Richard Williamson's Column November 17

Many storms we forget, but we never forget wars. In his last year of life, my father was continually harassed by a deep underlying fear that could only manifest itself as "the crake" in his mind. The crake is part of ancient Norse myth, of course, giving us derived names and words such as crow and croak. It is harbinger of death and destruction and may even be the manifestation in our genetic code that automatically signifies the difference between good and evil.

Father had written a short story in the 1920s called The Crake, which was a description of the Devon fishermen's interpretation of the crake as they knew it: a terrible sea monster that lived in the deep but was never seen. In 1830 Tennyson described it thus: ".< TH>.< TH>. Below the thunders of the upper deep; far, far beneath the abysmal sea, his ancient, dreamless sleep, the Kraken sleepeth."

Richard Williamson's Nature Trails appear every week in the West Sussex Gazette. To read the full version of this article, see November 17 issue