When I was a child our fence separated town from country. Climb it, and I was in a paddock dotted with sheep. There was a shallow gully that ran east-west across the paddock and we would spend hours in there playing armies or peering into rabbit holes. The paddock was bordered to the north-west by a line of huge pines home to a colony of magpies; every spring they made our war games all too real. Once, Mum shot one, resting the barrel of the gun on the kitchen windowsill — she’d meant to frighten it.
Love the way this is put, full of memory , learning, understanding and challenge