ONCE upon a lifetime ago, long before motorways had sliced up the English countryside and the stain of urban sprawl was but a twinkle in a planner’s eye, a Herefordshire young-feller-me-lad by the name of Bob Jenkins would snatch every school-free moment to wander the fields and woods of his native county.

From dawn to dusk – and even far into the night – Bob would fish the waters of his beloved River Arrow, set snares for rabbits, search for birds’ nests and generally get up to all the tricks that had been so beloved by countless generations of country boys until the arrival of the computer age was to change everything forever.

Like many a village lad, Bob received a thorough grounding in the three Rs at the local school, but if the truth really be known, his most important education only started once the bell had rung to announce the end of lessons.

For this was when the day only truly began for Bob, a time when a voice in his head urged him to keep the appointments with his real teachers… Tom, the penniless pike-catcher of a vagrant who lived in an outhouse and ‘the Doctor’, a fisherman capable of reeling in brown trout as easily as a magician pulls pigeons out of a hat.

Bob Jenkins was brought up in the village of Titley, a small community between Kington and Presteigne and this enchanting book is the account of his boyhood during the 1930s and wartime 40s.

It is indeed a well-crafted odyssey through the past that is, to some extent, now very much a foreign country. Possessing the rare eloquence of a man who not only has a great tale to tell, the author also has the necessary command of his native tongue required to tell it.

And make no mistake, the reader is soon drawn to his prose, like a moth to a henhouse lamp, entering this lost world into a time that existed before the young professionals lived in over-priced former labourers’ cottages, blocking narrow streets with their 4X4s.

His entire universe was the broad spread of nearby Rushock Hill, the vale of the River Arrow and the mysterious Flintsham Pool, a small lake that seemed to guard many a piscatorial secret deep below its languid surface.

And accompanying him on his numerous escapades is his faithful dog Turk, whose damp muzzle seems to be constantly testing the Marcher country air for the scent of rabbit, fox or hare.

Quite obviously a labour of love, this was a story that had been incubating for some time and, as Bob admits, it didn’t take all that long to put pen to paper once the muse arrived. It was like a seed that had for long lain dormant in the ground, waiting for the right conditions to spread forth and burst with abundance.

There will be many men born either just before the Second World War or just after who will recognise much that lies within these pages. Many of Bob’s adventures, not all of them strictly legal, are nevertheless endowed with the pure innocence of childhood, rural life being viewed through the prism of wide-eyed wonder and a yearning for discovery.

It is a journey through boyhood, a diary of days that never seemed to end, when the sun may not have always been shining, but was never long in returning to burn the rain clouds away.

Our story draws to close with the arrival of American troops around 1943. Their coming, in many ways, also signals the end of one era and the beginning of another.

These men with their cowboy film accents might as well have been aliens from another world and effect on small communities such as Titley must have been very great indeed. Nothing would ever be the same again.

Today, Bob Jenkins lives in the village of Callow End, near Worcester, where the occasional sight of a heron hunting for eels in the brook at the bottom of his garden echoes all those similar scenes that were once so familiar in the beloved Herefordshire that lies just over the hills.

There is a saying… you can take the boy out of the country but you can’t take the country out of the boy. Without any shadow of doubt, it might have been coined with Bob Jenkins in mind.

That Boy and His Dog can be obtained from Bob Jenkins, Careys Brook House, 53 Upton Road, Callow End, WR2 4TZ e-mail bj@threecountyssociates.fs.business.co.uk phone (01905) 830732.