The Dun Cow Rib

by John Lister-Kaye

  That day stands out because in some strange way I had suddenly become an immeasurable fraction more aware both of myself and of the written word. It was a dawning, not of any great revelation – far from it – and precious little to do with religion, but it was a tiny incremental step away from the existential mindlessness and childish impenetrability of my own being. Until that moment my world had been largely defined by the likes, dislikes, rules, decisions and edicts of others without reference either to what I might have thought or wished. This decision was different, not earth-shatteringly different, nor would it change much, but it was mine and mine alone – and perhaps, just perhaps, it was the beginning of the discovery of ME.

  Looking back now, I thank that kind vicar for giving me the chance to read the lesson, for believing in me and giving me something to lift me away from the fear and the hurt of beatings, of Hampton Down, and from the nagging dread of my mother’s illness, and from constantly being in trouble. On my way home I entered that splendid medieval church with brighter eyes and a new spring in my step, determined to do my best.

  It was cool inside and my footsteps echoed from the flagged floor. The massive oak door clunked shut behind me. Parallel arcades of tall, pointed arches framed the nave on both sides, embracing an empty silence. From high windows the dying sun slid golden stripes across the carved pews. An ornately patterned and heavily sculpted timber ceiling of dark oak bore down from high above. Would I like to walk up this aisle to the great carved eagle lectern with most of the village faithful staring at me? Could I make my voice heard? I walked forward to the chancel steps, footsteps echoing in the loaded silence. A wave of self-belief flooded in. The vicar had asked me to read a lesson. ME.

  The lectern was only a few feet away. I stepped up and looked out between the spread wings of the great bird, its rapacious hooked beak and hooded eye half turned toward me, as though it didn’t quite trust what I was up to. I imagined all the villagers sitting there, Mr and Mrs Browne from the ironmongers, Mrs Walsh, Mark and Dizzy Cuff, Mother, Father and Mary too. Perhaps Mr and Mrs Barron would be there with their daughter, Susan. Then in the loudest voice I could manage without shouting, I pealed out the only Isaiah lines I could remember ‘. . . and the weaned child shall put his hand on the cockatrice’ den. They shall not hurt nor destroy in all my holy mountain.’

  Out from the shadows of a side aisle came an old man wearing a flowing black gown. He limped and was stooped with age. ‘’Ullo, young ’un.’ He smiled and nodded. ‘You readin’ Sunday? I’m Mr Morley, the verger. Give you a fright, did I?’

  ‘No, no,’ I said, blushing horribly. ‘Mr Walsh asked me to read later on, for the harvest festival.’

  That night I lay awake. I read and re-read the Isaiah passage. I hadn’t a clue what a cockatrice was, or an asp, and I had no idea why the lion should eat straw like the ox, but I loved the undulating landscape of its images, every rolling syllable. ‘He shall smite the earth with the rod of his mouth, and with the breath of his lips shall he slay the wicked.’ God had spoken. I loved it all.

  * * *

  That summer holidays we spent at the Manor House, where, unforgettably, I would witness an event of biblical dimensions, the chilling ramifications of which would mark a shift in the way I thought about animals and stay with me for life. I have already said that haystacks, sometimes the size of cottages, were a common feature of farm life in those days. Often they were of hay, a store for winter feed for cattle, sheep and horses, and others were skilfully constructed corn-stacks of harvested sheaves – wheat, barley or oats – waiting to be brought in to the thresher. A bulging larder of ripe grain-filled ears, a cereal bonanza for rats and mice.

  At kitchen tea one afternoon Nellie told my grandfather that a call had gone out from the Manor Farm for local boys to attend the dismantling of a large wheat-stack the following morning. ‘You’ll want to go, young Jack,’ she said, making it sound as though it was something not to be missed. ‘Would that be all right, sir?’ to my grandfather.

  ‘Have you ever seen a stack taken down?’ He turned to me, peering over his half-moons.

  ‘No,’ I replied hesitantly, not understanding the significance of the event. ‘Then you must go.’ He was smiling and I thanked him warmly; any excuse to join in with things on the farm always excited me. The conversation ended.

  After tea I asked Nellie what it was about.

  ‘Rats,’ she said. ‘Ooh! I does hate rats.’

  ‘What do you mean, rats?’

