The Dun Cow Rib Read online

  There are moments and incidents that engrave themselves permanently into memory. They become way markers on the blundering journey to comprehension. I was shocked, but only mildly. Predation was no new revelation, far from it; I had witnessed nature’s harsh old laws many times at many levels and seen the evidence: badgers ripping hedgehogs open and leaving only the spiny skin; sparrowhawks plucking chaffinches alive; I’d heard the piercing screams of a young leveret being mauled and dragged off by a stoat. But it was the unexpectedness of the snake event, and its totality, every last chick so efficiently gobbled, and the speed. The whole drama barely took two minutes.

  But there was another dimension, too: the unpredictable, complicated, loaded, helplessly subjective one of human emotion. I had watched the coots build their reedy nest, counted the glowing eggs of the completed clutch, ticked off the days, been there for the moment of final hatching. They were mine. I ran out that day uplifted by the loaded bounty of expectation. I had hoped to see the chicks out on the water, riding on their parents’ backs, snatching insects from the weedy surface. But instead I had to stand and watch their summary destruction. I told some of my friends and they laughed. ‘So what?’ one said.

  The following week in Mr Kennedy’s English lesson, in preparation for the Common Entrance exam we would all have to pass if we were to be accepted by a public school, we were required to write an essay on something recent of our own choosing, like the cricket match or being taken out to Sunday lunch or . . . it didn’t matter what. Carefully and faithfully, I wrote the doleful tale of the coot chicks’ demise.

  The last lesson before lunch, a subject reserved by Mathey himself, was Divinity. Both he and his wife were dedicated Christians who took their religious responsibilities very seriously. His subject that morning was human frailty, and in particular that of Judas’s betrayal and Peter’s denial in the Garden of Gethsemane in the run-up to Jesus’s trial. Mathey had made us explore the narratives in all four gospels of the New Testament. I loved the resonant solemnity of Jesus’s prediction to Peter in St Matthew, Chapter 26: ‘Verily I say unto thee, That this night, before the cock crow, thou shalt deny me thrice.’

  ‘M-m-m-it’s an important lesson, boys. M-m-m-all about TRUST and m-m-m-BELIEF.’ His multiple wobbling chins seemed to trebly labour the point.

  To my surprise, later that afternoon I was called into his study. Mathey sat at his desk, cigarette dangling, my essay open in front of him and Mr Kennedy standing with his back to the window. I wondered what I had done wrong. ‘M-m-m-m-Mr Kennedy has shown me your composition, m-m-m-John. It’s very good. M-m-m-it reads very well. M-m-m-you obviously have some promise in m-m-m-English. Do you enjoy it?’

  ‘Yessir, I do.’

  ‘M-m-m-good. I’m pleased to hear that. M-m-m-but I’m afraid he has had to fail you this time because the m-m-m-composition had to be on a recent m-m-m-event, not a made-up story about snakes.’

  ‘It wasn’t made up, sir. It was true. It happened during the cricket match.’

  He was shaking his head as well as stammering. ‘M-m-m-now come along, John. I don’t think so. M-m-m-I think you have a very active imagination. I don’t think we have bird-eating snakes in our games field and, anyway, you can’t have been watching snakes and paying attention to the cricket match, now, can you? In your m-m-m-Common Entrance exam you must be truthful or you will fail that too.’

  Mr Kennedy joined in. ‘That’s right. There are so many things you could have written about, John. And I am bound to ask whether you made up that story just because I killed a snake last week. Were you trying to make a point?’

  ‘No, sir, I wasn’t. And it was true, every word, I promise.’ Mathey and Mr Kennedy looked at each other and then back at me. I saw Mr Kennedy raise his eyebrows. Both of them looked smug, their expressions gripped by that nameless schoolmasterly certainty that, whatever argument is presented, they are bound to be right. Mathey began again.

  ‘M-m-m-there’s a place for fiction, John, and perhaps one day you will be able to write what you like, but for m-m-m-now and for you to m-m-m-pass your exam we need the m-m-m-truth. You’ll have to write another composition instead of m-m-m-games this afternoon and hand it in to Mr Kennedy by suppertime. M-m-m-m-do you understand?’

