My Wild Life

by Simon Cowell

  I started looking for a new house for us to live in. While the cottage was lovely and served our needs, it was small and I felt we needed somewhere bigger with a bit more land. Jill was not as enthusiastic as I was – she was happy where we were – but I went looking anyway and I found a place in Leatherhead that I persuaded her to view. It was an old farmhouse with outbuildings and plenty of land. It felt right as soon as I walked inside. Randalls Farm had a good energy and felt familiar, perhaps because I had grown up around farms. There was a coach house in the grounds where people travelling to London would have stopped over to rest and feed and water their horses in the old days. The stone trough for the horses was still outside. There were gardens and then land beyond on which there were a few buildings and a barn. The rest of the farmland that used to surround the house had been sold off and developed over the years but, while there were several business parks nearby, the area still felt like the countryside. Just over the road was Leatherhead Crematorium – so we knew the neighbours would be quiet – and the River Mole was a five-minute walk away. Jill liked it and, because it needed some work, it was on the market for a lot less than it was worth. I nearly bought it without telling Jill – I put in an offer and only told her afterwards. We paid £90,000 for it and at the time it was worth £120,000 so I was pleased with the deal.

  A year after we moved Jill fell pregnant once more. Again, it just sort of happened and Jill didn’t even tell me the news first: she told my parents. I found out by surprise on a trip to Gloucestershire. We were driving there to visit her parents and my folks were in the car with us looking after Lou when Mum mentioned it. Jill probably didn’t want to bother me, given the amount of time I’d spent with Lou.

  Of course, I was delighted and Gemma came along several months later. Randalls Farm became a proper home. We had our own family unit. With two young mouths to feed I found myself working even harder and longer hours, and Jill still looked after the children without any assistance from me. I was a spectator and I regret not seeing the kids as much as I should have when they were little. There is a big hole that I can’t ever fill. In retrospect I was an awful father who was never there and I will feel guilty about that until the day I die.

  Jill never complained. She got on with the job of raising our daughters and I get so cross now when I hear people use the phrase ‘only a housewife’ because it is obvious to me that it is bloody hard work.

  Several life-changing things happened in the year after we moved. In addition to Gemma’s birth we had another new arrival, which consequently would change the course of all of our lives. Jill and I had always kept pets. We had a golden retriever named Max who moved with us to Randalls Farm. There was plenty of space for him to roam around in and plenty of space for anything else. We were both animal lovers and we also both harboured unfulfilled ambitions to work with animals in some capacity or another. We had both wanted to be vets when we were younger but lacked the required qualifications. Then one day we got a call from an old friend of ours asking a favour. And she had a box with her.

  It was Anne Cooper, the slightly eccentric wildlife rescuer and former neighbour from Brockham. She explained the purpose of her visit. We were both equally bemused and flummoxed.

  ‘I’ve got a neighbour. She had a seagull in her flat. It only has one wing . . .’

  ‘What are you talking about, Anne?’ I interrupted.

  ‘Here,’ she said, opening the box and showing me the grumpy-looking bird.

  ‘The poor thing couldn’t stay where it was. It was living in a bath. Your mum told me there is a bit of space at your new place. I thought perhaps you could give it a home?’

  Jill and I looked at each other.

  ‘Why not?’ we said.

  Anne was part of a network of people that helped the local wildlife and they all seemed to know each other and swapped tips and advice. If one had an animal that couldn’t go back in the wild for whatever reason, they would ask around in the community and try to find a home for it if they couldn’t keep it themselves. It was a bonkers little world, but extremely good-natured and quite noble. These people had their own reasons for doing what they did – I thought that some of them were just lonely while others were a bit dotty – but ultimately they were doing good things and helping animals.

  I took the box from Anne and she explained the basics of caring for the gull. Luckily gulls eat almost anything so there was no problem sourcing food for it.

  ‘It’s all right,’ I said soothingly to the animal, ‘we are not going to hurt you. Welcome to your new home.’

  The bird was quite used to being handled and let me pick him up.

  ‘He’s very gentle,’ Anne said. ‘His beak isn’t that sharp and I should imagine he will be okay with the children.’

  ‘Patient zero’ made itself at home inside and outside the house. It would waddle in the kitchen looking for scraps. I had always planned on building a pond so we dug one out soon after the gull arrived. The bird loved it and a few months later it had company. My dad had a new job managing a farm for a friend and he decided to sell the family home and move into a cottage on the farm. The house Dad was selling had a pond, which was home to a swan. The swan had just appeared in his yard one day and wasn’t very well. Dad fed it and looked after it and it became part of the family. He was devastated when he thought he was going to have to rehome it somewhere new. He was happy to let us have it, and he could visit it anytime he liked.

