The Dun Cow Rib Page 24

  I thought for a moment. Then from deep inside, from a living, singing core of confidence that had been silently fermenting within the hot canyons of my brain for more than ten years; from the hundreds of hours of wandering and watching in the wilds of the Manor House and the ditches, ponds and woods of Somerset; from the dozens of wet days in the school-room library poring through ancient tomes; from standing up to Bernie and the Menace over Butterworth’s pen, and from defying Miss Gibbs at Martock, came a sudden surge of combative audacity. I took a deep breath. ‘You can ask me anything you like, sir.’

  Both men seemed taken aback and a glance flickered between them like a spark. ‘All right,’ said Mr Hill with a slow but not sinister smile. ‘What sort of birds would you expect to find here at Allhallows?’

  For a split second I hesitated. Was this a trick? Did he mean the birds in the corridor? I stood up and took a step towards the window that looked out over a formal terrace with woods and fields in the distance. I suddenly felt completely at home.

  ‘There are rooks in those big pine trees, sir, and jackdaws with them, they flock together at this time of the year, and there’s a blackbird on the lawn, and a song thrush over there.’ Both men were now craning to see what I was pointing at. ‘And those are woodpigeons flying over the field, and I can see a cock pheasant out there too, in the distance. There are house sparrows right beside us, sir, on the guttering just out there, and that’s a pied wagtail on the balustrade. I expect it nests on the building somewhere. The nest is made of grass and it lays about five eggs of speckled grey. You can see it catching flies, that’s why it has such a long . . .’

  ‘Yes, yes, I see. You really do know your birds, don’t you?’ But it wasn’t a question – it was an affirmation. His tone had shifted. I knew he was impressed, almost as though he was enjoying it.

  ‘. . . a long tail for swerving suddenly, and of course near the sea there’ll be lots of gulls.’ I pressed on, determined to harness the moment. ‘And I’ve seen the birds in the corridor, sir.’

  ‘Oh, have you? Yes. They’re rather wonderful, aren’t they? They were collected by Sir Henry Peek, the biscuit magnate who built this mansion in the last century. It was his passion. I believe every British bird is there.’

  ‘Oh wow! Sir, they’re amazing, like a museum.’

  ‘Yes, John, they are, but you won’t be coming to Allhallows to learn about birds. Your mark at Common Entrance was not very good. If we grant you a place, you will have to work hard to improve your academic standard.’

  Mr Lee seemed to come to my rescue. ‘He’ll be good at biology, headmaster.’ He had a whiney voice that seemed to emerge through his nostrils, but he was smiling. So was Mr Hill.

  I knew I’d passed. Mr Hill pressed a buzzer and a secretary lady came to the door to take me back to my parents. Another black-gowned school prefect showed us round the school. When it was time to go, the headmaster, the man I would know for the next five years only as ‘Boggo’, and with whom, in time, I would forge a bond of mutual trust and respect, met us in the forecourt and shook hands warmly. My parents were nodding and smiling.

  * * *

  What I did not know until later, and what I am sure they had not properly appreciated, was that Allhallows sat on an 800-acre National Nature Reserve of international significance.

  The Axmouth–Lyme Regis Landslip on the south Devon coast is one of the most remarkable geological phenomena in Britain. In his exhaustive tome A Textbook of Geology, published in 1882, that irrepressible Victorian Sir Archibald Geikie FRS records the Landslip:

  In the year 1839, after a season of wet weather, a mass of chalk . . . slipped over a bed of clay into the sea, leaving a rent three quarters of a mile long, 150 feet deep and 240 feet wide. The shifted mass, bearing with it houses, roads and fields was cracked, broken and tilted in various directions . . .

  That Christmas Eve at around midnight a vast chunk of clifftop farmland broke free and slid quietly and gently towards the sea . . . A whole southern English estate had effectively parted company with the world of agriculture and human influence, and slipped away in the night to do its own thing. It was a geological splinter group, a scion of old England breaking free.

  It became a great Victorian spectacle, drawing tourists from all over Britain, and a mecca for fossil enthusiasts, who crawled over the ammonite-studded lias beds and chipped gleaming sharks’ teeth out of virgin chalk terraces.

