The Dun Cow Rib Read online

  On one such exploration I found, tucked away in an old cabin trunk, several wartime gas masks, unused, still in their original cardboard boxes. There were two types: some were black rubber masks which fitted snugly over your face with a clear cellophane panel to see through, white webbing straps round the back of your head and a khaki canister of filtration crystals hanging immediately in front of your mouth. The others, called GS Respirators, were clearly superior: whole head masks with round glass eyepieces and a twenty-eight-inch-long expanding rubber tube like an elephant’s trunk leading from your nose and mouth to a separate canister carried in a khaki haversack at your side. These were much more sinister, with all the shock effect of an invader from outer space; it was impossible to tell who was inside.

  Wearing one of these superior masks, I stalked the servants’ back corridors searching for victims. My first was Sally Franklin, swabbing the flagstones with a bucket and mop. I crept up behind her and stood still. She swabbed slowly backwards toward me until all I could see was her voluminous backside encased in a wrap-around floral pinafore. I reached forward and tapped her bottom. She spun round. A muffled ‘BOOO!’ issued from inside the mask. Sally shrieked and leapt away, kicking over her bucket and sending her mop flying. I ran and ran, back down the corridor and out into the stable yard. I hid the gas mask in a manger and sauntered back into the scullery as though it was nothing to do with me.

  Sally was sitting at the kitchen table, tears streaming down her face, Nellie doing her best to console her with a cup of tea. ‘You’re in trouble, young Jack, you are,’ Nellie scolded. ‘Look what you done to poor Sally. You nearly gave ’er an ’art attack. You wait till I tell your father.’ But I knew she never would.

  Nellie West was my friend. She was my grandfather’s housekeeper. Her father, economically known as West, had been his chauffeur and valet, and her mother, Elsie, had worked in the laundry. Both had died in service before I was born. Slowly growing mould, West’s dark green and gold braided livery still hung in a wardrobe in the old coach house. Nellie had started life as a chambermaid in her teens and gradually progressed to become a prominent member of the staff. After my grandmother’s sudden death she had found herself at the head of the much-reduced post-war household. She would rule the Manor House with absolute dedication and my grandfather would come to depend upon her for the rest of his life.

  A smile twinkled permanently in her blue-grey eyes and about her bunched cheeks, lips ever ready with a facetious quip: ‘There’s no lunch today, young Jack, cos I’ve heard you’ve not bin good enough.’ Or ‘I’m thinkin’ of putting you under the pump cos I can see dirt behind your ears.’ Yet she often spoke with a sigh and an inner sadness, saying, ‘Do you really think so?’ as though she were unworthy of her own opinions. She had greyed early and grown more than a little plump beneath her habitual navy blue or grey tunic dresses, always adorned with a floral pinny, and she was not surprisingly single.

  Born in the first few years of the century her timing couldn’t have been much worse. Turning fifteen at the end of the First World War, most of her potential seventeen- to twenty-year-old suitors, and many much older from her tiny rural community had failed to come home. They were the lost generation. In common with thousands of village girls the length and breadth of the country, Nellie’s life chances at marriage had perished ingloriously in the trench hells of Verdun, Arras, Passchendaele and the Somme. By the time I was seven she would have been approaching fifty and she had accepted her spinsterhood with grace and cheerful dignity.

  To me, Nellie and the Manor House were synonymous. She had always been there, a steadfast bulwark of my earliest childhood memories. I could not have enunciated so ardent an emotion back then, but I loved her, second only to my mother. Without it ever being acknowledged by either of us, Nellie West had entered my inner consciousness as a fixture, an anchor point of deepest security, as much a pillar of my brief existence as the Manor House itself. Whenever we arrived to stay, while my father always set off in search of my grandfather in his smoking room or his workshop or one of his precious glasshouses, I ran to the kitchens to find Nellie.

  Those gas masks sparked an endless burst of imagination. Better than any cowboy hat or cap gun, they were real and tapped into a constantly creative vein. I could be a Martian invader or a horrid German paratrooper prowling the woods and fields, or I could be the hero hunting them down. I could be a burglar raiding an imaginary bank or a highwayman like the Dick Turpin I had read about, leaping out from behind a tree to halt an imaginary carriage and pluck rings and necklaces from rich ladies’ necks and fingers.

