The Dun Cow Rib

by John Lister-Kaye

  There was also the much friendlier Familiar Wild Birds (1883) by W. Swaysland, in four volumes, in the popular Cassells series, and their companion Familiar Wild Flowers (1890) by F. Edward Hulme, in nine delicately illustrated volumes. And one of my favourites, to which I turned every Easter holidays, British Birds’ Eggs and Nests Popularly Described (1898) by the Revd Canon Atkinson, who loomed large and benignly dotty in my schoolboy imagination. I saw him in his dog collar and grey shirt, long grey mackintosh, lace-up black boots and leather gaiters to the knee buckled onto baggy black trousers. As I explored the wildest reaches of the Manor House grounds it seemed entirely possible that I might bump into him out there with wire-framed pebble glasses on his nose, little black binoculars round his neck, notebook in hand, creeping round the hedgerows, peering into thickets, parting branches and exploring nooks and crannies in his never-ending forages for nests. It was a possibility beyond parody and one whose latter-day stereotype I would encounter countless times in the years to come.

  As the outside world opened up to me, so I began to search out and build collections of my own. Moths with names as vivid as their exquisite colours and riotous patterns: the Elephant Hawkmoth in startling pink and cinnamon; the migratory Death’s Head Hawkmoth with a white human skull leering from its back; the opulent shimmer of the Golden Spangle; the Emperor, with four glaring eyes on its pink and orange wings; The Snout, with a ludicrous Cyrano de Bergerac nose; the spectacularly pointillist day-flying Scarlet Tiger; the heather-feeding True Lover’s Knot wrapped in umber brocade; the Feathered Gothic, with its intricate cathedral tracery; and the Leopard Moth in the glowing white fur and stippled black spots of a snow leopard.

  Clutching my treasured guide, The Butterflies of the British Isles (1918) by Richard South – ‘with accurately coloured figures of every species and many varieties, also drawings of egg, caterpillar, chrysalis and food plant’ – I forayed out to find and capture: Painted Lady, Speckled Wood, Grayling, Green Hairstreak, Brimstone, Orange Tip, Clouded Yellow, Peacock, Small Tortoiseshell, Common Blue and Red Admiral. Page upon page of delights that were rarely difficult to locate in those treasure-filled days of lark trilling meadows, rampant hedgerows and bright, sparkling streams. I loved stalking them through the heady herb-scented pastures, adored seeing them jump and blow away with the wind.

  And then there were the adrenaline-pumping encounters with scurrying, leaping, burrowing, snuffling, tiptoeing, plodding, wriggling, flittering, squirming, swimming, dipping and diving antics of bats and badgers, voles and squirrels, rabbits and rats, hares and dormice, weasels and stoats, deer and otters, foxes, frogs and toads, newts and slow worms, lizards and grass snakes, mice and moles. Oh! The rapture the first time I found a nest of harvest mice, no bigger than my fist, woven into the long, golden stalks of wheat. I ran all the way back to tell Nellie.

  The birds were my constants, always coming and going, honouring and saluting the seasons, often taken for granted, expected, unconsciously loved and an endless source of wonder. The moorhens on the orchard pond; the swallows skimming in and out of the stables’ rafters; the rooks’ nests clotting the tops of the oaks and beeches in the graveyard; the starlings bursting from the missing tile in the apple store roof; the long-tailed tits in their domed nest in a prickly Berberis thicket, tail protruding from the hole like a teaspoon in a jam pot. It never occurred to me that they might not always be there. They were ‘a tremor at the edge of vision’, as John Alec Baker would so electrically describe them in his unforgettable elegy to the peregrine falcon. Despite the constant killing, our English countryside of the 1950s was rich and I did not know it. To me it was the endlessly engaging projection of those old books, a gloriously illustrated album to be opened, absorbed and into which I could utterly lose myself, a found fulfilment all my own.

