I played in this dirty hole throughout my childhood; in the English rain the earth smelt of dense, brown, wet garden. The garden is the garden where I planted my first seeds plunging my small fingers into the ground to make a hole for them, it is the earth where my precious marbles, begged and borrowed from my older brother, disappeared into the sticky clay, it is the dirt where my enormous father raked the leaves which fell from the trees in the Autumn into piles and where I ran and jumped amongst them. This is the earth of childhood where the smell of nature and its seasons was mine to remember.

Hannah Collins