The Dun Cow Rib Page 4
Perhaps that’s why I had loved The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe so much. It was that sense of passing from one world into another, where the known, the measured and the ordered could be cast off like a cloak, and the unknown, alluring yet slightly frightening, became as irresistible as a drug to an addict, while at the same time knowing that safe passage back through the wardrobe was always an option. It was where my imagination spiralled skyward, where make-believe ruled and I could pretend to be anything or anybody I chose, and where nothing else mattered.
My favoured route was up the Broadwalk, a long, paved path that led away from the ordered formality of the gardens to a long avenue of huge old elms and oaks surrounded by brambles and nettles and the tangle of ever-encroaching wildness. If this extremity of the grounds had ever been tamed, it certainly wasn’t any more. Wood pigeons fired out of the heights on clapperboard wings, and starlings and jackdaws burst indignantly from nest holes as I approached beating back the brambles and bashing trunks with my precious stick.
It was here that I first met a fox. It wasn’t really my own discovery. Old Bob, pulling leeks for the kitchens, slicing the tops with a single swipe of his hook-bladed knife as he spoke, had told me that there was an ancient oak stump at the top of the Broadwalk that was hollow. ‘An ol’ fox holes up in there,’ he had announced. ‘You can smell ’im as you pass by.’
I rushed to check it out. The huge oak had blown down and the trunk and branches removed decades before. Wind and rain had worked on the vast root plate, which had slowly subsided back to earth, leaving the stump sticking up at an angle. At my seven-year-old chest height, its rotted hollow was bigger and deeper than I had imagined, reaching further down into the cavernous roots than the end of my stick. I placed my head right into the hole and peered inside. It was completely empty and all I could smell was the fungally dampness of decay. I probed around its dark interior with my stick. Nothing. I wandered off and forgot about it.
A few days later I found myself passing the stump and thought I’d look again. I sauntered up confidently, expecting nothing, and thrust my head into the gaping void. Too late I realised that the rancid pungency that now assaulted my nose was markedly different from the time before, strangely alive and vital. The fox shot out like a jack-in-a-box, fur brushing my face as he fled, giving me such a fright that I fell over backwards into a clump of stinging nettles.
I would never forget that fox. It would mark a climacteric in my private, cerebral engagement with the natural world. I don’t think I had ever touched a wild mammal before, except perhaps rescuing a drowning mouse from the rain butts or rabbits snared by the farm boys. But a fox was different. It was big and strong and very wild. I had seen its gleaming teeth and smelt its foetid breath. When I stood up I was shaking all over, trembling, not with fear – it had happened far too quickly for that – but with the suddenly triggered involuntary rush of adrenaline. For a stretched collision of time and space I didn’t know what to do. My pulse was racing. I stood and stared at the stump. Questions swirled. Could it have bitten me? Savaged my face? Would I get into trouble if I told the grown-ups? Was there another fox in there? If there had been danger, it had passed me by, and anyway there was nothing I could have done to avoid it.
I approached the stump cautiously. This time standing well back, I knocked it with my stick several times before taking a closer look. It was empty, of course, but the cavern reeked of dark, musky animal, intimate and strangely prehistoric, belonging to another world. It was a smell I would never forget, a thrilling essence of excitement as sharp as vinegar, of danger, of adventure and above all a scent of wildness – alive and free.
3
The Manor House
If I ever get to be so old that I can no longer recognise my children; when I hear my name being called and it means nothing to me; when I cease to be able to name the birdsong I have known all my life and when the pageant of the season’s turning fails to move me; when each day merges into the last and the next as a continuous fog and I hear people whisper, ‘He’s lost it, poor old bugger’ – they will be wrong.
I shall be running free with the soft wind in my face, skipping through the shining grass of the damp Longbottom meadows, swiping with my stick at thistle heads to watch the downy seed caught and flown in eddies of sunlit breeze. I shall be straddling the old crack willow fallen into the pond where the moorhens built their soggy nest. I shall be under the ancient yew searching for tawny owl pellets, leaping the little box hedges of the ordered gardens and racing past the long glasshouses four in a row. I shall be heading out. The ancient flagstone floors will be cold beneath my bare feet once again and Nellie will be chasing me round the kitchen table with a tea towel. I shall be eight years old, laughter rippling through me till I ache, free as a cloud, embraced and held fast by the joy and the jubilation of careless youth. I shall be back at the Manor House.
