Days Gone By

We could never have loved the earth so well if we had had no childhood in it.

~George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss, 1860~

I have been having a super time looking through old photographs and I found these two of my sister and me. We are in our back garden where we kept our pet rabbits. My Dad built several rabbit hutches which were very well done as even though he was a policeman, building things with wood was one of his hobbies. Gardening was another. He also had a great love of animals and I doubt we would have had so many rabbits if he didn't enjoy them as much as my sister and I did. Children being children, even though we were expected to help out which we did in our own way, I know my parents were their main caretakers. My Dad also loved the old American cowboy shows on TV; Cheyenne, Sugarfoot, The Virginian, Rawhide and Wagon Train. Everything stopped in our house when they came on, and so it seemed that all our pet rabbits had Cowboy names from those shows. In the top pictures we're holding Cheyenne and Rowdy Yates and can't remember who else, and in the bottom picture I am holding Sugarfoot. Little did I know back then that I would be moving to America and living in the land of the cowboys. Well, almost, I know we've got to go a bit more west for that these days.