The fascination with cameras started very early and was less about photography and a lot more about taking apart and never knowing how to put it together again. It was more about 'how does it work' in a world full of working and not working things. Of people who came and went and sometimes went and never came back again. In a world of mystery where every moment carried the scope of all eternity. Where delight and disappointment were sparring allies. Where the only real sense, was a sense of wonder.

'I WAS set down from the carrier’s cart at the age of three; and there with a sense of bewilderment and terror my life in the village began. 

The June grass, amongst which I stood, was taller than I was, and I wept. I had never been so close to grass before. It towered above me and all around me, each blade tattooed with tiger-skins of sunlight. It was knife-edged, dark, and a wicked green, thick as a forest and alive with grasshoppers that  that chirped and chattered and leapt through the air like monkeys.

I was lost and didn’t know where to move. A tropic heat oozed up from the ground, rank with sharp odours of roots and nettles. Snow­clouds of elder-blossom banked in the sky, showering upon me the fumes and flakes of their sweet and giddy suffocation. High overhead ran frenzied larks, screaming, as though the sky were tearing apart. 

 

For the first time in my life I was out of the sight of humans. For the first time in my life I was alone in a world whose behaviour I could neither predict nor fathom: a world of birds that squealed, of plants that stank, of insects that sprang about without warning. I was lost and I did not expect to be found again. I put back my head and howled, and the sun hit me smartly on the face, like a bully.' 

From Cider with Rosie - Laurie Lee (1914-1997)...