I looked up and saw it there. At least, I saw all that remained of it after fourteen years of rain and snow and wind. The blue, emblazoned covering, of course, had long since rotted away. So had the tail pieces. But the crossed sticks of the frame, very black now, stuck out of the gap between the arches of the railway bridge like two teeth in an aged smile.

I have, as a boy, tried hundreds of times to scale that massive bridge. To us lads, in those days, it lay there striding across the vale on its ten tall legs like a shiny-red, smoke-streaked dragon. Quite regularly we used to go down in a small force to meet it, to pit our wits and feeble strength against it, and try, by climbing it, to lay its rumbling carcass in the dust. The bridge, however, always beat us. As far as I know only one boy ever managed to climb higher up its perpendicular sides than the top of the arches. And even he fell back at the rim of the parapet, fell back into the bushes and broke an arm.

And so, when my favourite kite went and lodged itself up there, I stood by the veils of dripping moisture beneath and wished it a long, last farewell. But just as I was about to turn away, I remember, a wave of that peculiar vindictiveness which sometimes floods our minds in childhood swept over me. I picked up a handful of stones and for five minutes hurled them, clattering and chipping, at the sides of the unconquerable beast.

The vale was one of our most popular playgrounds. There was a privet plantation down there, used by the corporation to provide cuttings for hedges around council houses. This, to us, was “Midget Sherwood.” In its dark, twiggy depths we lived countless great new chapters in the history of Robin and the black King John. There was also in the vale a disused claypit, with puffing dust which a pebble from a catapult could spurt up like a genuine bullet. There were craters, jagged and lipped like shellholes. There were caves and bunkers and trenches. Whenever Robin grew tame we could dash across the road, changing personalities as we went and, sliding on our stomachs over the claypit, engage in sneaking attacks on the ridge where the Germans had their positions at Neuve Chapelle. Many of my friends were to do the same sort of thing in earnest very soon.

In 1939 the evacuation of the schools robbed me of all my playmates. Of fifteen or twenty children who had lived in my immediate neighbourhood I was the only one who remained. How silent everywhere seemed these months, and how lonely! One’s footsteps seemed to echo and for the first week or so one wandered about in a kind of watchful, hopeful bewilderment. But there was one compensation. The others, at their new homes in Ramsbottom and Macclesfield and Blackpool, had still to attend classes as regularly as before. While I, the solitary survivor in the city – with the exception of my very small brother, – never saw the inside of a school for almost two whole years. In those days that was something to be wildly grateful for.

During the afternoons in that first glowing autumn of the war I used to stroll regularly down to the deserted claypit. Sometimes I would take a book with me – a long one, such as Crusoe or Treasure Island or Swiss Family Robinson – and sit and read by the railway sidings. Or perhaps I would merely lie on the brown, rustling grass, to watch the clouds roll by over the glinting silver fantasies of the barrage balloons. Since there was no one to drag me into a game, no one dashing about disturbing things, I was often able to net small fish in the muddy pool at the bottom of the deepest crater. And as the seasons changed I could slide down the snowy slopes on a piece of Anderson shelter or, later, watch the birds come northwards over the bridge to nest in the uninterrupted peace of the privet plantation.

I built myself a small shack, and personal den, out of old bricks and pieces of tin plate. I clothed the sides and roof with lumps of turf and rounded the whole thing off neatly so that from a distance it looked like a natural – though perhaps somewhat inexplicable – little hummock, a green bubble in the brown, undulating sea. I furnished it with two orange boxes. When it rained I could sit, sheltered, and watch the water splash and gurgle beyond the doorway. I soon found that rats were occupying my den at nights, but though at first the signs of them frightened me I was never driven out. I even caught two in a home-made trap. When I picked up their broken corpses and felt their soft, damp fur they seemed so small and weak that I ceased completely to worry about them.

But most often I flew kites. Kites which I made myself out of tissue paper and sticks of cane, and which I flew from sewing cotton procured by the dozen bobbins by the lady next door who worked making uniforms for soldiers. I became expert in both the making and the flying of these kites. I could judge to a fraction the accurate balance between length and breadth, between tail-weight and area of paper surface. I could gauge the wind to the nth degree.

Kite flying during the war was, I heard, an offence against the realm. But I flew my kites so high and so far that had any busybody ever even noticed one dodging about like a mote in heaven he could not possibly have located the flyer. And the vale was always desolate but for me, sitting there on the ridge with the sounds of the aircraft factory up on the high road buzzing about me and the whistling of the trains tickling my ears.

As a rule I made kites to go far, not to last, and I continued to run them out, bobbin after bobbin, until I could see them no longer. Then, when it was time for tea, I would cut the kite adrift and let my imagination dance away with the trailing end of cotton.

One day, however, I actually bought a kite – a blue cloth one, all printed gaily and frilled. This one I decided to preserve, using only twine to fly it. Perhaps I never really got accustomed to it after my paper ones. Perhaps I never quite learnt to time and judge it as I had my own. Anyway, I lost it one afternoon. I was tugging at it to lift it, against the wind, over the bridge when it developed a crazy tail-spin and nose-dived in spite of all my efforts to prevent it into the black gap in the wall between the arches.

I can well remember how wretched I felt as I watched it. But that was fourteen years ago now. And how astonishing it is that the framework of that kite should still be up there.