everyday functions of country life, there existed among the family members an unspoken moral principle broadly interpreted as ‘never ask anyone to do anything you can’t do yourself’, and which seemed to honour a centuries old tradition of manual dexterity and self-sufficiency in English country life, a tradition of which they were rightly and properly proud.
I was allowed to stand and watch, occasionally to help out – ‘Hold that end, boy, for the last cut. Don’t let it fall.’ It seemed there was nothing they couldn’t turn their hand to: making and repairing hand tools, barrows, carts, garden furniture, or hanging doors and re-roofing sheds. Often it was mechanics, spanners and wrenches for nuts and bolts or metalwork, grinding on the engineer’s wheel: ‘Stand back, boy, and get your goggles on.’ Sparks showered in dazzling arcs and then at the brick forge a lump hammer ringing on the anvil, ‘Pump those bellows, boy, we need more heat,’ before welding in the fire.
Later, when I was considered old enough, I was indoctrinated in those same skills: ‘Whoa! Steady now. Slowly, slowly. Never force it. Let the saw do the work.’ Or ‘Hold the hammer at the end, boy, not halfway down.’ And the first time I rushed to pick up a piece of steel still hot from welding and smelt the roast beef aroma my own burning flesh the observation would be: ‘Well, you won’t do that again.’ Words spoken not with any sense of reproof – far from it – they came with that age-old, firm but all-embracing warmth of loving instruction from master to pupil, from father to son, that had served so well down the generations, always couched in the same proudly principled tenet of independence that bound us all together.
Other buildings were not locked. Dark, cobwebby interiors of potting sheds, apple stores, wood stores, stables and various annexes to the old coach houses were an endless source of mystery and delight. Games of hide and seek with my sister always ended in tears because we could conceal ourselves so completely and so unfathomably that either the seeker gave up in frustration and wandered off or the hider lost patience, became bored by never being found and emerged insisting, ‘You’re useless!’
It was often after such frustrations that I was abandoned and left to devise my own entertainment. Wonderful though it was, the Manor House was a cut-off world still roundly entrenched in Victorian values. We children had no local friends and village children did not venture into Manor House territory; had they done so I suspect we would have been actively discouraged from associating with them. Not that I was ever lonely – quite the reverse, I loved being left to explore on my own.
Beyond the line of ancient trees at the top of the gardens lay a large pond ringed with crack willows, some of which had broken up in winter storms and fallen into the water. Further on again was an orchard of ancient apple and pear trees, gnarled and pruned to distorted configurations, neatly spaced in ordered rows and perfect for climbing. Those old fruit trees taught me to be an expert tree climber and when I fell, as often I did, it was never very far, landing ruffled but unhurt, cushioned by the long grass below.
The pond was a favoured haunt. Wings thrashing, mallard often rose from the water rasping their alarm as I approached and every year moorhens laboured back and forth to create a nest of soggy weed among the twigs of a fallen willow as it lay across the surface of the water. I thought it might be possible for a small boy to clamber out along the fallen limb to a position just above the nest.
In those days many country boys collected birds’ eggs. My grandfather and his father before him both had cherished collections in specially made wooden cabinets of drawers, the precious blown eggs carefully labelled and housed in partitioned sections on beds of cotton wool – Linnet, Hawthorn thicket, Ryton Wood. 24.4.26 – many dating back to the Victorian era. It had been a fashionable and entirely acceptable pastime, many amateur collections proudly maintained to museum standards.
The cabinets stood in my grandfather’s smoking room, a room we dared not enter. My father had also had a collection of his own when he was a boy. He showed me the drawers of eggs, drawer after drawer, row upon row. Eggs of birds I had never heard of: hawfinch, redstart, corn bunting, whinchat . . . I longed for a collection of my own.
The bottom drawer of my grandfather’s cabinet housed the intricate paraphernalia of professional egg collecting: a set of special drills twirled between forefinger and thumb for cutting the perfect round holes in the end of the eggs, minuscule for wrens and warblers, much larger for geese and swans; slender blow pipes of several sizes for inserting through the hole and gently blowing out the yolk and white; a little phial of surgical spirit for cleaning and disinfecting the shell, inside and out, and a glass pipette for administering it; a wad of lint for lining the drawer sections and a roll of cotton wool in dark blue paper; a pair of fine pointed scissors; tweezers and a soft paint brush; crystals of silica gel in a tiny pot and another containing crystals of naphthalene for keeping mites and other bugs at bay.
That spring I sat quietly on the bank and watched the moorhens heaping up their weedy pile. They worked fast and diligently, both birds ferrying back and forth with beaks crammed with any old weed they could find. The pile grew well clear of the water, so much so that one bird had to remain on the mound while the other passed the weed up to it. Then she sat.
I couldn’t keep away. Every day I visited several times, the bird always firmly parked on her nest. I longed to see into it, but I couldn’t. Even when she came off I still couldn’t see in from the bank. I climbed a tree nearby but however I craned my neck it was no good. Very stealthily I ventured out along the fallen branch. Immediately it shook the nest; the hen took fright, springing away into the water with a sharp-edged yelp. She half flew, half skedaddled across the surface, cutting a dark trail through the bright green duckweed to the far side, where she disappeared under an overhanging thicket.
I saw my chance and stepped boldly out along the branch until it began to wobble under my weight. Then I dropped to my hands and knees, clinging on to slender, twiggy laterals as I crawled forward. At last I could see into the nest. There, glowing with heat, were seven stone-coloured eggs speckled with rusty dots and squiggles. They were magnificent. At that moment I wanted one of those eggs more than anything else in the world. I wanted to take one home and show it to my father and my grandfather to persuade them that I needed to start a collection of my own – my own cabinet of drawers, my own carefully inscribed labels, my own toolkit, my own trophies.
I crawled forward again. The branch flexed alarmingly under my weight, but there was still a long way to go. The nest was woven into the flimsy extremity of twigs well out from the main stem. I lay down on the branch and inched forward like a snake stalking its prey. I could still hear the moorhen squawking anxiously from its hideaway. Another five feet to go – with a sickening snap the dead branch broke and I crash-landed in the water.
It wasn’t deep, only about three feet. I quickly righted myself, hauling up on the branch, dripping and spitting foul water like a ducked witch. My wellingtons found the bottom and I stood up and wiped the weed from my face. I’d cut my lip and blood flowed freely down my sodden shirt. Stinking of rotten eggs, bubbles of marsh gas were percolating to the surface all round me. Then I realised that I was sinking. I tried to raise my feet one at a time. They wouldn’t budge. I was sinking into deep, cold, evil-smelling mud. Nothing for it but to abandon my boots and haul myself out on the branch in soggy socks. I took a long last look at the nest, still out of reach, before hauling back along the branch to the bank.
I limped painfully home, cringing with every step. I crept in the back door to the scullery desperate to find Nellie before anyone else saw me. ‘Oh my lordy Lord,’ she cried, wringing her hands in her pinny. ‘I knew you was up to no good.’ Water trickled down my legs and pooled muddily on the flagstones at my feet.
‘Please don’t tell,’ I begged. I knew she wouldn’t.
5
Ye hunter’s badge
I
