The Dun Cow Rib

by John Lister-Kaye

  ‘Yeah, course. Come on, let’s go to the Slabs.’ Piers leapt to his feet and we were off again, running the steep shingle contours, slipping and sliding as the pebbles gave way beneath us, falling and rolling in helpless laughter, leaping up and running on towards Axmouth in the west. It was a whole new dimension of freedom, something I had never experienced before, just as the novelist John Fowles would portray it: ‘a triumphant denial of contemporary reality, an apparently sub-tropical paradise . . . not a roof to be seen, not a road, not a sign of man’.

  The Slabs were just that. Vast slabs of flat, twenty-million-year-old Jurassic blue lias, a tough, compressed amalgam of limestone and mud, exposed at low tide, stretching far out into the bay. They covered many acres and had been polished smooth by centuries of wave action. As we meandered across them, fiddler crabs scuttled away and vanished into weedy cracks, and tiny gobies and blennies shot across shallow sun-warmed pools like computer cursors zooming around a screen. That afternoon the kingdom of the foreshore was all ours. I was excited and exhilarated; a hot fizz of elation coursed through my whole body, an intoxicating fix of sublime well-being.

  There, in their uncounted thousands, were the massive spiral fossils of ammonites, antecedent cephalopod molluscs of the present day Nautillus, some of them measuring several feet across, dotted about like oversized Catherine wheels. I had never seen anything like it. They were a revelation. Awe and a flushed sense of discovery collided as we ran from whorl to whorl. We kicked off our shoes and paddled barefoot through the shallows of this tepid marine wonderland, shouting, ‘Over here! This one’s huge.’ The gentle wavelets of the flooding tide lapped at our ankles, warmed by the sun-soaked lias beneath.

  For me, it was a new sort of exploring. The cliffs were a frontier, a few hundred acres of real wilderness – such a rare phenomenon in Britain – where nature had grabbed the chance to pioneer a landscape handed back after thousands of years of human occupation. In just 120 years, with all the dazzling panache of true, uninterrupted biological succession, it had established a new woodland climax. Its bare rock terraces had witnessed the universal struggle for dominance from every tiny microscopic organism up to the glorious undulating canopy of the ash trees themselves. The sense of wildness was overwhelming, evoking an entirely new response, a comprehension of the wider world as lovingly invested in the immeasurable abstract as in the measurable reality, and which held within it something akin to rapture. I had never experienced true wilderness before and I wouldn’t understand its real significance for many months, but slowly, very slowly, that reality would unfurl before my eyes.

  We had seen a few gulls wheeling overhead and a roe deer had crashed away from us in alarm halfway down to the beach, but that was all in the way of animal life. I never managed to interest Piers in natural history, but I shall always remain grateful to him for that dramatic, unforgettable induction, that wild, abandoned baptism, not by fire but by sheer exhilarating, devil-may-care rejection of any sense of caution or self-preservation in a place that called for nothing less. In his company life at once became a thrilling and uplifting challenge. It opened my eyes and my mind to the endless possibilities presented by the luxuriant, living jungles of the Allhallows cliffs. It was as though that heightened freedom had shown me another view of the natural world, a view I would never forget. When, late that afternoon, we turned for home, toiling back uphill to the school, I fell silent and dragged my feet. I didn’t want it to end. As Wordsworth had it: ‘For I have learned / To look on nature, not as in the hour / Of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes / The still, sad music of humanity.’

  * * *

  There was a school natural history society – at last – with all of eleven boys signed up, but eleven was perfectly good enough for me. It met on Wednesday evenings once a fortnight and had a field trip one or twice a term at most. For the rest, the members were left to their own devices and to foster their own interests. But there was one shining highlight, which, once I located it properly in my second term, became a driving force for the next five years.

  The society was overseen by the director of biology, Tom Wallace, who was also a serious naturalist and an expert mycologist. I quickly discovered that he was a charismatic teacher who responded electrically to real enthusiasm in his students. He would become a mentor throughout my school days and a valued friend for the next thirty-five years, until his death in his nineties. While the general companionship of the natural history society was comforting, I lost no time in working out that direct contact with Mr Wallace was infinitely more rewarding.