  ‘You’ll see. Mind you gets there early.’ I didn’t know what I felt about rats, but the prospect of finding out was an anticipation that bubbled and fizzed within my chest all night long. I couldn’t wait.

  When I arrived at the large stack in the corner of one of the Longbottom fields, the intemperate Manor Farm tenant, Howson, was there with his red David Brown tractor and a large trailer with outward angled hayracks at either end. Two of his men, George and Sid, armed with fierce-looking, two-pronged pitchforks, were standing on the trailer and two more men, whose names I didn’t know, also with pitchforks, had climbed a ladder onto the top of the stack and were unpicking the straw thatch, the waterproof protection for the sheaves beneath. The stack was already surrounded by a gaggle of village boys and men, more arriving all the time, walking and running in, tipping their bicycles onto the hedge and hurrying to join the crowd. The air was loud with their shouts and a general buzz of excitement arose, engulfing us all. Everyone seemed to be armed with stout sticks.

  Once the thatch was thrown aside, the two men on top began to fork the sheaves, sending them flying through the air down to George and Sid, who deftly caught them on their pitchforks and, with a flick of practised wrists, tossed them into place on the trailer. There must have been twenty onlookers by then, forming themselves into a tight cordon around the stack and the trailer, more arriving all the time. I still had no idea what was about to happen.

  When the first layer of sheaves had been thrown, a few mice appeared, darted haphazardly to the edge of the stack and leapt to the ground, scuttling away into the hedge and vanishing. One or two youths swung at them half-heartedly as they passed. Then a rat. A shout went up – ‘Hoy!’ – and men were pointing. The rat hit the ground running and tried to nip past the hobnailed boots of the cordon. A club swung. A hefty swipe felled it with one blow. ‘Hoy!’ again, and ‘Hoy! Look there, and over there!’ Suddenly there were rats bursting out in all directions at once. The scene became a hubbub of excited shouts, wildly swinging clubs and sticks, and rats flying in all directions. ‘Gor! There’s a big ’un!’ and ‘Nice one, Dick! That got the bugger.’ ‘There! Bert, there!’ Another two rats were smartly felled.

  The two men up top never wavered. Their pitchforks stabbed and swung with an easy, unchanging rhythm. George and Sid calmly caught sheaf after flying sheaf, never missing, as the stack on the trailer grew and grew. It was a seamless, ageless ballet, performed with a sensuous and fluid grace, never hurrying, never changing pace, two sheaves flying through the air at once, the pitchforks immediately swinging back to raise another two in a mesmerising tandem of synchronised and apparently effortless skill.

  The rats kept coming, mice darting helter-skelter among them. I was speechless at the sheer numbers. Hundreds of rodents, large and small, perhaps thousands. As each sheaf was lifted, a rat, sometimes two or three, huge ones almost the size of rabbits, middling ones and hordes of youngsters not much bigger than hamsters, seemed to be lurking beneath. They bolted in all directions, swarming so fast and so thick that many escaped untouched. And still they came.

  This was the awesome horde of Samuel the Prophet, visited upon us by the wrath of God. It was a plague, a swarm, a multitude, a host, or a living, surging scourge unlike anything I had witnessed before. It belonged with Moses’ plagues of locusts I had read about in Exodus, and the plagues of blood, flies, frogs and lice, the plague of rats and mice that ‘marred the land of the Philistines’.

  When the trailer was
fully loaded, the ballet ceased. The tractor and trailer departed and the men climbed down. The farmer’s wife arrived with flasks of steaming tea and homemade drop scones, sweets and lemonade for the boys. The men sagged to the stubble and leant against the stack. Boys ran round collecting up dead rats and piling them into a bloody heap. A shout would go up, ‘That ’un’s still alive, look!’ and a cudgel would thwack to finish it off.

  ‘’Ow many’s that, Marty?’ someone called out.

  ‘’Bout four hundred ’n odd,’ came the reply.

