In my early childhood I lived in a village in south Bedfordshire, surrounded by sprout fields and piggeries which gave the air a permanent faecal tang. To this generally agreeable, porky aroma would be added once a week the stomach-churning waft of the ‘lavender lorry’ on its round of the cesspits. Sometimes this malodorous vehicle would be so overfilled that it would spill over and mark its passage with a glistening trail of brown along the road. It was not this, however, that pricked my curiosity. The only mystery about sewage was why people called it ‘night soil’. It was, rather, the dogs, which back then in the 1950s used to speckle the pavements with faeces of pure white. Being accustomed to this, we boys saw nothing odd in it and called it ‘dog chalk’. Until now this distant phenomenon had slipped from my memory, and so I had failed to wonder why modern dogs do things so differently. But now I think I may have an answer. To find it I have had to make a journey of some 4,500 miles from my home in eastern England to a parched high plateau beneath the misted peaks of Mount Kenya.
What do You think about The Hunt For The Golden Mole?