  One of his non-school responsibilities was to the Nature Conservancy, the government agency in charge of all National Nature Reserves. The Axmouth–Lyme Regis Undercliffs NNR was his personal bailiwick, where he was in charge of biological recording and general overseeing of the designated 800 acres between the clifftop and the sea, with a public footpath running the seven miles through the middle of it. By offering to help him with that task I could further my own interests at the same time as arriving at a special status with my mentor.

  There was no end to his encouragement: preparing moth, butterfly and beetle collections; pressing wild flowers between sheets of blotting paper in his heavy cast-iron Victorian plant press; cleaning skulls and bones in vats of bleach; collecting fossils of ammonites and belemnites, sharks’ teeth and holaster sea urchins; bird watching; identifying fungi; learning how to make proper biological observations and submitting records. That ongoing engagement with the statutory NNR became a constant, a dependable absolute that I came to rely on by day and night – a whole other reason for being at Allhallows.

  If my father had known that the school was inadvertently directing me away from a more conventional education, I think he might have intervened. But he didn’t. He knew very little. Such was his preoccupation with my mother’s health and his dedication to his own business and family affairs that he saw little need to watch over his errant son’s progress. Besides, natural history as a hobby had been an accepted norm for country boys for generations. He thought I would grow out of it. So did just about everyone else.

  My father was also struggling with an extremely difficult decision. His father was dying. At eighty-eight my grandfather was bed-bound and wretched. He had openly declared that he’d had enough. We all knew it was coming. Whenever the phone rang my father jumped to get to it first. Every weekend he drove the 170 miles north to the Manor House. When home from school I went with him. To me it was much the same, the same freedom, the same fun and laughter in the kitchens, the same old Nellie. ‘My, my, you have growed up, young Jack. Next thing I knows you’ll be courtin’.’ But there was also a hovering inevitability and the unspoken questions everyone was avoiding. Would we move there? Surely, we would. Surely the grip of centuries would bind us to it, come what may. I didn’t dare ask. I couldn’t imagine life without the house, the farm, the woods, the Longbottom meadows, Nellie’s porridge on winter mornings and Aga toast for tea. And then it happened. A phone call to my housemaster. ‘John, your grandfather has died. Your father is sending someone to collect you in the morning. You will need your Sunday suit.’

  I was sixteen and over six feet tall. My voice had long since broken and I was shaving every day. The urgent current of adulthood was sparking through my veins. The drive back to Bartonfield was a desert of barren silence. Mother pale and drawn, Mary in tears. The next morning we all left for the Manor House.

  Nellie met us at the front door. She was composed, but her eyes were red-rimmed. Sally Franklin told me she had been crying for three days. Nellie took my hand and led me straight into the drawing room, where the old man was laid out in his huge coffin. He was dressed in a pale blue satin suit with mother of pearl buttons. She leant forward and kissed him on the forehead. ‘Don’t he look peaceful?’ she sighed. I had never seen a dead man before. In the dining room my father and uncle received a procession of tenants and villagers who had come to pay their respects. They came all day. In a
heroic bid to overcome the sadness of the hour, he laughed and joked with farmers and workmen he’d known all his life, no hint of the long faces and sighs from the rest of us as he dished out glasses of port, Nellie bustling backwards and forwards with trays of scones loaded with jam. I sneaked off to check that the Dun Cow rib was still in place. It was. A wave of relief flooded over me. For a ghastly moment, I had feared there was worse to come.

  On the day of the funeral all morning the church bell tolled its doleful message across the village. The family assembled in our Sunday best and stood waiting in the hall until the vicar arrived in his vestments, billowing spinnaker-like in a bitter wind. My mother invisible behind a black veil. The pallbearers shouldered the old man out onto the gravel. He weighed nineteen stone and even with eight of them they struggled. We trailed along behind. When we passed through the white gates onto the lane I was astonished to see bouquets of flowers and wreaths lining the path all the way from the lych-gate through the graveyard to the church.

