in fear of these ferocious beasts. One cow grew to enormous size; four yards high it stood and six in length. This monstrous beast took to raiding villagers’ crops and gored anyone who stood in its way. When several folk had been killed, the villagers turned to the lord of the manor. ‘You must rid us of this menace,’ they cried angrily. Straightaway the noble knight mounted his charger and set out for the heath with his lance and his broadsword. But when the great cow loomed out of the mist it was so huge, and so terrible was its bellow, that he turned and galloped away as fast as he could.
Greatly humiliated, he set off for Warwick Castle to find another knight who was renowned for slaying giants and dragons. Together they rode out to kill the cow. But when the beast flared its nostrils and tossed its huge horns at them, once again they fled. Concerned for their reputations, the two knights hit upon a plan. Off they went to find an old witch who lived in a cave on the edge of the moor. They plied her with gold until she agreed to cast a spell on the cow.
In the evening twilight the witch appeared from behind a rock and muttered her incantation. The great beast fell quiet beneath the spell. She produced a sieve from under her skirts and began to milk the cow into it. The cow turned its huge head and saw its precious milk draining away into the moor. Slowly it lumbered away into the mist and died of a broken heart.
Both knights took a rib from the dead cow and returned to their villages, each claiming that he had slain the cow, but the witch had cursed them for their lack of courage, saying that if ever they parted with the ribs their families would die out. So to this day one rib hangs in Warwick Castle and the other remains in our family.
It’s a con. The ribs are not ribs at all. They are the two sides of a minke whale’s lower jaw: two very large and uncannily rib-like bones. When in the 1970s we had ours carbon dated, it proved to be over 950 years old. Far from illuminating the Dun Cow legend, this revelation greatly deepened its mystery. It would appear that at some point in the far distant past some wag or prankster thought the legend deserved to be immortalised by producing the hard evidence of the cow. It was a cunning ploy. The ribs were very convincing – they could only have come from a huge beast – and for many centuries local people had believed in the colossal cow, utterly convinced by those awesome bones.
* * *
Separating the servants’ quarters from the formal dining room was a long disused butler’s pantry. During the war years it had become a cluttered store for a random miscellany of intrigue, like a bric-a-brac shop. Running the full length of one long wall were full-height, built-in cupboards, floor to ceiling. Teasing open their cobwebby doors was like opening huge windows into a distant past. Carefully and dutifully arranged on plain pine shelves was the china and glass of an Edwardian era of extravagant house parties, grand dinners and hunt balls.
There were Coalport and Dresden tea sets, whole Crown Derby and Minton dinner services with vast meat platters – big enough, I gaily imagined, for a glazed boar’s head with an orange in its mouth, steaming haunches of venison or a whole salmon with a cold, staring eye, such as I had seen in illustrations of medieval banquets. There were soup tureens, sauce boats and vegetable dishes with ornate porcelain arrangements of tomatoes, marrows and turnips bulging across their lids, and an ancient, chipped and faded, blue and white service of family crested ware.
When I opened those cupboard doors, I fancied I could hear the bustle and hustle of a busy household, the laughter of family and guests, the merry gossip of servants, and the chink of china and glass. When I closed them, the silence of the empty house settled around me again so that I hurried to open the next one.
It held rows of dusty cut-glass tumblers, twisted champagne flutes, sherry, port and wine glasses and rummers; ranks of decanters, carafes, claret jugs with silver lids and handles, Bacchus’ bearded face glaring from their lips like gargoyles; glass flagons and demijohns encased in woven wicker; flower vases of every configuration and size, and then, in the end cupboard, several large, plain blue-and-white or floral-patterned china pitchers and ewers for marble-topped bedroom washstands.
On a last lower shelf stood a row of large china slop buckets with wicker-bound handles and lids smothered all over with brightly coloured rosebuds, as if they might somehow divert attention from their practical function. At floor level, tucked away, there were rows of floral potties and heavy bed-warming bottles of beige stoneware and some curiously wedge-shaped white china vessels I puzzled over. Much later I discovered they were slipper bedpans.
Closing the cupboard doors shut off the past, trapping it back in the dark, no longer a real part of my life or the life of the house. The room returned to what it had been forced to become during the lean and wearisome years of the war, a dumping ground for duller stuff – two old wooden ironing boards and a wash-board, big cardboard boxes piled up, a canvas golf bag with a few wooden shafted clubs, two broken wicker carpet beaters, ancient black-initialled leather suitcases with ships’ labels and stickers from foreign parts, broken lampshades, gut-stringed tennis racquets in square wooden presses, a broken bagatelle board with the balls missing.
A cluster of tea chests was crowded into a corner, packed full of folded blackout sheets like satanic shrouds. Another contained the headphones, consoles and wall-mountings of several wireless sets dating from the early days of radio before the First World War. There were long-handled copper warming pans, an umbrella-stand full of walking sticks and feather dusters on long canes and, most perplexing of all, a rattan-backed mahogany commode in the form of an armchair. When I lifted the seat lid I found a gaping oval hole. I had never seen such a thing before and I peered into it, finding only a plain wooden shelf beneath. I struggled to comprehend why anybody would want to sit in a chair like that, so I spent fruitless hours balancing uncomfortably and hoping that by doing so its purpose might become clear. When I showed it to my sister, Mary, she said, ‘It’s a lavatory, silly. What did you think it was for?’ I spent the rest of the day wondering why anyone would seek to deposit their daily doings on a wooden shelf.
On one such exploration I found, tucked away in an old cabin trunk, several wartime gas masks, unused, still in their original cardboard boxes. There were two types: some were black rubber masks which fitted snugly over your face with a clear cellophane panel to see through, white webbing straps round the back of your head and a khaki canister of filtration crystals hanging immediately in front of your mouth. The others, called GS Respirators, were clearly superior: whole head masks with round glass eyepieces and a twenty-eight-inch-long expanding rubber tube like an elephant’s trunk leading from your nose and mouth to a separate canister carried in a khaki haversack at your side. These were much more sinister, with all the shock effect of an invader from outer space; it was impossible to tell who was inside.
Wearing one of these superior masks, I stalked the servants’ back corridors searching for victims. My first was Sally Franklin, swabbing the flagstones with a bucket and mop. I crept up behind her and stood still. She swabbed slowly backwards toward me until all I could see was her voluminous backside encased in a wrap-around floral pinafore. I reached forward and tapped her bottom. She spun round. A muffled ‘BOOO!’ issued from inside the mask. Sally shrieked and leapt away, kicking over her bucket and sending her mop flying. I ran and ran, back down the corridor and out into the stable yard. I hid the gas mask in a manger and sauntered back into the scullery as though it was nothing to do with me.
Sally was sitting at the kitchen table, tears streaming down her face, Nellie doing her best to console her with a cup of tea. ‘You’re in trouble, young Jack, you are,’ Nellie scolded. ‘Look what you done to poor Sally. You nearly gave ’er an ’art attack. You wait till I tell your father.’ But I knew she never would.
Nellie West was my friend. She was my grandfather’s housekeeper. Her father, economically known as West, had been his chauffeur and valet, and her mother, Elsie, had worked in the laundry. Both had died in service before I was born. Slowly growing mould, West’s dark green and gold braided livery
