I learnt my first lesson in the treatment of animals from them; their master’s son I may have been, but that didn’t mean they would tolerate any liberties. I was introduced to wildlife on our afternoon walks through the ancient coppiced woods on the farm with Nanny Pratt. These were not just walks for the good of our health; rationing was still enforced and Nanny Pratt always carried with her a Sussex trug made from willow boards and, depending on the season, she filled it with flowers for the nursery, edible plants, berries or nuts. Trailing along behind her as she foraged, my sister and I quickly learnt to identify what was edible, where to find it, and why it grew there. We soon understood that some plants might look good to eat but are, in fact, deadly poisonous – such as the black or translucent berries of climbing byrony, or the dark purple ones of deadly nightshade – and we knew never to touch those we did not recognise. At the same time, any inquisitive child is bound to take an interest in the wildlife around him or her as they walk, surrounded by birdsong, darting insects and the furtive rustling of unseen little creatures. It was on these outings with Nanny Pratt, as I began to learn about the breeding seasons of animals, that the seeds of my fascination with natural history were sown.
On these afternoon walks we sometimes met others bent on the same mission as ourselves, such as womenfolk from the village or retired farm workers harvesting the hedgerows for a whole range of edible or medicinal plants. In the early autumn there were always families of noisy Cockneys on their traditional holiday, when they came down from the East End to pick hops and apples, who would be searching for blackberries or rosehips along the lanes and in woodland. Later, on 14 September, it was the custom for bus loads of townspeople and their children to descend on the countryside to strip the hazel trees on Nutting Day. The coppiced oak, hornbeam, chestnuts and hazel woodlands were busy places through the winter, as the farm men cut and stacked the poles to dry for fencing materials. Sometimes we would see an old man cutting hazels to make into hurdles, and one winter a group of charcoal burners set up camp, living in wigwam-shaped canvas tents and building their curious earth-covered fires.
THE COPPICED OAK, HORNBEAM, CHESTNUTS AND HAZEL WOODLANDS WERE BUSY PLACES THROUGH THE WINTER, AS THE FARM MEN CUT AND STACKED THE POLES TO DRY FOR FENCING MATERIALS. SOMETIMES WE WOULD SEE AN OLD MAN CUTTING HAZELS TO MAKE INTO HURDLES, AND ONE WINTER A GROUP OF CHARCOAL BURNERS SET UP CAMP.
In 1956 we moved from Scarletts Farm to Eckington Manor, a red-brick Queen Anne House in the village of Ripe, overlooking the long sweep of the South Downs, with better facilities to allow my father to concentrate on breeding hunters and eventers. Here the parameters of my life began to broaden. My family moved south shortly after the First World War, but kept the farms and woodland in Cumberland and Northumberland. There were other family business interests in the north, and every couple of months my father and grandfather would go up there to attend meetings and visit the tenants, sometimes taking me with them. We would travel by train to Carlisle, stay for a few days at the Crown and Mitre Hotel, then drive along the old Military Road beside Hadrian’s Wall to the family farms at Wingates Moor, near Longframlington in Northumberland. My parents were keen on their fishing, and one of the greatest thrills of my young life was being carried onto the Inverness car sleeper at King’s Cross at midnight, falling asleep to the hiss and chuff of the steam engine, and waking up to the grandeur of the Scottish Highlands north of Stirling. On other occasions we drove down to the West Country to stay with my grandparents at Endsleigh, in Devonshire, the stunning ‘cottage orné’ mansion built in 1810 for the Duchess of Bedford, when they took the fishing on the river Tamar. Before my tenth birthday I had seen much of the natural glory of Britain from the chalk downs and wooded valleys of the south, the high fells of Cumbria and Yorkshire and the magnificence of the Cheviot Hills, to the majesty of the Scottish Highlands and the open moors of Dartmoor and Exmoor.
My social perspective expanded when I went to the village school for a short while and met the children of the people who made up our community. In those days 70 per cent of the population were still employed in agriculture and the remainder were the publican, storekeeper, rector, blacksmith, carpenter, and a handful of commuters and retired people. A little later I went to a Dame school in Hailsham, which was attended by the children of the local businessmen and farmers, and then, when I was eight, I was off to boarding school.
All children of my age had one thing in common, regardless of background or whether they were rural or urban: within the code of good manners and respect for the belongings of others, we had the freedom of the countryside and nature was our primary source of entertainment. To be outside enjoying it was considered a healthy, beneficial and profitable way for the young to spend their time. These were the philosophies around which the Scout movement, which did such exemplary work in introducing inner-city children to country lore, had been based. We made camps in the woods and spent hours being eaten alive by midges, watching a badger sett when the sow brought her piglets out at dusk, or a vixen’s earth when she played with her cubs on a summer evening. We caught tadpoles in jam jars in the early spring, watching them grow into little frogs before releasing them back into the wild, and we overturned cowpats to find worms for use as bait when we fished ponds and streams for sticklebacks or eels.
Butterfly and egg collecting were still viewed as acceptable during my childhood, and although this bird nesting was officially banned in 1954 it took a few years before the hobby was finally seen as abhorrent. At one time every child would have been given a butterfly net and specimen jar, or an egg-collecting kit with the little drill for making holes in the shell and a glass ‘blowing tube’ for removing the yolk. The prevalent view in those days was that egg collecting was educational, an opportunity to teach the young how to watch birds returning to their nest sites with nesting material, and that if one egg was subsequently carefully taken from a nest no harm was done as a bird would always lay a replacement.
In due course, Joe Botting, our gardener, began to take me ferreting, and within a year, as with many of my contemporaries, I acquired ferrets of my own and could ferret unattended. Ferreting is a wonderful way for the young of both sexes (my daughter, Rosie, kept ferrets) to learn the responsibility of looking after an animal, and if they have listened to what they have been taught they can have enormous fun hunting with them and experiencing the thrill of bringing something home for the pot. It is also the way in which urban sportsmen have traditionally kept in touch with their rural roots; even today there are more ferrets kept in municipal environments than rural ones.
As children we learnt the seasons of birds, animals, reptiles and insects; the ones that hibernated and those that were nocturnal; the predators, the quarry they hunted and the corridors of safety, such as hedgerows, that smaller animals used as habitat, or links between woodland. We also came to understand how wildlife responded to differing weather conditions, and, most importantly, we learnt to recognise the signs of animal presence. We could all identify the narrow tracks of rabbits leading from their burrows to their feeding grounds, or the broader path of a badger, the three forward and one-heel toe of a pheasant or four-toed narrow pad of a fox crossing a muddy path through a wood. The telltale signs left by the hair of an animal passing under or over a barbed-wire fence or close to brambles would not evade us, nor the fine, soft, grey-brown fluffy hair of a rabbit, the stiff, straight, bristly hair of deer, the long, white and grey of a badger or the short russet of a fox. So, too, could we decipher the messages in their droppings: the twisted dung of a fox, full of fur, bone fragments and seeds, and the acrid stench of his urine, where he marked his territory; the oblong dropping of rats; the long, crinkly, single black dropping of a hedgehog, glinting with remnants of undigested beetle carapaces; the tidy, open latrine of a badger or the stinking, fishy pile of otter spraints on a boulder beside a river; the oval, dark khaki droppings of roe deer or the regurgitated pellets of an owl, full of the tiny bones of shrews and voles. Above all, we learnt that every wild animal relies on sound and scent to warn them of danger, and that silence and a downwind approach were essential if we hoped to watch them.