  Wooden swords in hand, I persuaded my sister to wear a mask too, so that together we could prowl the corridors seeking out a fearsome ogre whose den was known to be the game larder. We approached with extreme caution. Then, stepping boldly forward I kicked the door open and shouted, ‘Come out and fight, you ugly beast!’ Only to find that he was not in, but the stark, bloodied evidence of his fearsome power hung in rows from the beams – hares, pheasants, duck and partridges, all his victims impaled by their beaks or their feet on rusty hooks, blood dripping to the flagged floor. Once, old Bob was in the larder quietly plucking pheasants. When I burst in to accost the ogre, I got such a fright at finding someone there that I ran for my life, mask or no mask. I rushed to the kitchen to tell Nellie. ‘Now that serves you aright, young Jack.’

  My father had installed a television for the Queen’s Coronation in June 1953 – small, a bit fuzzy, and black and white, of course. Although viewing was strictly controlled, I was allowed to watch Westerns, my favourite by far being Stagecoach – proper cowboys and indians – repeated every Christmas for years. I used to sit cross-legged on the floor, entranced, my face only a few inches from the tiny screen. As influences waxed and waned so I variously became Davy Crockett, Daniel Boone, Kit Carson, the dashing Wells Fargo agent Jim Hardie, and inevitably I was gripped by The Lone Ranger, but never the oh-so-smooth masked hero in his white Stetson, polished boots and creaseless britches, on his spotless white horse ‘Hi-Yo Silver!’ Oh no, it was Tonto I wanted to be: the moccasin’d indian with the tracking skills of a leopard who leapt onto his horse bareback and was usually the one who did all the dirty work (played by the brilliantly named Mohawk actor Jay Silverheels). I tied a dishcloth band round my head and wandered the woods muttering ‘Kemo sabe’, possessing not the first inkling that its translation was ‘trusty scout’ in Potawatomi. I longed for a sheath knife like Tonto’s.

  It was not a sheath knife, but my grandfather gave me a shiny black clasp knife for my eighth birthday. It wasn’t new, it had been his, and that made it more precious still. It had two blades, one large and one small, a bottle opener and a hook for getting stones out of horses’ hooves. To me it was also like being awarded a latch key; a tacit acknowledgement that at last I was old enough to venture out, to whittle my own sticks, to essay, raid and foray, returning like Robert Louis Stevenson’s ‘hunter home from the hill’. Armed only with the knife and a four-foot hazel stick my father had cut for me, and clad in the new dark green gabardine ‘windcheater’ from my mother, with patch pockets and a zip fastener (still a novelty in Britain), I ventured forth into the great unknown.

  That stick possessed magical powers: it could be Robin Hood’s bow or his sword or staff; it was Huck Finn’s pole, rafting downriver; with a length of string it became a whip, or, with the thicker end tucked into my armpit, a gun, accompanied by the ‘Pwrrch! Pwrrch!’ from pursed lips with each imagined shot, as I prowled the hedgerows. My stick and my knife were essential props I carried everywhere – my armory, my badges of office, my power beads. Into the shaft I carved notches and rings for imaginary villains I had gunned down or defeated in breathless hand-to-hand encounters.

  These two items had located the violent core of my inner self, a Pandora’s box of hyperactive pre-pubescent imagination, slaying enemies without mercy, hanging, drawing and quartering the Sheriff of Nottingham, gunning down and beheading inn
ocent victims in my rush for power and domination. Without them I was nothing, as helpless as a highwayman without his mask and pistol or a knight without sword and shield. I became permanently attached to my stick, beside my bed at night, never heading out without it. Then, one day, in a fit of pique because I had refused to take her with me, my sister snapped it in two. I was devastated and a secret murder boiled in my heart.

