The Dun Cow Rib

by John Lister-Kaye

  After a few weeks I had fallen in with a friend of about my age, Charlie Morley, a quick-witted lad with an easy laugh, who, unfathomably, was being raised by his grandparents. I asked him one day where his mother and father were. ‘Dunno,’ he said and ran off. I never asked again. When eventually he took me back to his dark sixteenth-century cottage home, grace and favour quarters in a medieval almshouse of low-ceilinged, shadowy rooms, I realised that his grandfather was the verger, the old man with a limp I had met inside the church. Their kitchen was an outhouse under a corrugated iron roof across a narrow flagstone passage open to the sky, where his grandmother lurked like a malevolent spider, ready to pounce. She was a small, hunched woman in her late sixties with frightening pebble glasses beneath a tangle of silver hair, who swore volubly and reeked of stewed cabbage. If Charlie was late home, she shot out of that cave-like kitchen, cursed him roundly and whipped him across the back of his bare legs with a hazel switch.

  One morning on the way to school I passed their house. Charlie ran out waving his arms excitedly. ‘Come and see yere,’ he called, rushing along the pavement to the iron railings in front of the village library. He stopped at a place where the arrow-headed top of one railing was missing – bright new metal gleamed where it had just been hacksawed off. ‘It were ol’ Mrs Crawley last evenin’,’ he recounted breathlessly. ‘She were drunk again and come off ’er bike right yere.’ He fingered the fresh cut. ‘Went right through ’er cheek and into ’er mouth, it did, so’s they ’ad to cut it off with ’er still on it. Stuck like a lolly on a stick, she were.’

  ‘Is she dead?’ I quizzed, captivated by this rural drama.

  ‘Nope. She’s in ’ospital down Yeovil. They said she didn’t feel a thing she were so drunk.’

  Just then old Mrs Morley came panting out onto the pavement waving her hazel switch. ‘What you boys on about, gossipin’ all bleedin’ day? Get on down to school or I’ll want to know why.’ We ran the last hundred yards, shirt-tails to the wind.

  In truth, the most startling difference was that I had never witnessed real poverty before. There were children who came in rags, not just hand-me-downs but threadbare garments, pullovers with elbows out, and torn, stained trousers. Some had no socks, pale ankles protruding from ill-fitting shoes with worn-out soles. Shoes without laces lashed loosely with string; sometimes odd shoes, one brown, one black; one a boot, the other a shoe. But above all, some from the very poorest homes, or no homes at all, the unkempt kids of travelling people, stank with a rich and rodent odour like a hamster’s nest. Davy Briggs, who could neither read or write, nor had any desire to, came from the roadside encampment at the crossroads up at the top of Bower Hinton. His father wore a greasy cap at a rakish angle and delivered Davy to school perched on the bare boards of a trailer drawn by a large skewbald horse with feathered hooves. Davy had a turned-up nose so that you could peer right into his nostrils. The older children named him ‘Piggy’ and made snorting noises whenever he walked by.

  We called them Gypsies, and their presence was a characterful signature of rural life of the ’50s. My father condemned them as poachers and thieves who would filch anything they could get their hands on: pheasants, chickens, pigeons, dogs, horses, sheep out of the fields; any farm tools left lying about would fall to their roving, predatory eyes. Their ageing womenfolk, swarthy and often toothless, wrapped in crochet shawls and floral headscarves, big golden hoops punched through sagging ear lobes, sold wicker baskets and white split-ash clothes pegs door to door, calling everyone ‘dearie’. ‘Pegs t’day, dearie? A penny ha’p’ny each, only a bob for twelve, dearie.’ But my father’s censure faltered over the bold equestrian skills of their men and boys. Horsemanship lay close to his heart; when the summer fairs came round, he couldn’t conceal his admiration for their fearless displays of roping and breaking wild ponies from Exmoor.

  Many of their children never came to school at all, but those that did, mostly boys, arrived in a redolent breeze of warm bodies and wood smoke, of chickens, dead mice and unaired emotions, the sort of sweet and creaturely smells you might find lingering in an old farm byre. At first I found them repugnant and pulled away, not knowing what to say or think. But as the weeks drifted by, those bucolic essences, their dirty fingernails, thick greasy hair and stale sweat ceased to offend me and I began to accept their scent as a primeval animal pungency not unlike that emanating from fox earths or badgers’ setts, familiar and somehow complementing the wilder cloisters of the woods and fields.