As you headed out of the quiet Warwickshire village, past the little brick bridge over the weed-waving brook that burbles through the green, passing between Borsley’s grocery store, the tart aroma from the block of cheddar cheese on the marble slab greeting you at the door, and Mr Anderton across the lane in his straw boater and a blue-and-white-striped apron, smile as wide as a valley, waving his cleaver over his butcher’s block – ‘Pettitoes not such a bad price this week’ – you turned up Church Hill, past the long terrace of cottages on the right, slate roofs staggered like a rickety staircase.
Then past the Georgian vicarage, square, solemn and not a little smug behind high-boarded gates and an ivy-quilted wall. Opposite, on the south side of the lane, a low red-brick boundary wall to the graveyard led up to an oak-beamed and shingle-roofed lych-gate where the lugubrious Reverend Ferguson posted his notices every week. For years I thought his name was ‘Vicar’. ‘Morning Vicar,’ was all I had ever heard. In the background the grey church tower stood square-shouldered against the sky.
The sweeping branches of ancient oaks and beeches trembled their shadows over the lichened gravestones of many of my ancestors, barely legible now. Far below, their bones and oak coffins were sifting down into archaeology in sure and certain hope of everlasting oblivion, earth to earth. Those trees seemed to me to be the very essence of antiquity. Their roots writhed silently beneath the tombstones and the flagged paths, tilting them drunkenly. The massive trunks powered upwards in plaited thongs of great strength, branched into an algal tracery against the sky where they clutched at the clotted nests of a hundred and more thronging, clamouring rooks.
A bit further on, on the other side of the lane and right at the end of the village, matching ornamental ‘in-and-out’ wrought-iron gates, both invitingly and forbiddingly painted bright white, were set a hundred yards apart. A dense privet hedge six feet high ranged between them like a green rampart. Behind the hedge, a long gravel driveway crunched through neatly mown lawns to link the two gates in a sweeping arc. Those gates announced the presence of a house that didn’t need a name; it was and always had been the Manor House.
It was the home I longed for. Even now, sixty years later, it is engraved upon my soul. Not my parents’ home at that delicate moment in my young life – my father was leading a peripatetic existence as he worked tirelessly to build a business and we had migrated to wherever he needed to be: Yorkshire, Bath, Devon, south Somerset; no, the Manor House was my father’s family’s long home to which we always gravitated as surely as bees return to their hive, however far afield the capricious winds of fortune had wafted us.
Family lore had it that Henry VII had made an ancient branch of our family Lords of the Manor, vassals to their feudal superior, Edward Plantagenet, Duke of Clarence and 17th Earl of Warwick in his magnificent medieval castle, around which the county town has mushroomed. In deference to this historical patronage many sons of our family had been christened Warwick, right up to the present day.
The house was built in the seventeenth century when fire ripped through the original Tudor oak-timbered manor house an
d razed it to rubble. Since then it had been added to seemingly endlessly, wings and extensions bursting out at every point of the compass and several in between, as if for centuries each successive generation had felt the need to append their own whimsical additions. By my time in the late 1940s, the original Jacobean oak-beam and straw-brick beginnings had been hemmed in on all sides by sprawling Carolean, Georgian, Victorian and Edwardian wings, each apparently oblivious to any sense of architectural cohesion. The result was a jumble of gables and eaves on steeply pitched roofs with plunging valleys beneath a thicket of towering chimneys.
Getting around inside these ill-fitting extensions demanded long corridors leading to many external doors over countless steps, flights of stairs and varying floor levels more akin to a ship than a dwelling. And yet this random agglomeration of additions had awarded the house all the vernacular charm and mystique of a Cotswold village, in what seemed wilful denial of its much more formal intentions.
