The Dun Cow Rib. John Lister-Kaye
of roots beneath. I had to take three steps to his one long pace, so I jogged along beside him, still jabbering out the awfulness of my find. We climbed the post and rail fences and out into the fields.
White-faced Hereford bullocks frisked away from us as we cut across their moist pasture of buttercups and clover and lanky thistles. We strode up the field hedges of dense hawthorn and may, where blackbirds and thrushes burst out with a shimmer of sun-silvered wings and clucking alarms, undulated away from us and dived back in again far up ahead. A magpie jetted out beside us and flew off cackling like a witch. We drew close and my heart began to pound. I ran forward. We jumped a ditch: a mighty leap for me and one stride for him as he muttered, ‘Where on earth are you taking me, boy?’
And there it was. There it was dead and snarling with a buzz of bluebottles about its nose and crawling over the bloody void where the ear and a slice of skull should have been.
‘Hmmphhh,’ my grandfather grunted from somewhere deep inside his waistcoated chest as he took the pipe from his teeth and pulled his lips forward and together in a pursed grimace of knowing disapproval. Then he nodded solemnly, ‘I know that dog. It’s been shot at very close range.’ And we turned away and began the long walk back to the house, the silence punctuated only by the regular sharp intake of breath from the side of his mouth.
* * *
It was mid-afternoon. My mother was away in hospital. My father, I learned, had driven my sister in the old black Rover the narrow twenty miles of the Roman Fosse Way – as straight as a blade – and a few winding Warwickshire-Oxfordshire back lanes into the quiet Cotswold market town of Banbury on some domestic errand. By the age of seven I had achieved a reputation for never being an asset on any shopping trip.
So that day I had been abandoned to my own devices; even by then I had established blissful contentment at being left to explore on my own, under the vague and undefined supervision of Nellie – ‘Now don’t you go getting lost, young Jack, or I’ll be for it’ – to catch red admiral butterflies on rotting plums or search for birds’ nests, things of which adults vaguely approved but had little desire to supervise. As usual I had wandered off that day into the woods and fields of the Manor Farm.
‘They’ll all be back for tea,’ my grandfather told me, pulling out his gold pocket watch and tapping its glass as if it needed waking up before telling him the time. ‘In another hour or so. You mark my words.’
He smiled down at me as he lit his pipe with a Swan Vestas, smoke pluming dragon-like from his nostrils, and then he was gone, leaving me earnestly marking his words, striding away from me, the high priest returning to his altar, back to his beloved geraniums and delphiniums and pyrotechnically bursting camellias that almost no one ever saw. He was gone again, gone for the moment, gone in measurable distances of yards and feet and inches, gone in physical presence with his tobacco trail wisping out behind him like an echo, gone in thought and preoccupation as his passion for flowers hauled him away, but to me he had not gone at all. Like the dog’s blood, the events of that day had congealed immutably within my seven-year-old head. My grandfather had become as present and live and tangible and knowable and, yes, as mine, as God to a lonely spinster.
At the ritual of five o’clock afternoon tea at the kitchen table, Nellie sliced the large white loaf in her own alarming style. She would hold the loaf on end, cut face uppermost, and saw horizontally across the top with the blade flashing back and forth toward her own ample bosom. The result was thick, ragged slices for making toast on the ancient Aga hotplate in a folding wire mesh frame. (There was a bread slicer for what she called ‘proper dining-room bread’.) This hot toast, with its imprint of mesh-singed check, she smeared with salty butter the colour of daffodils from the farm dairy, heaped dripping onto a platter and placed strategically in the middle of the table where two large jars, one of honey and the other of her own strawberry jam, lay invitingly open.
It was an invariable routine and a near-compulsory gathering of such family as were about, possibly for the first time since breakfast. ‘I’ve baked a cake,’ Nellie would announce, delivering to the table a warmly volcanic fruit cake rising to a sultana-fissured crater at its summit. Her toast and cake drew us in like moths to a candle. Only on Sundays was the tea ritual extended to the hushed formality of the Jacobean panelled dining room, and that was an adult affair where from the sideboard they poured their tea into Dresden bone-china cups from a silver teapot and the bread was neatly sliced on the slicer. Children stayed in the kitchen with Nellie, and that suited me fine.
Kitchen tea came from a large china pot, glossy brown, dressed in a knitted and fitted blue and yellow cosy, and was poured through a strainer into big blue-ringed teacups of simple household ware. With a long-drawn sigh my grandfather always collapsed his great length into a big, high-backed oak carver at the far end of the table; my father and my uncle sat on either side, while my sister and I perched nearest the Aga under Nellie’s watchful eye. ‘Now, no tipping back!’ she would hiss at me in an audible whisper, flipping her tea towel against my shoulder in mock anger. ‘Or you’ll be in right trouble and no honey for a week.’ And when my sister and I giggled feebly at this rebuke she would add, ‘And just you remember your manners at table.’
I can remember dozens of such sleepy summer afternoons and kitchen teas, dozens of days of toast and honey and jam and crumbling fruit cake, of Nellie’s teasing and the grown-ups locked in yawningly leaden conversation about the abhorrent politics of the day, but only one when, together like old buddies, my grandfather and I held the family in thrall, when the saga of the dead dog gripped them so; only one when I was at the centre of his world and my world and the whole wide world and everything revolved around him and me and my awful discovery.
‘The boy’s found a dead dog in a ditch at Longbottom,’ he announced as soon as he had lowered himself into the chair. ‘He took me out there. It’s that wretch Howson’s dog – Tramp, I think he called it – a big terrier of a kind. Shot at point-blank range. Half its head is missing.’ He loaded strawberry jam onto his toast.
Nellie looked pale and turned away to the Aga to busy herself with more toast. ‘Whatever were you doing out at Longbottom?’ my father enquired directly.
My grandfather rescued me. ‘He was just birds’ nesting. It’s a good spot. There are magpies in those thorn hedges.’
‘Why d’ y’ think he shot his dog?’ my father quizzed, changing tack.
‘That man has a terrible temper on him. He’d shoot anything. It disobeyed him, I shouldn’t wonder, and he blasted it. Damned shame. It was a decent looking dog and good at the rabbits.’
* * *
I now see that it was inevitable that those explorations, those dreamy solo sorties into the woods and fields where a child’s unfettered imagination could run riot, meeting and treating every encounter with the surging excitement of real discovery, would become an addiction from which I would never fully recover. Every day I longed to escape. I would rush through breakfast, gobbling down Nellie’s thick porridge as fast as I could. ‘Please may I get down?’
‘Yes, you may. Now don’t you go getting into trouble, young Jack, or you’ll be . . .’ But I would be out of the door and away before she could finish the sentence. Usually I didn’t know where I was going. There was never a defined purpose, it was just out and away and come what may.
Perhaps that’s why I had loved The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe so much. It was that sense of passing from one world into another, where the known, the measured and the ordered could be cast off like a cloak, and the unknown, alluring yet slightly frightening, became as irresistible as a drug to an addict, while at the same time knowing that safe passage back through the wardrobe was always an option. It was where my imagination spiralled skyward, where make-believe ruled and I could pretend to be anything or anybody I chose, and where nothing else mattered.
My favoured route was up the Broadwalk, a long, paved path that led away from the ordered formality of the gardens to a long avenue of huge old elms and oaks surrounded by brambles and nettles and the tangle of ever-encroaching wildness. If this extremity of the grounds had ever been tamed, it certainly wasn’t any more. Wood pigeons