I CAN distinctly remember the first time the words 'Natural History' entered my lexicon.

I was eight, my brother 10, and my grandparents still young enough then to plan a trip from the Home Front heartland of Kent to the centre of London, a magical place filled with sights and sounds so very different to those we encountered at Gran's small bungalow in the country.

Our days out to London were always the highlight of the two school holiday weeks we spent away from our parents every summer.

They started early, following a quick check on our horoscopes in The Express over bacon and eggs to make sure nothing untoward was going to happen. Auntie Connie and Uncle Bill would meet us on the platform to catch the morning train from Sandling station to London Paddington.

Auntie Connie would be laden with at least two of those zipped shopping bags full of food, which we would be required to eat in the course of the day; Uncle Bill, always in a suit, would be wearing his brown trilby, with a blue rain coat folded neatly over one arm.

And so the six of us: me, my brother, Gran and George (we never called him grandad or any such thing, it didn't seem to fit) wearing Sunday best, Auntie Connie and Uncle Bill would set up camp in our own compartment, in the days when trains had such luxuries, and try to keep a lid on things until we reached the capital.

It would be no mean achievement; our final destination on this occasion was the stuff of dreams: the Natural History Museum, a place which turned out to be even more wonderful than it sounded.

I can vividly recall setting eyes on the towering gothic building, the monstrous gargoyles and statues set high on its great grey arches, surveying the constant flow of human traffic on the pavements and busy Cromwell Road below.

The huge, foreboding structure was just as I had imagined, and I couldn't wait to get inside, if only for a break from the cheese paste rolls, jam tarts and chocolate cobnuts which were produced every time we stopped for more than a heartbeat.

In those days the museum was nothing like it is now. There were no interactive displays, audio guides, or animatronics. It was just a load of dinosaur bones, fossils and the odd glass jar containing a sepia-soaked specimen of some naked creature or another.

But it was magical to us. I could have studied those bronze brontosaurus bones all day, hoping beyond hope that the skeleton would somehow come back to life and reclaim the cavernous entrance hall for dino-kind.

It never did. But from that day began many years of interest in nature, both in history and in the present, which remains to this day.

And I thought I knew the odd thing about it — I watched Wildlife on One as religiously as I did The Duke's of Hazzard — but I now know there is much to learn.

There are, alas, no dinosaurs at the Kingskerswell Natural History Society, not many of them would fit inside the community centre building for a start. And especially not on AGM night, when the room is mostly filled with chairs.

Dotted around the walls, offering more than merely token decoration, are posters depicting British frogs, dragonflies, ducks, small mammals. It's a cold night, and three red bars of light from the many wall-mounted electric heaters illuminate them from above.

I rather suspect, once the 20 or so members present take those seats and fall silent, that they are mainly here for Phil's quiz, an annual highlight and as stern a test of wildlife knowledge as any of them can imagine.

Phil, who founded the society 20 years ago, was chairman for the first 11 and has been something of a driving force for all of them since. Having opened business, the current chair, David, is duly elected for a fifth term by a hasty show of hands.

Business is run through in a similarly rapid manner, like I used to bolt down my tea when I knew what was for pudding. The rest of the previous committee become the present committee, and few matters arise other than a keenly felt need to attract new members.

One potential selling point might be the brevity of their annual meetings.

"A lot of people don't know what's going on in the village because we don't have a parish magazine," says one local resident. "Up our end we don't have any idea what's going on." I had no idea Kingskerswell was so sprawling.

Anyway, it is decided that more use will be made of the internet and other such communication devices in the search for new blood. Then we move on to 'any observations'.

This is a bit like it sounds, with members recounting any brushes with nature from the past month. They range thus:

"There was a heron in the garden below us being mobbed by seagulls."

"I've seen a heron mobbed by seagulls at the seaside, but never inland."

"I saw a dipper at Bickleigh Mill crossing."

"We saw a green woodpecker."

"We saw a lesser spotted one ..."

"We had a mistle thrush."

It ends with the decidedly poignant: "We had two mice drown in our water butt."

Which seems like a perfect time to break for tea and biscuits.

Phil, a county councillor for 16 years until last year, uses the time to set up the projector for his quiz. I use the time to annoy him by asking questions.

"It's nice to see something that you started still going," he says of the society. "It was first set up in 1990 for the people of Kingskerswell, but there are not many of those people here now as I look around.

"I always had an interest in photography and started the first meeting of the society after a slideshow in this very hall.

"We'd like more people who are receptive to green ideas. It would be nice to have young people, but unfortunately young people with families don't tend to have the time.

"It was always one of my aims to try to communicate with young people, do field studies with them."

Being a retired chemistry teacher, however, he would know how difficult it is to make a young person do something other than what they are currently doing.

If they were interested in those field studies, though, Phil and the society could offer some pretty special sites of interest within this very parish: Kerswell Down and at the church meadow.

"Conservation and habitat management has always been the aim of the society," says Phil.

"Kerswell Down is an inner limestone grassland, one of only three others of comparable size in Devon.

"It has butterflies associated with grassland such as the Marbled White, Brown Argus and Grizzled Skipper. And there are quite a few other grassland species found there.

"To a large extent it's just flora, but there are some very special plants there, such as Dwarf Thistle, Dropwort and Hound's Tongue."

If these names, quite unfamiliar to my ears, had not forewarned of the nature of the quiz to follow, Phil's next admission was the clincher.

"I'm actually a beetle specialist. There aren't too many enthusiasts out there. I actually go out hunting for specific species. Some of them have very specific habitats."

My beetle knowledge, as it turns out, is not what it could be. Nor, for that matter is my butterfly, native plant or insect larvae.

Dennis, sitting in front of me to my right, turns round and offers to help.

"That's a comma," he whispers, just about loud enough for everyone to share the information, as one appears on the projector screen.

"That's a blue something," he adds, when a butterfly of that colour must be named.

The rounds require us to identify type, favourite food and caterpillar of various butterflies, before moving on to plants, other insects and Phil's specialist subject — "It's got serrated antennae, that's a clue..."

"Butcher's brush," says Dennis over his shoulder as we go through the rounds. And then: "Stag beetle ... Violet click beetle ... That looks like ... a nettle."

I had got that one, but Dennis clearly knows a lot more than I do.

"When I first came I didn't know anything," he says when the questions are over. "Some would say I don't know much more now. But so long as you can walk through the door, you can come. Everyone is welcome.

"After a while, all of a sudden, you get to know that's a such and such, or that's a such and such. You get a new appreciation of things. And you enjoy more of nature while you're out in it."

There is some confusion as to who has actually won. It's almost decided that Phil should have the wine as thanks for his quizzes, but he's the one who brought it, so Anne eventually, reluctantly, takes it for her score of 40 points out of 50.

I was pleased to discover I had amassed four and a half.

David, who scored a very creditable 35, is now looking forward to another year as chairman. And he begins it by addressing that pressing issue.

"It's important for us as a society to attract new people, we can give something to them, and they to us hopefully," he says, as the posters come down around us, and those heaters are switched off.

"You can learn a lot. The benefit of our society is that there is something you can actually do, rather than just talk about. You can actually make a difference to the local countryside.

"It is a fairly ambitious thing to do on a village basis, but we don't know how many more people we can realistically expect to come from Kingskerswell."

I assure him that natural history is the sort of thing for which people are willing to make special journeys. Especially when some of that history is alive and well and, much like a certain museum, free for us all to enjoy.