There was a boating lake there, where they had little child-sized boats, each with a steering wheel and an accelerator (I don't remember any way of braking). How those boats worked I don't know, but to pilot one of them, all on one's own, buzzing rather slowly round the lake like a waterborne dodgem, was magic.
We must always have gone to stay with the Boucher grandparents in the summer holidays, I think — I don't remember anything other than constant blue skies and sunshine on the beach at Barry Island, a very big beach, it seemed.
Fifty or so years later, I chanced to go back there. It was really a rather small beach, and it was raining buckets.
The thing about Granny B was that she was always such fun to be with. Not a bad epitaph.
Grampy B, who adored her, was a big man, running to fat when I first remember him, as retired athletes do, with a head of white hair and a fine white mustache. He had been one of the all-time greats of Welsh Rugby Union Football.
Like Grampy K-S, he also much liked poor jokes, and his idea of fun, when, say, they came to us for Christmas, was to secrete about the house such things as a banana that squeaked, a doughnut that made rude noises as of one breaking wind, a fork that bent when you used it, and a realistic rubber dog mess. Grampy K-S might have laughed at these items from the joke shop. Granny K-S would not have. Nor would she have found a rude postcard funny, but mercifully when she did actually receive one, she didn't understand it.
It was sent'from Tenby, of course'by Father's brother, my uncle Joe (who had married Mother's younger sister, Rosemary). Joe would always send to Mother and Father one of Donald McGill's saucy postcards with pictures of fat ladies in bathing costumes and risqué captions. On one occasion my parents received a view of the North Beach and Goscar Rock.
“Surely this was meant for Motie?” they said. “She must have got ours!” And my little brother was hastily dispatched to Bitton Hill, to arrive there before the postman.
He was too late. Granny K-S was puzzling over a McGill postcard featuring, among other things, an octopus, and the joke line leaned heavily on a confusion between “tentacles” and “testicles.”
“Oh, boykie!” said Granny as Tony burst in. “Can you explain this to me?”
My four grandparents would meet, perhaps once a year, at Bitton Hill at one of those huge Sunday teas, at which, in summer, there would be peaches from the walled garden and, in winter, crumpets oozing butter and sometimes a particular cake made to the recipe of a distant never-seen-by-me cousin and always bearing her name. Thus, “Now who will have a piece of Nellie Green?”
Yet neither pair of grandparents ever relaxed the formality of their address, one to the other. No Christian name was ever used, nor such nicknames as Motie and Potie. Granny K-S might say to Granny B, “Another cup of tea, Mrs. Boucher?” And the Bitton grandfather might ask the Dinas Powis grandfather, “Another sandwich, Mr. Boucher?” And vice versa.
It did not imply coldness, much less dislike, that “Arthur,” “Clare,” “Alice,” and “Charles” were never used. For each couple respected and approved of the other, despite differences of character and outlook. Quite simply, they were Victorians.
Chapter 9
FOXES AND BADGERS
Monday 25 March
Annunciation of BVM
Lady Day.
Fox took broody in orchard. Shot at him.
As well as the cattle, the pigs, the goats, the hens, the ducks, Woodlands Farm was home to a variety of other animals. There were rabbits, a spotted variety called English, which I bred in various colors — black, blue, chocolate — supposedly for show, though I never showed one. The pinnacle of my success was to sell one really well marked buck for twenty-five pounds, but at least the deep freeze was kept well stocked. There were guinea pigs: I did show one of these — it won third prize (in a class of three) — and Betsy had two much loved mice called Fairy Snow and Ogre Daz. There were also guinea fowl, foolish birds that sometimes drowned while drinking at a cattle trough. There were lots of dogs always, mostly Myrle's dachshunds and twice we had a Great Dane, and masses of cats to earn their livings in barn and cowshed.
One memorable tortoiseshell-and-white queen called Dulcie Maude had, in all, 104 kittens. One litter was born and reared in an old doll carriage stashed away in a loft, the babies nestling comfortably on a doll's pink blanket. I fixed a kind of box on the wall outside the kitchen door, in which we put scraps for cats. It was called the Mogamatic Fullpuss.