  The mistake I made was the naive assumption that other boys and girls shared the same opportunities, enthusiasms and interests. They didn’t. But long ago at the Manor House, oblivious that Robert Mudie had published it 120 years before, when William IV was on the throne and in the year of four Prime Ministers – Earl Grey, Lord Melbourne, the Duke of Wellington and Robert Peel – I had taken completely to heart the injunction in his 1834 preface: ‘to entice my fellow Britons of all ages . . . into the fields, that they may know and feel the extent of delightful knowledge . . . to say nothing of well-sinewed limbs . . . met there . . . in abundance by all who will but take the trouble of seeing with their own eyes and hearing with their own ears’. Hear! Hear! Robert Mudie. Every word absorbed by me in 1954 with Elizabeth II only just crowned and the eighty-year-old Sir Winston Churchill in No. 10.

  In 1834, most people, it seems, had not been listening. The great flywheel of the Industrial Revolution was spinning like a top and country people in droves were abandoning the land for work in the cities. A hundred and twenty years later, in what was rapidly becoming an urban and suburban-based, although still industrial, post-war British society, wealth creation had taken over as life’s principal cultural goal, totally supplanting the rural idyll. Even if it had been explained to me, I would not have understood that like a failing marriage, nature and the people of Britain were losing touch with each other and drifting apart, the gulf deepening and widening with each successive generation.

  To my dismay I discovered that I was on my own. Neither at Hampton Down, at Martock nor at Hill Brow was there a nature club or even a master or mistress any more than passingly interested in wildlife. I drew a blank. The other boys had virtually no knowledge of natural history, knew nothing of birds or mammals beyond an obvious few, knew the names of only the commonest butterflies, no moths, no wild flowers or even the trees. ‘He’s a nature freak,’ they laughed.

  Bleak moments stand out. I remember a humble woodlouse, lost and helpless, ditheringly multi-legging it across a boy’s desk. ‘Ugh!’ he cried out and pulled back.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ I asked. ‘It’s only a woodlouse.’

  ‘It might sting,’ was his stridently ignorant reproof as he flattened it with a book.

  One day after games I was strolling back to the school from the cricket pitch with a gang of boys and a young master called Mr Kennedy, when a grass snake slithered from the verge and began to wind quickly across the track in front of us. Before I had even seen it Mr Kennedy had shouted ‘Keep back!’ and had beaten the snake to death with a cricket bat. I was shocked. I picked up its limp, broken body and curled it in my cupped hands. ‘Drop it this instant!’ Kennedy barked at me. ‘It could still bite.’

  ‘It’s a grass snake, sir,’ I answered flatly. ‘It’s harmless.’

  ‘Oh,’ he said. ‘How was I to know that? It could have been an adder.’ I wanted to say, So what if it was? You didn’t have to kill it. It was trying to get away from us. But I didn’t.

  That was the first time I’d held a grass snake, or, for that matter, a British snake of any kind, except shiny slow worms, which are not snakes, but legless lizards. But I had seen adders and grass snakes coiled in the spring sunshine and watched in awe as they silently flowed away into the undergrowth. Even in its broken stillness this grass snake possessed a stark, functional perfection that both embraced and surpassed beauty. That the life had been so abruptly and so unnecessarily hammered out of it only seconds before filled me with a silently simmering resentment. The more I looked at it, the more I felt embittered. The other boys crowded round. ‘How d’y know it’s a grass snake?’ ‘Are you sure it can’t bite?’ ‘Ueere, it’s slimy!’

  ‘It’s not slimy, you idiot! That’s blood because it’s been squashed. Snakes aren’t slimy, they’re dry and silky.’ Instinctively I was defending the loss of this lissome young life. ‘It’s beautiful,’ and then I added, ‘It was much more beautiful a moment ago, when it was alive and doing nobody any harm.’

  Mr Kennedy reacted angrily. ‘Oh, do shut up! It’s only a ruddy snake.’ He stomped off, leaving me holding the snake, with one or two boys still lingering, intrigued as much
by the taut exchange as by the dead snake itself.