  I had never seen it full before. More and more villagers were arriving all the time and the lines of flowers spread further down the lane. ‘O God our help in ages past’ and ‘Rock of ages, cleft for me’ lifted to the leaden February clouds, alarming the sparrows that hopped in and out through a broken pane in a high nave window.

  Looking back all these years later, I am fully aware that what we were experiencing that day was a rural ritual that had remained largely unchanged since the Middle Ages. The funeral of the lord of the manor was one of the squirearchy of Old England’s last hurrahs. It was a day out for everyone, young and old. There would be an extravagant tea in the village hall, beer and skittles in the evening. That the old boy was also a baronet simply added lustre to his name. Later my father told me that a thousand people had turned out that day.

  * * *

  When I returned to school a few days later, I was surprised to find that everyone knew. One of the masters had cut my grandfather’s obituary from The Times and posted it on the school noticeboard. It was the first time in my life that I had felt self-conscious about my family. ‘Hey, Liss. Is your dad a sir now?’ I didn’t know what to say. I was apparently interesting not just because I was a nature addict, which I was used to, but because I had now been re-labelled, shut in a locked box whether I liked it or not, and someone had thrown away the key. The world had shifted beneath my feet. Some things would never be the same again. It would take me many years to understand that people did not accept you for what you really were, but only for what you were perceived to be.

  For the most part, after a few days my friends and the other boys in my house took little notice, which suited me fine. Slowly the mantle of amateur naturalist reasserted itself, and partly as a diversionary tactic I began to encourage it. From time to time boys and masters would bring me injured birds that had flown into windows or been hit by cars, or dazed hedgehogs in a box. I don’t know why I was expected to be able to cope with these casualties, but my reputation somehow preceded me and I just got on with it.

  One spring term a boy found a pair of newborn twin roe deer fawns in deep bracken down the cliffs. Instead of leaving them alone – which is what he should have done – he gathered them up in his arms and brought them back to school. They were exquisitely beautiful, golden fur with lines of white spots down their backs, long gangly legs, huge eyes and ears, and twitching liquorice noses. When I said, ‘You idiot. The mother won’t accept them back now they’ve been handled,’ he was offended and dumped them on me so that I had to rear them myself and somehow try to return them to the wild.

  I had never reared roe fawns before and I immediately got it wrong. One ailed and died within a few days, and I thought I was going to lose the other one too so I decided to try a crude post-mortem on the dead twin to see if I could find out why. I discovered that it was hideously constipated, its bowel distended and blocked solid in a long black line. On examining the back end of its living twin I accidentally stimulated a sudden outpouring of dung, also hard and clotted together, which didn’t seem right. Then I remembered that I had watched a roe doe suckling its fawn in the woods at home and had observed that the doe nuzzled and licked the fawn’s bottom as it suckled. Perhaps that’s what I have to do, I thought. It worked. Every day, every time I bottle-fed the surviving fawn with a diluted cow’s milk and glucose mix, I also gently massaged its back end with my fingers. The result was electrifying. Not only did it stimulate the bowel to work, but the fawn became energised and fed greedily.

  The school possessed some semi-derelict farm buildings below the cricket pitches and we used them more or less as we pleased. Some became illicit smoking dens and I often saw furtive groups of boys sneaking in and out in the dusky evenings. The disused dairy made a perfect hideaway for my various animal charges. Over the years I raised orphaned badger cubs, roe fawns, tawny owlets, a brood of eleven mallard, grey squirrels, rabbits, and leverets and a fox cub, all hidden away in those old buildings. At three months old, I was able to release the well-grown roe fawn back into the wild ash woods of the cliffs. I don’t know whether it survived, but I like to think that I had given it a chance.

  * * *

  And then there was Goat Island and the Chasm. After that very wet summer and autumn in 1839, the chalk cliff had fractured easily through the clifftop farm, skidded on the clay, and split away in a massive rift. A whole chunk of Devon farmland broke free and slid down towards the sea. It became known as Goat Island and the gap, three-quarters of a mile long, 150 feet deep and 240 feet wide, as the Chasm. This great gulf rendered the island inaccessible except with great difficulty, so it was abandoned to wild nature, which, with entirely predictable consequences, lost no time in taking it over.

