George: A Magpie Memoir
By Frieda Hughes
Profile Books £16.99
Frieda Hughes has sent me skipping down memory lane.
In the early 1950s, when he was ten or eleven, my older brother ‘adopted’ an abandoned day-old magpie, and I well remember the domestic mess and bedlam it generated as it grew up.
It was called Lucky (we didn't know its sex) and to get it out of our lives – to give it its freedom – after several months