  In marked contrast the well-scrubbed children of relatively well-to-do families dressed tidily and took their studies seriously. Mr Barron’s daughter, the dark-haired, slight, imp-faced Susan, was one of those. Always immaculately turned out in a smart frock with white ankle socks and polished shoes, she was the first Martock child I had seen when I was summoned to her parents’ house with my father, peering warily at me through the bannisters. I thought she was aloof and I think she must have looked on me as a curiosity, perhaps coloured by something her father had said after that first interview. Did she know I had been expelled from Hampton Down? Did she know why? Later both my sister and I came to know her better, appearing together in a fancy-dress pageant at the church fête on the vicarage lawn. She was bright-eyed, intelligent and fun in a tom-boyish sort of way, always a ready laugh with the flush of Somerset meadows colouring her vowels; but just as I would be pigeon-holed by many of the children because of my unfamiliar voice and mysterious background, I was never able to see her as anything but the schoolmaster’s daughter, always wary that she might tell her father what I was up to.

  In the playground I was ragged about my accent. ‘What you doin’ yere? You’m a college kid, bain’t you?’ Or ‘Where you bin to? Oi ain’t never seen the likes of you round yere afore.’ It dawned quickly that speech was the key to conformity. Mimicry came easily; in just a few weeks I could imitate the fruity Somerset patois with its rolling Zs as in ‘Zomerzet’, its gratuitous Rs tipped in when ‘grass’ became ‘grarse’, and the total abandonment of Hs as in ‘Look at ’arry, ’e’s a lazy sod, ’e is.’ And ‘thic’ for ‘that’, as in ‘Give thic ball yere, will ’ee?’ When asked ‘Where do you live?’, you didn’t say ‘I live in Martock.’ You said, ‘Oi stay down Mardick.’ Before long I was fluent; a home voice and a school voice, the one barely intelligible to the other. Swearing was surprisingly mild, with ‘sod’ being the commonest insult. ‘You daft sod!’ or ‘’E’s a silly sod, ’e is.’ But in anger it was often piqued by stronger spices – ‘Oi told ’im to bugger orf an’ mind ’is own soddin’ business.’

  One afternoon a barn owl flew low over the playground. ‘Look at thic fuckin’ owl,’ Davy Briggs called out. I’d often seen barn owls but I imagined ‘fuckin’ owl’ was the local name. It seemed to slip off the rural tongue with a glassy resonance. As I walked home I met the vicar outside the church.

  ‘Hullo, John. How are you getting on at school?’ He smiled broadly.

  ‘Very well, thank you, vicar.’

  ‘What sort of things do you enjoy most?’

  ‘This afternoon a fuckin’ owl flew across the playground.’

  Instantly his face clouded.

  ‘Go home and wash your mouth out with soap and water,’ he insisted, banishing me down the road. I wondered what on earth I had said. My mother looked shocked when I told her, but later I heard her chuckle as she recounted it to my father.

  What I was up to was, on the face of it, the most innocent of pursuits that a country boy could indulge. I was escaping. Escaping into the woods and fields of a self-perpetuating, effervescent adventure. I was living two worlds, a world of conformity, the rigour of school, striving to fit in and the dull routines of the learning process, and another world altogether, as much in my head as in reality, as I disappeared off into the imagined wildernesses of the countryside. The misery of homesickness and Twig at Hampton House; my mother’s unexplained absences; bullying Bernie at Hampton Down; the freedom of the Manor House, de
licious and heady, and the hundreds of hours of solitary exploration during those formative years had armed me with a sturdy carapace of independence and self-determination. At that moment in my young life I had no need of friends.

  Innocent, that is, until I set eyes on Noreen Ashby. Are boys of ten supposed to be acutely gender aware? I certainly hadn’t been until that exquisitely feminine thunderbolt speared into me. With the notable exception of Twig, whom Betty and I had viewed as an unpleasant affliction unworthy of any gender, all the women in my short life had been benign mother figures – Nellie, Mrs Warmley, the sympathetic matron at Hampton Down, my own mother, of course, even Mrs Barnwell, Sally Franklin and the bird-like Dizzy Cuff had shown me affection and warmth. In their various roles I had loved them all for their compassion and manifold kindnesses, much as a dog dotes on its master who feeds it. Theirs was an open, unqualified brand of love, pure, nourishing and unquestioning, like the Mississippi, rolling on ‘full flood, inexorable, irresistible, benignant’.

