In modern times, you might expect such fellows to dress in combat fatigues, with a US general’s baseball cap, travelling in a giant black 4WD pick-up called something like Toyota Exterminator, with smoked windows and a great array of lamps rigged across the top. Back then, it was more army-surplus anorak, flat ’at and old Land-Rover.
I felt a little in awe of them. I was a young, idealistic RSPCA do-gooder, while they came across as real country characters, dyed in the wool, here when the grass grew, part-of-the-landscape Yorkshire.
That they were genuine ferret enthusiasts was not in doubt and, at the time, I couldn’t see any further than that. They wanted me to be chairman of this great pan-Yorkshire organisation they were going to set up, and I should have asked more about what they thought I was bringing to the party. With hindsight, it’s apparent that ferret welfare was important but it wasn’t as important as getting rabbits to sell at a quid each. With the RSPCA link in a formal, official Society with a capital S, they were hoping that such additional respectability would gain them more and better rabbiting access to private land. And that, as we shall see, wasn’t even the half of it. Yogi may well have been smarter than the average bear; he was certainly smarter than the average RSPCA inspector.
The first meeting of the new society was arranged, and it was to be held at a house in a village way up in the Pennines on a Sunday afternoon. It was a very nice house too, detached, good old Yorkshire stone, owned by a friend of Yogi’s, with a large upstairs room that had a bar in the corner. I took my cousin Gary with me and we were a bit late, so there were maybe twenty men in there when we arrived, all apparently members in favour of the protection of ferrets.
Frank had put an agenda together, with various formal matters to be resolved – badges, subscriptions, rules, election to committee and whatnot – that he rattled through in short order, which was just as well because of the beer. The house owner was a brewing hobbyist and he was selling his latest concoction, that he called Ferret’s Breath, at ten pence a pint. It went down far too easily and then came back at you with a bang. It was a dark brew, something like Theakston’s Old Peculier only stronger, and little organised thought could have been given by the chairman or the members to any agenda matters after the first hour.
Next came the fund raising. It was a bit like a garage sale. Members had scoured their lofts for unwanted items, and these were to be sold at knock-down prices to raise money for the cause. In our befuddled state, neither Gary nor I questioned why the items were unwanted. There were clocks, trousers, shirts, radios, a chainsaw, power tools, four Scalextric sets in their boxes, two professional-quality food mixers – nor did we ask why most of them came from one source, to be bought up eagerly by the others.
The source was a quite spectacular, villainous-looking fellow whom we immediately but secretly nicknamed Fagin. He wasn’t tall but he had the hair and the features, including the worst set of teeth any dentist had never seen. Well, everybody was getting stuck into the Ferret’s Breath and the rest of the meeting is a bit of a blur in my memory, and it was no use me asking Gary because he also can’t remember how we came to be asleep in the car until dawn the next day.
Motorway services were the only places open so we stopped there for some breakfast and, gradually, the mists began to clear.
‘Funny thing, that,’ said Gary.
‘Funny?’ said I.
‘Yes, all that stuff. Most of it new. Some of it still in the original packaging. Good quality, a lot of it.’
‘And most of it coming from Fagin,’ I said as a penny dropped somewhere with a loud ping.
We decided to go to one more meeting, to see for ourselves if, on the one hand, this had been a supremely generous gesture by one individual ferret fan to mark the foundation of the Society or, on the other hand, there had been a very different kind of ferreting going on and our members, as well as being everyday country folk, were also leading figures in the Huddersfield and West Riding Brotherhood of Fences, Receivers and Sellers-on.
Always expect the unexpected. Fagin wasn’t at the next meeting so the garage sale was much more low key, although still with a suspiciously large proportion of new goods, and Yogi had a really special announcement to make. As Hon Sec of our Society, he had taken it upon himself to write to the Country Landowners’ Association, offering to take a ferreting stand at the National Game Fair. This Game Fair I knew was absolutely the event of the year in field sports, held at a different country estate each time, such as Harewood House, Belvoir Castle or Ragley Hall. The country house where the next fair was to be held was not one of those.
