We taught ourselves to count and do takeaways via Ten Green Bottle Hanging on the Wall.

We knew something nasty might happen if we didn’t eat up all our greens.  We soon realised the Green Belt had little to do with karate.

I’ve been digging deeply into my memory patch for reminders of how various shades of green dominated Norfolk lives long before it became fashionable to wear them

Join me on the village green opposite our primary school where lurked copies of Anne of Green Gables and How Green Was My Valley, useful grounding for the  compelling novels of Graham Greene … you know, brother of Sir Hugh Greene, director general of the BBC for most of the 1960s.

Talking of television from a more innocent age, we walked the police beat with Dixon of Dock Green, hid in the forest with Richard Greene as Robin Hood and tried to double our money or hear opportunity knocking with the ever-effusive Hughie Green.

Musical treats included Frankie Vaughan emerging from behind the Green Door and Tom Jones rolling on The Green, Green Grass of Home. Green Goddess could be a funny drink or a fire-fighting machine. Little boys without hankies had to hum Greensleeves. 

Just a bit of fun to prove we were in that green grove way back when bartering down country lanes turned into daily festivals of flowers, fruit and vegetables. There’s nothing new under the sun or blossoming hedgerow.

After all, the pastoral impulse in Victorian England is being echoed uncannily  in some of the forces and feelings of the current Green movement, especially on a muddled road to a General Election bound to intensify concerns over environmental damage rather than come up with realistic ways of dealing with it.

Our great debate seems much more complicated  than necessary despite being elevated to the highest political level. At least the Victorians were spared too many contributions from that department.

High priests in their back-to-the-land pulpits, John Ruskin, William Morris and Edward Carpenter merely had to put up with being called sandal-clad eccentrics who spouted slogans like “The plough is a better backbone than the factory” and encouraged girls to dress as Alpine peasants.

Perhaps the lasting value of their “alternative” pursuits was to urge future generations to question a deep-seated belief in untrammelled progress. Even in the late 19th century, market forces, working through a process of evolution to balance supply and demand, brooked no intervention.

It would be foolish to draw too many analogies between that era and this one, but certain similarities are most striking.

The late 19th century brought a dramatic flowering  of societies for protecting and preserving parts of old England from urban and industrial onslaught. We owe much to these pioneers who really meant it when they talked of saving something for their children’s children.

On a purely local track there may be a strange sort of comfort to be gleaned from discovering complaints we have come to take for granted were being aired well over a century ago. Bygone Norfolk, a volume edited by William Andrews in 1897.

Included this swipe at so-called progress: “Of late years many interesting birds and animals once plentiful in Norfolk have become either rare or extinct. This is owing partly to better drainage of the marshes, the introduction of better guns and to the invasion of a host of Cockney visitors.

“Steam launches, numberless yachts, popping revolvers and champagne corks leave no peace to modest denizens of the reed beds. Fowling-guns destroyed the splendid bustard that once roamed on the western heaths. What a magnificent bird it must have been and how short-sighted its destroyers!”

In his History of Norfolk published in 1885, Water Rye dipped his prolific pen into critical waters as he came up to date… “It is painful for one who has known and loved the Broads as long as I have, in common honesty, to say that their charms have been greatly exaggerated of late.“

To read some of the word-painting about them you would think that you only had to leave Yarmouth and sail up the North River to get at once into a paradise of ferns, flowers and fish... the first few miles will effectually disilusionise any stranger who has been taking in this Swiss Family Robinson sort of rubbish”.

A fragile ecological fabric remains infinitely more precious than any short-term economic gain. And the same must go for our rural landscape  as vote-seekers haggle over hideous housebuilding  figures and “vital infrastructure”  destined to invite even more examples  of widespread destruction of our dwindling  countryside.

Before we are overwhelmed by global climate issues, and a weird mixture of apathy and arrogance  among those who know they must tackle them, there’s just about time as polling day beckons  to take another quiet look round  our  green,  green grass of home.