The house stood at the edge of a modest estate of farms and woods and was surrounded by broad acres of gardens and grounds. Close to the house they started off with the prescribed orthodoxy and the unmistakable Englishness of a country house, dignity upheld by manicured lawns, clipped box, privet and yew hedges and topiary, partitioned by walls and steps of ancient limestone intricately patterned with dark mosses and pale lichens. As you moved outward a network of flagged paths led you through a walled rose garden, the stonework dripping with bright aubretia, up stone steps and on beneath Japanese pergolas at the path intersections, smothered in tangles of rambling roses; then on past extravagant herbaceous borders and shrubberies bursting with scent and colour. Well away from the house, the walled gardens relaxed into much more casually arranged fruit beds of gooseberries, black and red currants, raspberries, loganberries, rhubarb and, finally, lurking discreetly in the distance, the ordered rows of vegetables.
Espaliered against the long south-facing wall, ten feet high, were pear, quince, plum, damson and apricot trees, where red admiral and peacock butterflies sipped the fruits’ oozing and fermenting sugars and basked drunkenly in the sun. That wall was an important boundary, a physical and aesthetic barrier between the disciplined world of horticulture and formal gardening and an altogether wilder world beyond.
Passing through any of its several archways another world opened up, tamed perhaps but certainly not domesticated, another country where long ago nature had claimed primacy, despite periodic, half-hearted summer mowings and prunings of its rampant, inexhaustible verdure. It was a country of ancient orchards, luxuriant paddocks and copses, weedy ponds, nettle banks and marshy hollows, lime kilns long abandoned, fox earths and badger setts, rabbit warrens and thorn thickets where roe deer lay up during the day. Yet further, on to the pocket-handkerchief meadows of the Manor Farm, where the rickety old farmhouse and ivy-smothered labourers’ cottages seemed not to have been built but to have grown organically out of the soil.
Behind the Manor House a discreet back drive led past the green-painted doors of the old coach house-turned-garages, to a veritable hamlet of outbuildings where the essential services of centuries of self-sufficiency had been performed: coach houses ivy-clad and a wide stable yard with a cast-iron hand pump and loose-boxes under a pan-tiled roof bursting with untidy sparrows’ nests, the laundry cottage, servants’ outdoor lavatories, wood and coal stores, pig stys, potting sheds, apple stores, saw mill, workshops, and four long, brick-based and white-painted glasshouses.
The Manor House was where, coming and going, we had been for centuries, and where my Victorian widower grandfather, born in 1873, now lived out his horticultural old age with my father’s younger bachelor brother, Uncle Aubrey. Looking back now, I see that to have spent so much of my childhood at the Manor House and to have experienced that rarified, virtually unchanged Edwardian world was a particular privilege no longer attainable in modern society. To me, throughout the 1950s, it was Xanadu, a private kingdom all my own and everything a country child could hope for, even though at some point I became dimly aware that I was a tenuous and perhaps the final tendril emanating from a broader vine, the roots of which were planted elsewhere.
* * *
Properly, our family were Yorkshire folk. We had been in the West Riding since the reign of Edward III, whose heralds issued a grant of arms to ‘Johannes Cay of ye lands and manors of Wodesham’ in 1367, which, 150 years later, would emerge as the elegant, stone-built Elizabethan Woodsome Hall at Kirkburton, much as it stands today. As a confused schoolboy struggling to locate our place in history, I once asked my father what we were. ‘We are Plantagenets,’ he replied enigmatically.
I was always a lazy student of history, struggling with meaningless names and dates, but in early adulthood I began to understand that just as contemporary politics had severely impacted upon my immediate family, so down the centuries we had always been pawns in the grander machinations of power. To hang on to what we had, and even to survive, over the centuries we had been forced to duck and weave. As worthy (and opportunistic) Protestants we wisely ingratiated ourselves with Thomas Cromwell when Henry VIII set about dissolving the vastly wealthy Catholic monasteries. By some deeply devious political chicanery we came in for several thousand acres of rich glebe farms to add to our expanding Yorkshire estates. We leapt into Catholicism to avoid being burned at the stake by Bloody Mary, and bounced out again to appease her passionately Protestant half-sister, the virgin queen.
