The Dun Cow Rib

by John Lister-Kaye

  It was the farmland of cockerels crowing at dawn and hens scratch-pecking through every yard and ditch; of haystacks in the corner of every field; of uncountable hordes of rats and mice; of dense thorn hedgerows skilfully laid by hand; of ducks dabbling messily on stagnant ponds and a brood of barn owls wheezing in every barn. Worked by farmers who paid country lads thruppence a rabbit to go ferreting and long-netting round the fields, it was the farmland of hay meadows and hedges brimming with cow parsley, meadowsweet, crimson poppies and ragged robin, loud with industrious bees and the omnipresent erratic flitterings of myriad butterflies. It was also the nocturnal farmland of bats in roofs and church belfries, of rabbit warrens on every bank, of foxes and badgers, of deer tiptoeing out of the woods at dusk, and a dawning world of hedgehogs and hares, otters and water voles in streams, of weasels and stoats, and chirruping hosts of farmland birds – linnets, corn buntings, turtle doves, goldfinches and yellowhammers flittering like blown sunshine through the fields and along luxuriant hedgerows bright with crab apples, sloes, hips and haws, where every autumn hosts of thrushes, redwings and fieldfares gorged like avian locusts – a thronging, simmering diversity almost unimaginable in today’s machine- and chemical-purged agri-deserts.

  To a country boy this tapestry of colour, movement and mystery was an irresistible draw, a treasure trove wholly unimagined, each discovery bursting unforgettably into my consciousness: every newt a nugget of gold, every wren’s nest a gem, every slow worm a bracelet of silver. To a nine-year-old, a muddy ditch became a great wetland. A tangled hawthorn thicket with a magpie’s nest embodied all the thrill of the wild wood. It was a countryside that never ended: always another lane, another haystack, another copse, pond, spinney, thicket and rambling, unkempt hedgerow to probe and crawl through, always a far-off woodland to discover, another stream, river, reed bed and marsh to explore. The cold ingenuity of insects to fathom. They became the private and deeply personal wildernesses of my dreams.

  Out there those dreams came alive. I was discovering a countryside of thrilling and boundless adventure. I wandered and watched and listened, pried and prodded my way into its limitless undertakings. On cardboard wings woodpigeons clattered off their twiggy nests in the gnarled forks of ancient cider apple trees, easy to climb to, where two fat squabs squatted like overfed miniature dinosaurs. When a sparrowhawk coasted over the orchards, trailing a tension of fear through the songbirds around me, I watched with awe and shared the sparkle of its urgent electricity while overhead buzzards inscribed their sky-wide circles above the woods. Rabbits scuttled for their burrows and I ran to plunge my arm in after them to see if I could catch one. I never could; the burrows were always too deep, but the thrill that one day I might be lucky never waned. I knelt on the piled diggings of badger setts to breathe in the musky aroma of freshly dug earth and a redolent animal presence. It was a natural history naturally gleaned. I had no concept of it at the time, but I was subconsciously building knowledge and understanding. It was an apprenticeship, time being served and the accumulation of experience I would call upon for the rest of my life.

  * * *

  One summer my wanderings took me a few miles along a tributary of the River Parrett near the sleepy village of Kingsbury Episcopi, where I habitually went to explore the muddy wonderland of the riverbank. Wind-rippled, light-flung, cursed by the heron’s rough crake, I knew it as the land’s secret edge. Water voles plopped into the slow stream and moorhens scuttled into the reeds fluting alarm, leaving a pointillist trail across the weed-stippled surface.

  There I met a tramp known locally as ‘Old Much’, after the ancient abbey at Muchelney, one of the lowest flood-prone hollows of the Somerset Levels. He over-wintered in a hay barn beside the abbey, where I had first bumped into him while searching for barn owls. I believe his real name was Dan Tucker, but he was Old Much to just about everyone and always would be. All summer he lived out, moving from farm to farm, building crude shelters from the bent branches of osier willows that sprouted energetically along the wet ditches.

