H.E. Bates Companion

A six-year-old boy accompanies his father on his "first far distant journey, through strange countryside, into another county, to a place he did not know." Eventually they arrive at a shop, a taxidermy owned by the boy's aged and impoverished aunt and uncle (undoubtedly based in part on Bates's visits, with his father, to his uncle Joseph Bates's taxidermy shop). There the adults cryptically discuss a tragic family situation, one that is never explained to the boy on the return journey. First published with the title "The Far Journey" in the Evening News (February 9, 1953), then with the final title in The Watercress Girl and Other Stories (1959).