the other passed the weed up to it. Then she sat.
I couldn’t keep away. Every day I visited several times, the bird always firmly parked on her nest. I longed to see into it, but I couldn’t. Even when she came off I still couldn’t see in from the bank. I climbed a tree nearby but however I craned my neck it was no good. Very stealthily I ventured out along the fallen branch. Immediately it shook the nest; the hen took fright, springing away into the water with a sharp-edged yelp. She half flew, half skedaddled across the surface, cutting a dark trail through the bright green duckweed to the far side, where she disappeared under an overhanging thicket.
I saw my chance and stepped boldly out along the branch until it began to wobble under my weight. Then I dropped to my hands and knees, clinging on to slender, twiggy laterals as I crawled forward. At last I could see into the nest. There, glowing with heat, were seven stone-coloured eggs speckled with rusty dots and squiggles. They were magnificent. At that moment I wanted one of those eggs more than anything else in the world. I wanted to take one home and show it to my father and my grandfather to persuade them that I needed to start a collection of my own – my own cabinet of drawers, my own carefully inscribed labels, my own toolkit, my own trophies.
I crawled forward again. The branch flexed alarmingly under my weight, but there was still a long way to go. The nest was woven into the flimsy extremity of twigs well out from the main stem. I lay down on the branch and inched forward like a snake stalking its prey. I could still hear the moorhen squawking anxiously from its hideaway. Another five feet to go – with a sickening snap the dead branch broke and I crash-landed in the water.
It wasn’t deep, only about three feet. I quickly righted myself, hauling up on the branch, dripping and spitting foul water like a ducked witch. My wellingtons found the bottom and I stood up and wiped the weed from my face. I’d cut my lip and blood flowed freely down my sodden shirt. Stinking of rotten eggs, bubbles of marsh gas were percolating to the surface all round me. Then I realised that I was sinking. I tried to raise my feet one at a time. They wouldn’t budge. I was sinking into deep, cold, evil-smelling mud. Nothing for it but to abandon my boots and haul myself out on the branch in soggy socks. I took a long last look at the nest, still out of reach, before hauling back along the branch to the bank.
I limped painfully home, cringing with every step. I crept in the back door to the scullery desperate to find Nellie before anyone else saw me. ‘Oh my lordy Lord,’ she cried, wringing her hands in her pinny. ‘I knew you was up to no good.’ Water trickled down my legs and pooled muddily on the flagstones at my feet.
‘Please don’t tell,’ I begged. I knew she wouldn’t.
5
Ye hunter’s badge
I can no longer remember when I first became aware of the significance of wildlife. Born into the woods and pastoral landscapes of England, I had gradually become familiar with the existence of foxes and badgers, otters, weasels and stoats, several species of deer and many birds, but no such rarified and thrilling excitement as a wildcat existed either in the cultural heritage of my background or out there in the English countryside.
The sporting tradition of the eighteenth-century country squire, of huntin’, shootin’ and fishin’, lay at the heart of that heritage. The staring, snapping and snarling relics of the chase adorned many of the Manor House corridors and rooms, an enduring cultural ingredient immortalised in lurid taxidermy. Fox masks with slavering tongues leered as I crept past, otters curled their bristly lips and the mad, goggle-eyes of hares stared out from passage walls, all mounted on glossy mahogany shields, duly dated and referenced on ivory plaques, like gravestones, Killed Paulton Way. 17.11.29, with the initials of the family member who had ridden home rejoicing.
