The Dun Cow Rib

by John Lister-Kaye

  It took fourteen hours in theatre, during which there was crisis after crisis of uncontrolled haemorrhage. More clots leaked away. Twice Ross had to go back into her heart to try to stem the bleeding. Afterwards he told me bleakly that if he had known her heart’s full condition he would never have attempted the operation. ‘There was so much scar tissue, we couldn’t find anything to stitch to,’ he said as she lay in post-op recovery. But she survived. Against all the odds she pulled through. She was a poor, broken wreck of a woman, but she was alive and, incredibly, still determinedly smiling. In intensive care that night when she came round and first saw us she had asked in Arabic for fresh mangoes and dates. She was back in Cairo, an eleven-year-old, awe-struck, watching in fascination as the Bedouin tribesman unloaded their camel cargoes beside the whispering Nile.

  Her recovery was slow and plagued with hideous complications, but her ceaseless encouragement for my new life seemed to give her strength. ‘You must follow your dream,’ she insisted. Over and over again I made the long trek south to see her. Every time I drove away I wondered if I would ever see her alive again. Although she was only in her fifties, there is a limit to what the human body can take. I knew she was losing her fight.

  Not long after she was released from hospital, in a private moment my father asked me how much longer the operation would give her. I wanted to tell him the truth: that she was on borrowed time; that she could drop dead at any moment; that if she was extremely lucky she might last a few months. But I couldn’t. I couldn’t bring myself to say the words. I knew it would destroy him. ‘Hopefully ten years,’ I lied.

  ‘Oh my God!’ he said, the blood instantly draining from his face. ‘Is that all?’ I realised then that he didn’t understand – didn’t want to understand – and that the portcullis of denial was still firmly in place. He had never permitted the thought that they might not grow old together. He had closed his mind to the very possibility of losing her.

  A few weeks later, sitting having afternoon tea together in their New Forest cottage, she with her feet up on a sofa quietly reading a Spanish novel, my father buried in his newspaper, he heard the book fall to the floor and saw a movement out of the corner of his eye. Her head had tipped back onto the arm of the sofa. Her poor, generous, endlessly loving, exhausted and battle-scarred heart had finally given up.

  I knew my mother for thirty-five years. I have no proper recollection of her ever being well. We saw her through four experimental cardiac procedures, three of which were groundbreaking open-heart surgery. I watched her suffer cruel strokes and fight bravely back through many months of rehabilitation. I saw her in great pain and angry with frustration at her incapacitation. Yet in all those deeply troubled years never once did she evince the slightest shred of self-pity, nor did I ever hear her complain that life was unfair.

  If I close my eyes I can immediately see her smile and hear her laugh, wide eyes flashing, throwing her head back with a little flick of her curls and that slightly startled look as if her mirth had caught her unawares. I know, too, that without understanding or recognising it at the time, it was her unexplained illness and her many absences that, from an early age, had made me seek solace by escaping into the wilds of the 1950s English countryside. I had buried myself in natural history because it surrounded me and it had irretrievably snared my boyhood imagination. More than that, she had become my only ally in the psychological struggle to defy convention and follow my own path. Her unflagging love and encouragement, even though she never properly understood what it was I sought, gave me the determination to break free.

  Not long after she died I went to the museum in Warwick and withdrew the Dun Cow rib. Death had twice visited the family and I felt that my childhood fears had been laid to rest. It was bigger than I remembered it, and heavy, but not even remotely sinister. I felt its place was back at the heart of my family, here at Aigas, where it hangs on its old chain to this day.

  Epilogue

  After my mother’s death my father took to visiting us at Aigas regularly. He became a lonely figure with a bewildered look that had taken charge of his face and never left him. Despite all its ghastly complications, theirs had been a marriage hallowed by the Gods of Absolute Devotion. He never had the words to express his love to his wife, but without her he had become lost, a fading echo of his former authoritative self. He needed his family to shore him up. I decided to teach him to fly fish.

  He had never found time for the country sporting pursuits of his Manor House upbringing and had stubbornly refused to take up any hobby or activity my mother couldn’t join in with. For those last years their principal pleasure was their home in Spain, sallying gently forth in their ageing car to explore little towns and villages in the mountains, chatting to the locals, returning to sit on their porch with a glass of amontillado to watch the Andalucian sun sink gently through the haze of crimson and purple bougainvillea that surrounded them. Without her, Spain was too painful for him. He couldn’t bring himself to go back.

  So he came to Aigas.