  When the tractor returned, the whole riotous affray started all over again. A man walked over to me. ‘You ain’t got a stick, sonny. ’Ere, take this ’un.’ He handed me a weighty blackthorn stick with a lumpy end. I thanked him and swung the cudgel. It felt good. A few minutes later they came again. A big rat, fully twelve inches from nose to tip of tail, came bounding straight at me. ‘Get ’im!’ someone shouted. Instinctively I swung. The rat flew into the air and fell a yard away. I turned it over with my foot. It was twitching, but blood was oozing from its mouth and ears. ‘Look out!’ the shout came again and another big rat dashed between my legs so that I had to swivel and swing at the same time, catching it behind me. It fell dead too, its back broken and its skull crushed. Then another and two more together. Clubs and sticks were flailing in all directions. The horde was dispersing thicker and faster than ever. Many more were escaping through the cordon because they came in twos and threes, too fast to catch. Some I had to stamp on because I had no time to swing the club.

  The nearer the bottom of the stack the men got, the more rats there were. Many had migrated down their tunnels within the sheaves hoping to escape that way rather than breaking cover. At the end, as the last three feet of the stack was whisked up onto the trailer, those remnant hordes finally broke free. It was bedlam. Hundreds of mice and rats burst out together in a swarming, pulsating, leaping, squirming and bounding carpet of grey fur and hairless tails spreading across the trampled and bloodied stubbles at our feet.

  Men and boys, some as young as ten, everyone charged with adrenaline, fired with blood lust, with the craving elation of mob sport, were shouting, laughing and yelling as they stamped and swung in a medieval orgy of death and destruction. I was swept up in it, consumed by the same ghastly waves of urgent and jubilant slaughter that surrounded me. We were rat mad, rat obsessed, rat frenzied, rat drunk, rat crazed. I killed and killed. I stamped on heads, guts burst open, entrails squirted out, the air pierced with the shrieks of dying rats.

  I don’t know how many I killed that day, maybe only twenty or thirty. At the end I was trembling. Some strange and chilling power had rushed in and taken me over, swept me out of my carefree boyhood and into some terrifying, uncontrollable animal impulse. I had become a predator beyond restraint and sanity, a killer overwhelmed with a deviant sadism justified by the enticement of the mob and the universal hatred of rats. It was a feeling I would not forget and which, when some hours later it had subsided, emerged in a confusion of guilt and remorse. It seemed to eclipse everything I had learned and felt about animals until that moment and it cowered uncomfortably in my heart. That night I lay in bed, still tight-chested at the events of the day, but the words I could not dispel, the words ringing in my head and which would not go away, were not mine. They were Isaiah’s – ‘they shall not hurt nor destroy in all my holy mountain’.

  * * *

  We returned to Martock as the long summer holidays drew to a close. The new school loomed. On that first morning my father walked me to the school building opposite the church. It felt strange going to school without a uniform. Boys and girls were walking in from all directions. Up above, on an ornately carved stone shield on the peaked gable above the entrance, were the words:

  Glory to God in the Highest

  MARTOCK

  NATIONAL SCHOOL HOUSE

  ERECTED BY

  PUBLIC & PRIVATE

  CONTRIBUTIONS

  AD 1846

  Jesus said suffer little

  children to come unto me

  ‘You have to find Miss Gibbs and report to her,’ he announced. Then ‘Off you go.’ He stood and watched me disappear through the green arched doorway.

  The building divided into two high-ceilinged classrooms at the front, and a smaller one behind. Mr Barron had the seniors on the left and Miss Gibbs’s class on the right, and a Mrs Hillsden had the youngest children at the rear. A timber and glass partition separated Miss Gibbs’s class from Mr Barron’s, the glass panels too high for us to see through. Light streamed in through high arched windows, wilted and dying wild flowers in jam jars on the sills. There was a walled playground at the back with lean-to corrugated iron lavatories, boys one end, girls the other, a thin wooden partition between them, where small holes had been bored for prying eyes. Each classroom had rows of desks and hard wooden benches, largely unchanged for the 109 years since it was built.

  Most children had gone straight through to the playground. Their shrieking and racketing outside shredded the air. A hand bell jangled angrily. They filed back in, pushing and shoving, moving to their designated desks in a ragged babble of broad Somerset voices. Miss Lily Gibbs stood at her own desk at the front. She was short, perhaps fifty, well-padded and greying, her hair pinned back, glasses sliding down her nose. She had a kindly face that reminded me of Nellie, but with a strong jaw, and sagging skin only loosely draped over the skull beneath. Then a roll-call.