Everyone was hugely enthusiastic about this fantastic opportunity to raise the image of ferret-keeping and spread the word of welfare, and many more pints of a new brew, called Goodnight Eddie Waring, were sunk in congratulations. Then Fagin turned up with a small velvet bag. He tipped out the contents – diamond rings, pearl necklaces, sapphire brooches – and said his auntie had died and left him this jewellery which, as it hadn’t cost him anything, he would like to sell and donate the proceeds.
On the way home, Gary and I decided we would quietly retire from society activities, but would give the game fair a go as our last hurrah. The main reason for this lack of immediate effect was a condition of the offer. As we were to be at the show for the first time, our chairman, in his other persona as RSPCA inspector, was to go well in advance to meet the man in charge, at the country house, for a short interview of authentication. I went, met an imposing chap who had that pre-war, aristocratic accent you rarely hear these days, and told him about the objectives of the Yorkshire Society for the Protection of Ferrets as laid down in our constitution. He was quite satisfied with that, and in his turn gave me a brief address on the traditions of the game fair and the high standards expected of exhibitors.
Came the day before the weekend, we assembled at Yogi’s mate’s place. Yogi had got hold of a minibus, which was not exactly in showroom condition. Apparently we would need to stop several times for petrol, not because of excessive consumption but because the rust had got through the petrol tank so it could only be filled to halfway. Fagin was there, and Frank, so we had The Three Effs plus about ten others from the twilight zone, and we set off as if on a rugby tour. Beer and whisky were being passed round before we’d gone ten yards, and there was no limit to the supply.
Thankfully the driver remained sober, or enough at least to understand the gateman’s directions to the exhibitors’ area, which was down a long driveway lined on either side by poles holding fancy white rope. None of your plastic tape rubbish here, obviously.
Next came the erection of tents. Alas, there was no such thing as a smartphone on which to film the scenes of chaos, for surely it was the sort of universal slapstick comedy that goes viral on YouTube. Even better would have been a silent film – a dozen and more drunken blokes, lurching around trying to put up tents they’d never seen before. Keystone Kops, eat your heart out.
Eventually, people crawled into half-erected tents for a late-afternoon nap, ready for the night out. There was a town not far away, sufficiently advanced in those non-cosmopolitan days to have both an Indian and a Chinese restaurant. The vote was for the curry house, despite knowing that we were sleeping close together in tents, and the pub crawl began. They had closing time in that far off puritan age, so we were forced by lack of beer out of the last pub at about a quarter to eleven.
Indian restaurants have always expected an influx at chucking-out time, but they weren’t so culinarily sophisticated then, and neither were their customers. Curries were judged on how hot they were, so our mob went for the Madras, Vindaloo and Bangalore Phall end of the menu.
I can’t remember if we were thrown out of the restaurant because it was closing or because we were drunk and disorderly. A contributory factor may have been Fagin, so drunk that he fell asleep in his Bangalore Meat Special, the out-breaths from his snores sending pilau rice and pieces of chilli across the table. Anyway, we set off again in
the minibus, stopping a couple of times for people to have a jimmy riddle or be sick, but that hardly interrupted the jollity with which the driver was joining in, singing ‘On Ilkley Moor Baht ’at’ with as much gusto as the rest.
We had a pass to get in the exhibitors’ gate but there was no one there when we turned up well after midnight. I was sitting at the back, not exactly as sober as a judge but sober enough to wonder why, as we went down the long driveway, the bus was veering from side to side, like a yacht tacking, to the accompaniment of laughs and cheers. There were also some bumps and clattering noises, the cause becoming obvious when we stopped and got out, about fifty yards short of our encampment.
The bus was gaily and profusely decorated with white rope, festooned even, as we had collected every item of temporary fencing on the way by clever use of the wing mirrors. We had the full length of it, with all the poles, right from the beginning, maybe a mile back, trailing behind us.