  One bright June evening we took a rowing boat out onto the little hill loch, eight acres of sky that shimmers within a fold in our hills above the house. I took the oars. He’d been a good pupil. Over and over again his dry fly looped elegantly through the air to land well out on the glowing water. The loch was as still as a mirror. On gossamer wings and with long caudal filaments streaming out behind them, mayflies danced around us, touched the water with their dangling legs and lifted weightlessly off again, hovering tantalisingly over their own reflections. Trout rose in barely audible swirls, mouthed lazily at the flies and vanished again. ‘You’ve got too much competition,’ I teased. He smiled, pulled on his pipe and cast again. I was impressed. Fifteen yards or more, the line peeled itself out and gently dropped his fly in almost perfect emulation of those around us.

  Unknown to either of us, deep below, a fine 2 lb brown trout saw that fly land. It fired into action, torpedoing towards the surface just as my father wiggled the line to give it life. High above the boat, emerging unseen from the gleaming white of the clouds, the burning binocular eyes of an osprey had also spotted that trout’s move.

  It happened so fast and so unexpectedly that it made us both jump. My father saw the trout curve to the fly; I glimpsed the shadow of the diving osprey. Delta-winged, blue feet thrust forward, talons spread wide, it crashed into the loch right beside the boat. Even as the trout saw the danger and swerved to dive, the osprey’s black talons plunged into its olivine back. They crimped and held. For four seconds that exquisitely handsome fish hawk decked in mocha and cream lay with its wings outstretched across the swirling surface. Its amber eyes boiled with fire for a dazzling moment of triumph before its long wings rose on folded elbows to scoop bucketsful of sunlight and heave clear of the water.

  The great bird seemed to lift in slow motion. Primaries like spread fingers, the wings pulsed and flailed in tight circles above the crested head, hooked bill thrust urgently forward. The chocolate cream trousers emerged first, then came the pale blue legs and the black talons socketed deeply into the squirming trout. Droplets fell away like pearls. The wings grabbed air, levered and hauled. Ten feet off the water it halted in midair for a mighty shake, emerging from the primaries and travelling inward to the body and right down to the spread tail, enshrouding the whole bird and fish in a fine mist of loch. The wings powered forward again and its grip on the trout shifted. One foot grasped the fish’s head, the other its back, so that it was slung missile-like beneath the bird’s belly for minimum air resistance.

  In less than forty seconds it was gone, rowing away into the bright evening sky, high above the birch trees that fringe that lovely little hollow. We watched in silence. Then my father slowly gathered up his rod and cast again, swinging back and forward three times before landing his fly well out on the other side of the boat. Satisfied with the cast he took the pipe from his mouth and, without looking at me, spoke quietly. ‘I don’t know why I’ve been fooling about
in industry all my life.’

  Almost exactly a year later he died suddenly and without warning, still in his sixties. It was three years and a month since my mother’s death. A coronary thrombosis had felled him, the doctors said. I am sure they were right, but deep down I knew that he had died of a broken heart.

  Acknowledgements

  The events I have described are the memories of a schoolboy and took place many years ago. That is what they are: a childhood memoir. It goes without saying that while impressions remain firm, some details are hazy. After half a century the memory plays tricks, especially with dates and places that no longer exist. Wherever possible I have sought corroboration, often very successfully, sometimes not. This book could not have hatched without help from my sister, Mary Carrel, two years older than me, whose memories are clearer, and to whom I am extremely grateful. She kept me on track and provided the essential documentary evidence of my mother’s letters from hospital. That we were sent away to different boarding schools at an early age inevitably meant that our lives began to diverge. So it is both pleasing and gratifying that she now lives only a few miles away and we are regularly able to reflect upon and share our memories. With her invaluable assistance I have reconstructed these events and personalities to the best and most faithful recollections I can achieve.

  I have changed the names of schools that still exist, and, of course, many of the personalities. While the memories and opinions of one pupil from sixty years ago can have no bearing upon the present-day performance of those schools, I would not wish to impugn anyone’s reputation. Where my references are glowing, as in Martock’s Dr John Parker of blessed memory, the schoolmaster George Barron and his mischievous and delightful daughter Susan, I have stuck with their real names, as, of course, I have with Lord Brock and Dr Paul Wood and the other medical and surgical professionals whose astounding skills kept my mother alive for so long. When I came to research Martock and its village school, the happy chance of discovering that Susan Barron, now Stevens, still lived in the village, was a huge leap forward. Without her spirited and generous encouragement I would have had real difficulty piecing together what the village and the school were like in the 1950s. Her unstinting friendship throughout the writing of this book was a great support.

