at table.’
I can remember dozens of such sleepy summer afternoons and kitchen teas, dozens of days of toast and honey and jam and crumbling fruit cake, of Nellie’s teasing and the grown-ups locked in yawningly leaden conversation about the abhorrent politics of the day, but only one when, together like old buddies, my grandfather and I held the family in thrall, when the saga of the dead dog gripped them so; only one when I was at the centre of his world and my world and the whole wide world and everything revolved around him and me and my awful discovery.
‘The boy’s found a dead dog in a ditch at Longbottom,’ he announced as soon as he had lowered himself into the chair. ‘He took me out there. It’s that wretch Howson’s dog – Tramp, I think he called it – a big terrier of a kind. Shot at point-blank range. Half its head is missing.’ He loaded strawberry jam onto his toast.
Nellie looked pale and turned away to the Aga to busy herself with more toast. ‘Whatever were you doing out at Longbottom?’ my father enquired directly.
My grandfather rescued me. ‘He was just birds’ nesting. It’s a good spot. There are magpies in those thorn hedges.’
‘Why d’ y’ think he shot his dog?’ my father quizzed, changing tack.
‘That man has a terrible temper on him. He’d shoot anything. It disobeyed him, I shouldn’t wonder, and he blasted it. Damned shame. It was a decent looking dog and good at the rabbits.’
* * *
I now see that it was inevitable that those explorations, those dreamy solo sorties into the woods and fields where a child’s unfettered imagination could run riot, meeting and treating every encounter with the surging excitement of real discovery, would become an addiction from which I would never fully recover. Every day I longed to escape. I would rush through breakfast, gobbling down Nellie’s thick porridge as fast as I could. ‘Please may I get down?’
‘Yes, you may. Now don’t you go getting into trouble, young Jack, or you’ll be . . .’ But I would be out of the door and away before she could finish the sentence. Usually I didn’t know where I was going. There was never a defined purpose, it was just out and away and come what may.
Perhaps that’s why I had loved The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe so much. It was that sense of passing from one world into another, where the known, the measured and the ordered could be cast off like a cloak, and the unknown, alluring yet slightly frightening, became as irresistible as a drug to an addict, while at the same time knowing that safe passage back through the wardrobe was always an option. It was where my imagination spiralled skyward, where make-believe ruled and I could pretend to be anything or anybody I chose, and where nothing else mattered.
My favoured route was up the Broadwalk, a long, paved path that led away from the ordered formality of the gardens to a long avenue of huge old elms and oaks surrounded by brambles and nettles and the tangle of ever-encroaching wildness. If this extremity of the grounds had ever been tamed, it certainly wasn’t any more. Wood pigeons fired out of the heights on clapperboard wings, and starlings and jackdaws burst indignantly from nest holes as I approached beating back the brambles and bashing trunks with my precious stick.
It was here that I first met a fox. It wasn’t really my own discovery. Old Bob, pulling leeks for the kitchens, slicing the tops with a single swipe of his hook-bladed knife as he spoke, had told me that there was an ancient oak stump at the top of the Broadwalk that was hollow. ‘An ol’ fox holes up in there,’ he had announced. ‘You can smell ’im as you pass by.’
I rushed to check it out. The huge oak had blown down and the trunk and branches removed decades before. Wind and rain had worked on the vast root plate, which had slowly subsided back to earth, leaving the stump sticking up at an angle. At my seven-year-old chest height, its rotted hollow was bigger and deeper than I had imagined, reaching further down into the cavernous roots than the end of my stick. I placed my head right into the hole and peered inside. It was completely empty and all I could smell was the fungally dampness of decay. I probed around its dark interior with my stick. Nothing. I wandered off and forgot about it.
A few days later I found myself passing the stump and thought I’d look again. I sauntered up confidently, expecting nothing, and thrust my head into the gaping void. Too late I realised that the rancid pungency that now assaulted my nose was markedly different from the time before, strangely alive and vital. The fox shot out like a jack-in-a-box, fur brushing my face as he fled, giving me such a fright that I fell over backwards into a clump of stinging nettles.
I would never forget that fox. It would mark a climacteric in my private, cerebral engagement with the natural world. I don’t think I had ever touched a wild mammal before, except perhaps rescuing a drowning mouse from the rain butts or rabbits snared by the farm boys. But a fox was different. It was big and strong and very wild. I had seen its gleaming teeth and smelt its foetid breath. When I stood up I was shaking all over, trembling, not with fear – it had happened far too quickly for that – but with the suddenly triggered involuntary rush of adrenaline. For a stretched collision of time and space I didn’t know what to do. My pulse was racing. I stood and stared at the stump. Questions swirled. Could it have bitten me? Savaged my face? Would I get into trouble if I told the grown-ups? Was there another fox in there? If there had been danger, it had passed me by, and anyway there was nothing I could have done to avoid it.
I approached the stump cautiously. This time standing well back, I knocked it with my stick several times before taking a closer look. It was empty, of course, but the cavern reeked of dark, musky animal, intimate and strangely prehistoric, belonging to another world. It was a smell I would never forget, a thrilling essence of excitement as sharp as vinegar, of danger, of adventure and above all a scent of wildness – alive and free.
3
The Manor House
If I ever get to be so old that I can no longer recognise my children; when I hear my name being called and it means nothing to me; when I cease to be able to name the birdsong I have known all my life and when the pageant of the season’s turning fails to move me; when each day merges into the last and the next as a continuous fog and I hear people whisper, ‘He’s lost it, poor old bugger’ – they will be wrong.
I shall be running free with the soft wind in my face, skipping through the shining grass of the damp Longbottom meadows, swiping with my stick at thistle heads to watch the downy seed caught and flown in eddies of sunlit breeze. I shall be straddling the old crack willow fallen into the pond where the moorhens built their soggy nest. I shall be under the ancient yew searching for tawny owl pellets, leaping the little box hedges of the ordered gardens and racing past the long glasshouses four in a row. I shall be heading out. The ancient flagstone floors will be cold beneath my bare feet once again and Nellie will be chasing me round the kitchen table with a tea towel. I shall be eight years old, laughter rippling through me till I ache, free as a cloud, embraced and held fast by the joy and the jubilation of careless youth. I shall be back at the Manor House.
As you headed out of the quiet Warwickshire village, past the little brick bridge over the weed-waving brook that burbles through the green, passing between Borsley’s grocery store, the tart aroma from the block of cheddar cheese on the marble slab greeting you at the door, and Mr Anderton across the lane in his straw boater and a blue-and-white-striped apron, smile as wide as a valley, waving his cleaver over his butcher’s block – ‘Pettitoes not such a bad price this week’ – you turned up Church Hill, past the long terrace of cottages on the right, slate roofs staggered like a rickety staircase.
Then past the Georgian vicarage, square, solemn and not a little smug behind high-boarded gates and an ivy-quilted