  Old Much looked as rough as guts – but that was misleading. Where you could see skin through thickets of grizzled beard and scarecrow hair, it had the complexion of old chamois leather dotted with black blotches, but that hid a gnarled, intense handsomeness that would have been frightening if his eyes had not shone with friendliness and a smile of impish excitement revealing a row of surprisingly intact, tobacco-stained teeth. He wore a greasy old trilby with jay’s wing feathers of startling blue tucked in the band. In his stained khaki greatcoat, tied with a plait of twine around his waist, and hobnailed boots beneath heavy serge trousers, he reeked like an old goat, smoking in a broken pipe such tobacco as he could get, made to go further with dried old man’s beard from the hedges, rubbed together between grimy palms.

  Old Much had lived off the land for decades, troubling no one. The local farmers who perhaps knew of his time in the trenches tolerated – no, I think better than that – freely accepted him as part of their landscape. It was said that he was a shell-shock case from the First World War, which would place him in his mid-fifties when I knew him – and anyway, people had concluded over many years that he was entirely harmless. He possessed curiously extravagant manners, always lifting his hat to women he passed on the roads and bowing when he thanked folk for their frequent kindnesses. Whatever trauma he had suffered had left him with an uncontrollable stammer, which would have been alarming enough had it not been for his openness toward everyone he met. It certainly never hindered his ability to find food and look after himself.

  Mark Cuff told me that many villagers gave Old Much cast-off clothes, eggs, vegetables and even occasionally tobacco, but that he would never enter a house, almost as if that might somehow compromise his dedication to the wildness of his beloved hedgerows. If my parents had discovered that I kept such company, they would have been aghast and banned it immediately, but he only rarely came to Martock, so there was little fear of them ever finding out. At his own level I believe he lived contentedly and well. He would appear from the hedge as I cycled the country back lanes or down by the river where I went fishing for perch. I can hear his cheery greeting now, ‘’Ullo J-J-J-J-Jack, b-b-b-boy. W-w-w-w-w-w-what’s up with ’ee t-t-t-t-t’day?’

  It was Old Much who introduced me to the sly trick of patiently observing woodpigeons’ nests until the twin squabs were nearly big enough to fly. At this crucial point he would climb the tree and tie the hapless squabs’ legs to their twiggy nest with a short length of twine. The doting parent birds would continue to feed their chicks indefinitely – until, that is, a few weeks later he returned to harvest them for his supper. By then they would be as fat as a Christmas goose, larger than the adult pigeons, and, with wings that had never flown, their plum-coloured breasts would be the most succulent morsels you could ever hope to sink your teeth into. In the summer months he often had ten pigeons’ nests on the go at once – twenty suppers to be char-grilled on a stick held over his fire.

  This was by no means his only ploy. In the embers he baked hedgehogs in a ball of clay, the spines sticking to the shell when he cracked it open. He told me that young grey squirrels filched from the drey were sweet when boiled with a potato; he showed me how to make a sort of chewy damper from the soft, tart pith hollowed from kale stems grown for cattle feed; he ‘borrowed’ mallard, teal, pheasant and partridge eggs from nests – never more than two – so that the birds kept on laying week after week. Most nights he milked a cow in the field and drank it hot from the udder; and he fermented his own rough cider in spring-clip-stoppered lemonade bottles thrust into the heat of a haystack. He taught me to snare rabbits and how to tie a bag net under a field gate and then frighten a hare into it. He never asked for anything except once quite early on, as I was departing, ‘Y’ c-c-c-couldn’t find me a b-b-b-b-box o’ m-m-m-m-matches, could ’ee, Jack?’ After that I always took him matches.

  But my favourite exploit on which I joined him on several moonlit nights was eeli
ng in wet meadows between the river and a series of ponds which used to abound in that soggy corner of Somerset. ‘You w-w-w-wanna c-c-c-come e-e-e-eelin’ t’night, J-J-J-Jack, boy?’ In certain seasons, when heavy dew soaks you to the knees, eels leave the rivers and rhynes (drainage ditches) and snake their way overland through the long grass to these ponds. Old Much seemed to know it all. He would sit on a hessian sack beside a pond and listen intently, holding a slender, forked hazel stick at the ready. The eels came in clots of three and four together, olive green, slimy and sometimes over a foot long. ‘’Ere’s a g-g-g-g-good ’un,’ he would cry, leaping up and pinning it to the grass with the fork and then stabbing another sharp twig down its mouth and out at the gills. When he had three or four squirming in his sack, he would call it a day. ‘D-d-d-don’t want to spoil it, now, do us?’ Old Much knew nothing of conservation, but he’d worked it out for himself. ‘Y’ take t-t-t-too much an’ you c-c-c-can’t come b-b-b-back for more.’

