We were lucky that it wasn’t near York, but even so it took Daddy and Bill, the farm manager, two hours’ driving as fast as the stock lorry could go to get there by six o’clock. While Bill skinned the dead foal, Daddy did his best to console the owners.
‘I’m afraid she’s a bad traveller,’ said the girl’s mother apologetically. ‘Just as well you didn’t bring a trailer because she won’t go into those at any price.’
As it was it took five of them and the stable broom to load Shamrock, frantic with stress and loss, and once in the lorry she flung herself from side to side, rocking the whole vehicle. Daddy said it had been a terrifying drive. She was wild-eyed, dripping with sweat, her udder shiny-tight with unused milk, when she came stiff-legged down the ramp just short of nine at night, and her earsplitting neighing echoed round the yard.
We lifted the orphan to her feet, dressed her in the dead foal’s skin, a gruesome sight with the over-large ears fitted over her head, and semi-carried her into Shamrock’s stable, propping her in a corner. This was crunch time, our last throw of the dice. Would Shamrock take to her? She was a big, powerful Irish Draught mare and she had had a terrible day. If she chose to take it out on the foal it would be curtains. We stood back, holding our breath.
Shamrock stopped neighing and stared for a long moment. The foal stood hunched up, head hanging, and did not move when sniffed and whiffled in a questing, rather peremptory way. The ill-fitting skin flopped sideways, dangerously close to coming adrift. Was Shamrock fooled? The foal may have smelled right, but it was nothing like her own.
Then a wonderful sound burst out from deep in her chest, more of a rumble than a whinny, and she gave the foal a gentle nudge, urging her round into a suckling position. Now it was up to the foal. Was she strong enough to respond to the signals? Would she risk putting her head near a stranger after Nutty’s furious squeals? Her nose rose, seeking blindly here and there, while Shamrock nuzzled her tail, willing her to take hold, find the teat…
The suspense was unbearable. I made a move towards them, longing to help, and was stopped in my tracks by Mummy’s fierce headshake. ‘Leave them alone!’
Just as the foal looked ready to collapse and our nerves were stretched to breaking-point, her small black muzzle fastened on the teat, lost it, found it again, and at once she began to suck so noisily that we all exhaled in a whoosh of relief.
‘Bingo!’ whispered Daddy, and Bill silently stuck up his thumb.
Under our eyes, the foal seemed to expand. She lost her crumpled, defeated look, braced her legs, and wiggled her little bottle-brush of a tail, and never from that moment on did Shamrock show her anything but the tenderest care. It really was a miracle.
One large worry remained. Like all newborns, a foal needs colostrum from its first feeds to provide immunity from disease and infection, and since Shamrock had long exhausted her supply the vet decreed that Twiga, as we named the orphan because of her giraffe-like yellow-and-black coat, should not be allowed to get wet until she could build up her own resistance to disease.
Easier said than done during a typically rainy Welsh summer. The result was that, for the whole of the next year, whenever storm clouds gathered over the farm, whoever was nearest would hastily put a feed in the manger, then rush out to catch Shamrock and lead her into the stable, with Twiga skipping alongside. They both much enjoyed this routine, and the foal became very tame and well-disposed towards the human race.
Over the next four years, she accepted quite equably the succession of saddle, bridle, and human on her back, but she had an independent streak and was inclined to question orders before obeying them.
‘You can’t really expect me to do that?’ she seemed to be saying when required to walk through a puddle or jump coloured bars. ‘Look, there’s a perfectly good way round.’
In many cases, I had to agree with her. Trotting and cantering in small circles is an integral part of schooling a youngster, but she found it boring and so did I, and this skimping of the basics no doubt contributed to her unpredictable behaviour at low-level riding-club competitions and in the hunting field. The ability to hop over any obstacle that crops up is an important feature of foxhunting, but though Twiga could jump like a springbok when it suited her, I could never tell whether she was going to take off or stop short in the last stride, and this led to some very public disagreements between us. It was in no way Twiga’s fault, and her top-heavy physique didn’t help.
