Otto English

Myth of the Month

Mr Pink

Though it sat on the edge of an ever-expanding new town, the Essex village where I grew up in the 1970s still had tangible traces of the county’s rural past.

The high street, with its four pubs, post office, and butcher, looked like it had sprung fresh from a Nigel Farage wet dream. There was a village green, a policeman who went everywhere on a bicycle, and a veritable plethora of ‘characters’ who would not have been out of place in the pages of Enid Blyton – the kindly nonagenarian Miss Izzard who would reminisce with visitors about her sweetheart who was killed in the Great War; the Skeggs brothers whose crumbling, Miss Havisham-like property was slowly disappearing beneath a tide of shrubs and ivy; and a kindly old man called Mr Pink to whom my mother delivered meals-on-wheels every second Thursday of the month.

Mr Pink, who was heading towards his 100th year when I knew him, was the sort of grandfather figure you see in Werther’s Original TV adverts. But he was also a veritable source of ancient wisdom and, as Mum rattled the metal lids in his kitchen and sought to fire up his oven, he and I would potter about his garden as he tutored me in the magical properties of plants and nature’s ‘signs’.

It was from Mr Pink that I learned that cowslip, when added to hot water, can cure colds; and that dock leaves relieve the pain of nettle stings in an instant. He taught me that if you see cows lying down, it is a sure sign that a storm is on its way. That lightning never strikes twice in the same place. That even in Essex it can get ‘too cold to snow’. And that if you ever come across a baby bird that has fallen out of its nest, you should not put it back lest its parents scent your smell and reject it. An old farmer, he passed on the tip that ‘a red sky at night is a shepherd’s delight’ while a ‘red sky in the morning is a shepherd’s warning’.