What was your first encounter with a fox? Vera Pettigrew writes: "As I sat outside in the summer sunshine, a young vixen slipped through the hedge and walked slowly towards me. Pausing to smell a bed of mint, she stared intently down the garden, probably looking for our dog. I held my breath as she came closer. Then, to my astonishment, her cold wet nose touched my bare toe. I moved slightly and she sprang, cat-like, away. Her rich red coat gleamed in the sunshine as she turned to look at me. We eyed one another .. . her tiny ears flickering backwards and forwards. Suddenly she was gone. Was she as amazed by her close encounter with a human as I was by mine with a fox?" This was at Annamoe, Co Wicklow and in the same place the writer was familiar with much wildlife, including badgers. At dusk one evening she heard ferocious growling and snapping just yards from the house. So preoccupied were the badgers with their fighting that they didn't notice the door opening until the dog barked. Then they ambled off in opposite directions. Not often seen, badgers fighting. (Irrelevantly there comes to mind the woman who was delighted to allow a hedgehog to nibble gently at her toe.)
These incidents are from the engaging book of memories by the wife of a rector of the Church of Ireland, and come from their time in Annamoe. The parish her husband ministered to was Derralossory and Calary. "The air was full of birdsong and the cuckoo called in sunshine and rain, even through the night." There came a problem with wine. A parishioner had presented a box as "something for you to sell at the fete." Opened, the box contained a dozen bottles of wine. There was no way, she writes, that in the 1950s they could sell wine at a country parish function. A Continental friend agreed to take a few bottles. They couldn't drink it themselves - it wasn't given for them.
At last, when they were due to move on to another parish, the husband, Stanley, disappeared. He came back carrying a spade. "I've solved the problem," he said. He had buried the bottles. So, one fine day, perhaps, someone will turn up an unusual cache. He didn't say where the bottles lie. This is from Where the River Flows: Annamoe Rectory by Vera Pettigrew. Anvil Books £8.95.