The Dun Cow Rib Page 12
Whoever built the Bartonfield farmhouse in the late sixteenth century had pretensions. Stonemasons with flair and skill must have been employed to erect the shell of the building to a particular design reflecting the vernacular vogue of the day – and then apparently dismissed. Whoever took the job over possessed neither a set-square nor a level or even a plumb line. It was as though the architect had said, ‘Build us four stout walls and an elegant facade and we’ll get the local lads to do the rest.’ Not that it was shoddily built – far from it. With thick stone internal walls, it was a house to withstand earthquakes, but behind that designer facade the construction was a joke, an escapade, an adventure where no rules applied, come what may.
The house, nowadays officially listed as an historic building, much extended and gentrified, still stands. It is built in Ham stone ashlar, a warm, sand-coloured, ferruginous limestone from ancient Roman workings on Ham Hill, a local landmark only a few miles to the south, and for many centuries the favoured building stone for south Somerset. Its soft, warm glow awards both charm and an unmistakable vernacular distinction to the entire district.
Thought to have been built in the reign of William and Mary, Bartonfield’s genteel pretensions extended to finely carved mullioned windows below a continuous string line and a classical portico with columns over an iron-studded oak front door – and no further. It was a powdered face, a cosmetically devised signal to the watching world, just that. Once behind that facade all pretense had been cast to the haphazard winds of functionality and, I imagine, budget.
The iron-studded oak front door opened into a wide passage with elegantly proportioned rooms off at the front, but which descended into virtual cellars and dungeons, dark and cramped, by the time it arrived at the back of the house. Forward-facing windows in the refined facade were matched, symmetrical and delicately constructed; to the rear they seemed to have been placed by whimsy, wherever someone thought a bit more light was desirable, the builders appearing to have competed amongst themselves willy-nilly for eccentricity of sizes, shapes and positions. Downstairs was floored in huge, uneven stone flags; doorframes were low and crooked. Upstairs, no bed, dressing table or chest of drawers could stand upright. Wide elm floorboards veered wildly across bedrooms, bucking and dipping as they went. Wardrobes leaned drunkenly. Ceilings lurched and curved into bulky black oak beams that had never witnessed a saw. Like surfacing whales, other beams emerged from plaster layered on like a child’s icing on a cake, only to vanish again a few feet later.
Busy building a limestone quarrying empire – he would become a leading expert on Sir Christopher Wren’s great buildings – my father had found himself managing several sites in the West Country at once: Portland, Beer, Maiden Newton, Bath. He needed a house central to them all. He plumped for Martock, on the southern edge of the Somerset Levels, in the 1950s very definitely a village, nowadays a thriving country town of 5,000 souls.
With the deeply embedded traditionalist and past-oriented instincts that shaped his whole personality, he had searched the countryside for something old. Old, old, OLD. In Bartonfield he found it – a former cider farmhouse on the western fringe of the village, complete with dairy, stables and a two-storey cider barn with its press and vats intact, rampant wallflowers bursting from the cracks in crumbling masonry, surrounded by orchards of cider apple trees. These gnarled old veterans fruited local varieties of small, bitter apples such as Red Worthy, Lambrook Pippin, Dabinett, Coat Jersey and Cap of Liberty, bred in and around the village over many centuries.
Cider – scrumpy locally – was important to the medieval Somerset economy as the chosen grog to refresh the dusty throats of working men. Whoever the industrious apple-pressing souls who commissioned the house were, they lived well. It was set back from, but facing, the narrow country road looking across a swift-running brook, a minor tributary of the River Parrett, which rippled through banks lined with ancient pollard willows, where moorhens, red-billed and with flicking white under-tails, stalked among quilts of watercress and mare’s tail, and to damp, buttercup-studded water meadows beyond, where shining galaxies of marsh marigolds thronged the many rills, beneath the ringing blue of those endless summer skies of my childhood.
I need not have worried. We didn’t lose a home; we gained one. The Manor House was a fixture, and would remain so for many years to come, rooted firmly at the core of my consciousness. I dreamed its stone-flagged corridors at night and was constantly in trouble from Twig when in class she caught me daydreaming through its soggy fields. Nothing else in my short life’s journey could supplant its superiority. So when my father told me that he had bought another house, I wasn’t really interested. It didn’t seem important.
