The Dun Cow Rib

by John Lister-Kaye

  Sally Franklin came in from the scullery, arms dripping with soapsuds. ‘I ’eard what you seen, Jack. That’ll be they Paget boys from over Dunchurch way. They’re a bad lot, they are. My Tom says they do their baitin’ in a barn late at night. There’s plenty round ’ere go to their meetin’s. ’Ee went along once. ’Orrible ’ee said it were. All blood and yellin’. ’Ee come away quick.’

  This shocking revelation made me long to learn about badgers. At Allhallows that first term I asked Mr Wallace about badgers on the cliffs. ‘It’s excellent habitat,’ he had replied, nodding enthusiastically. ‘Badgers do well here.’ I asked if anyone had ever studied them.

  ‘No. No, I don’t believe they have. It’d make a good project. Are you interested?’ Just the answer I’d hoped for.

  ‘YES SIR. Yes, please.’

  ‘Then first you need to read Dr Ernest Neal’s excellent monograph, The Badger. There’s a copy in the biology lab.’ That night in the dorm I read it under the blankets with a torch, hanging on every word.

  Mustelidae. The weasel family. Otters, badgers, weasels, stoats, polecats and pine martens. Meles meles, the badger. The odd one out, the only one significantly different: un-weasel-like and the biggest and strongest member of the mustellid tribe in Britain, an omnivorous weasel-bear, a digging weasel-bear with a formidable bite. On witnessing the death of a sow badger, T.H. White had called them ‘the last of the English bears . . . Her home was tidy, her habits industrious by night, her claws and forearms agriculturally strong.’ I was on a mission, determined to find badgers of my own.

  To the east of the Pumping Station, a deep gulley known as Charton Goyle separated the cliffs from the rough fields of Charton Farm. The land rose steeply to the crest of a bank crowned by a dark conifer plantation. I knew about badger paths, their habitual foraging routes from their setts night after night, some so well worn that you could mistake them for human trails. I searched for the giveaway signs: the path passing under a log or through a fence, black and grey hairs caught on wire, scrapes and snuffles in the grass where the badgers had grubbed out a beetle or an earthworm, or dug out a vole nest with their long, scouring claws.

  I wandered through the farm fields following their paths back toward the cliffs. They led into the conifer plantation known as the Pheasantry. I could see the pad marks in the mud, counted the five claw indentations from the digging front feet –‘agriculturally strong’. And there they were. Badger setts. The triumph of ownership flooded in. My badger setts, mine. Huge mounds like mechanical earthworks, chalky clay heaped outside the entrances to a dozen or more dark burrows, spilling down the bank for many feet. ‘Sometimes’, Dr Neal had written, ‘setts are hundreds of years old with dozens of entrances leading to a maze of tunnels deep underground.’ I felt a huge buzz of pride.

  As the weeks passed that summer term I located many more setts spread across the Landslip. I mapped them and showed them to Mr Wallace. He was impressed. ‘Why don’t you try some badger watching?’

  ‘Would I be allowed to be out at night, sir?’

  ‘Don’t worry. Leave it to me.’

  A few days later, between lessons, a maths master called Mr Barr stopped me in a corridor. ‘So you want to go badger watching, do you?’ It took me by surprise.

  ‘Er, yes, sir.’ I stammered. ‘I do rather.’

  ‘All right, boy. I’ll take you.’ I was astonished – the last thing I had expected. ‘Do you know where to go?’

  ‘Yessir. It’s not very far, but we’d have to be out till quite late, sir. About ten o’clock.’ He smiled genially, clearly amused by the whole idea. ‘That’s OK. I’ll clear it with your housemaster. How about Saturday night?’

  And so it happened. It was a flop – a monumental flop. Mr Leslie Barr, known to us in tasteless schoolboy parody as ‘Larry’ after a cartoon character called Larry the Lamb, was a distinctly un-lamblike, bluff, middle-aged widower with a military bearing and a bristly moustache whose alternative nocturnal forays I would get to know much better in the years ahead for another reason altogether. He was a kind and decent fellow, but with a famously short fuse, capable of exploding into a seething rant at a moment’s notice. It was all bark. He bore neither malice nor grudges. If you had angered him, infringed one of his many fragile disciplinarian sensitivities and received the full fusillade of his rage, within minutes he seemed to have forgotten all about it and was genial all over again.