Other trophies were scattered about the house so that I never knew what was going to confront me as I rounded corridor corners. At first their strange language bewildered me, a codified lexicon of their own, which, to enter the enticing world of conformity, you had to know by heart: foxes lived in ‘earths’ and their silver mounted bushy tails were ‘brushes’; otters lived in ‘holts’ and their thick, tapering tails were ‘poles’; badgers dug ‘setts’, their long-clawed paws ‘pads’; and you didn’t say deer hooves, you said ‘slots’. On white and gleaming frontal bone, red deer antlers possessed their own full glossary – important to know your tines: ‘brow’, ‘bez’, ‘trez’ and ‘tops’; ‘hummel’, ‘switch’, ‘ten pointer’ or the complete, majestic spread of a twelve-point ‘Royal’ stag – or full mounted heads of fallow ‘bucks’ with broad palmate antlers, or roe ‘bucks’ with ‘pearling’, or the freakish malformation of a ‘perruque’, all haughtily eyeing me from on high.
A whole 38 lb salmon with the glassy eye of a crazed convict stared malevolently from above the butler’s pantry door. In the hall, above a cast-iron umbrella stand bursting with thumb sticks, walking sticks, croquet mallets, ram’s horn crummacks, silver-knobbed canes and old black Briggs’ umbrellas with knobbly handles, something deeply scary called a ‘ferox trout’, all 12 lb of it, with mouth agape and multiple jagged teeth, shark-like, bared for the snap and snatch, floated its menacing grin through the rigid weed of its glass case. All these relict lives were alarmingly life-like; I tiptoed past them as much in awe as in fear that those teeth might still bite.
At the far end of the smoking-room passage was the gunroom, where immaculately oiled and polished guns and rifles gleamed alluringly from their glass-fronted cases, securely locked away from the prying fingers of small boys, territory from which I was expressly forbidden. ‘Now don’t you let me catch you nowhere near,’ Nellie would wag her finger at me, but that made it a certainty and I sneaked off there as soon as no one was about.
That long corridor, with its threadbare red runner and squeaky floorboards, lined with bookshelves, also led to my grandfather’s indoor sanctuary, his study, known as the smoking-room, which was always locked if he wasn’t there. I would not have dared even try the brass doorknob. But that corridor held an irresistible magnetism for a small boy. The whole place reeked of antiquity, the irrepressible incense of a past when nothing ever changed: tobacco, gun oil, the tangy scent of cordite, all blended with mansion polish and a whiff of mothballs.
Every August for most of his adult life my grandfather had taken off to Scotland, in the 1930s it was in his elegant, long-bonneted convertible two-litre Lagonda Tourer, driven by Nellie’s father, West, who performed the triple roles of chauffeur, personal valet and his loader. Top quality English side-lock shotguns came in pairs: Purdeys, Holland & Holland ‘Royals’, Boss, William Powell, Churchill, there are many makes, always in beautiful flat leather cases, embossed with names, initials or family crests, each piece of the dismantled guns – stock, barrels, fore-end – bedded in their own scarlet or royal blue felt-lined compartments. There would also be fitted slots for a small phial of Rangoon gun oil, two steel snap caps, a special ebony handled screwdriver which exactly matched the slot on the engraved side-lock screws, a ramrod with knurled ebony handle and threaded cleaning mops. A matching leather magazine contained the cartridges.
Such English shotguns were then and still are universally recognised as the best guns in the world, nowadays costing more than an expensive car. They are also works of art. Their steel side-lock plates always intricately and beautifully engraved with acanthus leaves or sporting scenes: pointers, retrievers and spaniels, or pheasants, snipe, partridges, duck or woodcock, and the highly polished stocks sculpted from Spanish walnut root. But those guns were also de rigueur, an essential hallmark of class and wealth, a social shibboleth and a passport to the finest sporting estates in Britain. You were expected to own them and to bring ‘your man’ with you.
While shooting across most of England was principally about pheasants and partridges, in Yorkshire and Scotland it was grouse – the red grouse – one of only two (with the Scottish crossbill) endemic British bird species. Grouse were then and still are shot walking up ‘over dogs’ – pointers or setters – or ‘driven’ toward the guns by a line of flag-waving beaters. They fly fast and low in coveys of up to twenty or thirty birds at a time. To maximise the ‘bag’ requires skilful sharp-shooting with two double-barrelled shotguns – hence the pair