When I saw it for the first time that summer holidays I might still have been six, or possibly just seven. We’d had other temporary homes before, as my father roamed about expanding his business affairs, but I do remember him collecting me from Hampton House – I thought to take me up to London again, but I was wrong. We turned south to the Mendip Hills and beyond to the vast waterlogged basin of the Somerset Levels.
I was given a small, narrow room at the back with a low window looking out over the cider barn and the stable yard to tall elm trees and the orchards beyond. I quickly warmed to the house’s higgledy-piggledy interior, much smaller than the Manor House. Its beams and low ceilings made it feel more like a large cottage than anything grander, but it had a friendly, nonchalant aura about it as if, down its long centuries, it had seen just about everything a house was likely to witness and nothing much surprised it any more. But most of all I liked the outhouses, the old cider barn and its cobbled floor, the dairy, abandoned to us children as a den, and the clicking thumb-latches to the stables’ doors, familiar from the Manor House. Up above was a long, cobwebby loft, accessed by a rickety ladder and quickly adopted and entirely taken over by fantail pigeons.
Like Kenneth Grahame’s Mr Toad, our father was occasionally given to sudden impulsive flights of fancy. They emerged without warning, burned furiously for a few weeks or months, and then fizzled out. They appealed to us children, keeping us guessing and humanising his otherwise inflexible and overtly conservative persona. One evening he arrived home carrying a hamper. ‘Guess what I’ve got.’ His eyes gleamed with child-like excitement. He thrust his hand in. There was a brief scuffle as he chased something around. Guinea pigs! I thought. The hand emerged holding the purest white dove I had ever seen. It was exquisite, as white as a sunlit swan, soft plumed, with a glossy eye of black opal ringed in a perfect circle of leathery pink. I was instantly captivated. Two cocks and three hens.
We never discovered where they came from or why he wanted them. He spent the weekend constructing a handsome barrel dovecote, erected in a corner of the garden behind the house. A few days later, impatient to see them strutting and pouting their courtship displays around the house, he let them out – far too soon. They never went near the dovecote again. They had immediately spotted blissful pigeon habitat in the loft above the stables, secure and predator free, with rafter perches and wall-head nesting shelves all the way round.
By the end of that summer my father had lost interest. But we had many more fantails displaying in an ever-expanding fly-past, dipping and diving onto the roofs, the air burbling with their dulcian cooings from dawn till dusk. A year later we had dozens. I loved those birds, and they became mine, spending many hours in the loft, lulled by their gentle language and hypnotised by the males puffing up their chests, fanning their tails and bobbing, bowing and pirouetting to their hens. Some were very tame and would feed from my hand; others would allow me to stroke them softly on the nest while incubating eggs. But a few would have none of it and would strike out angrily with a hiss and a wing swipe at my hand.
Those pigeons presented my first serious dip into animal biology. By counting the days of incubation I could time the hatching, the egg rocking very slightly as the chick began to saw at the inside of the shell with the ‘egg tooth’ on the top of its bill. Then th
e crack, a hairline fracture; later a tiny hole and an angular fragment of shell breaking away, revealing the wrinkly membrane beneath. The whole process could take all day, so I would go away and sneak back an hour or two later, only to find that virtually nothing had happened. This first stab at avian life held me in thrall. I found it hard to believe that the cramped, screwed up chick, apparently so helpless and frail, could possibly break free from the shell and within a few hours transform itself into a baby bird covered in yellow down, ugly and reptilian though they were, with hideous bulging eyes, stubby wings and vulgarly distended bottoms.
Sometimes in those early days I became impatient and tried to hurry the hatching by picking bits of shell away, but all too often it would end in death because the chick hadn’t properly freed itself from the yolk sack and the blood supply hadn’t closed off. Bleeding freely from its umbilicus, the chick would weaken and within an hour or two it would be dead.
I had to learn these things the hard way. I don’t ever remember either asking an adult or having anyone else around who might have given me guidance. My mother had a natural affinity with animals; blessed with patience and compassion in equal measure, she had reared whole broods of orphaned birds, lovingly mixing food and teasing it into tiny mouths with a curious glass syringe that delivered a worm of soft food from its nozzle. Once it was greenfinches, six of them all lined up along the verandah rail, all fluttering stubby wings, all squawking for food at the same time. Another time it was goldfinches, but also baby squirrels and rabbits, even field mice. Had she been there I am sure I would have asked her for help, but in those early days of the fantails she wasn’t. She was in hospital.