  The evening came. He looked the part in a battle dress top with his trousers tucked into his socks and a pork pie hat on his head. He carried a shooting stick with a leather seat. The weather was set fair. Gnats danced in the cooling air. The sun had long slid below the western horizon, leaving a trail of fire-fringed clouds in its silent wake. We walked quietly down the path.

  We settled in. I sat on a log and Larry perched himself on his shooting seat stuck firmly in the mud of the bank, about fifteen yards from the sett entrance. It had never occurred to me to brief him on what he could and couldn’t do. Surely he would know, or perhaps Mr Wallace had instructed him? Maybe he’d been badger watching before. He would know that you had to sit still and be quiet, wouldn’t he? I was wrong.

  He fidgeted, shuffled his feet, swatted gnats, coughed loudly, blew his nose and then, as if to guarantee failure, he lit his pipe. A fog of yellow tobacco smoke hung in the static air. I longed to tell him to put it away and keep quiet, but didn’t. I was too raw, too young, too naive, too polite, too diffident, too unsure of what a fourteen-year-old schoolboy could say to a master thirty years his senior. So we sat there for two and a half hours, Larry puffing away on his pipe and me cursing him to hell and damnation under my breath. No self-respecting badger would have come anywhere near us and, anyway, if any animals had approached our entrance they would have taken one sniff and headed back underground to an exit well out of sight many yards away. I was too shy even to say, ‘Let’s call it a day.’

  ‘Well, that was a rum do!’ he suddenly announced in his gruff military way. We trudged back in silence.

  Yet Larry Barr had done me a huge favour. He had established a precedent and delivered mildly dotty respectability to a nocturnal activity that otherwise, and had it been proposed solely by me, would certainly have raised deeply sinister suspicions. Whether or not I sought permission to be out at night (which I bothered with less and less as the terms ticked by) really no longer mattered. If challenged, I had the perfect alibis. Entirely unwittingly, Larry Barr and Tom Wallace had legitimised both badger watching and my nocturnal wanderings.

  Not long afterwards, I saw my first badger. In the years to come I would see dozens of them and would raise three orphaned cubs given to me by a local farmer at Dowlands on the Seaton side of the cliffs. I named them Shadrach (Shad), Meshach (Mes) and Abednego (Nego), rescued not quite from a fiery furnace but from the unpredictable and unstable geological forces of the cliffs. A group of setts had been ripped apart by a landslide and the unweaned cubs had somehow struggled to the surface unscathed. He never discovered what happened to the adults, perhaps buried alive. I raised those three cubs and delivered them back to the cliffs at seven months old, releasing them into some abandoned setts where I hoped they would survive. I think it’s unlikely; badgers are very territorial and chase out intruders, often viciously. But back in 1960, in those days of far fewer options, it seemed to be the right thing to do.

  What Shad, Mes and Nego did achieve was to cement my love of the Pheasantry badgers in particular and all mustelids, the whole weasel family, in general. I would come to know their individual stripy faces; I gave them names – Fluffy, Dozy, who emerged on summer evenings and went to sleep in the sun, a sow called Sneezy, and Battleface, covered in scars, Lousy, because he scratched so much, short-tempered Snappy . . . and so on. My field notebook quickly filled with sketches of their face patterns and scars. And inevitably, week by week they came to know me and my scent, eventually scarcely bothering to glance in my direction. Playful cubs ran over my feet. As if to claim me
as part of her own territory, Sneezy even thoughtfully delivered a droplet of strong-smelling amber musk from her anal scent gland onto my boot, the ultimate badger accolade.

  The cliffs and the Pheasantry badgers were, for the most part, a happy saga of natural history study laced with an adrenal frisson of nocturnal escapade. I was hooked, a badger junkie. I longed for dry summer evenings, thought about little else all afternoon. As soon as prep was over I was off and away, always alone, slipping quickly through the lengthening shadows of the trees, school and boring lessons and beastly, sadistic prefects shedding from my brain like thistledown, off into the beneficent sanctuary of the woods unseen, unheard and unmissed. Badger emergence was usually around eight and I would try to be back for lights out at nine-thirty. If I was late, I could wheel out my trump card – Mr Barr. It never failed.

