bedstraw. She knew the cures for all one’s ills that could be made from the purple Self-Heal. Thoughts like these whiled away some of the hours as he rested among the Pennywort, Goat’s Beard and Scarlet Pimpernel, waiting for dusk. Otherwise he slept or dozily studied the fields before him, without thought or care of passing cars. The meadow that fell away directly before him stretched golden with buttercups dancing in the arms of the soft summer breeze. From it a lark rose pouring out its paean of praise that a blackbird in a nearby oak matched with a cadence of liquid notes. Below the meadow the land stretched green to tangles of trees and shrubs, their roots overlain with coverlets of monkey-musk and cushions of king-cups with yellow iris fringing the waters of the lake. The lake itself was a long mirror-like sliver of sapphire blue framed in the secret shadow of the trees. Beyond the lake and Wych Elm Wood to the left lay the rolling, mounded, sand-pitted golf course and far to the right, the town. Many back gardens made up a patchwork that was herringbone-stitched with fences and embroidered with flowers. Some were decorated gaily with flags of washing fluttering in strings or flying around on whirligigs. On summer Saturdays and Sundays the air was loud with the echoing chatter and whirring of lawn mowers and heavy with the scent of new-mown grass.
Directly beyond the lake and between the town and the golf course lay a small world that was the delight of children (of all ages). It was a world in miniature, laid out to scale in every detail; complete with Lilliputian houses, churches and shops. Railways and roads joined the villages and towns and linked them with Industry. All was there to delight the visitor from Easter to Summer’s end and to provide help for charities from the takings at the gate. It was to this pleasing mini-land called Knotty Cot that Hitch was bound.
The golden day slipped by taking with it the weary soreness from Hitch’s feet, leaving them fresh with the itch to feel familiar ground again. Mothy dusk gave way to moon-silvered dark. It was time to go. Keeping to the path that followed the hedges still hazy with the white of hedge parsley, down the sleepy meadow and over the drowsy fields he went, murmuring a snuffling-huffling song to himself. He felt content and it showed in his quiet