  * * *

  That summer my parents tried to get me into another prep school. It seemed hopeless. Private schools were bursting at the seams; the de-mob baby boom had seen to that. One morning my father announced that I would have to go to the village school in Martock. I liked that idea. It was close, a short walking distance from Bartonfield, and I would no longer have to board. It sounded pretty good to me. Before the end of the holidays, he added, ‘You will have to go and meet Mr Barron, the headmaster.’

  ‘As long as he’s not like Mr Forbes,’ was my curtly muttered retort.

  The Hampton Down imbroglio had not entirely died. One day my parents drove me to Bristol ‘To see a doctor.’ Confused, I thought that it was for my mother. It wasn’t. ‘He’s a special doctor for youngsters like you,’ my father said, explaining nothing.

  ‘I don’t need a doctor, do I?’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ my mother smiled at me. ‘He only wants to talk to you.’

  The brass plate read ‘Dr Fordham’, buttressed by a string of incomprehensible initials. He was a child psychologist with rooms in Clifton overlooking the famous Brunel suspension bridge. He was jolly and slightly portly, wearing a three-piece Harris tweed suit in a hairy windowpane check, the sporty effect topped with a bow tie. A gold watch chain undulated between the pockets of his waistcoat. A wide smile rippled across his ruddy complexion and wobbled his double chins when he laughed. The waiting room had a gas fire and I remember finding a copy of a Beano Annual while my parents went in with him. ‘Won’t be long,’ he said breezily.

  When it was my turn, they left the room. I sat on an upright chair with a shiny leather seat. ‘You’ve got nothing to worry about, but I need to ask you some questions,’ he beamed at me reassuringly. ‘Now I hear you’ve been in quite a bit of trouble at school. Can you tell me about that?’ He listened intently and scribbled notes at his desk. ‘And you’re sure you had nothing to do with breaking Butterfield’s fountain pen?’

  ‘Yes,’ I answered flatly. ‘Quite sure.’ Doing my best to swallow my surging indignation. How many times and how many people did I have to tell before they believed me? ‘And he was Butterworth not Butterfield,’ I added sourly.

  ‘Ah yes.’ He scribbled some more. When we got to Bernie’s caning, he asked me: ‘How many strokes did you get?’

  ‘Ten.’

  ‘Are you sure it was ten?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I counted them.’

  ‘Are you quite sure it was ten? You’re not exaggerating, are you?’

  I glowered at him. What a stupid question, I thought. ‘I can count,’ I replied sullenly.

  Then he changed tack. ‘Now this was about two and a half weeks ago, I think your father said?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Have you still got marks on your bottom?’

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘I’d like to see, if you don’t mind.’ I stood up and undid my short trousers. He came round from his desk and stood behind me. He lowered the top of my underpants. ‘Hmmm. I see.’ He went back to his desk. He pulled a gold watch out of his waistcoat pocket and glanced at it. ‘Now you didn’t like Mr Forbes, did you?’

  ‘No. I hated him and he hated me.’

  ‘What makes you think he hated you?’

  Another silly question. I thought hard for several seconds. ‘Mrs Warmley told me . . .’ His eyebrows shot up above the gold rims of his glasses. ‘And she said he was a bully.’

  ‘Oh, did she?’ He scribbled furiously, nodding, ‘Did she now?’

  When he called my parents in, my mother came straight to me and put her arm round me. ‘All right?’ she whispered, as she pressed my head to her cheek. There was a brief discussion. I was asked to leave the room. The door stayed open. I heard Dr Fordham tell them there was a corporal punishment convention of a maximum of six strokes. Then I heard the words ‘unnecessary violence’. I could have told you that, I thought.

  My father had loosed off an angry letter to the chairman of the Hampton House governors demanding a written justification for Bernie’s breach of the convention and a return of the term’s fees. A skirmish of threats and counter threats ensued, salvoes of solicitors’ letters and harshly spoken telephone calls. A number of parents had been shocked by the way I had been caned and had threatened to withdraw their boys from the school. One of these, a Mr Peter Pargeter, was a local solicitor who offered to act for my father free of charge. His wet and apparently delicate son, Jeremy, with far too thin a neck and a runny nose, had been in the maths class with Butterworth and me, but between sniffs he had been decent enough to say he didn’t think I had anything to do with it. He was withdrawn from the school that summer.

