The Dun Cow Rib. John Lister-Kaye
not ‘at least double that of the very largest domestic cat’. And it has marginally longer limbs and a broader skull also with fractionally larger canine teeth, but ‘the great length and power of the limbs’ and ‘ten rings to his tail’, ‘the lynx-like appearance’ and ‘the extra claw’ are all pure myth. Now having first-hand experience of many wildcats, both alive and dead, there is no extra claw and I have never seen one with more than six distinct rings to its tail, and many have only four or five.
Other writers and observers have chosen to perpetuate this feline mythology – the wildcat’s fierceness, its fangs, its untamable reputation, its size and dramatic strength – but much of it is simply fabricated or dramatic exaggeration. The obvious and overriding fact is that the animal is WILD. Of course it is fierce. Of course it is strong. It is a predator and needs a vicious bite to secure and kill its prey, just as do the fox and the badger, the otter, weasel, stoat and pine marten, if you are daft enough to test any of them on soft human flesh. And in common with all of the above, if cornered or attacked by man or dog, all of them will struggle and bite as fiercely and as savagely as any wild animal. I know very well how strong the wildcat is.
When I first came to live in the Highlands in the 1970s, I had a collection of ornamental wildfowl – ducks, geese and swans of many different species. They were secured in a large enclosure fenced to six feet with stout netting to keep out foxes and badgers. During the first few years I was puzzled to find that birds as big as geese were disappearing without any obvious indication of the culprit; ducks and geese vanishing off their nests but never any sign of a struggle. So I set a large cage trap baited with a dead wood pigeon. In the morning I found myself staring into the flaring green eyes of a wildcat. I drove it to Glen Affric twelve miles away and released it into the ancient forest of the Caledonian Pine Reserve. Soon the predation started again. I reset the trap. Again I caught a cat, another large wildcat tom, hissing, spitting and angrily flicking its bushy tail. Off I went to Glen Affric again, marvelling at the strength of a cat that could snatch a weighty Canada goose from its nest and then climb a six-foot fence with the bird in its teeth, leaving scarcely a feather behind.
As Gavin Maxwell relates of his Highland home in the 1960s, back in those days wildcats did not seem to be rare on the west coast or in the remoter reaches of these glens. On winter nights we would often catch sight of their burning green eyes in our headlights. Gamekeepers on surrounding estates regularly hunted them down. Every year we heard of wildcats being shot or snared. In the 1970s, a local keeper known only as ‘The Blue Charm’ (after a much-favoured salmon fly) told me that in snares and gin traps he killed ‘ten or more wildcats every year’.
As a child and well into my teens I barely questioned this gratuitous killing. It was what was done – the norm, part of the accepted culture of sporting estates the length and breadth of Britain – together with trapping, snaring and shooting of every hooked beak, every weasel, stoat, polecat, pine marten, hedgehog, otter, badger and fox, even herons and gulls; every creature, in fact, that might have the temerity to take a game bird, or its egg or its chick, as well as many innocent species that didn’t. It was killing that those gamekeepers were specifically employed to undertake, their success displayed on macabre gibbets, totems of murder, where the wind- and rain-shrivelled corpses of ‘vermin’ were proudly arrayed. To quote Maxwell again, ‘the estate . . . had long waged war upon the wildcats, and a tree . . . was decorated with their banded tails hanging like monstrous willow catkins from its boughs’. I had seen many such gibbets in the woods around my English home and was drawn to them out of morbid curiosity, astonished by the numbers of birds nailed there: rows of jays, crows, magpies, sparrowhawks, owls, kestrels, merlins, hobbys and buzzards, among the hapless weasels and stoats in their dozens.
The world has moved on significantly since then; protection laws have emerged and most people’s values have shifted towards conservation, although there are still plenty who would put their ‘sport’ before any aspect of nature conservation. Maxwell, I am pleased to record, writing in 1959, makes his own views entirely clear: ‘the wildcats are (now) protected . . . Under this benign regime the number of wildcats has marvelously increased.’ If only that were still the case today.
