The Dun Cow Rib. John Lister-Kaye
home from the hill’. Armed only with the knife and a four-foot hazel stick my father had cut for me, and clad in the new dark green gabardine ‘windcheater’ from my mother, with patch pockets and a zip fastener (still a novelty in Britain), I ventured forth into the great unknown.
That stick possessed magical powers: it could be Robin Hood’s bow or his sword or staff; it was Huck Finn’s pole, rafting downriver; with a length of string it became a whip, or, with the thicker end tucked into my armpit, a gun, accompanied by the ‘Pwrrch! Pwrrch!’ from pursed lips with each imagined shot, as I prowled the hedgerows. My stick and my knife were essential props I carried everywhere – my armory, my badges of office, my power beads. Into the shaft I carved notches and rings for imaginary villains I had gunned down or defeated in breathless hand-to-hand encounters.
These two items had located the violent core of my inner self, a Pandora’s box of hyperactive pre-pubescent imagination, slaying enemies without mercy, hanging, drawing and quartering the Sheriff of Nottingham, gunning down and beheading innocent victims in my rush for power and domination. Without them I was nothing, as helpless as a highwayman without his mask and pistol or a knight without sword and shield. I became permanently attached to my stick, beside my bed at night, never heading out without it. Then, one day, in a fit of pique because I had refused to take her with me, my sister snapped it in two. I was devastated and a secret murder boiled in my heart.
I have often wondered whether those years and the wildness that seemed to flourish within me were a direct result of my mother’s illness and absences, or whether they were a natural outpouring of youthful exuberance given the freedom to expand unchecked in the splendid Elysian fields of the little Manor House estate. Had she been there I don’t think my mother would have been able to exercise any more control than Nellie. The potential for escape was always too great, the horizons too wide, and my energy and determination too deeply rooted. She possessed neither the strength nor the will to hold me in check. In truth, I had no idea either then or for many years to come how seriously ill my mother was. I was gloriously out of control.
Those early years of discovery were often hazardous, even dangerous, but always exhilarating. As a fuller awareness of my expanding landscape slowly dawned, so I think I began to realise that its possibilities for adventure and excitement were limitless. But that first brush with the fox had changed me. From then on, with the immutable tidal wash of destiny, natural history and wildlife would always be the most likely ingredients of fulfillment.
I can’t now remember precisely when, but probably by the age of seven or eight, my exploration of the self-contained world of the Manor House had begun to burst at the seams. It was expanding out of doors. While the house’s labyrinthine interior still held endless opportunities for adventure, the extensive out-buildings were new and exciting. Some, such as my grandfather’s large workshop, were firmly locked.
It would be several years before I was allowed to try my hand at carpentry; years before I could be trusted with belt-driven lathe and band saw, planes and chisels honed on whetstones until they were as sharp as a sabre. Both my grandfather and my father were highly skilled practitioners, way beyond anything that might be described as a hobby. They were that rare combination of professional men and amateur craftsmen. Although until the Second World War the little Manor estate had employed men and women to perform most everyday functions of country life, there existed among the family members an unspoken moral principle broadly interpreted as ‘never ask anyone to do anything you can’t do yourself’, and which seemed to honour a centuries old tradition of manual dexterity and self-sufficiency in English country life, a tradition of which they were rightly and properly proud.
I was allowed to stand and watch, occasionally to help out – ‘Hold that end, boy, for the last cut. Don’t let it fall.’ It seemed there was nothing they couldn’t turn their hand to: making and repairing hand tools, barrows, carts, garden furniture, or hanging doors and re-roofing sheds. Often it was mechanics, spanners and wrenches for nuts and bolts or metalwork, grinding on the engineer’s wheel: ‘Stand back, boy, and get your goggles on.’ Sparks showered in dazzling arcs and then at the brick forge a lump hammer ringing on the anvil, ‘Pump those bellows, boy, we need more heat,’ before welding in the fire.
Later, when I was considered old enough, I was indoctrinated in those same skills: ‘Whoa! Steady now. Slowly, slowly. Never force it. Let the saw do the work.’ Or ‘Hold the hammer at the end, boy, not halfway down.’ And the first time I rushed to pick up a piece of steel still hot from welding and smelt the roast beef aroma my own burning flesh the observation would be: ‘Well, you won’t do that again.’ Words spoken not with any sense of reproof – far from it – they came with that age-old, firm but all-embracing warmth of loving instruction from master to pupil, from father to son, that had served so well down the generations, always couched in the same proudly principled tenet of independence that bound us all together.
Other buildings were not locked. Dark, cobwebby interiors of potting sheds, apple stores, wood stores, stables and various annexes to the old coach houses were an endless source of mystery and delight. Games of hide and seek with my sister always ended in tears because we could conceal ourselves so completely and so unfathomably that either the seeker gave up in frustration and wandered off or the hider lost patience, became bored by never being found and emerged insisting, ‘You’re useless!’
It was often after such frustrations that I was abandoned and left to devise my own entertainment. Wonderful though it was, the Manor House was a cut-off world still roundly entrenched in Victorian values. We children had no local friends and village children did not venture into Manor House territory; had they done so I suspect we would have been actively discouraged from associating with them. Not that I was ever lonely – quite the reverse, I loved being left to explore on my own.
Beyond the line of ancient trees at the top of the gardens lay a large pond ringed with crack willows, some of which had broken up in winter storms and fallen into the water. Further on again was an orchard of ancient apple and pear trees, gnarled and pruned to distorted configurations, neatly spaced in ordered rows and perfect for climbing. Those old fruit trees taught me to be an expert tree climber and when I fell, as often I did, it was never very far, landing ruffled but unhurt, cushioned by the long grass below.
The pond was a favoured haunt. Wings thrashing, mallard often rose from the water rasping their alarm as I approached and every year moorhens laboured back and forth to create a nest of soggy weed among the twigs of a fallen willow as it lay across the surface of the water. I thought it might be possible for a small boy to clamber out along the fallen limb to a position just above the nest.
In those days many country boys collected birds’ eggs. My grandfather and his father before him both had cherished collections in specially made wooden cabinets of drawers, the precious blown eggs carefully labelled and housed in partitioned sections on beds of cotton wool – Linnet, Hawthorn thicket, Ryton Wood. 24.4.26 – many dating back to the Victorian era. It had been a fashionable and entirely acceptable pastime, many amateur collections proudly maintained to museum standards.
The cabinets stood in my grandfather’s smoking room, a room we dared not enter. My father had also had a collection of his own when he was a boy. He showed me the drawers of eggs, drawer after drawer, row upon row. Eggs of birds I had never heard of: hawfinch, redstart, corn bunting, whinchat . . . I longed for a collection of my own.
The bottom drawer of my grandfather’s cabinet housed the intricate paraphernalia of professional egg collecting: a set of special drills twirled between forefinger and thumb for cutting the perfect round holes in the end of the eggs, minuscule for wrens and warblers, much larger for geese and swans; slender blow pipes of several sizes for inserting through the hole and gently blowing out the yolk and white; a little phial of surgical spirit for cleaning and disinfecting the shell, inside and out, and a glass pipette for administering it; a wad of lint for lining the drawer sections and a roll of cotton wool in dark blue paper; a pair of fine pointed scissors; tweezers and a soft paint brush; crystals of silica gel in a tiny pot and another containing crystals of naphthalene for keeping mites and other bugs at bay.
That spring I sat quietly on the bank and watched the moorhens heaping up their weedy pile. They worked fast and diligently, both