We were dashing Cavaliers in the court of Charles I – effusive supporters of the Royalist cause – and studiously kept in with Prince Rupert of the Rhine. One gallant ancestor, a knight called Sir John, was appointed Colonel of Horse to the king. He had helped raise 700 West Riding men to fight for the Royalists, for which he accepted a baronetcy in 1641. But in 1645 it all went horribly wrong when they were routed by Parliament’s New Model Army under Sir Thomas Fairfax and Oliver Cromwell at the Battle of Naseby, the turning point of the Civil War. Sir John galloped away unscathed but would later forfeit everything to Cromwell’s Republican parliament: titles, houses, estates and privileges – the lot. It was a sepulchral moment.
When by popular demand Charles II was restored to the throne in 166o, while the Republican signatories to his father’s execution were being summarily hanged, drawn and quartered, we somehow inveigled our way back into favour. Our titles were reinstated and we were allowed to buy all our lands back, both in Warwickshire and Yorkshire, for a painful payment of £50 to the newly formed Cavalier Parliament, a pecuniary affront we never forgave, far less forgot. We had learned a bitter lesson. From then on we kept our political heads down and got on with looking after our own interests.
By the eighteenth century we had stumbled across coal underlying our Yorkshire land just in time for the emerging colonial markets and the incipient Industrial Revolution. On the mining profits and only a few miles from Woodsome Hall, enthusiastically competing with the fashionable expansion of the times, we built Denby Grange, a second, much more stately mansion which would become our principal family home. Its grand Georgian façade was attached to the restored shell of a twelfth-century Cistercian abbey that had been sacked in the Reformation. It overlooked the lush Colne valley, and was where, when I was born in 1946, our close cousin, Sir Kenelm, still lived in arthritic bachelor grandeur. But my great-grandfather had been a second son, not in direct line of succession for the Yorkshire estates. Instead, in 1856 his father had awarded him the Warwickshire manor and its adjoining lands as a wedding present. My grandfather had been born just down the east passage from my bedroom, so had my father.
It was only after Clement Atlee’s 1948 socialist government nationalised our collieries, removing in one eviscerating Act the family business and capital holdings it had taken us 250 years to develop, that the deeply disillusioned Sir Kenelm debunked to Mullingar in Ireland to live out his days shooting snipe and raising racehorses, while the share-holding family elders took the tough but ultimately prudent decision to up sticks and abandon Yo
rkshire altogether. The titular heartland then shrank back to our medieval association with Warwickshire, where, on his share of coal profits, my great-grandfather had founded a cement works, later the Rugby Portland Cement Company.
When, many years later, I was old enough to look back down the drama of the centuries I found that we had somehow managed to produce a colourful, if never illustrious, array of dramatis personae: a few prominent courtiers; a mistress to James I; several swashbuckling soldiers; various undistinguished MPs; an adventurer who travelled the south seas with Captain Cook; a celebrated Lord Mayor of York who built the Mansion House and whose coat of arms still hangs on the Micklegate Bar; a chaplain to George II who became an outrageously greedy pluralist clergyman and Dean of Lincoln Cathedral; an ivory, then slave trader; one of Britain’s first female industrialists; an opium dealer; a bevvy of sporting parsons; several masters of foxhounds; a Groom-in-Waiting to Edward VII; another king’s mistress; a couple of naval captains; a fraudster and card sharp; several Lords Lieutenant; a pioneer Canadian cattle rancher; a successful racehorse breeder of classic winners; an eminent cricketer and a cement manufacturer. There was also quite a procession of probably dull but thoroughly worthy citizens, but, alas, no writers, nor any hint of a naturalist.
At six years old I knew none of the above. Small children are blissfully unaware of who they are or where they come from. To me the Manor House was a paradise enhanced by the strange, unstoppable passage of time. All I knew was that it was the home where I always felt we belonged, my sister Mary and I, or perhaps I should say where it never occurred to us that we didn’t belong. It was never clear to me whether something we had done meant by us, the living family, last week, or last year or even by my grandfather, who seemed to me to be as old as Noah, or whether it had been done centuries before. One spring, jackdaws blocked a tall chimney with twigs and debris, which proved particularly tricky to clear. Staring up at men struggling with rods and brushes on the roof I heard my grandfather say, ‘We didn’t think about jackdaws when we built it so tall.’ Later I discovered that we probably built it in about 1620.