  ‘Yessir,’ I muttered darkly and turned to go.

  Then he added, ‘And, John, no more m-m-m-imaginary snakes, please.’

  As I closed the study door carefully behind me I thought to myself, Hmmm, so much for trust and belief.

  18

  Dark shadows, bright horizons

  As I was about to ascend to public school, grim news came from the Manor House. My grandfather, then aged eighty-four, had been up to his usual horticultural activities in the gardens. He had long harboured an obsessive loathing of what he called ‘Bloody dockweeds!’ – the common perennial garden weed properly named Broad-Leaved Dock, Rumex obtusifolius, with a deep tap root, the plant whose leaves produce a milky liquid containing astringent tannins and oxalic acids, very effective for curing stinging nettle rash. I knew it intimately. For a country boy in those days of short trousers it was impossible to avoid getting your legs stung. I was always rushing to find dock leaves and clamping them to my calves and shins.

  Early one afternoon, angered by a large specimen flourishing under a hydrangea, he bore down upon it with a sharp garden fork. He stabbed viciously at its deep root. His great height was already beginning to cause him balance problems and by then he was habitually walking with a stick. He wobbled, missing the dock and spearing his own left foot. Two prongs tore through the soft tissue at the base of his toes. He yelled with pain and yanked the fork out again.

  He hobbled off to his armchair in the smoking-room and rang the bell for Nellie. For ease and comfort in his old age he had taken to wearing black lace-up boots of soft canvas. The left one had immediately filled with blood. Nellie came and administered a large whisky. She tried to unlace the boot, but it hurt too much and he told her to leave it alone. She had no idea how serious the wound was. The old boy was in no mood to be humoured, so she left. ‘Just you ring if you needs me and I’ll bring you a nice cuppa tea.’

  He always was independent of spirit and autocratic. He had never suffered fools. All his life he had been an authoritative figure, enhanced by his great height and having been a Deputy Lieutenant and JP for Warwickshire for decades. It was widely rumoured that when presiding on the bench petty criminals pleaded guilty at the sight of him. Since my grandmother’s death he had become even more dogmatic, shutting himself off from a world he felt he no longer belonged to and entombing his opinions in solitude. No one challenged his authority. The old man had a long-standing dislike of doctors, calling them ‘damned quacks’.

  Nellie was devoted to him; the household had been her entire life and she cheerfully cared for his every need. As they had aged together he and the Manor House had become her whole existence, a symbiosis based upon mutual respect and dependency that had morphed into a genuine but unspoken affection. She tried many times to persuade him to let her see the wound. ‘Hadn’t we better take the boot off and take a look, sir?’ she pestered cautiously. ‘I think I’d better call the doctor.’ But he wouldn’t hear of it. It hurt too much. He wanted it left alone. He wanted to be left alone. Wringing her hands on her pinny, Nellie retreated.

  The next morning she was disturbed to find that he had spent the night in his armchair, foot up on a stool, the boot still on. She telephoned my father. By the time he arrived the following day the entire boot was firmly cemented in place with congealed blood. After a long argument he persuaded the old man to be helped upstairs and to soak the boot off in a warm bath. In the end he had to cut the boot away with sharp scissors. He revealed a horrid mess – black swollen toes and a strong smell of rotting flesh, foetid and foul. Gangrene.

  In hospital the doctors took one look and announced that he would have to lose his left leg above the knee. It was amputated a few hours later. To a proud, elderly man w
ho had been physically fit and active all his life, it was a devastating blow. With so many levels, steps and stairs, the Manor House was wholly unsuitable for a one-legged octogenarian. He had to stay in hospital while my father organised moving a bed to the large drawing room and fitting it out with a commode and all the necessary aids that an exceptionally tall invalid might need. When a few weeks later I was taken to see him, I rushed to the servants’ hall to make sure the Dun Cow rib was still in place. It was and I heaved a huge sigh of relief.