As well as my collection of domestic animals, there were, of course, wild ones too. The woodlands were a paradise for wildlife. There were seven acres that had been the site of nineteenth-century opencast coal workings, a jumble of high hillocks and deep bowl-shaped hollows. Three of these acres, uninspiringly called the Wood, were thickly covered with trees, principally ash and scrub oak. The remaining four, known as the Brake, were more open and consisted of patches of rough grass and of dozens of huge blackberry bushes.
Under the great armored bushes lived rabbits. Myxomatosis, a highly infectious viral disease, was still a few years away, and these stub rabbits (an old name for those that live in aboveground cover) used the giant briars as protection from their natural enemies.
Judging by the number of times we saw them strolling up our drive and cocking their legs on the bordering shrubs, there were plenty of foxes too.
Our relationship with our foxes contained an illogical blend of love and hate. “A wise fox will never rob his neighbor's hen roost” is an adage of some truth, and we liked to think that the occasional slaughter, as on the day after Betsy's birth, was the work of an outsider. And generally the losses were small. The odd duck might go missing, and now and again a hen would “steal” a nest — lay and sit a clutch of eggs in the bottom of a hedgerow — and chance her luck, which then ran out.
On the whole, we took good care to shut the poultry up at night and didn't grumble too much. Later we converted the loft over the old stables into a deep-litter house where 300 or 400 birds lived in complete safety. But, before that happened, we were treated to a prime example of the kind of fox behavior that leaves the farmer fuming.
I can remember the scene vividly, Before and After.
Before — a bunch of a couple of dozen cockerels foraging in spring sunshine on a patch of ground behind the cowshed. They were White Wyandottes, brilliant against the new grass, each wattled head capped with a rose comb of brightest red. They're fit to kill, I thought as I went indoors to breakfast. They were.
After — a tremendous noise and kerfuffle had me dashing back out again with my mouth full. One of the many dachshunds that we then had was a chicken chaser — It's Mandy, I thought. As I came round the corner of the cow-shed, I could see, dotted over perhaps half an acre of land, snowy-white bodies, still or still twitching, while the gaping survivors lurched about, shocked into shaking aimlessness. counted. Sixteen dead. The raider had not been hungry, just having a bit of fun, for when I collected up the corpses, only one rose-combed head had been taken away, as a memento.
Woodlands Farm was on the outermost edge of a famous foxhunting country, a land ruled by a great duke and his duchess. Twice only did we have the doubtful pleasure of the hunt's uninvited presence.
On one occasion a section of the field galloped through a number of electric-fenced paddocks, leaving a tangle of broken wire and uprooted posts. If they were shocked, they did not show it.
And on another memorable morning the duchess herself came clattering up the drive flanked by a couple of outriders and galloped into the yard, where a number of small children, our own and some of friends, were wandering about. “Alas, regardless of thei doom, the little victims play!” Luckily she missed them.
Oh, but only think of all the time when one fails to make a proper response. Remember those moments of inertia while the mind searches feverishly for the right riposte, witty or withering.
“Have ye seen hounds?” shouted the duchess with a sidelong glance from her sidesaddle, but answer
came there none. Openmouthed the peasants stood while the riders pressed on and away, past our Dutch barn and across our pastures. As they disappeared beyond the horizon, we heard a splintering crash. One of our five-barred gates had been broken, as a memento.
I don't want to moralize on the rights and wrongs of foxhunting. There are reasons why the fox should not be a protected species. In those days the protection that the Woodlands foxes enjoyed during a season of hate was due to my poor marksmanship. But it's worth remembering the loving side of the relationship. The fox is a beautiful animal. His coloring is beautiful, varying from a mahogany to a red so pale as almost to be orange. And there is beauty in his moving, not drip-tongued, drop-eared, draggle-tailed, and half a field in front of thirty couple of hounds, but in the full joy of his freedom, drifting across the ground as light as a hen's feather, his brush fluffed, his ears cocked, and his sharp eyes bright.