  Slowly, as tourist interest in the land receded and it was abandoned because of its inaccessibility, nature reasserted its authority. Dominant ash woods began to cover the lost fields and exposed rocks and soils. A riot of undergrowth and wildlife invaded its cracks and fissures. It scrolled back 10,000 years, sloughing off the relics of human presence. The cottages fell to rubble and disappeared beneath nettles and fireweed. Bramble jungles closed over the farm tracks and the fields sprouted unkempt crops of their own. It went wild – for 120 years nature romped unimpeded across its virgin terraces. It went gloriously, joyously, unstoppably wild.

  It was into this extraordinary Robinson Crusoe wilderness that I strode, wide-eyed, flushed with excitement, in 1959. In Elaine Franks’ exquisitely illustrated sketchbook The Undercliff (1989), a moving foreword by John Fowles precisely mirrors my own experience:

  on a fine summer’s day the Undercliff is . . . a triumphant denial of contemporary reality, an apparently sub-tropical paradise . . . not a roof to be seen, not a road, not a sign of man. It looks almost as the world might have been if man had not evolved, so pure, so unspoilt, so untouched it is scarcely credible, so unaccustomed that at times its solitudes may feel faintly eerie.

  In their beneficent wisdom my parents could not have chosen a school more appropriately suited to a child of the English backwoods. That they had no idea the Landslip existed, of its potential significance to their son, smacks of fate. What they could never have guessed, and almost certainly did not want, was that it would finally concrete in place a passion for nature that was already deep-rooted and vigorously sprouting. Sometimes these things just happen.

  So I ascended, if that is the right word, to Allhallows for the beginning of the school year. To my utter delight I discovered that, at last, there was a natural history society I could join.

  19

  Rock of ages

  After the very tightly monitored and regulated regime of Hill Brow, Allhallows presented itself as the sublime antithesis: a vast flint mansion perched among clifftop fields and wild woods overlooking Lyme Bay on the county boundary, Portland and the Golden Cap of Dorset in the rising east, the distant tors of Devon to the setting west. A littoral landscape where the sea and the land clashed with each other in never-ending turmoil, the seethe and drag of crashing waves framed our days. It was a dripping wonderland where sea mists rolled in as banks of dense, cloying cloud, regularly engulfing us all, and yet, for all its maritime dampness, it was a school freedom I had never experienced before.

  It took a bit of getting used to, making Hill Brow look like a detention centre by comparison. I found myself searching for someone to ask if I could go here or there, if I could explore the extensive grounds, gardens and playing fields that surrounded the virtual village of flint-studded buildings and quadrangles that made up the school campus. Or whether I could cycle the half mile inland to the village of Rousdon and the general store called the ‘Shrubs’, where we bought ice cream and lollies, sweets and cream buns with money jingling in my trouser pocket, another complete novelty. Or whether I could take off on my ancient Raleigh Lenton bicycle even further afield to the seaside resorts of Lyme Regis or Seaton, draughty and deserted in the winter gales, bright and bustling in the summer sun. The answer from older boys was always a shrug of the shoulders: ‘Go where you like. Free time is free time. But just don’t ever be late for lessons, prep or games, or, worst of all, for chapel or bed.’

  Such liberty was exhilarating, a fresh breeze after a sultry day, almost as good as being at home, at Martock or the Ma
nor House, not like school at all. Away was away and nobody, but nobody, seemed to care. Discipline was entirely delegated to prefects: ‘school prefects’ who strode about with the air of demigods in black gowns over their maroon waist-coated, grey herringbone tweed suits. They were senior boys of seventeen and eighteen, in their final sixth-form year. They ruled over the entire school, unlike the less exalted ‘house prefects’, also sixth-formers, whose jurisdiction was restricted solely to their own houses. Both ranks of prefect had the authority to administer corporal punishment – beatings with slipper or shoe; some with a sadistic streak even manufacturing stout wooden implements for the purpose. And they did – rites of passage for the prefect as much as for the unfortunate juniors upon whom they preyed. Catching us juniors talking after lights out was more about asserting power and providing sport for newly appointed house prefects than it was a justified corrective. I learned fast that one could be beaten for almost any misdemeanour, however accidental or trivial.

