Phil: a birds eye view

Phil was born in St Albans in 1949 where his parents and their two other children were living at the home of his Father’s parents. When he was six months old his father took out a mortgage on a house in Hertfordshire and the family moved into Orchard Cottage in Sawbridgeworth where Phil grew up and where his family lived until the death of his mother in2008, his father having passed away in 1991.
Phil’s early childhood differed from that of his brother Steve and sister Jane because their father David, as an officer in the Royal Marines, had been largely absent during the war years, leaving their mother Mavis to bring them up on her own. Mavis told me that, as a small child, Jane would chase after any soldier she saw crying “Daddy! Daddy!”
David doted on his youngest child and Mavis was glad to let him take over. He took great delight in these duties, standing little Phil on the kitchen table to dress him in the mornings. If Phil woke in the night he used to call out for his Daddy, not his Mummy. Understandably Steve and Jane were a bit jealous of Phil and rather resented him.
Phil adored his father and was greatly influenced by him. He got his love of birds from his father who owned a lot of books on birds and their nests and habits and had a collectors cabinet full of their eggs. Phil learned all their names and had a little album where he kept the feathers he found. When he was old enough to roam by himself in the nearby fields, hedgerows and water meadows  and had learned the trick of sitting on the ground for long periods of time watching, he knew where all the nests were in the trees, hedges and reeds. He was always able, in the years I knew him, to identify all the birds we heard by their call.
Phil managed to fail his eleven plus exam, thanks to his tendency to be immersed in his own thoughts and not always paying enough attention to teachers he didn’t find interesting. This caused him to miss the announcement that the day had come to sit the dreaded 11+. Finding himself in a pleasantly silent classroom with what seemed to be a very boring set of worksheets he spent the whole time watching the birds from the window where he was sitting until the bell rang and the papers were collected.
There was a Catholic grammar school in Bishop’s Stortford where it had been expected that Phil would go but because he failed the 11+ and his mother was Catholic he was sent away to    Laxton, a prep school in Lanarth in the Brecon Beacons, run by Dominican Friars. It was an interesting place bird wise for Phil and he found an ally in one of the Friars who shared his interest. On one occasion he took the Friar to where he had found quite a rare bird sitting on eggs. I wish I could tell you the name of the bird but sadly I can’t remember it.
Later he went to Laxton boarding school in Peterborough where he had two friends that I know of: Edward MacMillan Smith who gave Phil the nickname Moose and George Bacon aka George Sausage who joined Phil on a couple of occasions sneaking out of school at the weekends and hitchhiking to London to spend time in Jazz clubs.
The most tedious part of Phil’s schooldays was the compulsory amount of time that had to be spent attending church – every day and three times on Sundays. He got round this by spending the whole of the service on his knees, which was considered to be more pious than the usual routine of standing, kneeling and sitting. One of Phil’s talents was his ability to fall asleep at will, in all sorts of positions, including kneeling. It was a good way for him to make up for the lack of sleep
incurred on his weekend jaunts to London’s Jazz life.
You can hear how much Phil loved his father by listening to track 6 Birds Eye View of his CD Digging In – a guitar arrangement for which there is no score.