Have you ever been o’er the hills and far away? I have. I flew o’er the hills in a spy plane. And yes, before you ask, I was a spy. The plane flew very low o’er the hills, not to avoid radar, for this was before radar, in the early days of aviation. The pilot flew very low o’er the hills so I could spy on them more clearly, peering over the side of the plane, my gummy eye fitted with a monocle the better to aid my vision. My scarf flapped in the wind. Those were the days.

Beyond the hills, far away, was the airfield where we came into land. A person with a couple of flags guided us down. Inside the hangar, I made my report to Control. I never did know Control’s name, nor what he or she looked like. There was a desk in a dark corner of the hangar, and Control sat behind it, engulfed in shadow, smoking. I had to remove my monocle before sitting down. Then I spilled the beans.

My report was simply a list of all the things I had seen while flying low o’er the hills. Farmyards, barns, cows, duckponds, charcoal burners, goats, bracken, tarns, lime pits, those sorts of things. I tried to arrange my list in alphabetical order for Control, off the top of my head. I had no idea what was going to be done with all this information. I wasn’t even clear which side I was working for, but that is the nature of the trade. We creep about in shadows, literally and metaphorically.

While I was giving my report, the pilot went off to the canteen for a cup of tea. In the early days of aviation every airfield had a canteen with a big tea urn. This may have been a Soviet influence, for these were also the early days of the Bolshevik revolution. I did not go to this particular canteen myself, so I can’t say if the tea urn resembled a Russian samovar. I could have asked the pilot, later, had the question occurred to me at the time. I don’t know if airfield canteens still have big tea urns, because it is a world I have left behind. My flying and spying days are long past.

I consider myself lucky that I did not end up shot in a ditch. That happened to quite a number of my fellow spies. Well, actually, I was shot while huddled in a ditch, but I was only wounded, and they didn’t finish me off, whoever “they” were. They may have been the enemy, or they may have been on the same side as me. The ditch in which I was shot happened to be at the edge of the airfield where I landed after flying o’er the hills and far away, so it was a very, very long walk home, with blood pouring out of my wounded head, across the hills instead of o’er them. I passed by all those farmyards and barns and cows and duckponds and charcoal burners and goats and bracken and tarns and lime pits and whatever else on foot this time. At ground level everything looked different, but that may have been because I no longer had my monocle. One of the bullets had smashed it to smithereens, and I left each smithereen where it lay scattered in the ditch.

That is my story of going o’er the hills and far away, and I returned to tell it. Not everyone does.