At the first Meet I took her to, she bucked nonstop with a curiously sedate rocking-horse movement – back and forth, up and down – that soon had me and everyone else in the vicinity helpless with laughter. On another occasion when hounds checked during a brisk morning run, she lay down in a muddy woodland ride and rolled with blissful abandon. I barely had time to scramble clear, and was obliged to borrow a long-thonged whip to get her to her feet again.
One way and another, she was never going to be the pride of the South Oxfordshire or any other Hunt, and her later career as hack for weekenders was much better suited to her talents.
Other horses came and went in the ensuing years, each with its own quirks, physical and behavioural. An International High-Goal polo pony who came to see out his retirement with us used to spend the first five minutes or so after he was turned out to graze cantering with short, smooth, grass-cutting strides some thirty yards along the fence, whipping round at the corner post and cantering back in the other direction, for all the world as if he was practising his footwork.
Zorzal had been bred in the Argentine, and had a chestnut coat of such satiny perfection that it looked like burnished bronze, with the kind of green-and-purple iridescence that you see on a starling’s head, but this smoothness made him vulnerable to midge attack on summer evenings, and he had evolved his own method of dealing with the nuisance. First he would plunge his head right up to the ears in the water-trough and splash it back and forth until great waves sloshed on to the ground and the whole area was liquid sludge. Then he would carefully roll in this mud-bath until he was coated all over in grey armour. The only way to get him clean was to run the hose over him, then scrape off the residue while he squirmed with pleasure, presenting different facets of his body to be worked on just like a man enjoying a massage.
Another chestnut, this time a home-bred yearling named Red Crescent, proved extraordinarily adept at letting himself out of his stable, and day after day I found him raiding the feed-shed next door to his box. Careful inspection of his mouth revealed that his tongue was split at the side, giving him a small thumb-like projection which he could fasten round the door-bolt and slide it open.
When asked if this would be a liability when we came to put a bit in his mouth, and the vet shook his head mournfully. ‘Oh dear!’ he said, deadpan. ‘I’m afraid he’ll always speak with a lisp.’
Even when Duff managed to negotiate squatters’ rights over a strip of field on the other side of the garden, space was tight and grazing chronically scarce. Horses are wasteful feeders, preferring to nibble the shortest, sweetest sward and not only ignore coarse grass and weeds but deposit their droppings among them in such a way that even the most carefully managed pasture becomes progressively more depleted and sour.
To counter this, I took to buying a couple of ten-month-old bullocks with robust appetites every year from my sister-in-law, partly to clean up the paddocks and partly to secure a supply of home-reared beef, but even they were daunted by the docks that infested the ground. We cut them, we dug them up, we even resorted to burning them off with a flame-thrower, but still they flourished.
‘You’ll never get rid of them without Gramoxone,’ warned a visiting estate agent. ‘Haven’t you heard that a single dock seed can live a thousand years?’
It was depressing news. The last thing I wanted was to spray herbicide on our only patch of pasture. Like it or not, we would have to live with the docks.
Other creatures that were not strictly necessary kept joining the strength: some of whom turn
ed out to be more congenial companions than others. The pair of geese I gave Duff for his birthday soon made themselves a nuisance by terrorising the dogs and leaving large green droppings on the lawn – a menace for the bare of foot – but there was something noble about the way the gander guarded his mate, standing sentinel at the door of her coop when she began to brood.
Hissing and flapping, he was formidable when challenged, so though I thought the eggs were taking a very long time to hatch, I didn’t want to excite his wrath unnecessarily, and waited over a month before investigating the nest, only to find the goose still sitting but stone dead, stiff and cold inside the coop, her eggs devoured by rats or squirrels. Did the gander know? Before I could decide whether he was a tragic hero keeping vigil over his dead mate or simply very unobservant, the fox passed by and carried him off.
