and gradually progressed to become a prominent member of the staff. After my grandmother’s sudden death she had found herself at the head of the much-reduced post-war household. She would rule the Manor House with absolute dedication and my grandfather would come to depend upon her for the rest of his life.
A smile twinkled permanently in her blue-grey eyes and about her bunched cheeks, lips ever ready with a facetious quip: ‘There’s no lunch today, young Jack, cos I’ve heard you’ve not bin good enough.’ Or ‘I’m thinkin’ of putting you under the pump cos I can see dirt behind your ears.’ Yet she often spoke with a sigh and an inner sadness, saying, ‘Do you really think so?’ as though she were unworthy of her own opinions. She had greyed early and grown more than a little plump beneath her habitual navy blue or grey tunic dresses, always adorned with a floral pinny, and she was not surprisingly single.
Born in the first few years of the century her timing couldn’t have been much worse. Turning fifteen at the end of the First World War, most of her potential seventeen- to twenty-year-old suitors, and many much older from her tiny rural community had failed to come home. They were the lost generation. In common with thousands of village girls the length and breadth of the country, Nellie’s life chances at marriage had perished ingloriously in the trench hells of Verdun, Arras, Passchendaele and the Somme. By the time I was seven she would have been approaching fifty and she had accepted her spinsterhood with grace and cheerful dignity.
To me, Nellie and the Manor House were synonymous. She had always been there, a steadfast bulwark of my earliest childhood memories. I could not have enunciated so ardent an emotion back then, but I loved her, second only to my mother. Without it ever being acknowledged by either of us, Nellie West had entered my inner consciousness as a fixture, an anchor point of deepest security, as much a pillar of my brief existence as the Manor House itself. Whenever we arrived to stay, while my father always set off in search of my grandfather in his smoking room or his workshop or one of his precious glasshouses, I ran to the kitchens to find Nellie.
Those gas masks sparked an endless burst of imagination. Better than any cowboy hat or cap gun, they were real and tapped into a constantly creative vein. I could be a Martian invader or a horrid German paratrooper prowling the woods and fields, or I could be the hero hunting them down. I could be a burglar raiding an imaginary bank or a highwayman like the Dick Turpin I had read about, leaping out from behind a tree to halt an imaginary carriage and pluck rings and necklaces from rich ladies’ necks and fingers.
Wooden swords in hand, I persuaded my sister to wear a mask too, so that together we could prowl the corridors seeking out a fearsome ogre whose den was known to be the game larder. We approached with extreme caution. Then, stepping boldly forward I kicked the door open and shouted, ‘Come out and fight, you ugly beast!’ Only to find that he was not in, but the stark, bloodied evidence of his fearsome power hung in rows from the beams – hares, pheasants, duck and partridges, all his victims impaled by their beaks or their feet on rusty hooks, blood dripping to the flagged floor. Once, old Bob was in the larder quietly plucking pheasants. When I burst in to accost the ogre, I got such a fright at finding someone there that I ran for my life, mask or no mask. I rushed to the kitchen to tell Nellie. ‘Now that serves you aright, young Jack.’
My father had installed a television for the Queen’s Coronation in June 1953 – small, a bit fuzzy, and black and white, of course. Although viewing was strictly controlled, I was allowed to watch Westerns, my favourite by far being Stagecoach – proper cowboys and indians – repeated every Christmas for years. I used to sit cross-legged on the floor, entranced, my face only a few inches from the tiny screen. As influences waxed and waned so I variously became Davy Crockett, Daniel Boone, Kit Carson, the dashing Wells Fargo agent Jim Hardie, and inevitably I was gripped by The Lone Ranger, but never the oh-so-smooth masked hero in his white Stetson, polished boots and creaseless britches, on his spotless white horse ‘Hi-Yo Silver!’ Oh no, it was Tonto I wanted to be: the moccasin’d indian with the tracking skills of a leopard who leapt onto his horse bareback and was usually the one who did all the dirty work (played by the brilliantly named Mohawk actor Jay Silverheels). I tied a dishcloth band round my head and wandered the woods muttering ‘Kemo sabe’, possessing not the first inkling that its translation was ‘trusty scout’ in Potawatomi. I longed for a sheath knife like Tonto’s.
It was not a sheath knife, but my grandfather gave me a shiny black clasp knife for my eighth birthday. It wasn’t new, it had been his, and that made it more precious still. It had two blades, one large and one small, a bottle opener and a hook for getting stones out of horses’ hooves. To me it was also like being awarded a latch key; a tacit acknowledgement that at last I was old enough to venture out, to whittle my own sticks, to essay, raid and foray, returning like Robert Louis Stevenson’s ‘hunter home from the hill’. Armed only with the knife and a four-foot hazel stick my father had cut for me, and clad in the new dark green gabardine ‘windcheater’ from my mother, with patch pockets and a zip fastener (still a novelty in Britain), I ventured forth into the great unknown.
That stick possessed magical powers: it could be Robin Hood’s bow or his sword or staff; it was Huck Finn’s pole, rafting downriver; with a length of string it became a whip, or, with the thicker end tucked into my armpit, a gun, accompanied by the ‘Pwrrch! Pwrrch!’ from pursed lips with each imagined shot, as I prowled the hedgerows. My stick and my knife were essential props I carried everywhere – my armory, my badges of office, my power beads. Into the shaft I carved notches and rings for imaginary villains I had gunned down or defeated in breathless hand-to-hand encounters.
These two items had located the violent core of my inner self, a Pandora’s box of hyperactive pre-pubescent imagination, slaying enemies without mercy, hanging, drawing and quartering the Sheriff of Nottingham, gunning down and beheading innocent victims in my rush for power and domination. Without them I was nothing, as helpless as a highwayman without his mask and pistol or a knight without sword and shield. I became permanently attached to my stick, beside my bed at night, never heading out without it. Then, one day, in a fit of pique because I had refused to take her with me, my sister snapped it in two. I was devastated and a secret murder boiled in my heart.
I have often wondered whether those years and the wildness that seemed to flourish within me were a direct result of my mother’s illness and absences, or whether they were a natural outpouring of youthful exuberance given the freedom to expand unchecked in the splendid Elysian fields of the little Manor House estate. Had she been there I don’t think my mother would have been able to exercise any more control than Nellie. The potential for escape was always too great, the horizons too wide, and my energy and determination too deeply rooted. She possessed neither the strength nor the will to hold me in check. In truth, I had no idea either then or for many years to come how seriously ill my mother was. I was gloriously out of control.
Those early years of discovery were often hazardous, even dangerous, but always exhilarating. As a fuller awareness of my expanding landscape slowly dawned, so I think I began to realise that its possibilities for adventure and excitement were limitless. But that first brush with the fox had changed me. From then on, with the immutable tidal wash of destiny, natural history and wildlife would always be the most likely ingredients of fulfillment.
I can’t now remember precisely when, but probably by the age of seven or eight, my exploration of the self-contained world of the Manor House had begun to burst at the seams. It was expanding out of doors. While the house’s labyrinthine interior still held endless opportunities for adventure, the extensive out-buildings were new and exciting. Some, such as my grandfather’s large workshop, were firmly locked.
It would be several years before I was allowed to try my hand at carpentry; years before I could be trusted with belt-driven lathe and band saw, planes and chisels honed on whetstones until they were as sharp as a sabre. Both my grandfather and my father were highly skilled practitioners, way beyond anything that might be described as a hobby. They were that rare combination of professional men and amateur craftsmen. Although