  Nature’s default is woodland; someone once described it to me as ‘God’s best thought’. On alkaline rocks such as chalk and limestone, the common ash, Fraxinus excelsior, outcompetes other species and becomes the dominant tree. When I first fought my way through the bramble tangle of the Chasm and zigzagged up the steep escarpment onto Goat Island to set tentative foot on its thin woodland soils, I was immediately enthralled. The ash woods, 120 years old, were the wildest woods I had ever seen.

  In the absence of grazing animals, no wild fires and without the interfering hand of man, the trees had germinated naturally from wind-scattered seed. They had surged upwards to the light, shading out competition so that each tree stood in its own private arena of influence, branches extended to their fullest reach and huge rounded crowns developing refined hemispheres of greenery. When seen from the clifftop above, they appeared like a gently undulating quilt of impenetrable jungle, appealing, enticing and beckoning. But from below, when I struggled in through the bramble tangle, it was impossible to tell where I was. It was a true wilderness, carrying with it all the heart-thumping uncertainty and excitement of a real frontier.

  I quickly discovered that while the ash trees hogged most of the light, other shrubs and lesser trees also thrived in their own precise and particular niches. There were spindle trees, with their bright scarlet four-lobed fruits awarding a harlot’s glamour to the shady depths, as well as handsome turkey oaks with glossy, deeply lobed leaves, scabby-skinned sycamores, soft-barked elders bearing clusters of fruit in the rich plum of venous blood, and the prickly evergreen canopy of holm oaks. Great banks of shiny hart’s tongue fern lolled among bulging clumps of male fern, revelling in the humid shade of the woodland. The more delicate fronds of soft shield and broad buckler ferns crowded around the roots of ash trees and among mosses whose names and needs I would strive to learn in the years to come. But plants were not what really excited me in those formative years. It was wildlife that flooded and coloured my dreams, the animals and birds I had begun to understand at Martock and the Manor House. I knew they were there and I longed to find them for myself.

  20

  The Pheasantry badgers

  When I went to Allhallows, I had never seen a living badger. Like everyone else in the West Count
ry I had witnessed their corpses muddied and bloodied on roadsides. I had collected their skulls and bones, made plaster casts of their five-toed pads and found their deep, dank setts in the woods around my home. I’d driven Nellie and my mother to distraction by boiling up putrid heads on the Aga and filling their kitchens with foul-smelling steam.

  I had even stumbled across a gang of farm labourers digging out badgers for sport. I had lingered to watch, shock and fascination clashing behind my eyes. A terrier was underground yelping frantically. Another strained at the end of its leash. Two men dug furiously, sandy earth flying. Two more stood by with shovels and thick hessian sacks. Large iron ‘tongs’ lay on the earth beside them. They dragged the terrier out by its stumpy tail. As he reached for the tongs one man turned to me and scowled. ‘This ’int no place fer kids. You get on ’ome.’ I walked slowly away, constantly looking back. ‘On ’ome, I told ’ee,’ he shouted, waving angrily.

  I knew they were up to no good. As I left the wood I saw their bicycles against the hedge at a field gate, a motorbike and sidecar parked nearby. Overcome by the need to know, I stayed. A wartime pillbox stood a few yards from the junction of three lanes, a perfect hide. Half an hour dragged by. They came laughing and joking, two men carrying sacks bound at the neck with twine. The sacks bulged and bounced on the grass. One man dumped them with their tools into the sidecar. Another dragged the terriers away, still yapping hysterically as they rode off.

  I ran into the kitchen and jabbered my breathless tale to Nellie. ‘I think they had two badgers in those sacks. What were they going to do with them? Where were they going?’

  ‘Ooh, now I think they men are cruel. They go baiting they poor beasts wi’ dogs.’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘For bettin’, young Jack. That’s what for. It’s a shame, I tell you. A right shame.’