ALIVE! SNAKES WHAT A TALE...
The Dun Cow Rib: A Very Natural Childhood
The cow’s rib was actually the jawbone of a whale, attached to a beam as a kind of ornament or talisman in the Lister-Kaye manor house in Warwickshire, a seat acquired in 1856. The family had made its fortune with mining concerns and owned the Rugby Portland Cement Company. John, the author of this enchanting autobiography, was never much interested in industry or business – but he loved the atmosphere and mystery of his rural surroundings: the cabinets of birds’ eggs and beetle collections, the walled rose garden and, in the adjacent churchyard, ‘the sweeping branches of ancient oaks and beeches’ that ‘trembled their shadows over the lichened gravestones of many of my ancestors’.
If I found this book uniquely moving, it’s because of the remarkable affinities. My own family were farmers, owning land in Wales since 1868. I grew up mucking in with the lambing, haymaking, corn harvesting. What a tough existence it was – I couldn’t wait to get away to university, shut myself in a warm room and read books. I am still doing that now. But when Lister-Kaye describes his childhood, it all floods back: stinging nettles and dock leaves; herons, house martins, moorhens and barn owls; ‘newborn kittens in a manger of sweet hay’. He finds a fox in an oak stump and peers into the dark gloom of a badger sett.
How lucky I was, I see only now, to have had a similar landscape in which to grow up – unsupervised by adults and free of health-and-safety concerns, too. John knew from the outset that he never wanted to leave such a habitat, dipping for newts and dragonfly larvae. ‘It was an apprenticeship, time being served and the accumulation of experience I would call upon for the rest of my life.’ Now Sir John, he serves on the boards of the UK’s Nature Conservancy Council, Scottish Natural Heritage
and the Scottish Wildlife Trust. What I particularly admired about
The Dun Cow Rib is that he refuses to be sentimental about the countryside. He knows full well that nature is full of spilled blood and guts – badgers ripping hedgehogs open, ‘leaving only the spiny skin’; sparrow hawks plucking chaffinches alive; and in an incredibly horrific scene he describes a grass snake patiently consuming an entire nest of freshly hatched coots: ‘The reptile’s head rose and fell in what passes for a swallow, a peristaltic muscular ripple.’
Being from the upper classes, the young John was packed off to boarding school at the age of five. He had a trauvery matic time at beastly institutions, the victim of sadists. To this day he feels keenly ‘the hurt of injustice and the anger of a child’s utter impotence’. He was like one of those coots advanced upon by a snake. He was caned so cruelly, lawyers were called in. The only thing that happened was that John’s father received a refund of the school fees paid in advance. Home life was no jollier. John’s mother was a chronic invalid, suffering from a leaking aortic valve. His father was characterised by bottled-up emotion and nervous coldness. However, ‘a brusque and laconic exterior gave an entirely false impression of uncaring insensitivity’. Not that John worked that out until late on in life, when his father was something of a sad widower who, when he went fishing, suddenly said: ‘I don’t know why I’ve been fooling about in industry all my life.’
John was fortunate to find his vocation early. His solace at school was the study of birds and mammals, reptiles, insects, plants and soils. Through complex family connections he went to assist Gavin Maxwell in Scotland with his writing projects. Suddenly world-famous after
Ring Of Bright Water, Maxwell was an eccentric chain-smoking, self-loathing homosexual who died of cancer in 1969 at the age of 55. It turned out that Maxwell’s pet otters were not the cute creatures of his book. They were savage and bit people’s fingers off.
John loved Scotland and the remote glens, and decided to buy an estate surrounding a ‘faintly ridiculous Victorian mansion’, where he founded the Aigas Field Centre.
Here, with his wife and children, he has recreated the agricultural world that has vanished elsewhere, owing to mechanisation, pesticides and the grubbing up of hedgerows. ‘I loved its wild woods and fields; the tangle of its long-forsaken gardens and its shimmering loch tucked into a fold in the hills,’ he writes. The habitat is paradise for wildlife, including the rare Scottish wildcat, a ‘snarling, hissing, spitting demon’.
I should love to pay a visit and to shake this fine author by the hand.