  Until that moment I don’t believe I had ever given a thought to my grandfather’s death, or that the Manor House might not always be there at the heart of my family. Together with my mother they were the rocks around which my whole existence had revolved. I had yet to learn that the world constantly moves on, that change is life’s inescapable yoke. When I travelled with my father to see him a few weeks later, I was shocked. He had aged visibly; the trauma of amputation and the total loss of mobility had taken a heavy toll – at his age an artificial leg was out of the question – but instead of shrinking with age, the lack of exercise had expanded him dramatically.

  His days consisted of the slow and laboured process of getting dressed with the help of a full-time male nurse, teased gently into a bold windowpane-checked tweed suit with shirt and silk tie, empty trouser leg neatly folded under his stump, silk handkerchief overflowing extravagantly from his breast pocket. Then to be wheeled across the room to his huge winged armchair, where he would spend the rest of the day listening to the Home Service and reading the Daily Telegraph.

  On fine days, with a wide, pancake-like Edwardian tweed cap on his bald head, his nurse would wheel him out into the garden in his specially enlarged wheelchair, ivory-handled fly-whisk in hand like an African potentate, and up the flagged paths to his glass-houses so that he could direct my uncle Aubrey to tend to his prize blooms. At the sight of his flowers he would perk up, mutter, ‘Delphiniums very fine,’ and then move on to the next house. But at other times he became very morose. More than once I overheard him say to my father, ‘I wish I was dead.’

  When I reported this to Nellie she looked shocked for a moment, recovered herself and tried to reassure me. ‘Now, don’t you fuss so, young Jack. I’ll look after ’im proper. Just you see.’ But she was wringing her hands in her pinny again and a waver had crept into her voice. An inevitability was slowly dawning: that my treasured wilderness, my world of joy and discovery, my universe of freedom and escape, and what for my entire life had been my Shangri-La, might now be time-limited. Then Nellie made it far worse. ‘When your grandpa passes on, I ’spect your mum and dad’ll be moving in, shan’t they?’

  Nellie had never properly comprehended the extent of my mother’s incapacity. She hadn’t understood that my mother would never get better and was far too infirm to manage a large, rambling country house. It had not entered her head that the family might be forced to sell up. Nor mine.

  * * *

  By 1959 my grandfather’s amputation was not all that was going wrong. Ten years after the nationalisation of the coal industry it had proved impossible for our cousin, Sir Kenelm, to hold the Yorkshire estates together. In an attempt to duck the socialist government’s swinging capital taxes – death duties claiming an excoriating 80 per cent – he had removed to Ireland, to an estate at Mullingar, where, as a failing old man he had neglected to make any sensible provision for succession. When he eventually died, and although my grandfather succeeded to the baronetcy, what was left of the Yorkshire estates had to be sold up to pay the duty. So collapsed my family’s presence in the West Riding of Yorkshire, a proud presence that had run continuously from father to son, ducking and weaving through the jungle of outrageous political fortune – and surviving – for more than 700 years. Now my grandfather was head of the family and the little Manor House estate was all that was left.

  Adding to this overarching family dénouement, my unsupervised upbringing and chaotic educational career had, as Mathey had predicted, produced dismal results in the Common Entrance examination. The post-war baby boom had filled most English public schools to capacity. As they came under pressure for places, so they raised the entrance pass mark from an achievable 70 per cent to as high in some schools as 85 per cent. At birth I had been entered for my father’s old school – my parents’ intended and expected school of choice. They had never dreamed that I might fail to get in and they had never considered anywhere else. My dismal score of 64.3 per cent now ruled that out, as well as all the other favoured possibilities. In desperation, my father tried to get me into Allhallows, an ancient but little-known public school perched on the Devon–Dorset clifftop between Lyme Regis and Seaton, whose entrance requirement was a modest 65 per cent. Even they were distinctly sniffy. It would all depend, I was coldly informed by Mathey, upon an interview.