  That is how all it began, with a seagull in a bath tub and a swan. Word spread that we took in animals and every now and then someone would call and explain that they had found something in their garden or something injured by the roadside and they brought it to us. I had enough knowledge from my farming days to know the rudimentary stuff when it came to animal first aid. Jill was more than capable and learned quickly. She loved having animals to look after. Our animal centre began to grow organically without us advertising or announcing it. It was pure word of mouth. It just happened and we did it because we enjoyed it. It was a hobby. I came home from work and looked after a few things. It was relaxing and a diversion from the stress of the City. I seemed to know what I was doing and had a natural affinity with the animals. When we’d patched our patients up we released them back into the wild. If they couldn’t go back, we found homes for them on the farm. We called ourselves Randalls Wildlife Rehabilitation Centre.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Animal House

  AS IT HAPPENED, Dad didn’t have to wait long to be reunited with his swan because a few years later he and Mum moved into our coach house, which had been hastily converted into a cosy bungalow. They brought along a few other additions of their own. Sadly, Dad’s fortunes had not worked out as well as he deserved or expected. The job on the farm was brought to a swift conclusion after a dispute with the farm owner. When Dad had sold the family home to move into the farm he had let it go too cheaply – I think he got around £30,000, which, for a four-bedroom detached house, was well below what it was worth at the time. Dad had worked hard all his life and ultimately had little to show for it when the farm job came to an end. With limited savings my parents were effectively homeless. Jill and I invited them to come and live with us at Randalls. Dad was such a kind, decent bloke who always had time for everyone that it didn’t need any further consideration. I was never going to allow my parents to be without a home; they had made so many sacrifices for me when I was growing up and, as far as I was concerned, it was an opportunity to pay them back – not that they expected it. So they arrived with their ‘family’. Dad had been collecting a small menagerie of water fowl, which he transferred to our pond. The seagull looked slightly disgruntled at having to share his home with a load of new arrivals.

  Throughout my life, circumstance has always provided in some way or another at crucial times; call it fate or divine intervention. That is what happened when my parents arrived. Dad was a brilliant handyman who could fix anything. He never needed to be asked – he just enjoy
ed the simple pleasure of finding something that was broken or could be improved in some way and tinkering with it. Consequently, within a few months of his arrival there was nothing on the farm that didn’t work. If something broke it was fixed within a day. I would walk through the garden, notice the outside tap was leaking and make a mental note to fix it, but by the next day it was already done. It was like having a magical elf who invisibly mended things. He went about the place very quietly and unassumingly, and was always there in the background. Everyone loved him to bits and he was a true gentleman. He also loved wildlife and knew several people from his farming network who soon got to know about our willingness to take in wildlife. Our ‘hobby’ quite quickly turned into something much more. We never dreamed it would be anything more than a pastime and we never really meant for it to expand. Initially our patients found a home in the kitchen.

  We didn’t advertise but the community was closer than it is today and people talked. Subsequently, every so often someone would arrive with a box. The exchange was always the same. There would be a knock on the door, usually at the weekend or in the evening. Jill or I would get up and open it.

  ‘Hello. A friend told me that you look after wildlife and I found this,’ they would say, offering the box for inspection. They would be invited inside.

  ‘What have you got there then?’ I would enquire curiously.

  The lid would be lifted and something would be nestling inside in some straw or ripped newspaper, rustling around nervously.

  I would then start asking questions to get as much information as I could about the creature – what injuries it had and where it had been found. I would take down the patient’s details on a pad that Jill helpfully left out by the door, attached to the wall with a piece of string. It was our log and helped us keep track of things. It was inevitable that I would take in the animal with the aim of feeding it, treating any injuries and ultimately getting it back out into the wild. Most commonly in the early days we would get small birds and hedgehogs. The hedgehogs were magical and we would be constantly rearranging our kitchen to cope with the growing number. We certainly didn’t go into it thinking we were going to create a wildlife hospital in our home. I can’t really blame anyone else because I let it grow and grow and tacitly encouraged it with a call to the local newspaper or the local radio station here and there, explaining that a new visitor had arrived. The local press loved it because there is nothing more heart-warming for the readers than a picture of a little baby hedgehog. After each small snippet in the papers we received more animals.

  We had cages to keep the animals in and we utilized household goods to deal with emergencies as and when they arose. It was think-on-your-feet firefighting. One day a woman arrived with a box and showed me a fully intact nest in which sat several tiny birds cheeping weakly. They were so fragile and young their featherless skin was translucent and their closed eyes bulged like black wounds.

  ‘A cat got their mother and the father never came back,’ the woman said. ‘I got my husband to get up the tree on the ladders and get the nest. I couldn’t stand there and do nothing. I could hear them calling for their mother. It was awful.’

  I reassured the woman and told her we would do our best to get them fit and healthy, and big enough to fend for themselves back in the wild.

  ‘Thank you so much,’ she said. She was genuinely emotional.

  ‘You’ve done the right thing,’ I told her. Naively I believed back then that human intervention was predominantly the best course of action. Over the years I learned that was a false assumption and often, especially with baby birds, the best thing to do if they are not in immediate peril is to do nothing as one or both parents will usually return. Even birds that fall from the nest often find their way to a safe hiding place where a parent will continue to feed them.