  In that first term I quickly made friends, although as at Hill Brow I found no one in my house, Stanton, with whom I could share my passion for natural history. While this was disappointing, by the age of thirteen I had come to accept that I was different – and quite liked it. The other boys in the junior common room fell neatly into two groups: those who sought to be kind and generous-spirited toward new boys, and those who sneered and made us feel inferior to boost their own egos. Public school life was a jungle whose laws were rapidly and painfully absorbed. Hierarchy, I quickly realised, was everything. In a common room of their own, seniors studiously ignored us ‘plebs’ as though we were untouchables, beneath their dignity to acknowledge our existence unless it was to bark at us to perform some menial task.

  House prefects enjoyed the privilege of shared studies with desks and armchairs, cookers and kettles, where they supplemented school food with toast and coffee, at weekends even cooking their own rudimentary meals on Baby Bellings. The aroma of burnt toast, Marmite and Welsh rarebit lingered permanently through their corridors. As juniors at the very bottom of this determinist pyramid, we were required to be domestic servants to our prefects, a universal and long-standing public school tradition known as ‘fagging’, so poignantly immortalised by Thomas Hughes in Tom Brown’s Schooldays. If you were ‘on studies’, you had to get up early, polish the prefects’ shoes, sweep their study floor, remove rubbish, do the washing up and generally tidy the room. If you forgot, you were beaten; if you were two minutes late, you were beaten; if you didn’t do it thoroughly, you were beaten; beaten if you hadn’t cleaned your own shoes or if you forgot to knock on the door. ‘What is this?’ I recall a prefect demanding as he pointed to a tiny scrap of paper on the study carpet. If you answered back, you were beaten for insubordination.

  One boy in my house whose generosity shone out from day one was a year ahead of me. His name was Piers Youldon, in whose company life became at once more dangerous and more fun, and I am sorry that I have made no effort to keep in touch with him. I believe he went on to Sandhurst and a successful career as a regular soldier. It was Piers who said to me early on in that first term as we sauntered back to the common room one Sunday morning after chapel, ‘I’m off down the cliffs. Wanna come?’

  I had barely heard of the cliffs. I knew that they were there, that they were within school bounds, that there was a path beyond the tennis courts leading into dense, enticing woodland and, so I had gleaned, eventually on down to the school’s private beach, but I knew nothing beyond that. Even if I had read of the remarkable geological incident known internationally as ‘the Landslip’, I had not understood what it was. ‘Old clothes. Ten minutes or I’ll go without you,’ he said in his habitual, take-it-or-leave-it, no-nonsense manner.

  I often think about that day. I don’t believe there was any preparation. No plan, no explanation or indication of where we might go, what we might do or even when we might return. I was a new boy. New boys didn’t challenge anything; you just accepted that was the way things were and went with the flow. Youldon was a year older, savvy, direct, decisive and, above all, genuine. It couldn’t have been clearer: ‘I’m going. You can come if you want to.’ Just that. No detail, no stated purpose, no justification, nothing more or less. A spontaneous gesture of companionship, perhaps even of friendship, thrown out: to be rejected or grabbed at face value, no questions, no strings.

  Off we went. I had no idea where we were going or what was coming next. Without any warning the reserved, apparently serious-minded Piers Youldon of the Junior Common Room transmogrified seamlessly and instantaneously into a wild animal. Once we had sauntered past the tennis courts and entered the woods, without a word he suddenly broke into a run. Not just a run – not a jog or a lope – he ran like a hunted stag. Full tilt. He was possessed. He shot off into the undergrowth ahead of me, vanishing from view. He leapt over fallen trees, skidded down muddy slopes, swung wildly Tarzan-like from creepers. ‘Come on!’ he yelled as I lagged behind, fearful of falling and hurting myself. I ran as fast as I dared, desperate to keep up, careering downhill, crashing through bushes, tripping over moss-covered boulders, slithering through muddy groves. Snagged by brambles, whiplashed by branches, I tore my shirt and grazed my knees.