  It was beautiful and I was not ready to abandon it. About sixteen inches long, it was a young male grass snake. Most of its length was a slender mosaic of dull olive green scales with a hint of lemon, broken by black bars and flecks on its flanks and belly, tapering to a finely pointed tail. Separating its flat, spear-shaped head from the body was a broad stripe of bright citrine yellow fringed by black. The same yellow flowed down its face to its jaw and circled its lidless eyes of fiercely staring jet. Underneath, its scales broadened across the whole of its width. Its spine was crushed in several places, but its head remained intact, both glossy eyes too fresh to have dulled. I held its little face up to mine and wondered what it was like to be a snake. I remembered what Bernie had made us learn by heart: ‘thou art cursed above all cattle, and above every beast of the field; upon thy belly shalt thou go, and dust shalt thou eat all the days of thy life’. The resounding, echoing, damning directive from Genesis he had spouted at us over and over again came flooding back to me: ‘And let man have dominion over . . . every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.’ The devil incarnate.

  Nature conservation was in its infancy. As a prep school boy I don’t think I had even heard of it. But I knew in the deepest marrow of my bones that, metaphor or no metaphor, the Bible was wrong. The first flickerings of a challenge to such a cogently endorsed diktat were beginning to form not just in my head, but in my heart. Of course, in the 1950s I had no idea that humankind was hell bent upon wreaking environmental havoc across the globe, but scientists have now determined that 1955 stands as the date when negative human influence could be detected in every habitat and ecosystem on earth. We had certainly taken that edict to heart. Dear God, we had. And dominion? We were well on our way to achieving full marks for that. A long time later, in adulthood, I would arrive at the life-long conviction that mankind’s God-directed habit of blaming wild creatures for problems largely of our own making was a fundamental philosophical error both of judgement and understanding. We have yet to learn how to live with other life forms on earth.

  I can still picture that wrecked snake, the boys gathered round. The memory is sharp: the people, the pressing faces, the hot chemistry of discord swirling through the moment. Like bashing Wells’ head on the metal fire surround, witnessing that snake bludgeoned to death was an indelible event, locked in for life, another rung on the ever-ascending ladder of awareness, not just of the natural world but of myself and my own emotions and those of the others around me. It was also the slow awakening of something new – of conviction.

  I have revisited that day in my head and re-run the event a thousand times over the years and wondered why it should have mattered so much. It wasn’t anything like an epiphany or even a watershed moment, and anyway, at twelve I was still far too naive and diffident to be able to exercise any sort of objective critical faculty. Much as the grass snake was beautiful, it had been the ignorance of the perpetrator far more than the death itself that had rankled. I’ve never forgotten it and never will, but two distinct hallmarks were indelibly tattooed into my expanding consciousness that day. The first was that it endorsed in the minds of my contemporaries that I felt differently about nature from them, and the second, that I was aware of a new sensation – that I was inadvertently assembling a reputation.

  * * *

  Behind the cricket pavilion in the south-west corner of the games field lay a stagnant rhyne. It was typical of the smaller man-dug rhynes, many of them very ancient, which drained that low-lying corner of Somerset. For most of the year these deep ditches remained static, a residuum reflecting the high water-table of that low-lying land, only filling and flowing outwards in the very wet months. As a consequence, these linear ponds were exceptionally rich wetland habitats. That particular rhyne was fringed with sedges and tall, whispering reeds, open water stippled bright green with duck-weed like a Seurat painting. I was well aware that both coot and moorhens were abundant in the rhynes and I could often hear them calling to each other from the dense perpendicular sanctuary of the reeds.

  Cricket was lost on me. I found fielding yawningly boring and always asked to be posted out to the boundary, where I could watch birds in the hedges or red ants tirelessly processing in and out of their tunnels in the parched summer soil. Batting was not much better. I was placed well down the order, a tail-ender, which meant that I had tedious hours of sitting waiting in the pavilion, often never getting to bat at all. The rhyne was a far more interesting place to be, so I would wander off behind the pavilion to explore its secret, wonder-packed Wind-in-the-Willows world of water voles plopping in and out of the stagnant water. More than once I got caught out when there was a sudden collapse of wickets and I heard frantic shouting, ‘Lister! Where the hell are you? Come ON! You’re in.’ And I had to rush back and get padded up, lolloping out onto the pitch still struggling to do up buckles, arriving at the stumps breathless and sweating, only to be bowled out three balls later.