I learned so much from those birds. Without knowing even the words, far less the science, I was imbibing the rudiments of bird biology and ethology. I watched the cock bird’s insistent minuet spirals, the hen’s coy submission, the mounting, the quick cloacal embrace, followed by the hen’s satisfied ruffle of tail feathers and the cock’s immediate collapse of ardour. My face only inches from the nest, I could witness the hens shuffling into egg laying, turning, heads tilted to gaze proudly at their work, the hot eggs wet and shining in the twiggy nest.
Then the hatching and the rearing. I watched the adult birds regurgitate a sticky ‘milk’ from the lining of the crop, rich in protein and fats, the chicks probing deep into each parent’s gaping throat. I saw the strong squabs wax fat and the weaklings falter and fail – a downy corpse in the messy nest trodden flat by its careless sibling. Both sweet and shocking, I learned that nature takes no prisoners. I watched the stubby, blood-filled plumules emerge from the reptilian skin and gradually flower into the miracle of feathers. I saw the pale, soft beaks narrow, harden and shape to a proper bill. Then there were lice.
Out of nowhere an infestation of lice devastated our pigeons. At first I didn’t know what was killing the chicks. Nest after nest failed. When I left the loft in the afternoon, well-grown, strong squabs would apparently be alive and well; by morning they would be dead in the nest. I told Mark. No one else around to tell.
Mark Cuff was a recently retired glove factory worker from the cottages next door. His wife, Isobel, appropriately known as ‘Dizzy’, was a porcelain skinned, bird-like creature in her fifties who lived on her own particular brand of nervous energy. She was supposed to help out in the house, and she did, after a fashion, but for some unexplained reason couldn’t carry or move anything heavier than a feather duster, far less a bucket or a coal scuttle, so she would nip next door and drag Mark in to do it for her. My father was convinced this was a ruse, but after a while he gave in and employed Mark too. He arrived every morning to perform a routine of chores that included bringing in coke for the boiler, logs for the fires, emptying ash and sweeping the yard. He also cleaned my father’s shoes.
Mark was small, shy and a man of eloquent silence. If he had something to say, it would be delivered with maximum economy. Puzzlingly, he called my mother ‘Mum’. When he came in to do the shoes, he would hang his cap on a lobby peg and say ‘Shoes, Mum,’ disappearing into the boot room without waiting for an answer. He moved slowly and deliberately. I used to watch him at work, carefully placing the polish tin down as if it were bone china. The only rapid movement I ever saw was the back and forth of the cloth to complete the shine.
‘Lice,’ he pronounced when I told him the chicks were dying.
‘What do you mean, lice?’ I asked, astonished that he had an opinion at all. ‘Lice is killing ’em,’ without looking up. Zip, zip, zip went the duster. A long pause. ‘What does lice mean?’
‘Bird lice.’
‘What is lice?’ I pressed. ‘I don’t understand.’
‘It’s bird lice, Jack. I’ve ’ad it wi’ me budgies. Y’ need powders.’
My father gave me two shillings to go and buy powders from Brownes, the ironmongers down the street towards the church, my first independent purchase. ‘And be sure to say thank you properly.’ To a child, Mr Browne was very large and very frightening. He was goggle-eyed behind thick-lensed circular glasses and flat-faced with sagging jowls like a bloodhound. He also had no neck. His huge head seemed to be balanced on his shoulders, chin resting on his chest, and his gorilla-like belly bulged above and below a wide leather belt. I imagined that when it was undone his whole torso would avalanche jelly-like to the floor. He didn’t speak unless he had to, but he did have just about everything in his shop – a proper ironmonger. Lined throughout with shelves crowded with bottles, packets, tins and tools; broom handles and willow-twig besoms stood in bundles in a corner; shining galvanised buckets were stacked one inside the next in a teetering ziggurat beside the counter. Shiny nails sold by the pound. The shop reeked with a nostalgically English cocktail of paraffin, creosote and mansion polish.
