yonks ago.’
It had been a grand hunting lodge like many that were built in the Highlands of Scotland at the height of the Victorian sporting era, although this was considerably older. The Duchess of Alba had entertained Francisco Goya there in the eighteenth century and it had harboured many other dignitaries, including General Franco, to hunt deer and wild boar. So had Lord Alanbrooke, the British Field Marshal and Second World War Chief of Allied Staff who’d had a stormy relationship with Winston Churchill but still managed to be powerfully influential over the Allied victory.
When Alanbrooke rented the Palacio in 1958, he and his wife had hosted a natural history expedition led by the founding triumvirate of what would later become the World Wildlife Fund: Guy Mountfort, Julian Huxley and Max Nicholson, three towering grandees of the embryonic nature conservation movement. With characteristic brimming enthusiasm, my mother had bought me a copy of Mountfort’s splendid book, Portrait of a Wilderness – The Story of the Coto Doñana Expeditions, and I had spent many hours poring over the black and white photographs. I still treasure it today, her fluid handwriting in the flyleaf, ‘I hope you can join expeditions like this one day.’
Memory billowed in – jaw flexing and a lump forming in my throat. Yes, it was here, on the edge of these marshes. That was the building; I’d stayed here in the ’60s, spent a night with her here. Then, just then, trapped by that implausible cocktail of circumstance and emotions, my abstract notion came flooding back in.
I suddenly saw that it had taken me most of a lifetime properly to understand that from early childhood every encounter with nature, each little glimpse of truth and comprehension of the natural world, had braided together to make me what I am. From some formative vital spark I had been hoarding images of birds and mammals, of reptiles and insects, of plants and soils and landscape and of their very essence, the wildness that defines them all, until at some consciously unordained past moment they had silently taken me over and modelled me into the creature I have become. Over the decades of working with nature everything had coalesced into a deeply personal raison d’être – yes, I suppose I mean a vocation. It was an extraordinary sense of destiny, mildly unsettling, and demanding questions I could not at that moment answer. But why? How did it happen? Was it one principal influence, or several flowing together like mountain streams? When, exactly, did it start? And just who or what could have been responsible?
In those few minutes my world had shifted. That notion – that misty, blurry, hovering thing I had been ducking for years – was suddenly as crisply defined as a bright mountain peak when the clouds part. My brain was fizzing. I needed to reconnect with that last haunting image of my mother.
Was it her unflagging love and encouragement that had been the determining force? The rare chance of being together in that wild and beautiful place, the squeezed hand, the gift of a book? Is that what had been happening all along? Had her fortitude and zest for life been the moving force throughout my childhood? Or was it the unintended consequence of her ghastly, life-shortening illness that had somehow funnelled me into what I am? My head was spinning. Memories and images crowded in, colliding, swamping each other and leaving me light-headed, floating in an emotional limbo. Did she spark a flame that night in the Palacio? Did it spin me off into a dizzying parallel universe, from which I would never fully return? I needed to capture that moment again and follow its lead.
* * *
There are thought to be no wildcats left in Doñana, but there is a stable population of around fifty Iberian lynx (Lynx pardinus), a mesmerisingly beautiful, medium-sized spotted cat with ear tufts and a bob tail, closely related to the longer-legged Eurasian lynx (Lynx lynx), the one that used to roam Scotland 750 to 1,000 years ago and that many would now like to see reintroduced. The park authority works closely with a lynx captive breeding complex on its western boundary, a shining conservation success: by the time I visited, sixty-nine radio-tagged lynx had been released into good habitat since the project started eleven years ago. Those lynx are out there and breeding. That’s exactly where we would like to be with the Scottish wildcat.
The welcome by Dr Antonio Rivas bowled me off my feet, his enthusiasm mirrored and endorsed by his entire team. Two days later I came away elated, rejoicing that nature conservation held such splendid people at its noble heart. I was exhilarated but tired, very tired. I turned in early. In my hotel room I re-read my notes, added a few more and climbed into bed. I sat tapping into my laptop. Suddenly my eyes weren’t focusing, lids leaden, sleep rolling in like a fog. I jerked awake, once, twice, three times . . . just catching the laptop before it slid to the floor. I gave in. In free fall – altogether out of it.
Much later, at an unlogged moment in the small hours, I surfaced sufficiently to dream vividly. I was back in the Palacio, aged nineteen, with my mother. Not just vividly, I was there. It was as real as a dream could possibly be. I caught her perfume on the sultry air, heard her voice and felt her arm in mine.
The notion I had harboured for ages was that a very long time ago some accident of fate had made me want to be a naturalist – no, not want, NEED to be a naturalist, a person wholly engaged with nature, philosophically, emotionally, practically and professionally. Now, after a long career in nature conservation, I needed to look back and tie down influences, analyse roots and causes, and above all work out just who and what had spun the wheel, handed me the potion, spiralled me into being what I am and have been for more than fifty years.
My mother was no naturalist. She had no scientific training at all, very little knowledge beyond what she had read, and even less opportunity to spend time in the wilds anywhere. My parents came to Spain every year for her health – British winters were always bad for her. They had built a home here, an eyrie high above the ancient Roman and Moorish fishing village of Fuingerola, long before it became a tawdry tourist resort. That one brief expedition to Coto Doñana was an exception, but one she loved.
The book she gave me, Guy Mountfort’s natural history classic with its wild boar, fallow deer, lynxes, flamingos and imperial eagles, had sparked a new sense of purpose. I don’t believe that the idea of her son becoming a naturalist had ever entered her head – the profession barely existed in the 1960s. No, I’m sure she only saw it as an uplifting hobby, a worthwhile pastime; but that was it, that was the moment the idea of participating in such an expedition and perhaps one day even mounting one myself had fired me with a restless, vaulting ambition.
In that time-eliding dream she was beside me, eyes flashing, smiling, laughing, encouraging – ‘Why don’t you stay here for a few days and try to see some of the wildlife?’ In a burst of memory as bright and shining as leaves after summer rain, I saw her chatting to the locals, old women swathed in black sitting in the afternoon sun outside their whitewashed cottages, and the little children playing in the dusty street. There she was; in self-taught fluent Spanish she was embracing the local people she so loved – ‘¿Son estas sus nietos?’ – and I watched her throw back her head with a little flick of her hair as she always did when laughter bubbled out of her like a mountain spring, and that slightly startled look, wide-eyes flashing, as though her own mirth had caught her unawares.
She had died suddenly and shockingly in her fifties, catching us all off guard – my father, my sister, me, her own twin sister, everyone who knew and loved her. None of us were prepared for it, although for God’s sake we’d had enough warning. Years of it. She’d been an invalid since my birth, battling with a degenerative heart condition, a struggle against hopeless odds with never the remotest chance of winning, yet never giving up. We knew it but we hadn’t seen it. We hadn’t seen it coming because we ruddy well didn’t want to and because she’d fooled us – brilliantly fooled us – for years and years. Even when all the chips were down she still managed to trick us into thinking she was OK, that somehow she’d pull through, that she’d always be there for us. She’d led us through a lifelong masterclass of endlessly loving, benign deception – a life of perpetual, courageous, stoical, dogged, resolute, unflinching