  * * *

  Our dormitory of nearly twenty boys was at the top of a flight of wooden stairs on the third floor. Immediately opposite our door on the other side of the passage was the door to our house matron’s room. She was a tall, well-configured but certainly not beautiful spinster in her late thirties called Miss Joan Metherell. She wore glasses with upturned wings and was bossy by nature, exactly what was needed to keep the domestic affairs of sixty rowdy teenagers in line. She darned our socks and tended to our laundry in austere sufferance.

  In my second year we became aware of the clubby aroma of pipe tobacco lingering on our staircase. Masters never came near our end of the main building and we were unsure exactly who this unwelcome trespasser might be. One night I slipped out to visit my badgers, not watching but just in the wood with them, sharing it by association and enjoying the night sounds of tawny owls and barking foxes, and just occasionally stumbling across a badger snuffling towards me. It was a nocturnalism I was learning by rote, time well served, that would run deep and stay with me for life. That night I was out for about an hour and a half.

  On my way in again, carrying my shoes for silence and halfway up the back stairs, I heard someone coming up behind me from below. I slipped into the shadows of a corridor and waited. It was Larry Barr. His tobacco aura followed him like a shadow. On the second landing he stopped, apparently to listen, only a few feet away from me. Then, moving furtively, he ascended the stairs again. I was intrigued, so at a safe distance I followed. The stairs spiralled upward in a tight circle. At the top he stopped to listen again before taking the last few steps to Joan Metherell’s door. I heard a faint tap and the door opened. A slice of light cut across the landing and Larry Barr slid inside. The door closed. It was nearly eleven o’clock. Hmmm, I thought. Interesting. Very interesting.

  I stood outside for a moment or two, just long enough to hear low music from a gramophone drown out any possibility of eavesdropping. I told the others, of course, hot with such splendidly salacious gossip. In no time we had branded Joan and Larry an item – this in an age of rigid propriety, when intimacy between adults was unspoken and extramarital sex was still severely frowned upon. To us it was a source of endless prurient speculation. We tied cotton threads across the top of the stairs and stuck thin slivers of Sellotape on Joan’s door once Larry was inside so that we could see whether the seal was broken during the night. By these means we were able to chart the frequency of his clandestine visits. They were as regular as clockwork. Saturdays, Tuesdays and Thursdays. The possibility that three nights a week carnal knowledge might be acting out so close to our dormitory door drove us to delirious heights of pre-pubescent inventiveness.

  I suspect that the reality was profoundly disappointing. It was a courtship, yes, without a doubt, but I think the overpowering shroud of propriety of the day and the dread of being caught in flagrante by us boys probably denied la pénétration on the premises. It pleases me to record that Larry and Joan would eventually marry and enjoy many decades of companionship, both living well into old age.

  * * *

  My badger-watching escapades were not always the idyllic pastoral preoccupation I have described. On my right arm I bear the scars of a savage badger bite. Returning one moonlit night from a successful visit to the Pheasantry, I was stopped in my tracks by an unfamiliar sound. It was a sound laden with distress, an ugly growling, whimpering punctuated with little yelps of pain. At first I thought it must be a dog, but then a rising tide of horror reared up within me. I knew what it was. Mr Wallace had told me that some locals in remote areas regularly snared badgers.

  I ran to the hedge and broke through, snagging myself on thorns. The moon filtered through the trees as I ran along the edge of the wood, swinging my little torch from side to side. And there it was.

  The undergrowth was flayed flat in all directions; the badger had its back to me in the centre of a ring of bare earth, a virtual crater, where the wretched animal was still digging frantically with its front feet. It was on a path. This was a badger out and about, on its rounds, heading along its habitual route.

  A stout, many-stranded wire, as taught as a piano string, led from the badger’s middle to a steel peg hammered deep into the ground. The unhappy animal had been there since the previous night, struggling in all directions, and had laid the ground waste with its desperate scrabbling. Finally it had resorted to what badgers do best, digging. It had dug and dug. Hopelessly and utterly in vain it had excavated a great pointless hollow of despair while the noose around its middle twisted ever tighter and tighter. It lay in its pit of exhaustion, still lamely digging with its front paws, suspended by the wire, scrabbling nowhere.