Suspended on a spring, the brass doorbell jangled angrily. I approached the long pine counter, grimy with age. Slowly, like a snail emerging from its shell, Mr Browne slid silently out from the gloom of a backroom. ‘Please, Mr Browne, I need some bird lice powders.’
‘Chickens?’
‘No, pigeons.’ He peered at me suspiciously before slithering off to a shelf a few feet away. Back he slid to plonk a tall tin on the counter. ‘One and nine.’ The sound emerged from vocal cords somewhere below his belt. I passed him the florin. Keys depressed like a typewriter, the large upright till pinged energetically and the drawer shot out, smacking him in the belly and bouncing off again. He handed me the three-penny bit without a word. I turned to go, then remembered. ‘Thank you very much.’ He nodded the tiniest, least-movement-possible nod you could imagine, so tiny it was almost invisible. I wasn’t even sure I had seen it. I ran all the way home.
They did the trick. The rubbery beaks of newly hatched chicks gaped cavernously from every nest. Sometimes I left my bedroom window open and scattered a handful of corn on the sill. I would be awakened at first light by a fantail scrum, white wings flapping, clambering over each other and pushing and shoving like suckling piglets. Sometimes pigeons flounced into the room and perched on my wardrobe, where they cooed and bowed soothingly. But when they crapped on my new school blazer, they were summarily banished from the house and I was forced to pursue my pigeon fancying outside.
* * *
That first Bartonfield holiday was marked by the absence of our mother. Russell Brock had corrected her mitral valve in an eleven-hour operation on 29 September 1954 and straight back onto the ward – there were no intensive care units in those days – where Paul Wood had overseen her long recovery, first at the Brompton and later at the Brompton’s cardiac convalescence unit at Frimley Sanatorium near Camberley in Surrey. What we didn’t know, and wouldn’t for several years to come, was that her aortic valve was also in trouble. But the procedure for aortic correction was still dangerously experimental, far too risky to attempt. Russell Brock and Paul Wood had seen it very clearly. They entered in her notes: ‘Aortic regurgitation is occurring. She will need to return for AV correction in due course.’ This was
visionary, but also wishful thinking. There was no aortic valve correction available until the mid-1960s, but that last sentence in Paul Wood’s handwriting is a clear demonstration that they intended it would be – if she survived that long.
The convention of silence had been religiously upheld. We were told only that she had had her operation. The option of going up to London to see her in recovery was never either discussed or available to us children. I’m sure my father went regularly, but we didn’t. I imagine it was considered too disruptive for her and too distressing for us, the subject never broached. Either my father couldn’t bring himself to talk about it, or perhaps his habitual inadequacy in communicating with children simply clammed him up. We would never know. Such information as we could glean came second and third hand from snippets overheard between adults or casual remarks from one of our minders. ‘Mummy’s doing really well,’ I remember being told, and wondering at what? I knew she loved embroidery. Was she doing well at that? And she was really good at making friends – perhaps that was it?
We children knew nothing. In our brief, sheltered lives anything even approaching the reality of exploratory heart surgery had never been explained to us – its dangers, such as blood clots getting away to the lungs and causing devastating strokes, the horror of infection or the ever-present risk of her heart stopping altogether. To us it was black and white. She was either well or she wasn’t; either she was alive, in which case we expected her to be exactly the same and coming home sometime soon, or, unthinkably, she wasn’t. Yet somehow, out of that swirling black hole of ignorance, I had begun to grasp the hollowing out possibility that she might not – that she could die.
For me, the move to Bartonfield at seven years old was shrouded in those acid anxieties. Yet in the security of home, whether at Bartonfield or the Manor House, I was easily diverted. Blessed with the sanguine naivety of my age and the security engendered by home, I didn’t lie awake at night worrying. There was always plenty to distract me and I absorbed my mother’s protracted absences as a part of the pattern of life dignified by the twin blindfolds of ignorance and soaring hope. But at school, in the dormitory, it was different. Hearing Betty sobbing out his own private homesickness beside me, the spectre of doom crowded in and kept me awake. When sleep finally came I had only two dreams, both of which recurred over and over again. One was of seeing my mother in the distance, running to her but never quite getting there; the other was at the Manor House, entering the old servants’ hall and seeing the rusty chains hanging empty, the Dun Cow rib nowhere to be seen – and then waking up sweating and with panic pounding in my chest.