The Dun Cow Rib Read online

  We had become a generic collective, embracing more generations, more individuals, more loves, fears, hopes, dreams, tragedies and joys than we could ever know or count. Not even the graveyard could list them, except the very recent ones, such as my grandmother, Emily, cut down at sixty-five by a sudden heart attack in 1944. Tirelessly she had marshalled the ladies of the village to produce fruit and vegetables for the war effort while filling every available cranny of the house with hungry evacuees from the Blitz hells of Birmingham, Coventry and London. She had overstretched herself, people said, and the firebombing of the old Coventry cathedral had broken her heart. Her stark five-foot limestone cross now stood beside the low graveyard wall in the shade of a vast beech whose huge branches clutched at the sky.

  Traumatic experiences he would never discuss had made my uncle Aubrey a shy and private man, turning quickly away if anyone mentioned the war. They had changed him and his life forever. He had served with the Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry and was taken prisoner on Dunkirk beach in May 1940. The Nazis marched them 500 miles to the notorious Stalag VIIIB Lamsdorf POW camp in Poland. When their boots wore out, they were forced to continue barefoot through a cruel winter. Feet bound in rags, black, frostbitten toes rotted and fell off as they hobbled along. They were starving. They had to beg raw potatoes and turnips from peasants along the way. Many died en route. Although my grandmother sent him food parcels every week for three years, Aubrey never received one. In dire health he was finally released in a prisoner exchange in 1943. He returned with suppurating malnutrition ulcers all over his legs, ulcers that would never heal, although he would survive as a virtual recluse for another thirty years. I once barged into the bathroom and surprised him changing the dressings. I have never forgotten the sight of raw flesh.

  * * *

  In common with many very old houses, the Manor House possessed a distinctive personality, an aura weighted far more heavily with the past than the present, with mythology as much as with reality, with the ghosts and shadows of those long-forgotten souls in the graveyard more than the living family and retainers, all of whom lived and moved in constant obeisance to the inescapable echoes of an unrecorded history. I loved it with a passion bone-deep and in all its unruly ramifications: its hidden cupboards and alcoves, its dingy corridors, its chill, feet-polished flagstone passages and its staircases leading upwards into shadow and mystery. Charged with an over-active imagination, exploring them became a never-ending adventure, the stuff of boys’ comic annuals. To me the house exuded a happiness that was alluring, confident and ever present, and I rested upon it like a cushion.

  There were rooms where instinctively I sensed that small boys were not supposed to be. Rooms I tiptoed through, furtively glancing over my shoulder in case the ghosts of the past stepped out from behind the door. Long stone-flagged passages where steps had been hollowed by centuries of bustling feet. It was a house into which small children could vanish for hours on end, exploring a seemingly endless succession of rooms leading into more rooms and more passages, up flights of steps, across landings, down again, through creaking doors revealing yet more rooms and corridors, ever more and more enticing.

  In the front of the house the formal reception rooms were big, although my grandfather had taken my grandmother’s death badly and had cut himself off from the world, refusing to entertain. He had retreated up the long west passage to the child-forbidden sanctuary of his study, known as the smoking room, only emerging for afternoon tea in the kitchen or dinner in the sombre Jacobean dining room, oak-panelling as dark as chocolate, dimly lit with half-shade sconces around the walls and candles flickering in silver candelabra on the long mahogany table.

  The spacious drawing room with its finely carved cornice and chimney breast, where the iron fire basket stood four square like a bulldog in the empty grate, was temporarily closed down. Dark portraits of unsmiling ancestors glared loftily from the walls. Dustsheets covered the furniture and the blinds of wide French windows leading out onto the south lawn were permanently drawn, lending the whole room the air of long sleep, as though a spell had been cast upon it – time not just standing still, but altogether banished.

  From the broad Jacobean hallway paved in large black and white marble chess-board squares, the elegantly curving main stairs bordered by high semi-circular alcoves, each one housing a large Imari bowl of rose petal potpourri, led up to more passages and bedrooms named after former occupants, mostly long dead. Great Aunt Amelia’s room, at the end of the longest corridor with the squeaky floorboards, was also shut down and locked, but with the heavy key left in the lock. I had to use both hands. The door squeaked open into a pallid gloom, sun-faded blinds drawn tight so that, tiptoeing cautiously in, it took a while for my eyes to adjust.