  Names I had never heard before, but which would become indelibly familiar as I began to engage with Martock village life: Tucker, Hebditch, Brooks, Chant, Gould, Cornelius, Yandle, Florey, Sparrow, Morey, Palmer, Paull . . . many of whom are still deeply embedded within the district sixty years later. These were the children of farmers and farm labourers, shopkeepers, glove makers, a tent manufacturer, a maker of hen houses, timber mill workers and road menders, postmen . . . all the local industries and regular services of rural life, including the schoolmaster’s black-haired daughter Susan, who studiously avoided my eyes as she stalked to her desk. Two immediate differences from Hampton Down struck me that first day: no semblance of uniformity – children wore anything, ranging widely from boys in scruffy shorts and jeans to tidy skirts and blouses for the girls – and the habitual use of Christian names, something it took me a while to adjust to.

  Miss Gibbs puffed out her cheeks and spoke slowly. She introduced me as the only new boy in her class. Twenty pairs of eyes drilled into the back of my head. Boys and girls. GIRLS. I had never been to school with girls before. Despite having a sister, I didn’t know anything about girls. Mary, older by two years, had also been sent away to boarding school. We had grown up on gradually but persistently divergent tracks. In the holidays she did her things with her friends, while I did mine, usually on my own. I don’t think either of us knew it at the time, but when at six I was sent way to Hampton House, our lives had begun to move apart, almost never fully intersecting again. It was just the way things were. Suddenly there were girls all round me. Little girls from the age of six, girls my age, and girls quite a bit older, girls in huddles whispering conspiratorially, girls crying, sulking, giggling, bossing and screaming at the tops of their thin, penny-whistle voices. Whether I liked it or not I was going to have to get to know girls.

  15

  An innocence exposed

  It was different. Oh yes, different, capital ‘D’ Different. So different that through those first weeks in Miss Gibbs’s class I sat in bewildered silence, unable to take it all in. Different dress, different voices, different rules, sounds, smells, facilities, lessons, totally different behaviour and codes of discipline, and, I would not properly grasp until years later, utterly different pupil, parent and teacher expectations. Each day I ran all the way home to tell my mother about it.

  Lessons were straightforward but never memorable or stimulating, teaching the barest necessities for rural life. Reading and writing were easy, although some children struggled agonisingly. We did no French or L
atin, but I have a dim recollection of some geography about paddy fields in China. Maths was called Arithmetic and was adding, subtracting, dividing and tedious multiplication tables we had to learn by heart and then stand up and recite to the whole class in a sing-songy voice.

  The principal teaching aid was a blackboard, while we wrote with pencils in exercise books with plain manila covers, the tart savoury of chewed wood and lead habitually on our tongues. I don’t remember possessing a textbook of any kind. Some children who seemed to find the whole educational process a mystery – not to say a waste of time – were well behind, still grappling with the basics of reading and writing at ten and eleven years old. I overheard Miss Gibbs tell Mr Barron that my reading was advanced, which gave me a funny inner buzz.

  Books were an escape from which I could garner self-confidence and serenity, and, I now realise, a shield against the chill winds of fear that had exposed my nakedness at Hampton Down and made me shiver with perpetual apprehension. I was allowed to read on my own while she battled with those less proficient. They were given chalk and slates and told to copy what she had written on the blackboard. Then she walked round with a damp cloth, rubbing out their ill-attended endeavours while the mists of education swirled past, high over their heads. We heard the same entreaty issuing over and over again: ‘No, Mervin, that’s no good, try again and pay attention this time.’ Mervin, we all knew, could not have cared less.

  For my birthday I had just been given Robert Ballantyne’s The Dog Crusoe and His Master, a rip-roaring tale of the prairies, of settling the Wild West, of Redskins and the redoubtable courage and loyalty of Crusoe. I loved that book with an intensity of emotion that brought me to tears over and over again, embodying a passion for freedom and wildness already deeply anchored within my psyche. I longed for those sessions when I could transport myself away from the stuffy classroom to thrilling, far-off plains and Red Indian tepees, to stalking deer in the woods and facing down towering, snarling grisly bears. Later, at home in the long summer evenings, I could escape into the humid Somerset orchards and fields in search of those same adventures. Grisly bears there may not have been, but it didn’t matter. There were rabbits, hares and grey squirrels to stalk and dark thickets to explore, where imaginary Indians might easily be lurking. Primed with such fizzing expectations, my heart would leap when the occasional cock pheasant burst from beneath my feet with all the shock and alarm of a wolf breaking from its lair.