  I remember the July day, the scudding sun-bright clouds, the first glimpse of the sea, Lyme Bay a brilliant lapis lazuli with cloud shadows as dark as great whales surging purposefully through on a brisk breeze. I loved the rattling drag and crash of the waves on the shingle beach. Lunch in awkward silence at the Bay Hotel in Lyme Regis, the smell of my father’s pipe and stewed cabbage in the dining room, taking my mother’s arm as she teetered unsteadily back to the car. ‘Now do your best, darling,’ she whispered. ‘Remember to say please and thank you for everything.’ Politeness and good manners were her default tonic for all ills. I remember the ten-minute drive to the imposing school gates, the long curving driveway until the vast central building loomed into view with its black-and-white mock-Tudor porch suspended above twin arches on massive Doric columns and its high, pitched-roofed tower offset to one side – the whole edifice a faintly ludicrous Victorian schloss built with Empire firmly in mind.

  We were met by a tall, good-looking school prefect in a flowing black academic gown. He had immaculately groomed hair and an aquiline nose. He was studiously polite to my parents, loftily welcoming to me. Aged seventeen he already possessed the confidence and presence of a leader of men. His name was Roger Wheeler, shortly to embark on a career that would see him achieve General Sir Roger Wheeler, GCB, CBE, Chief of General Staff of the British Army, 1997-2000.

  Parents in first. Wheeler escorted them up the wide Italian marble staircase to the headmaster’s study. I sat in a waiting room and watched in expanding horror as boys in grey herringbone tweed suits and jackets, as tall as full-grown men and with gruff voices, strode past the window. I was not at all sure I wanted to attend this frightening school. My parents came back from the headmaster. ‘He’s serious but charming’ was my mother’s reassuring verdict. Wheeler whisked me away. Up to the first floor where, to my speechless astonishment, I found a vast array of stuffed birds in massive floor-to-ceiling glass cases running the full length of a long, wide corridor. ‘Wait here.’ He disappeared along a passage.

  I walked to the nearest case, where seabirds of every description – puffins, auks, shags and cormorants, gulls and terns, gannets, shearwaters and petrels – were displayed on artificial rocks and cliffs against a dioramic background of blue sea and sky. It stretched away down the corridor, further than I dared go. I could see great eagles, hawks, falcons, herons, cranes . . . they went on and on. I had never seen anything like it, even in the natural history museums I had visited in my short, sheltered life. Suddenly I liked this school.

  Wheeler came back. ‘You can come now.’ Gown billowing out behind him, he strode down a dim passage and knocked boldly on the headmaster’s study door. As I entered he whispered, ‘Good luck.’

  I wasn’t expecting two men. The headmaster, Victor Archibald Lord Hill, inevitably known to the world as Val Hill, was wearing a hairy Harris tweed suit of startling burnt sienna. He was sitting in a captain’s chair behind a large leather-topped desk with an embossed border. Up loomed the horrible image of Bernie and his study. This was bigger and grander, with more soft furnishings and big windows looking out over gardens and a terrace toward fields and the distant sea,
but the image persisted. I wondered how many boys had been caned in this room. He stood up and smiled. He was a big man, with wavy black hair carefully groomed and a slow, deliberate manner of speech. ‘Come along in and take a seat.’

  With his back to the fireplace, the man I later discovered to be the deputy head, Horace Lee, came forward and shook my hand. Then blank. I remember nothing more of the formal bit of the interview. All I could think of were the birds in the corridor. They had knocked me off balance, taken me completely by surprise. I’m sure I said all the predictable things: ‘Yes, sir’ and ‘No, I don’t think so, sir’; ‘I like cricket [a lie] and rugger [I’d never played it] and hockey [true] and English is my favourite subject [nearly true].’ And then, after ten gruelling minutes of what felt like floundering helplessly in deep water, buffeted by waves and dragged by currents, came the sudden, unpredicted, merciful wave that dumped me safely onto a bright, sunlit strand. ‘And do you have any hobbies?’ Mr Hill asked.

  ‘Natural history, sir.’

  ‘Oh. Natural history, eh? How nice. What sort of natural history interests you?’

  ‘Everything really, sir. Birds, mammals, plants, insects. All that sort of thing, sir.’

  ‘Really?’ His eyebrows raised and he threw a glance at Mr Lee. I could see he was sceptical, an ill-concealed ‘we’ll soon see through this’ lurked beneath his methodical delivery, then ‘Tell us something you know about.’