I made some half-hearted suggestions about putting it all back but nobody took any notice. Fagin, refreshed by his Bangalore snooze, pulled out a foot-long Bowie type knife and slashed the ropes free. Home James, he said, and nobody will know it was us.
Oh yes they will, I thought, wondering if Gary and I should start walking home now. Gary said we’d get up very early and disappear before the storm broke, so that became our plan. What seemed like minutes later, I heard my name being called.
‘Inspector Langdale. Would you care to account for this?’
‘This’ was Frank, held by his collar by one of the three stewards who stood outside my tent, dressed in tweed Norfolk jacket and plus-fours, knitted stockings with a red ribbon, and finely polished brogues. Frank looked as if he’d been pulled backwards through a bramble patch.
‘Is this man with you?’ said the steward holding him, while the other two showed me what they were carrying: about a dozen each of rabbits and pheasants.
‘Honest, Mr Langdale, I was just out for a walk and I found them, and I was bringing them back to ask you what to do,’ said Frank.
The others were spilling out of the tents, and a right motley crowd they were. The stewards looked at them with a mixture of disgust and disbelief, and at the long trail of destruction that had been their exhibitors’ driveway. They had no proof of any misdemeanour and, examining the potential witnesses, decided they would never get any.
‘You have fifteen minutes to decamp. If you are not on your way by that time, we’ll call the police. Now, get moving, and you can be sure that the Yorkshire Ferrets Club, or whatever you call yourselves, will be forbidden entry to every field sports event in this country, sine die.’
‘Carter, what’s it mean, syni deeay?’ asked Gary later.
‘It’s Latin. They use it in court. It means never, ever again, no matter how long you live.’
15
GOING OVER THE EDGE
Always keen to explore the outer limits, I trained in abseiling and rope rescue to become one of the designated RSPCA men to be called on when an animal fell over the edge of a cliff or something similarly dangerous. Depending on who was available at the time, I could be sent to rescues miles away in the Peak District, up in the high Pennines, the Lake District or, in this case, at Flamborough Head.
This famous promontory, between the bays of Filey and Bridlington, has chalk cliffs up to 400 feet high that are much favoured by breeding seabirds, thousands and thousands and thousands of them. It has one of the two UK mainland gannet colonies, and gannets were the reason for the call.
They’re migratory birds that don’t breed until four or five years old, during which time they might join a different colony from their birth one but, once they have bred, they will return again and again to the same place and, if it’s still there, the same nest. They lay only one egg (unless it is lost, when they’ll lay a replacement), so there’s just one chick and here lies a problem of the modern age.
It is father gannet’s job to refurbish and maintain the nest which, on the gale-swept cliffs of Flamborough, is a more or less continuous task. Floating around in the sea, he will see bundles of nylon twine, bright blue or orange, that have come away from fishing nets and that look to him like perfect nesting material.
If there’s too much of this stuff, out of balance with the natural components such as seaweed and other bits and pieces of vegetation, the chick can get tangled up in it. At eleven or twelve weeks old, the chick is meant to glide down to the sea, where it lives off its reserves while learning to fish and fly properly. Entwined in nylon mesh, it will be unable to leave the nest in due time, and will be left to die when its parents set off on the journey south.
Every winter, the coastguards used to combine with the RSPB and the RSPCA to mount a nest-cleaning exercise, abseiling down the cliffs below the village of Bempton, swinging on the end of a rope several hundred feet long, throwing dead gannet chicks into the sea and collecting all the nylon. Nobody could stop the male gannets gathering more next year but at least they would start with a clean nest.
Three long, stout metal pegs were driven into the ground with a sledgehammer, and the rope was threaded through to make your belay. To descend you had the standard figure-of-eight, which is a solid aluminium device with a small hole and a large hole through which you pass your rope and which allows you to run free or brake, depending on how you put on pressure.