Early one fine morning I drew the bedroom curtains and there he sat on the lawn below, front paws neatly together, white-tipped brush curled around him, muzzle pointed inquiringly up to my window. I don't remember my reaction, can't recall if it was hate — get the gun — or love. What a picture. I only know that when I walked out into the empty garden, there upon the steps of the sundial was a steaming pile of fresh scats, as a memento.
Our ambivalent attitude towards foxes didn't apply to our badgers because they did our livestock no harm. Not that they would have turned their snouts up at our birds if a fowl-house door had been left open one night, but it just didn't happen. The only damage they did was occasionally to roll in standing corn, leaving billiard table—sized playpens of thoroughly flattened stalks.
The badgers lived in the Wood. One of the large mounds held a complex of rooms and tunnels driven perhaps ten feet deep under the roots of a little grove of elder and holly, the bark of several of the trees scored vertically by the cleaning of long front claws, and the ground around worn bare and smooth by the passing of many feet over many years. The set (or burrow) had seven entry holes, and the colony, we judged, was a large one, perhaps of several families living communally. Sometimes we were wakened from deep sleep by the racket going on in the Wood, twoboars wrangling maybe, or cubs at mock-fighting play, a cacophony of high-pitched staccato squeaks and chattering.
At about this time my brother, Tony, had a pet badger called Wilhelmina. She had been given to him as an orphaned cub: a little sow with a particularly wide strip of white down the center of her face, a stripe so wide as to distinguish her forever from all other badgers.
She was just like a little bluish kitten, probably no more than ten days old. This extreme youth may well have been significant as regards her reactions. Later I heard the story of another, older cub that was given to a doctor who was crazy about badgers. It lived in his garage beside his car and was at all times ill humored, guaranteed to bite everyone and anyone. Denied this pleasure by evasive action, it eventually contrived to make use of a handy pair of steps to climb in through the open window of the car, which it then eviscerated, ripping the interior to small shreds.
Wilhelmina by contrast was biddable, intelligent, and affectionate. She used her teeth, but only in love bites. Standing upright, so that once she was part-grown, gum boots were no defense, she would bite Tony in the fleshy part of the back of the thigh just above the knee, first in one leg, then in the other.
At first it was all hard work, bottling such a small baby. And in the early days Tony must have worried that once she was really mobile, she would light out for the wild, and he trained her to a lead. But it wasn't necessary. She reacted in every way like a domestic animal, though the nocturnal habits of her species caused her to be sleepy by day and only really to be wakeful towards evening.
At that time my brother lived with our parents, now removed to Bitton Hill, a large Victorian house that had plenty of outbuildings, and Wilhelmina slept her days away in a small loose box that had once been home to a donkey.
But as soon as Tony arrived back from work, the badger would chatter like a magpie until let out, to greet him with the double bite and then to rush off with the terriers for a game on the lawns that could only be called rough-and- tumble. Accepted entirely by the dogs, Wilhelmina would knock them flying and they'd return the compliment and not a harsh word was spoken.
By the time she was eighteen months old, Wilhelmina was sleeping in an old coach house where my grandfather had kept his wood-turning lathe, and she was free to come and go during the night. Unfortunately this meant that others were free to come in, and at her first season a big boar badger sought her out. It was not her sexual condition that excited him, rather was he offended by her state of domesticity and her treacherous alliance with man. He gave her a terrible beating and nearly killed her.
Wilhelmina recovered and, in due course, came on heat for the second time. And now she left for good to seek her wild fortune, and the stable yard never heard that magpie chatter again.
Two years later, Tony was driving home late at night, going fast up the long, winding drive to the house. He saw the badger that suddenly crossed the road but, try as he would, could not avoid it. It was a sow, with a stripe down its face so wide as to distinguish it forever from all other badgers.
My closest contact with a badger at Woodlands Farm was of a nature so unlikely as to be unbelievable. Many years ago I put the incident down on paper and sent it off to a journal called The Countryman. I did not even receive the courtesy of a note of rejection.