The peacocks, however, were an unalloyed success – at least while we lived at Bromsden. Surrounded by tall beeches and high-gabled barns, with no neighbour nearer than half a mile, it was the ideal place for them, providing plenty of wild food and safe roosting. Though ground-nesting and therefore vulnerable to foxes during the breeding season, so beautifully camouflaged were the peahens and so close did they sit among nettles and brambles that a human could almost tread on the nest before seeing it, while other predators could not apparently detect any scent while they were brooding.
We bought the original trio – Shalimar the peacock and two wives – from the director of a research project into peafowl then taking place at Nuneham Courtenay, and confined them in a pheasant-rearing pen for a fortnight before cautiously releasing them one by one over the next week. This slow acclimatisation is essential, we were told, and it worked very well, with the captive birds providing an inducement for the free one to stick around until all were ‘hefted’ to their new habitat.
It gave an exotic dimension to the farm to see them float gently down from their roost in a tall beech, and pace grandly about the yard and garden. Occasionally they would behead a flower or take a dust-bath in a newly raked seed-bed, but on the whole their splendour outweighed the damage to our plants, and Shalimar’s stately ritual pavane before he shook out his train with a rippling rattle was a never-failing entertainment for the children.
The trio were early risers and saluted the dawn with a noisy chorus of screeches in summer, which brought back happy memories of the Indian jungle both for us and for Nannie who, in her twenties, had worked for the manager of a copper mine, and very much approved of the subcontinent and its peoples.
Ten years later, though, it was a different story when we moved to a new home in Gloucestershire – the home of my dreams, but unfortunately a good deal less suitable for peafowl because we had a near neighbour. He was an exceptionally kind and tolerant man, too deaf to worry about the screeches at dawn, but he loved his garden and even his forbearance did not extend to allowing peafowl to destroy his vegetables, nipping off the leading shoots of his peas and taking dustbaths in his young carrots.
It was painful to see him blaspheming and dancing with rage when he discovered his carefully tended plot transformed into a pot-holed mini Passchendaele.
‘I’ll shoot the brutes!’ he roared, and it was in vain for me to promise to keep Shalimar and his ladies on our side of the buildings when with one flap of the wings they could sail over the intervening roofs and land on his lawn.
Another of this neighbour’s loves was his big, old-fashioned Rover, which he kept in showroom condition despite the muddy lane, and his fury was understandable when Shalimar attacked his own reflection in its shining bonnet. Not only did he spatter it with blood, but with beak and claws he inflicted deep scratches which required expert attention from the garage. It became ever more clear that I would have to find the birds a new home.
Peafowl are not everyone’s cup of tea, but to my surprise we found an immediate taker, an old friend who lived near Oxford, and kept purebred chickens as a hobby. She wanted Shalimar and his by-now extensive family. I wanted to part with them: it seemed the perfect arrangement. I went over to inspect their new habitat, and could see only one thing wrong with it. There were no tall trees near at hand. The farm was in a wide valley bottom, with the land rising gently about half a mile away on either side, and round the house the orchard trees looked barely high enough for peacocks to roost safely.
During the acclimatization period their new owner planned to keep them in an open-fronted barn wired in with chicken-netting, and I gave her the usual warning to let them out one at a time to accustom them to their surroundings. With some difficulty we captured three hens and two young cocks, but Shalimar himself evaded us.
‘Never mind,’ said Marika, transferring the bulging sacks to her car. ‘Perhaps he can join us later.’
Three weeks later she rang to report trouble. The birds had looked so droopy and depressed after a fortnight’s captivity that she had let them all out together, whereupon they had flown away in a flock and settled in the churchyard of the nearest village, a couple of miles away. She had put up notices in the village, asking residents not to feed the peacocks, in the hope that they would return when they got hungry, but even before she got back to her car she found her notices being torn down, and within days the village had split into two camps.
‘They’re our peacocks now,’ declared one faction. ‘These beautiful birds have chosen to live here. We must let them stay.’