  During one of these long waits I found a pair of coots building their nest mound of dead reeds, stems in a twiggy tangle and lancet brown leaves crudely woven into a bowl-shaped basket, about two feet above the water level. It was very close, so I could watch them to-ing and fro-ing as well as keeping half an eye on the batting order. As the weeks slid by I came to long for afternoons of cricket. When the incubating bird got off to feed and stretch its wings, on tiptoe I could just see in sufficiently to count the nine blue-green, black speckled eggs of her clutch. Incubation is twenty-one days. I kept count.

  On day twenty-two there was a cricket match against a Taunton school. I prayed for us to win the toss and to bat first. I hit lucky. I wouldn’t be needed for hours. I crept to the edge, slowly and carefully parting the reeds. There, to my utter delight, was a huddle of fluffy black chicks, newly hatched. I didn’t know that they would be so beautiful, all together in an indistinguishable bundle except for their tiny red bald heads, absurdly fringed with ragged yellow down. One was still struggling out of its shell, wet and bedraggled as it pulsed and wriggled free. One egg remained, addled or the chick dead in the shell. An adult coot stood on the rim of the nest glowing with pride and energy.

  Suddenly it cried out in alarm, answered by its partner in the reeds, their sharp klaxon calls rending the sultry summer air. The adult vanished off the nest but stayed close by, calling anxiously, but not in my view. Then with a slow, sinuous ripple, the surface duckweed wavered and parted. The water seemed to cleave itself apart right to the edge of the soggy mound of the nest.

  At first I thought it must be a fish, but a second later a flat, angled, weed spotted head emerged at the nest rim and rose stick-like out of the water. I held my breath. Like an unstoppable wind-wave rippling through a hay field, a large, long grass snake wove its effortless way up the side of the mound and onto the top. Its long body flowed out behind it, tail still invisible in the water.

  I was planted, fixed, as rigid as a graveyard angel, gripped by this latest, unexpected fling of nature’s revelations. I had seen grass snakes before, but never one swimming like this, its shining wake stretching out behind it, and so very close. But I was slow. Oh! I was so very slow to understand what was happening, to take in what ageless elemental drama was unfolding only a few feet away. Snakes have to feed; they eat mice, frogs, newts, water voles, they devour whole nests of rats, but it had never occurred to me that I might witness the removal of an entire clutch of coots. I wanted to cry out, but no sound came; I was speechless with disbelief, with horror, with fascination, with helplessness. But with awe, too. An uncertain rain-washed acceptance slowly overcame me. This was nature, the nature I had come to love – vital, wild, random, remorseless. All I could do was watch.

  With a quick, sharp lunge the snake’s jaws gaped and engulfed the first chick, head first. I saw the tiny backward-pointing teeth descend and a muscular convulsion flow down the snake’s body as the chick disappeared from view. Then a sharp jerk forward and a second chick
was grabbed by a stubby wing. Its little red head disappeared into the gaping maw, tiny pink feet paddling air. Then a third, and a fourth, and a fifth.

  The parent coots were still squawking frantically from inside the reeds. One bird broke out and scuttled across the surface, slicing the duckweed into a long stripe of black water. It vanished but its anguished cries continued. The snake now slid further up the nest. I could see the bulge of chicks behind its head gradually lumping backwards as the powerful contractions hauled and flexed. The jaws stretched again. The white interior of its gullet flashed as a sixth chick was grabbed. I heard its thin, faint cry as it disappeared and the jaws lunged once again – the seventh. All that was left was the chick so recently hatched, still too weak and wobbly to stand, a life barely begun, beside the solitary addled egg.

  The snake seemed to know there was no hurry. It jaws closed and its tongue, black and bifid, flicked in and out several times before it slowly eased forward until its nose was up against the last helplessly wobbling chick. Almost in slow motion the lower jaw dropped away, the pallid throat yawned and the chick’s head was grabbed. The reptile’s head rose and fell in what passes for a swallow in a snake, a peristaltic muscular ripple, before it turned and slid silently down the side of the nest and into the water. As it swam away, gliding right past me, head just above the surface, I could see the weed coiling and waving to the sinuous weave of its long body. The weed-clogged wimples of its wake made it look far larger than it really was, spinning the weed dots into tiny whorls and eddies as it flowed, unhurried, away across the rhyne to disappear into the reeds on the other side. I stared blankly at where it had vanished and then back at the nest, empty but for its lonely addled egg.