Give us a clue
IT must have been in 1956 when my grandmother announced her intention to rise early the next morning to pick mushrooms from the field near our Hampshire village. ‘They only grow overnight, so I need to be there before anyone else,’ she declared. Born in 1896, this was a girl of the Wiltshire countryside, so I presumed she knew what she was talking about. Still, it seemed odd, even to your then five-year-old correspondent. How could anything grow that fast? The whole business worried me for decades.
This conundrum was to be the first of many that have attended my countryside walks over the years. I was destined never to rest when confronted by a mysterious lump on a leaf, the centre of a flower