  After only a few minutes of this helter-skelter, lunatic assault on the cliffs we arrived breathless and panting at a derelict octagonal flint building called the Pumping Station. It had pumped millions of gallons of spring water up to the huge Victorian mansion that the school had taken over in the 1930s. Now it was an abandoned ruin, dank and smelly, the roof half off, windows smashed and its door hanging by a broken hinge. Its huge tanks still held water, overflowing and as clear as gin, but brimming with life: newts, tadpoles, dragonfly larvae, water snails and leeches, and to which I would return over and over again in the years to come.

  The Pumping Station also stood at a crossroads, a parting of three ways. To the left and right a broad path led east to Lyme Regis, or west to Axmouth, both several miles away in either direction. Our path led on, steeply downhill to the school’s beach.

  ‘Have you been to the beach?’ Piers asked when we had got our breath back.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Come on, then.’ And we were off again. ‘That’s the proper path,’ he yelled over his shoulder. ‘I know a better way. Follow me.’

  We veered off into the undergrowth again, ash fronds whipping my face as I plunged ever downwards, never knowing what was coming next, blindly following. Was this an initiation? Was he checking me out? Could I handle it, take the pace? Had I got what the older boys called ‘spirit’? But I don’t think so. It was what Youldon was like: straight, open or closed as a book, decent and kind. Running wild was his diversion, a private assertion of surefootedness, nerve and utter recklessness. It didn’t have to have a purpose; it was a release, a fling; an extreme blossoming of youth’s unthinking exuberance.

  I continued to admire his no-nonsense approach to life throughout our years together at Allhallows. I began to understand that it was possible that it was also an escape, that his keenly honed personality had in part been forged by tragedy, like Gavin Maxwell’s, and like my own constantly nagging spectre of the Dun Cow rib, the ever-hovering fear of losing my mother. A year later Piers and I were both sent to Northern Ireland to attend an army cadet force camp at Magilligan, on the northern shore of Lough Foyle, near Portrush, hosted by the Royal Ulster Rifles. As we crossed on the ferry from Heysham to Belfast through the warm summer night, I stood in silence with Piers at the ship’s rail. The sea was dark and calm; the only sounds were the water rippling by and the dull throb of the ship’s engines. Suddenly he spoke quietly. ‘My father’s out there.’

  ‘What?’ I said, failing to understand. ‘Where?’

  ‘He was drowned. Just here somewhere.’ We stared out at the dark waves. ‘The war was over, but his ship hit a German mine right here in the Irish Sea. Lost with all hands. He was coming home. They never found him.’

  We made it to the be
ach that day, somehow, after crashing through what seemed like miles of entangling undergrowth, always plunging downhill, lurching over sudden unexpected mini-precipices of bare chalk, and glissading madly down wet and slimy blue lias banks or wading up to our shins through mud flows of porridge-like clay freshly squeezed out of the ever-shifting ground. The whole undercliff was as unstable as a recent earthquake epicentre, a constantly crumbling dynamic at the land’s edge, where the heavy rain-laden chalk fractured and broke free, to lurch, buckle and collapse in huge ledges and terraces towards the sea, slipping and sliding on the greasy and impermeable clay far beneath.

  At last we burst out onto the empty beach. The broad palate of Lyme Bay, a great arc of bright lapis lazuli, was spread before us on one of those flawless summer days that are such an inexplicable feature of childhood memory. Surf crashed onto steeply banked terraces in a slow, rolling and seething roar. The tang of salt keen in our mouths, we skimmed flat pebbles into the swell, dodged the rushing and sucking waves and fell breathless and panting onto the sun-warmed shingle banks. As we lay there a great surge of comprehension flooded over me as though I was awakening from a long sleep in a new country, and suddenly realising where I was.

  All the fear and anxiety of being a new boy, all the worry about rules and regulations and petty traditions (such as juniors always having their tweed jackets done up on the middle button because to swagger about with your jacket undone was a closely guarded privilege of seniors and a misdemeanor for which you were certain to be beaten by a house prefect); fears about getting into trouble without knowing why; about being in the wrong place at the wrong time . . . All of those worries sloughed away from me in one sudden dawning that I could do this on my own, that the cliffs had no rules or prefects, that they were here and wild and unmanaged and as much mine as anyone else’s. Still struggling to believe it, I think I stammered something like, ‘Can we just go anywhere?’