  No dustsheets here; a room intact as if the old lady had just walked out, as no doubt she had before collapsing into a border of heavily scented damasks and mosses in the rose garden a few years before I was born. They said she was dead before she hit the ground; sun hat, scissors, trug and cut roses theatrically arrayed around her like the pre-Raphaelite J.E. Millais’ painting of Ophelia, and, when they found her, Bif, her little Yorkshire terrier, loyally sitting among her billowing skirts.

  Her big brass bed still had a floral quilt counterpane and an eiderdown neatly spread over case-less pillows of blue and white ticking, and square folded blankets ready to be made up as though she was expected back any day. The glazed chintz curtains were part drawn; on the sills small tortoiseshell and peacock butterflies lay dead, brittle wings closed in a rigid clinch.

  Her ivory-backed, family-crest-engraved hairbrushes still held strands of her platinum hair, tortoiseshell comb and silver-topped pots and trays for kirby grips, powders and creams laid out on her dressing table, and ornate flasks, too tempting to ignore. I eased the glass stopper from one little phial and recoiled, quickly replacing it. The perfume, rich and luscious, powered over me. It was as though some deeply personal element of her inner being had come back to life and escaped into the stillness of the room, the genie out of the bottle. Flushed by guilt, I felt that I had rudely invaded her privacy, made more poignant by the engaging stare from the silver-framed, fading sepia photograph of her handsome young officer husband killed in the Battle of Gallipoli in 1915. I quickly retreated, quietly locking the door behind me.

  But it was the labyrinthine service areas of the house that I really loved: the separate world of kitchens, sculleries, dank slate-shelved larders, the old servants’ hall, game-larder, laundry and sewing room all ruled by Nellie West, the housekeeper, whose ‘I got my eye on you, young Jack’ made me wonder why she didn’t use both eyes. And where the almost completely toothless cook, Mrs Barnwell, with pouting lips like a goldfish and hair in a net, and Sally Franklin the scullery maid, with a backside like a shire horse and who daily threatened, ‘If you don’t look out I’ll skin thee alive’ together with deaf Ada in the laundry, whose surname I never knew, and old Bob Bryson, a retired gamekeeper then working on as a gardener, with sunken eyes swimming in bloodshot pools and whose pipe protruded through a double gap in his lower teeth, as well as a few other daily worthies, all lived out the merry backstairs pageant of everyday life. To my child’s feasting eyes everyone seemed happy and content; they all got on with their various tasks, gaily teasing each other as though they were all members of the same family.

  Uncle Aubrey was often to be found there too, bandaged legs always in black wellington boots, his proximity revealed by a perpetual acrid fog from chain-smoking his filter-tipped Kensitas cigarettes, only removed from his lips to replace with another. As the staff numbers had dwindled during the war years and never been replaced, so Aubrey, once rehabilitated, had taken over the management of Moloch, the vast anthracite boiler in the outer scullery, where he also boiled up the daily bouillabaisse of bran mash, kitchen left-overs and vegetable peelings for the chickens in the paddock. For the rest of the day a rich aroma of barley meal edged with the sharper, earthy ess
ence of hot bran and potato peelings pursued him through the house.

  To me the front of the house seemed lifeless, most of its occupants dead and gone, enhancing the daunting possibility of ghosts and the lurking fear that accompanied territory forbidden to us children, as though there must have been something sinister there to hide. The adults who did pass through, including our parents, always seemed to live in a bubble of orgulous best behaviour, a strictly observed correctness that vanished once through the green baize door, where the servants’ rooms and corridors bustled with life and ribald laughter.

  4

  The Dun Cow

  It was in the oldest Jacobean quarter of the house that one of the most mysterious relics of local legend, the Dun Cow rib, was permanently housed. On a few links of rusty chain at either end the rib was slung from two square iron spikes driven into a black beam crossing the ceiling of the servants’ hall. Like all ribs, it was curved with an angled head at one end, but this rib was exceptional. It tapered through four feet eight inches in an arc of dark, heavy bone. No one knew how long it had hung there. Some said 400 years, from the time of King James I, others claimed a much more ancient origin stretching back through former dwellings now crumbled into history, back a thousand years to the misty days of peasants, feudal overlords and Saxon kings. As a child I stood and stared up at it with a mixture of fear and awe.