  I have often wondered whether those years and the wildness that seemed to flourish within me were a direct result of my mother’s illness and absences, or whether they were a natural outpouring of youthful exuberance given the freedom to expand unchecked in the splendid Elysian fields of the little Manor House estate. Had she been there I don’t think my mother would have been able to exercise any more control than Nellie. The potential for escape was always too great, the horizons too wide, and my energy and determination too deeply rooted. She possessed neither the strength nor the will to hold me in check. In truth, I had no idea either then or for many years to come how seriously ill my mother was. I was gloriously out of control.

  Those early years of discovery were often hazardous, even dangerous, but always exhilarating. As a fuller awareness of my expanding landscape slowly dawned, so I think I began to realise that its possibilities for adventure and excitement were limitless. But that first brush with the fox had changed me. From then on, with the immutable tidal wash of destiny, natural history and wildlife would always be the most likely ingredients of fulfillment.

  I can’t now remember precisely when, but probably by the age of seven or eight, my exploration of the self-contained world of the Manor House had begun to burst at the seams. It was expanding out of doors. While the house’s labyrinthine interior still held endless opportunities for adventure, the extensive out-buildings were new and exciting. Some, such as my grandfather’s large workshop, were firmly locked.

  It would be several years before I was allowed to try my hand at carpentry; years before I could be trusted with belt-driven lathe and band saw, planes and chisels honed on whetstones until they were as sharp as a sabre. Both my grandfather and my father were highly skilled practitioners, way beyond anything that might be described as a hobby. They were that rare combination of professional men and amateur craftsmen. Although until the Second World War the little Manor estate had employed men and women to perform most everyday functions of country life, there existed among the family members an unspoken moral principle broadly interpreted as ‘never ask anyone to do anything you can’t do yourself’, and which seemed to honour a centuries old tradition of manual dexterity and self-sufficiency in English country life, a tradition of which they were rightly and properly proud.

  I was allowed to stand and watch, occasionally to help out – ‘Hold that end, boy, for the last cut. Don’t let it fall.’ It seemed there was nothing they couldn’t turn their hand to: making and repairing hand tools, barrows, carts, garden furniture, or hanging doors and re-roofing sheds. Often it was mechanics, spanners and wrenches for nuts and bolts or metalwork, grinding on the engineer’s wheel: ‘Stand back, boy, and get your goggles on.’ Sparks showered in dazzling arcs and then at the brick forge a lump hammer ringing on the anvil, ‘Pump those bellows, boy, we need more heat,’ before welding in the fire.

  Later, when I was considered old enough, I was indoctrinated in those same skills: ‘Whoa! Steady now. Slowly, slowly. Never force it. Let the saw do the work.’ Or ‘Hold the hammer at the end, boy, not halfway down.’ And the first time I rushed to pick up a piece of steel still hot from welding and smelt the roast beef aroma my own burning flesh the observation would be: ‘Well, you won’t do that again.’ Words spoken not with any sense of reproof – far from it – they came with that age-old, firm but all-embracing warmth of loving instruction from master to pupil, from father to son, that had served so well down the generations, always couched in the same proudly principled tenet of independence that bound us all together.

  Other buildings were not locked. Dark, cobwebby interiors of potting sheds, apple stores, wood stores, stables and various annexes to the old coach houses were an endless source of mystery and delight. Games of hide and seek with my sister always ended in tears because we could conceal ourselves so completely and so unfathomably that either the seeker gave up in frustration and wandered off or the hider lost patience, became bored by never being found and emerged insisting, ‘You’re useless!’

  It was often after such frustrations that I was abandoned and left to devise my own entertainment. Wonderful though it was, the Manor House was a cut-off world still roundly entrenched in Victorian values. We children had no local friends and village children did not venture into Manor House territory; had they done so I suspect we would have been actively discouraged from associating with them. Not that I was ever lonely – quite the reverse, I loved being left to explore on my own.

  Beyond the line of ancient trees at the top of the gardens lay a large pond ringed with crack willows, some of which had broken up in winter storms and fallen into the water. Further on again was an orchard of ancient apple and pear trees, gnarled and pruned to distorted configurations, neatly spaced in ordered rows and perfect for climbing. Those old fruit trees taught me to be an expert tree climber and when I fell, as often I did, it was never very far, landing ruffled but unhurt, cushioned by the long grass below.