  I ran to it. Blurry little eyes looked up at me from a striped face muddied with earth and saliva. Its gums and lip flanges were torn and bloodied from gnawing at the wire, at the roots, at stems and sticks, at the steel peg, at anything within its tethered reach. Its breath was shallow and laboured, a stentorian wheezing groan. The animal was beyond fear, crazed with the desperation of its plight through the long hours of torture. I had never seen a badger in a snare before and I was aghast. Common sense vanished. All I wanted was to set it free.

  First I tugged at the peg. I tugged and heaved, but it was driven home with a sledgehammer. I grabbed the hawser around the peg and tried to bend it back and forth, but it was far stronger than my adolescent hands. I turned back to the badger. For the first time I saw that it was one of mine. It was the mature boar called Battleface; the scars on its nose and lower jaw gave him away.

  The wire noose had drawn the badger’s middle into a small circle a fraction of its normal girth, twisting round and round, tightening and tightening, the noose winding ever smaller so that the blood supply was cut off to its hindquarters. The normally powerful back legs lay limp and useless. In that moment of naivety and swirling emotions it never occurred to me that the badger wouldn’t understand that I was a friend. I knelt beside it. I ran my hands up the twisted wire to where it disappeared into the thick grey fur, feeling for a weakness where I could work on it.

  In one sweeping lunge Battleface heaved up and round on its front feet and clenched its jaws fast onto my forearm. My yell echoed through the wood. But the badger did not let go. Badgers don’t – that’s what they’re famous for. Their permanently articulated jaws deliver a terrible bite with a relentless grip. That’s why badger baiting was and sadly still is seen by some criminal and mindless thugs to be a ‘sport’. Battleface’s teeth had stabbed through my jacket, pullover and my shirt. I felt the long, curved canines scrape past the bone as the bite closed on the muscle just below my elbow. The jaws clamped like a lock.

  I cried out. But the badger held tight. I tried to stand up and pull away but it was too heavy and it hurt even more to pull. Fear flooded in. But I was also in luck. In its pain and exhausted desperation it turned to bite at the wire again. The release was wonderful, my own pain blanked by the rush of adrenaline, and unaware in the darkness of my own blood running freely down my arm. Now much more wary, I took off my jacket and smothered the wretched animal’s head, quickly kneeling on it to pin it down so that I could work at the wire. Bat
tleface had done most of the work. Those formidable jaws had almost chewed it through. With a dozen determined bends it snapped. A few seconds later I had unwound the last twisted strands and was able to pull the snare clear. I stood up and lifted the jacket off.

  I have never forgotten the sight of that badger shuffling off into the wood. Its hindquarters were almost useless, dragged along by its powerful digging forelegs. I think it must have made it back to the setts where I suspect it died of internal organ damage deep underground. I’m sure the blood supply had been cut off too severely for too long. I never saw Battleface again, but to this day he lives on in the scars on my arm.

  21

  Ring of Bright Water

  While I was still an impressionable fifteen-year-old helping out as assistant librarian at school, I noticed that Gavin Maxwell’s global bestseller Ring of Bright Water was immediately taken out again after it was returned. It was a crystalline moment I have never forgotten: I was sitting on a bench seat in the sunny corner of the library reading the fashionable novel of the moment, Giuseppe di Lampedusa’s The Leopard, and was happily engrossed in Sicily’s dust, bed bugs, chapels and chandeliers.

  The full extent of Maxwell’s personal complications would only be exposed to the world at large in his lyrically poignant autobiographical account of the remote cottage hideaway Camusfeàrna and his pet otters. It was a book that would ensnare the public imagination for many different reasons and at many levels: its luminous descriptions of a landscape and an enchanting wildlife most people didn’t know existed; its revealing honesty about Maxwell himself, about his esoteric upbringing and his feelings toward the otters; about the tragic circumstances of the death of his beloved otter, Mijbil; and the obscure, Robinson Crusoe lifestyle that was such an antithesis to the hum-drum, workaday existence of the vast majority of the post-war Western world. It would become a publishing phenomenon, selling well over two million copies, translated into nineteen languages and, to his intense chagrin, contorted into a very successful cuddly-animal-cum-romantic-tragedy feature film starring Virginia McKenna and Bill Travers.