  I was first told its unlikely legend by my father when I was five. He picked me up in his arms. ‘Run your fingers along it,’ he whispered, as if to heighten its mystery. It was as rough as the ancient oak beam from which it hung, and patchily dark, its many centuries staining it almost black in places, quite unlike any bone I had seen before. And it was heavy, heavier than me at that age, although I would not hold its full weight in my arms for many years to come.

  It was an inauspicious moment. George VI had just died on 6 February 1952. The whole nation was in mourning, the national newspapers edged in black. I can clearly recall the bold headline ‘THE KING IS DEAD’ and the chill of shock and disbelief permeating round the entire house. Across the lane the church bell tolled, and from its tower the St George’s Cross rippled at half-mast in the winter breeze. My grandfather and father dressed in black suits. They wore black ties for days. With long faces and lowered voices the grown-ups talked of nothing else. Around the kitchen table Nellie, Mrs Barnwell, Sally Franklin and Ada pored over the newspapers, and special issues of Picture Post and the Illustrated London News. On the day of the funeral, 15 February, they crowded around the old wireless set on the sideboard to listen to the Home Service coverage, the doleful brass bands, wailing pipes and muffled drums of the procession from Buckingham Palace to Windsor, and the sombre commentary by the young Raymond Baxter. Nellie was in tears most of the day, sobbing into her tea.

  It was only a few days later that my father took me to see the rib. The funereal mood and pall of death seemed to lurk in the darkest corners of the house. He told me that it had never been taken down since an unknown hand nailed it there all those centuries ago. His words struck chill into my heart: ‘It must never be moved, and when it is, there will be bad times, and death will visit the family,’ – although I’m sure he added that bit for dramatic effect. It worked. My imagination whirled like a top. I could see the headline, YOUR FAMILY IS DEAD, with a black edge all its own. The rib’s image, hanging there on its old chains, went in deep and has remained, stark and vivid, to this day.

  The legend of the Dun Cow is well known throughout middle England. There are many pubs called the Dun Cow; villages such as Dunchurch and Ryton, Bourton, Stretton and Clifton, all still have the historical appendage ‘-on-Dunsmore’ attached to their names. They surround a once wild and barren heath known as Dunsmoor, bisected by the Roman Fosse Way. A second almost identical rib hangs in Warwick Castle ten miles away, and to this day many versions of the legend persist throughout the Midlands. Our own family narrative, written up by a Victorian maiden aunt in the mid-nineteenth century, runs like this:

  About 900 years ago, in the reign of the Saxon King Athelstan, a herd of wild cattle roamed a heath in the middle of England. The Dunsmoor villagers lived in fear of these ferocious beasts. One cow grew to enormous size; four yards high it stood and six in length. This monstrous beast took to raiding villagers’ crops and gored anyone who stood in its way. When several folk had been killed, the villagers turned to the lord of the manor. ‘You must rid us of this menace,’ they cried angrily. Straightaway the noble knight mounted his charger and set out for the heath with his lance and his broadsword. But when the great cow loomed out of the mist it was so huge, and so terrible was its bellow, that he turned and galloped away as fast as he could.

  Greatly humiliated, he set off for Warwick Castle to find another knight who was renowned for slaying giants and dragons. Together they rode out to kill the cow. But when the beast flared its nostrils and tossed its huge horns at them, once again they fled. Concerned for their reputations, the two knights hit upon a plan. Off they went to find an old witch who lived in a cave on the edge of the moor. They plied her with gold until she agreed to cast a spell on the cow.

  In the evening twilight the witch appeared from behind a rock and muttered her incantation. The great beast fell quiet beneath the spell. She produced a sieve from under her skirts and began to milk the cow into it. The cow turned its huge head and saw its precious milk draining away into the moor. Slowly it lumbered away into the mist and died of a broken heart.

  Both knights took a rib from the dead cow and returned to their villages, each claiming that he had slain the cow, but the witch had cursed them for their lack of courage, saying that if ever they parted with the ribs their families would die out. So to this day one rib hangs in Warwick Castle and the other remains in our family.