We all live by the instilled standards of our time. My grandfather certainly did, and I doubt whether he would have questioned the killing of wildcats. But extirpation? That’s another matter, and I would like to think that he would have pulled back, as, interestingly, did the redoubtable John Colquhoun, who firmly advocates trapping against poisoning, whereas Charles St John heartily advocates strychnia as a tool of vermin control.
Illegal poisoning of birds of prey on sporting estates is still a very live issue in nature conservation circles, arguably worse now (2017) than it has been for most of my career. But surprisingly, and to his great credit, Colquhoun decries exterminating ‘vermin’ altogether. In a telling aside he states unequivocally:
Clearing off the vermin by poison has been much in vogue in recent years. But, to say nothing of murdering all the dogs in the neighbourhood, it seems a pity to treat the now rare and interesting rovers of the desert like rats. This . . . may find favour with the man whose only pleasure in Highland sport consists of butchering game. For my own part I would rather trap one fine specimen of . . . the wild-cat or the marten, than shoot one hundred brace of grouse.
For all his killing, I fancy I hear the muffled beat of a conservationist heart, heavily disguised by the cultural mores of his day. In a later essay in Volume II, entitled The Natural History of Sport, he beats a drum familiar and endearing to my ears.
A passing glimpse at the wilder and more interesting British animals is every year becoming less common, since the cultivation of moorlands . . . draining, tree-planting etc. has, in many districts, driven away the aboriginal beasts of prey from haunts where they have prowled for centuries . . . When a schoolboy I remember how often the hen-roosts were plundered by pine-martens or wild-cats, which nightly crept forth from this sanctuary and the superstitious awe with which I listened in the calm twilight of summer to the cry of the tiger-cat to its fellow . . . For years this habitation of wild beasts has been swept away as if it had never been . . . call it improvement if you will . . . as an old sportsman I protest that some of our best fishing rivers have been ruined, our wild sport curtailed and our very climate modified . . . by these same labours of the improver. As the Indians fled before the white settlers, the remnants of our nobler predatory animals have sought refuge among remote Highland wilds, but they will find little sanctuary even there . . . [as] every . . . mountain and rugged moor are sought out and set apart exclusively for grouse and deer. Keepers have been commissioned to destroy the ‘vermin’ by exterminating as many as possible of our rarer and most interesting beasts and birds of prey; so that the eagle, the peregrine, the kite, the marten, the wild-cat . . . are fast receding . . . to make way for such real vermin as droves of pheasants, which afford no better sport than barn door fowls.
Well said, Mr John Colquhoun! Would that his words had been heeded by the sporting fraternity. We might still have some wildcats out there and some unsullied habitat for them. A hundred and thirty-five years after those words were written our task is immeasurably harder.
6
Rheumatic fever
For the first eleven years of her life my mother was a normal healthy child, a non-identical twin with her sister Margaretta. Then it happened. At 12.35 p.m. on Friday, 16 October 1931 the shining white-hulled 14,000-ton Royal Mail Ship Corfu eased away from the passenger boarding berth at London’s Tilbury dock. It was the Peninsular & Orient liner’s maiden voyage, off on the London to Hong Kong run via the Suez Canal, calling at Southampton, Port Said, Aden, Bombay, Colombo, Penang and Singapore. On board were 170 first-class and 211 second-class passengers; among them were the twins, Margaretta and Helen, with their eight-year-old sister, Priscilla, and their parents, bound for Port Said.
It was the girls’ first experience of foreign travel, off to Cairo and on up the Nile to Aswan, where their father was to take up his post as a consultant engineer. During the passage through the Med, Helen developed an angry sore throat. Two weeks later, as they disembarked to travel upriver, she was running a high temperature. Glandular fever, the English ship’s doctor had declared. He was wrong. So began the problems