  Allhallows College closed down in 1998, and I left the school thirty-five years before that, but I have disguised the names of some fellow pupils where I felt that my words might cause offence. Certainly none was intended and I apologise in advance if anyone feels I have been unfair or incorrect.

  It is probably true that if I hadn’t gone to Coto Doñana, I might never have written this book. It was the boundless enthusiasm of Dr Antonio Rivas and his team at the Iberian lynx captive breeding centre at El Acebuche which, entirely incidentally, spun me back to such a vivid vision of my mother at the Palacio Doñana. So I am doubly grateful to Antonio for both spurring our wildcat project on and providing the accidental setting for that haunting reminiscence.

  I am most grateful to the authors of British Cardiology in the 20th Century (2000), Malcolm Towers and Simon Davies, and Emeritus Professor of Clinical Cardiology at Imperial College, Celia Oakley, for references, biographical sketches and opinions on the extraordinary careers of Russell Brock and Paul Wood. My thanks, too, to the estate staff of the Royal Brompton Hospital for allowing me to revisit the tunnel under the Fulham Road, now disused and closed off. To James and Katie Baillie for accommodation and hospitality in Fulham, my gratitude and love. For assistance with research and access to archives and my mother’s medical records, I am extremely grateful to Angela Redmayne and Dorothy Watkins, and archivist Chris Newbold from the British Library and the Department of Health.

  I am also grateful to Chris Newman, Peter Isaacs and Roger Potter for insights into the prep school, Hill Brow, also closed down, and particularly Chris Newman’s collation of reminiscences of old boys and the history of the school.

  To my friend and reviewing colleague David Robinson, former literary editor of The Scotsman, my most sincere thanks for reading an early draft and making extremely helpful suggestions.

  My thanks are also due to Jimmy Watt of Gavin Maxwell Enterprises Ltd and to Random House for permission to quote from Ring of Bright Water, The House of Elrig and Raven Seek Thy Brother, and especially to Gavin Maxwell’s biographer, Douglas Botting, for generous help. To Virginia McKenna, who starred with her husband Bill Travers in the film of Ring of Bright Water, I extend my heartfelt thanks for all the work she did to perpetuate Gavin’s memory with the Maxwell museum on Eilean Bàn, and for being such a supportive friend at Aigas.

  Several good friends who are no longer with us also deserve recognition and my wholehearted gratitude: the late Lovell and Lilian Foot, who so kindly lent me their cottage in which to write The White Island, and the late Richard Frere, who provided so much support, company and fun in the early days of Highland Wildlife Enterprises and Aigas Field Centre. Kathleen Raine died in 2003 aged ninety-five. In the early years of Aigas Field Centre she became a friend and often came to stay. She valued and supported the positive influence Gavin had given otter conservation in particular and nature conservation in general. For her help and encouragement I will always be extremely grateful. Also the late Professor Russell Coope and his son Rob, both of whom enabled us to begin our wildcat captive breeding project. Without their contribution of solid advice and the gift of our first live wildcats, we would never have got it off the ground. I cannot thank them enough.

  My agent, Catherine Clarke of the Felicity Bryan Agency, always shores me up and has been delivering wisdom and encouragement for many years. Her friendship and help are invaluable. Simon Thorogood of Canongate has been my editor and friend throughout the production of this book and my thanks go to Jamie Byng and his staff for wanting to keep me in the Canongate fold.

  My son, Warwick, and my loyal secretary, Sheila Kerr, have generously afforded me the time to write, and have put up with my absences from Aigas at times when I should have been more attentive to other work. Others who have helped and encouraged me along the way, and to whom I am very grateful, are our daughters, Hermione, Amelia, Melanie and Emma, our son Hamish and ma belle fille litéraire, Christelle Baillie; good friends Leslie Cranna, Jonathan Willet, David Dixon, Paul and Louise Ramsay, and Peter and Fran Tilbrook; invaluable help with the wildcats from Alicia Leow-Dyke and Louise Hughes; inspirational fellow writers Helen Macdonald, Mark Cocker, Brian Jackman, Jay Griffiths and Jim Crumley, and my dear friend and long-term literary sage, Martha Crewe.

  But as always, my wife, Lucy, has put up with my almost constant distraction throughout the several years and the historical assault course through which the book has picked its way. Research can be a lonely and sometimes depressing task when brightly remembered places are found to no longer exist, or to have been ravaged by crude and vulgar development. As well as lovingly tolerating my many cerebral and physical absences – she calls herself a literary widow when I’m writing – Lucy often came with me, and propped me up with loyal and nourishing moral support on many of those essential expeditions.

  John Lister-Kaye

  House of Aigas, 2017