For climbing back up, at the RSPCA we trained using the prusik method, having two loops of cord attached to your rope by prusik knots, which loosen when not under tension. You clip one loop to your chest harness and put a foot in the other. The knot tightens on the rope, you haul/push yourself up maybe eighteen inches, depending on how tall you are, lean down, pull the foot loop up, stand in it again to gain another eighteen inches, and so on. It’s very tiring, especially when you have a rescued dog in your backpack.
The coastguards had a different method. A reduced tug-of-war team of three or four men took hold of your rope and marched away from the cliff edge, hauling you up rather more speedily but, if you were used to prusiking, it could seem like the white-knuckle rollercoaster ride you’d rather not go on.
Those cliffs are intimidating anyway, but in the winter, with the wind enough to bowl you over and the wild waves crashing so far below, it’s quite sufficient to make the most experienced abseiler nervous. Just to add a little frisson, a telly crew was there that day – a typical grey Flamborough November day – to make a piece for a wildlife programme.
Another extra was Malcolm, a recently joined RSPCA inspector, still on probation as it were. The practice was to give the new boys as much experience as possible in their early days, so if there was anything especially interesting or unusual going on, management would send a Malcolm on detachment. I raised a query when contacted about this one, suggesting that abseiling down Bempton cliffs in winter wasn’t exactly the stuff of induction courses, but no, Malcolm would be all right, he was ex-Army and fully trained in rope rescue.
He confirmed this himself when we met, but there were signs that perhaps we were not talking about the same thing when I described the coastguard hauling-up technique. Maybe I was imagining it but I thought he lost some of his natural colour, but no, he was sure he’d be able to handle that, so I went on to explain that I would go over first, so he could watch what I did, then he’d go over, and I would be at the top to make sure everything was tickety-boo.
Looking back, this all seems terribly wrong. I only had his word that his army experience left him up to the job in hand. Soldiers train by abseiling down viaducts, ready to mount a surprise attack on the village. Bempton cliffs in a freezing gale, with a three- or four-hundred-foot drop onto rocks and raging sea, was perhaps too much of a proposition.
Still, Malcolm said he could do it, and he repeated that after I’d shown him exactly where we would be working, peering over the cliff edge from one of the viewing points they had then. Those are the nests, right down there, I said – right down there being a good 250 feet or more.
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br /> Tourists look at this place in the summer, sunny day, still windy, always windy but not as windy, with cliffs covered with white gannets, puffins, fulmars, little auks, and the sea still crashing in but not as threatening when it’s blue and white. Today, bleak November, overcast, sea black, cliffs naked, the occasional gale-tossed gull the only sign of life, the whole business had a much darker, more threatening edge to it, and Malcolm certainly felt it. He really did go pale this time, and rocked on his heels.
‘You don’t have to do this, Malcolm,’ I said. ‘You can just watch. You don’t have to go over. Nobody’s forcing you.’
I’d heard of people turning green, and Malcolm was on the way to that, his face a yellowish white with a hint of seasick, but no, he would do it all right. I thought back to my own time as a trainee. I was so desperate to do well that I’d have taken on any challenge they’d thrown at me. How lucky I was that they hadn’t thrown this.
I was now a TV cameraman as well as everything else, with a very heavy so-called lightweight camera attached to my helmet like a large miner’s lamp made of lead. I went over in standard fashion, walking backwards, abseiling down in gradual leaps, and spent half an hour clearing out nests until a combination of frostbite, windburn, hypothermia and delirious visions of hot coffee overcame my sense of duty and I radioed to be pulled up by the tug-of-war coastguards.
There could be no possibility of Malcolm wearing that camera so I checked anxiously that my amateur pictures had been okay. I took off my harness and handed it to Malcolm, who was shaking. I asked him again, and again during the age it took him to get the harness on, if he was sure about this.
An Alligator in the Bathroom...And Other Stories Page 12