The garden behind our house is rather peculiar in the sense that halfway between the house and the end of the garden there is a drop of some twelve or fifteen feet down to a lawn and a few trees. The soil below this little cliff is alluvial and black and of a stunning quality just as if it had been brought there from elsewhere
Personally, I have always felt that during one of the Ice Ages some 10,000-12,000 years ago, a raging torrent brought ice cold water from underneath a glacier and carried it away to what would one day become the River Trent. As it did so, it left us our mini-cliff , and, a hundred yards beyond our fence, a much smaller, non-raging not-a-torrent, called the Daybrook.
I haven’t any pictures of this cliff, but I do have one or two which show clearly the almost sheer drop down to the lawn. Here’s the first….
The white lines in the trees (on the right) are the window ledges of the bedrooms of the houses in the street below.
In the next photograph, you can see the garage of a house in the street below…….
Because of this fifteen foot cliff, my friend Widdle was faced with a slight problem in that he had to find a viable route up to the patio where he would be given one or two of the free sausages he enjoyed so much.
There were perhaps three main routes up to the patio. The first and most difficult was to come round the back of next door’s garage where he had to negotiate a path only six inches wide with a drop of some fifteen feet to the ground below. The drop is very obvious in this picture where Widdle turns silently from his precarious perch to the safer surface of the patio, the location of our garage before we had it demolished……..
Did you notice that Wisddle’s paw is perched in mid-air, twelve feet or more above next door’s lawn ?
Alternatively Widdle could come across the lawn and then walk up the flight of steps which I myself had made when we first moved into our house some forty years previously. First of all, he might sit and wait on the luxuriant sward of a particularly damp lawn………
Or, he might just explore the grass, looking for anything interesting that he could take away with him…..
After checking the lawn thoroughly for discarded food, Widdle beats a determined path to the bottom of the steps…..
Once Widdle has made his way up to the top of the thirty nine steps, he can step out into Sausageland…..
Where, with a little bit of luck, somebody would be sitting waiting for him, sausage in hand……
He might even meet an old friend, Yin Yang, the Killer Kat…..
John Knifton 