  Late summer and a stuffy classroom. An enervating airlessness hung thick and heavy as syrup. After lunch we tumbled back in from the playground. In a conspiratorial gaggle, girls tittered as they took their seats. Mickey Florey from the old forge cottages at the back of North Street had picked a fight with me – a sort of pecking-order skirmish, more bluster than anger, his only weapon in a struggle to assert himself over this bumptious, uninvited incomer. I’d stood my ground. When the bell rang my hair was ruffled, blood from my nose smeared my sleeve and my hands were dirtied. He’d torn my shirt, but I had pushed him over, downed him, and that was good enough for me.

  Miss Gibbs called me to the front of the class. ‘You’ve been fighting, haven’t you?’ she snapped. Her grey hair framed a brow doubly creased with the force of interrogation.

  ‘Sort of, miss. Sorry, miss.’

  ‘Fighting in the playground is strictly forbidden.’

  ‘Yes, miss.’

  ‘Who were you fighting with?’ Her hooded eyes glared. The class fell silent.

  ‘It wasn’t really fighting, miss, just ragging.’

  ‘I asked you who with?’ Her voice was honed to a sabre edge.

  ‘Just some of the boys, miss. We were just fooling . . .’

  ‘I want to know who you were fighting with. If you don’t tell me, I shall send you through to Mr Barron.’

  I said nothing. To this day, I don’t really know why. It certainly wasn’t through any love of Mickey Florey – I thought he was plucky, but I also knew he was what my father called a lout. But the rough and tumble of boarding school had taught me jungle lore. Survival was bigger than just winning a fight. I had somehow osmosed a knave’s honour. The prospect of being labelled a sneak swirled in front of me like an autumn fog. No, I thought, No, No, No. I stayed silent and looked at the floor.

  ‘Are you going to defy me?’ Her face reddened, the colour diffusing down her neck in a tidal rash.

  ‘Yes, miss.’ I dropped my voice. ‘Sorry, miss.’

  A knife-edge moment. I stared at her button-over shoes, black and scuffed, and gritted my teeth. I had no idea that I was calling her bluff and I would not have known to call it that, but it would be a valuable lesson that grafted itself onto life’s budding stem that day. One I would never forget. ‘Go and sit down.’ She spat out the words. ‘I’ll think what to do with you later.’ But she never did. She was unsure of her ground and I had sensed the chink in her mail. Perhaps it hadn’t been a proper fight after all. Without a name she was stymied.

  The sun ripped through autumn’s yellow fingers in dazzling bites of late September heat. At the end of lessons we all shuffled out, squinting, into the street. A tap on the shoulder. I spun round, thinking it was Charlie. I found myself staring into the wide, dark eyes of a girl. Noreen Ashby. I barely knew her – had never spoken to her before.

  ‘Well done,’ she said.

  I was speechless – had no idea what she meant. ‘What for?’ was all I could manage.

  ‘For not telling on Mickey, silly.’ A smile spread across her rosy lips and danced in her brown, laughing eyes. My lungs emptied, the sky fell in, time crashed to the dusty pavement at my feet.

  ‘Thanks,’ I spluttered, pinned wordless and lost to a suddenly gyrating universe. When eventually I broke free, I raced all the way home.

  I ran straight to the loft to sit with the dulcet certainty of my pigeons. The males were billing and cooing, bobbing, bowing and pirouetting to their virginal white hens, coy and demure. But the metaphor was utterly lost on me. I was yet to understand, and would not properly grasp for several years to come, that what had happened to me that afternoon could be anything to do with biology, with mating, with the continuing propagation of our species.