  The pond was a favoured haunt. Wings thrashing, mallard often rose from the water rasping their alarm as I approached and every year moorhens laboured back and forth to create a nest of soggy weed among the twigs of a fallen willow as it lay across the surface of the water. I thought it might be possible for a small boy to clamber out along the fallen limb to a position just above the nest.

  In those days many country boys collected birds’ eggs. My grandfather and his father before him both had cherished collections in specially made wooden cabinets of drawers, the precious blown eggs carefully labelled and housed in partitioned sections on beds of cotton wool – Linnet, Hawthorn thicket, Ryton Wood. 24.4.26 – many dating back to the Victorian era. It had been a fashionable and entirely acceptable pastime, many amateur collections proudly maintained to museum standards.

  The cabinets stood in my grandfather’s smoking room, a room we dared not enter. My father had also had a collection of his own when he was a boy. He showed me the drawers of eggs, drawer after drawer, row upon row. Eggs of birds I had never heard of: hawfinch, redstart, corn bunting, whinchat . . . I longed for a collection of my own.

  The bottom drawer of my grandfather’s cabinet housed the intricate paraphernalia of professional egg collecting: a set of special drills twirled between forefinger and thumb for cutting the perfect round holes in the end of the eggs, minuscule for wrens and warblers, much larger for geese and swans; slender blow pipes of several sizes for inserting through the hole and gently blowing out the yolk and white; a little phial of surgical spirit for cleaning and disinfecting the shell, inside and out, and a glass pipette for administering it; a wad of lint for lining the drawer sections and a roll of cotton wool in dark blue paper; a pair of fine pointed scissors; tweezers and a soft paint brush; crystals of silica gel in a tiny pot and another containing crystals of naphthalene for keeping mites and other bugs at bay.

  That spring I sat quietly on the bank and watched the moorhens heaping up their weedy pile. They worked fast and diligently, both birds ferrying back and forth with beaks crammed with any old weed they could find. The pile grew well clear of the water, so much so that one bird had to remain on the mound while the other passed the weed up to it. Then she sat.

  I couldn’t keep away. Every day I visited several times, the bird always firmly parked on her nest. I longed to see into it, but I couldn’t. Even when she came off I still couldn’t see in from the bank. I climbed a tree nearby but however I craned my neck it was no good. Very stealthily I ventured out along the fallen branch. Immediately it shook the nest; the hen took fright, springing away into the water with a sharp-edged yelp. She half flew, half
skedaddled across the surface, cutting a dark trail through the bright green duckweed to the far side, where she disappeared under an overhanging thicket.

  I saw my chance and stepped boldly out along the branch until it began to wobble under my weight. Then I dropped to my hands and knees, clinging on to slender, twiggy laterals as I crawled forward. At last I could see into the nest. There, glowing with heat, were seven stone-coloured eggs speckled with rusty dots and squiggles. They were magnificent. At that moment I wanted one of those eggs more than anything else in the world. I wanted to take one home and show it to my father and my grandfather to persuade them that I needed to start a collection of my own – my own cabinet of drawers, my own carefully inscribed labels, my own toolkit, my own trophies.

  I crawled forward again. The branch flexed alarmingly under my weight, but there was still a long way to go. The nest was woven into the flimsy extremity of twigs well out from the main stem. I lay down on the branch and inched forward like a snake stalking its prey. I could still hear the moorhen squawking anxiously from its hideaway. Another five feet to go – with a sickening snap the dead branch broke and I crash-landed in the water.

  It wasn’t deep, only about three feet. I quickly righted myself, hauling up on the branch, dripping and spitting foul water like a ducked witch. My wellingtons found the bottom and I stood up and wiped the weed from my face. I’d cut my lip and blood flowed freely down my sodden shirt. Stinking of rotten eggs, bubbles of marsh gas were percolating to the surface all round me. Then I realised that I was sinking. I tried to raise my feet one at a time. They wouldn’t budge. I was sinking into deep, cold, evil-smelling mud. Nothing for it but to abandon my boots and haul myself out on the branch in soggy socks. I took a long last look at the nest, still out of reach, before hauling back along the branch to the bank.