  Mrs Warmley had also spoken up for me, convinced that I had nothing to do with the destruction of Butterworth’s pen. She had told my parents Bernie ‘had it in for me’ and she had threatened to lodge a formal complaint to some overarching independent schools’ authority. In the end, faced with legal action, more boys being withdrawn and the threat of bad publicity, Bernie caved in and wrote a letter of apology to my parents, fees repaid in full. My father was tickled pink. He bought me a sheath knife with a gleaming stainless steel blade in a leather sheath. Superseding my grandfather’s clasp knife, it shot to the top of the list – the best present I had ever been given.

  Off we all went to the Manor House. Proudly, I showed Nellie my new knife. ‘Ooh, that’s a beauty, just what I wants for cuttin’ cabbages,’ she teased, feigning to take it away.

  ‘Oh no you don’t,’ I countered, pulling at her arm.

  She handed it back. ‘Now you just be careful what you gets up to, young Jack, or you’ll be for it!’

  I laughed loudly as I ran off. It seemed to me that I had been ‘for it’ far too much lately. I still didn’t do irony, and besides, nothing mattered any more. I was away from Hampton House, away from boarding, away from the dystopian world of pompous Bernie and his swishing, stinging cane. My all-forgiving mother was back, issuing love and grace in equal measure. Nellie was there, right there, the same as always, laughing, teasing, adding succour to the generous, all-redeeming boundaries of my universe. There would be Aga toast and honey for tea and my grandfather would come in from his glasshouses and lower his great length into the big carver at the end of the table and ask, ‘What you bin up to, boy?’

  * * *

  What I got up to was not intended to be trouble, but often seemed to court it. The law of unintended consequences chose to settle its unfair mantle upon me most of the time. So it was with the Arabian swords.

  Rigid convention unchanged from Victorian days required that at bedtime, bathed, teeth-cleaned, hair brushed and in our pyjamas, dressing gowns and slippers, we were taken to the smoking room to say goodnight to the old boy (born in 1873, he was an immutable Victorian). It was a solemn affair. Nellie would knock on the door before entering, ushering us in in silence.

  That room was a museum of intrigue and fascination for a child, and as I had been told repeatedly throughout my childhood, stric
tly out of bounds. It served as his study and estate office, where he sat at a huge roll-top desk beside the French windows leading out onto a wisteria entwined verandah with steps down onto the smoking-room lawn. Sometimes he would be there, working at his papers, writing letters in his looping copper-plate hand, sometimes sitting in his vast wing chair beside the coal fire, almost always smoking one of his block Meerschaum pipes that sat in a rack beside him. A cigar humidor stood in the corner. The whole room reeked like a 1930s gents’ Piccadilly club.

  We were allowed to sit on the red leather-topped fender for a few minutes only. A brief exchange followed: ‘Well, have you had a nice day?’ ‘Yes, thank you, Grandpa.’ ‘Have you caught any nice butterflies today?’ – my latest passion. ‘Yes, Grandpa, I got a red admiral and a green hairstreak.’ ‘Did you now? Well done, where did you get those?’ ‘The red admiral on the plum trees on the tennis court wall, and the hairstreak in brambles in the School Lane hedge.’ ‘Well done, dear boy, well done.’ Then on tiptoe we would kiss him on his bald head as he leaned forward and patted us fondly on the shoulder. ‘Goodnight, Grandpa.’ And that was that. We would be ushered out.

  Every time we performed this ritual, I spotted some other item of burning fascination. There was the long ivory spiral of a narwhale tusk propped in a corner. A stuffed hairy wild boar piglet was wedged behind the spindle bars of an ornately carved sideboard among rows of leather-bound books and a rank of very ancient pewter plates. Fallow deer antlers topped the bookcase. To one side an old English double-hammer shotgun with brown Damascus barrels straddled the wall. I tiptoed round a world globe on a side table, longing to spin it, and eyed with wonder a ticking barograph with its rotating trace of gentian violet. Little clusters of miniature portraits and silhouettes of family long dead studded another wall. On his desk I spied a long ivory letter opener with a huge curved whale’s tooth mounted in silver for the handle, and the faded skin of an African spotted cat, perhaps an ocelot, flopped sensuously over the back of a chair.