  When the woman left I started to think about the challenge I had just accepted. I had a nest full of birds that needed to be fed and kept warm. I racked my brains to think of where to put them. Eureka! We had an electric frying pan – one of those gadgets that you buy because they seem like a good, time-saving idea but that you never use. I dragged it out from the back of the cupboard, cleared space on a worktop, put it on the lowest setting and placed the nest gently on it. Then I grabbed my coat and car keys and went to a local angling shop to buy a pint of maggots. Back at home I found a bowl and mashed up some of the maggots into a smelly, revolting paste and, using a turkey baster, I spent the next thirty minutes feeding the birds. They loved it and over the following weeks we made several trips to the angling shop to keep a constant supply of mashed maggots, which the birds devoured hungrily. Thankfully, Jill and I had grown up in rural communities so we were not precious about the kitchen and keeping it spotless. Farmhouse kitchens are always in a state of organized chaos, with people and dogs traipsing in and out. Ours was the same, full of life and wildlife. The gas-fired Aga was regularly used to warm a patient. We patched up animals, bathed wounds and disinfected them.

  ‘Remember the oven when you go, there is a hedgehog in there,’ Jill would call out as I ventured off to work. She would prepare breakfast for the girls, then start to feed the animals. I got as involved as I could during the weekends and the evenings, but Jill did all the hard work.

  It was a steep learning curve to begin with as there was no internet from which to get information. If only we had Google back then, it would have made life a hell of a lot easier. There was much trial and error and I utilized the network of other animal carers who were doing similar things. We shared information. Anne Cooper was a constant source of support and advice and if she didn’t know something she would be able to put me in touch with someone who did. I made telephone calls to the RSPCA and to other wildlife rescue centres, the most established of which was called Tiggywinkles, based in Buckinghamshire. It had been set up by a man called Les Stocker and his wife Sue in 1978, two years before we started our little enterprise. I saw Les on the news and it inspired me to some extent. I thought, If they can do it, we can.

  Slowly, as we became more established, people started calling us for advice, too. The guiding purpose of what we did was to get injured animals back into their natural habitats but on occasion things would arrive at our door that were too damaged to survive in the wild or which had been kept as pets and were too imprinted by man. That, to me, is the worst-case scenario for any animal. It has lost its natural survival instinct and instead is a prisoner to man. As the years went on I formulated a strict philosophy, which I’ll explain later. However, in our early years we took in several animals that became permanent fixtures in and around the house. One of the first was Fleur, a beautiful barn owl.

  At this point it is important to explain a little about my thoughts on naming animals. I believe that anthropomorphizing wild animals – attributing human characteristics to them – is the first step to imprinting them. Wild animals don’t have names because they are not pets, so I have tried to make a policy over the years of never naming things when they are brought in. My policy works sometimes but other times my daughters or, in later years, volunteers would give something a name. Fleur, however, already had a name when she arrived. She was delivered by the RSPCA. I had become friendly with one of the local inspectors, a very lovely man named Bill Alston.

  Bill called me one day and explained that he had confiscated an owl from a person in Surrey because the bird was being mistreated and was being kept in a cage. He asked if I had room for her. We had the barn at the top of the farm, which could easily be sectioned up to create a secure aviary space, so I agreed straight away. Owls are magnificent, intriguing creatures and this one deserved a better life. Dad set about making a suitable enclosure and Bill brought Fleur over. It was evident from the very start that she had no fear of humans, which is not a good thing for a wild animal. Bill explained the dos and don’ts of owl care and left Fleur with us. She made herself right at home and hopped onto my shoulder while I held the tether attached to her leg. She survey
ed the chaos of the kitchen, twisting her head from side to side, making a careful note of the animals in cages arranged around the room, no doubt thinking what tasty snacks they would make. I made a note to keep her well-fed in case she was ever tempted to help herself to one of the patients. Dead chicks were added to the weekly shopping list that included maggots, earthworms, dog food, cat food and sprats for the seagull.

  People started to call when they saw stranded wildlife and sometimes I would go and collect animals if I was around. From there the rescue service began. The very first rescue happened soon after we started out. It was Sunday and the phone rang. I answered and spoke to the manager of a local golf course.

  ‘We have a problem with a swan on the eighteenth tee,’ he explained. ‘The blasted thing has been there for hours and it won’t move. If you approach it, it hisses and no one wants to get attacked. It’s holding up all the members – they can’t play through.’

  ‘Is it injured at all?’ I asked.

  ‘We’ve not been able to get close enough but it certainly isn’t moving,’ he explained.

  ‘I’ll be right over,’ I said.

  I went out to the garage and started to rummage around for any equipment I might need. I grabbed a pole, reasoning that from a distance I would be able to gently nudge the swan to see if it could be moved. I took a large fishing net in case I needed to try and catch it and I took the biggest carry-cage we had. I also took a pair of thick leather gloves. I packed it all up in the boot of the car and drove to the course where I was met by the exasperated manager, his face red with frustration at the obstinate swan that was ruining Sunday for his members. He showed me across the green to the scene of the crime.

  The tee was surrounded by members, mostly men in various shades of pastel all looking equally irritated. The manager pointed.

  ‘There it is,’ he said, with barely concealed ire.