  It’s a con. The ribs are not ribs at all. They are the two sides of a minke whale’s lower jaw: two very large and uncannily rib-like bones. When in the 1970s we had ours carbon dated, it proved to be over 950 years old. Far from illuminating the Dun Cow legend, this revelation greatly deepened its mystery. It would appear that at some point in the far distant past some wag or prankster thought the legend deserved to be immortalised by producing the hard evidence of the cow. It was a cunning ploy. The ribs were very convincing – they could only have come from a huge beast – and for many centuries local people had believed in the colossal cow, utterly convinced by those awesome bones.

  * * *

  Separating the servants’ quarters from the formal dining room was a long disused butler’s pantry. During the war years it had become a cluttered store for a random miscellany of intrigue, like a bric-a-brac shop. Running the full length of one long wall were full-height, built-in cupboards, floor to ceiling. Teasing open their cobwebby doors was like opening huge windows into a distant past. Carefully and dutifully arranged on plain pine shelves was the china and glass of an Edwardian era of extravagant house parties, grand dinners and hunt balls.

  There were Coalport and Dresden tea sets, whole Crown Derby and Minton dinner services with vast meat platters – big enough, I gaily imagined, for a glazed boar’s head with an orange in its mouth, steaming haunches of venison or a whole salmon with a cold, staring eye, such as I had seen in illustrations of medieval banquets. There were soup tureens, sauce boats and vegetable dishes with ornate porcelain arrangements of tomatoes, marrows and turnips bulging across their lids, and an ancient, chipped and faded, blue and white service of family crested ware.

  When I opened those cupboard doors, I fancied I could hear the bustle and hustle of a busy household, the laughter of family and guests, the merry gossip of servants, and the chink of china and glass. When I closed them, the silence of the empty house settled around me again so that I hurried to open the next one.

  It held rows of dusty cut-glass tumblers, twisted champagne flutes, sherry, port and wine glasses and rummers; ranks of decanters, carafes, claret jugs with silver lids and handles, Bacchus’ bearded face glaring from their lips like g
argoyles; glass flagons and demijohns encased in woven wicker; flower vases of every configuration and size, and then, in the end cupboard, several large, plain blue-and-white or floral-patterned china pitchers and ewers for marble-topped bedroom washstands.

  On a last lower shelf stood a row of large china slop buckets with wicker-bound handles and lids smothered all over with brightly coloured rosebuds, as if they might somehow divert attention from their practical function. At floor level, tucked away, there were rows of floral potties and heavy bed-warming bottles of beige stoneware and some curiously wedge-shaped white china vessels I puzzled over. Much later I discovered they were slipper bedpans.

  Closing the cupboard doors shut off the past, trapping it back in the dark, no longer a real part of my life or the life of the house. The room returned to what it had been forced to become during the lean and wearisome years of the war, a dumping ground for duller stuff – two old wooden ironing boards and a wash-board, big cardboard boxes piled up, a canvas golf bag with a few wooden shafted clubs, two broken wicker carpet beaters, ancient black-initialled leather suitcases with ships’ labels and stickers from foreign parts, broken lampshades, gut-stringed tennis racquets in square wooden presses, a broken bagatelle board with the balls missing.

  A cluster of tea chests was crowded into a corner, packed full of folded blackout sheets like satanic shrouds. Another contained the headphones, consoles and wall-mountings of several wireless sets dating from the early days of radio before the First World War. There were long-handled copper warming pans, an umbrella-stand full of walking sticks and feather dusters on long canes and, most perplexing of all, a rattan-backed mahogany commode in the form of an armchair. When I lifted the seat lid I found a gaping oval hole. I had never seen such a thing before and I peered into it, finding only a plain wooden shelf beneath. I struggled to comprehend why anybody would want to sit in a chair like that, so I spent fruitless hours balancing uncomfortably and hoping that by doing so its purpose might become clear. When I showed it to my sister, Mary, she said, ‘It’s a lavatory, silly. What did you think it was for?’ I spent the rest of the day wondering why anyone would seek to deposit their daily doings on a wooden shelf.