184 A DIFFERENT OUTLOOK ON LIFE One stormy autumn night when my nephew Roger was about 20 months old, I wrapped him in a blanket and carried him to the beach in the rainy darkness. Out there, big waves were thundering in, dimly seen white shapes that boomed and shouted and threw great handfuls of froth at us. Together we laughed for pure joy - he a baby meeting for the first time the wild tumult of the ocean, I with the salt of half a lifetime of sea love in me. It was hardly a conventional way to entertain one so young, I suppose, but now, with Roger a little past his fourth birthday, we are continuing that sharing of adventures in the world of nature that we began in his infancy - a sharing based on having fun together rather than on teaching. I have made no conscious effort to name plants or animals or to explain to him, but have just expressed my own pleasure in what we see, as I would with an older person. I think the results have been good. We have let Roger share our enjoyment of things people frequently deny children because they are inconvenient or because they interfere with bedtime. We have searched the shore at night for ghost crabs, those sand-coloured, fleet-legged beings rarely glimpsed in daytime, our flashlight piercing the darkness with a yellow cone. We have sat in the dark living room before the window to watch the full moon riding lower and lower toward the far shore of the bay, setting all the water ablaze with silver flames. The memory of such scenes, photographed by his child's mind, will mean more to him in manhood, we feel, than the sleep he lost.