It was my morning to milk, a peerless morning towards the end of June. Going out to fetch the cows, my way lay across a seven-acre field called the Big Ground. This had been cut for hay the previous day, and the tight uniform swathes of grass lay bluish and shining in the risen sun. Suddenly, out in the middle, I saw a badger. By chance I had no dog with me that might harry it, so I ran, fast, to see if I could get a closer look before the brock could leg it away to the safety of the bordering Brake. Not only did it not run away, it took not the slightest notice of my panting arrival but continued to snuffle about in the cut grass with as much unconcern as though I had still been in bed. It seemed the most comprehensive snub. Embarrassed, I took off my hat and with it patted the broad bottom. I began to murmur inanities.
“Hullo, old chap! What's the matter, then? Don't you speak to strange men? Sent me to Coventry, have you?”
But indeed this was the unkindest cut of all. The badger would not in any way acknowledge my presence, it simply moved, achingly slowly, towards the shelter of the woodland, my hat beating an unavailing tattoo on its backside. It found a hole in the hedge and disappeared.
Two mornings later, at the very same time in the very same place, I saw two badgers. With the nonchalance and élan of a man on hat-slapping terms, I ran gaily towards them. My friend! I thought. And his friend! Asinine words formed themselves ready for my smiling parted lips. “Hullo again! Wanting some more of the same treatment, old fellow? And have you brought your girlfriend?” But at a short hat's throw from the pair, it became suddenly obvious that this was a case of mistaken identity. With a horrid chorus of noises, squeaks, chatterings, and fierce piggy grunts, all unmistakably menacing, both badgers rushed madly at me on their short legs with mouths agape, and my camaraderie was forgotten as I fled at top speed.
It's a perfectly true story. But you can't really blame the editor of The Countryman.
Chapter 10
DOGS
Wednesday 3 January
Wonderful surprise! Susie returned after
eight days and eight nights missing in this
v. cold weather. Very weak and thin but OK.
Obviously has been stuck somewhere.
M feeding her hourly with milk and glucose.
We've owned so many dogs over the years, but two unforgettable individuals at Woodlands Farm were Anna the dachshund and Susie the terrier. Anna's speciality was maternal love. Very early on, her name was usually corrupted to “Nanny,” and the sight of any nursling brought her
running. You could hear the crackle of her starched apron as she fussed and fidgeted, certain of the incompetence of the real mother, of whatever breed, and longing to get her paws on the little darlings. And it wasn't only puppies that she tried to foster. Kittens were well received in a cat crisis. She did not need to be in milk, she just came into it at the drop of a baby — as when she did her best for Blodwen's two piglets.
Her other tour de force was in holding her water. She may have been a bit short for a dachshund, but she must have had a very long bladder because, in wet weather, which she abhorred, she would lie doggo for twenty-four hours. Chucking her out in the rain did no good, since you could not make her do anything. In fact it was a most unwise move, because her resulting wet feet went straight upstairs and onto the nearest bed.
“Have you seen Nanny anywhere?”
“No, but it's raining.”
“Oh well.”
And we would know that under one or other eiderdown there would be a small unmoving lump, in instant hibernation. But she wasn't a lie-abed in good hunting weather. Then she went to ground, often in company of Susie, after rabbit or badger or fox. She sometimes spent so long in the bowels of the earth that the search party would be called out, Myrle and I and the children and Gladwyn roaming the woods and fields, endlessly shouting her name, a fruitless exercise since she never answered to it.
The only hope of finding the needle in the haystack was to happen upon that day's chosen spot and hear her, only faintly at that because her bark was shrill and feeble. Once she was gone for forty-eight hours. We had drawn a complete blank at all the usual places, the big set and favorite earths and buries in the woods and round various fields, the long, densely bushed embankment of the railway that ran along Woodlands Farm's southern boundary. Fearfully we searched the tracks and then the verges of the main road but found nothing. We'd pretty well given up.
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