  Looking back, it was a bizarrely contradictory juxtaposition. I was a country boy, always watching, always learning. I knew and probably understood more about sex – especially bird sex – than any other pupil of my age in that school – every precise detail, from the parent birds’ courtship to the chicks’ fledging and maiden flights. And not just birds. By the age of ten I had witnessed snorting stallions with elephantine hose-like erections rearing onto their mares; I had marvelled at the glistening pink billiard cues of lumbering Hereford bulls stabbing into the Manor Farm cows; I’d watched rams pounding the rumps of their ewes; every morning rampant cockerels trampled their hens into the dirt. I had seen farm dogs tail to tail in a tied coital clinch, and I had captured toads gripped together, males riding the females in raw amplexus. I had watched engrossed as Bernie’s peacocks fanned and vibrated their absurdly extravagant tails at their dowdy little peahens before crushing them underfoot like so many grapes. But human beings? Parents? School teachers? Girls? No. Never. Not in my wildest imaginings. The sex taboo was unbroken, as thick and intacta as the Virgin Queen’s hymen.

  The word had never been mentioned in our family and the same was true of the other boys at Hampton Down – probably of most children of our pre-sexual revolution epoch. We were all cocooned in the same impenetrable warp of innocence, an innocence unimaginable today in our world of multimedia information overload. To us 1950s boys, parental sex was not just myth; it didn’t exist and never had. Inconceivable. Unimaginable. Unfathomable. Not just improbable – impossible. Far less had we ever dreamed of Mrs Warmley baring her nether regions to a man, or Bernie prancing around a bedroom with an erection. Yet despite this blackout of unknowledge, in the dorm after lights out we had explored its mythology of denial in exaggerated and creative detail.

  Many of us had sisters. We were well aware of the physiological differences between boys and girls, men and women. But we had never made the connection. Not for a fleeting, flickering moment. Even Bramley, a quiet and serious Hampton House boy whose mother had recently presented him with a baby sister, was unable to add more than that it had been in her tummy and she went to hospital to have it.

  ‘Where did it come from?’ we asked, agog at this hot, topical intelligence. There was a long silence. ‘How did it get out?’ we pressed.

  He looked nonplussed and confused. It was no good. ‘The nurses took it out,’ was all we got.

  We were primitives staring in fearful disbelief before a full solar eclipse. We knew there was something out there, some vague, intriguing, hovering adult mystery, arcane and untouchable, but we had not the slightest idea what it could be.

  Wild theories had been aired by Hampton Down boys who had tried to assert themselves by claiming superior knowledge – fragments of truth cobbled into absurdities: that your belly-button was somehow where it all took place; that women had to hand their eggs in to a doctor for hatching; that parents could dictate sons or daughters in advance, like choosing apples or pears; that God, the church font and saying your prayers somehow had something to do with it. In the end, the unanimously agreed and entirely satisfactory conclusion was that to have babies women went and spoke to a special nurse who arranged it all for them. Nor had love anything to do with any of it. The lo
ve word had never once emerged from the swirling fog of our long, inventive discussions.

  Love existed in an entirely separate compartment, as distinct as whisky from water. To me love was warmth, security, home. Love was Nellie, Mrs Warmley, my mother’s perfume. Love was a hug, my own bed, toast and honey at the Manor House. Love was happiness and unfettered freedom, running wild. It was watching the pigeons lay eggs. I knew perfectly well what love was and where it belonged. I had read it in the Bible – the love of God and the God of love – plain for the world to see. All the rest, all that romance stuff, the sugary sweetheart hoo-ha, all that poetry and song, was make believe, a boring game adults played – so much froth.

  If that was the case, what in the name of God’s breakfast was happening to me? That night I sweated; I tossed and turned. I got up and drank cold water, tried to read a book. Nothing helped. No matter how hard I tried to dispel her from my thoughts every few seconds my mind boomeranged back to Noreen Ashby and the irresistible vortex of that hollowing out, excoriating smile. In the morning I was trembling. I couldn’t eat. All the way to school I ached in the pit of my stomach. I thought I must be ill.

  I had often listened to my mother’s gramophone record of Richard Tauber singing the songs of Old Vienna, ‘Girls were made to love and kiss . . .’, words that had been utterly meaningless and which I had dismissed as so much theatrical hogwash. But as I dragged my raincoat along the Martock pavement that morning those lyrics now came flooding back to me with a fresh and deeply unsettling bite: ‘I have suffered in love’s great deeps, I know the passion that never sleeps, I know the longing and wronging of hearts . . .’ Oh Cripes! Is that it? Am I in love? Is this hopeless, nagging confusion what all the fuss is about? The thought horrified me, but I couldn’t shake it off. It refused to go away.