‘They are destructive pests. They’ll ruin our gardens,’ responded their opponents. ‘Chase them away before they do any more damage.’
It was a difficult situation for Marika, but she would not admit defeat. With immense diplomacy she persuaded the more co-operative villagers to let her build traps in their gardens, baited them with peanuts and other favourite foods (raw pastry being a particular delicacy) and over the next three weeks she tried again and again to recapture the truants. At last – triumph! She lured all but one hen into her makeshift cage, and from a distance jerked the string that slammed the door shut. Her final move was to drive the captives over to Theale, near Reading, donate them to the Child Beale Trust, which specialises in exotic fowl and there, for all I know, their descendants may be living still.
On his own, with no hens to show off to or young cocks to challenge, Shalimar settled into a peaceful bachelor existence and ceased to torment our neighbour. Cherchez la femme, is the key to tiresome behaviour in most animal species – I do not exclude humans – and in his single state Shalimar gave us much pleasure yet even so, when he died at the age of thirteen, I did not replace him. Unless you live at least half a mile from the nearest household, Duff and I agreed it is best to leave peafowl in the Indian jungle where they belong.
CHAPTER FOUR
The Small Holding
IN THE LEAGUE tables of human stress, moving house is right up there with divorce and bereavement, but if leaving Bromsden was a wrench for me, it was far worse for Duff. Although I loved the house in its surrounding woods, deep down I had always been aware that it did not belong to us and never would. It was far and away the most covetable house on the two thousand-acre estate, and one day the owners were bound to want it back. When that day eventually came in 1985, it did not take me by surprise.
‘What did Peter want?’ I asked one spring morning as the land agent left after an unusually long session in Duff’s study, and I added only half jokingly, ‘Is he trying to turn us out of house and home?’
He didn’t smile, let alone laugh. ‘Well, yes,’ he said after a pause. ‘That’s just about what it boils down to.’
So the blow had fallen at last, and though it may not have been wholly unexpected by me, it was very different for him. Bromsden had been his childhood home as well as the house where he brought up his own family. He knew every tree, every path, every rutting stand for deer and rough corner where a pheasant might be lurking, as well as every inch of the garden and buildings. He knew everyone who worked on the estate and had grown up with the locals. He had played cricket for the vill
age and run the Shoot, built fences and mowed lawns, installed central heating and improved the house out of all recognition. It was very much his patch, and being asked to leave was much more of a blow to him than it was for me.
Yet the break was not ill-timed. Our children had flown the nest, so there was no hassle over schools; Nannie was installed in a bungalow, and there was nothing to stop us taking our animals to a new home, although we knew that finding anywhere comparable would be near impossible. Handsome brick-and-flint farmhouses don’t grow on trees and South Oxfordshire – the first bit of real countryside outside London – is a very expensive area.
So where should we go? North, South, East or West? At the time it scarcely seemed to matter. We drew a circle that took in all the country less than two hours from London, and reluctantly began the disillusioning task of skimming through estate agents’ brochures; but as it happened, finding a house did not take long. After visiting two in our price range that were poky, uncomfortable, cramped and dislikable in every way, a very small ad in the Daily Telegraph caught my eye, and two days later we drove to the western side of Gloucestershire to look it over.
It was by no means love at first sight when we left the narrow lane and surveyed the building set a few steps above a brashy farmyard. Built in Cotswold stone of several different vintages, with some brutalist grouting outlining the newest bits, the old house was long, low, and curiously proportioned, as if it had shrunk and expanded with the changing requirements of a succession of owners. It had, perhaps, started off as two cottages plus a barn, linked together with more regard for utility than aesthetics and, as we later learned from a neighbour, in 1936 the whole roof and top storey had been arbitrarily sliced off, because the weight of the heavy Cotswold stone roof was crushing the rest of the house, driving the walls outwards. Large metal cross-ties had then been driven through the first floor from side to side to lock the walls in place, and the roof replaced with ugly concrete tiles which didn’t even project over the guttering.
A Job for All Seasons Page 9
