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He and my grandmother had had eleven children, six girls and five boys. Most of them had left the village by the time I was born, on October 12, 1964, and I never met them. A few stayed, but apart from one sister, Leenie, who was very close to my mother, I don’t remember seeing any of them. I think my arrival, out of wedlock, caused a rift in the family.
The cottage we lived in felt huge to me as a small boy, but in reality it was very modest, with low ceilings that I hit my head on whenever I tried to bounce on my bed. It was a typical tied workman’s cottage made of the local red brick, set back from a narrow lane and looking on to a meadow at the back, with dense forest beyond. At night I would lie in bed with the window wide open and listen to the noises of the night—scarcely any of them man-made. There were no major roads or motorways and no railway lines within miles. The only thing that sometimes broke the silence was the noise of jets screaming overhead from one of the many air bases in the county. The air bases are still there, but Norfolk is still, forty years later, one of the least populated counties in England, and is still one of the most inaccessible corners of the country.
In the 1960s, it was like a place that time forgot. While the rest of the country was enjoying postwar prosperity, people in the village of Great Massingham were living as they had lived centuries ago. There were several farms in the locality, most of them mixed: they had dairy herds, sheep, pigs, and beef cattle as well as cereal crops, vegetables, and fruit. The land was broken up at that time into small parcels divided by tall, thick hedges and forestry that kept the worst of the Arctic weather at bay—and provided perfect cover for wildlife. And almost all of the farmers laid down pheasant chicks in the spring and ran shoots during the winter months.
Winters were harsh. The cold blew in from the Urals to the east and the Arctic to the north, bringing huge quantities of snow and ice. The hedges stopped most of the snow from drifting, but at times the roads were completely impassable and the landscape was white for weeks and the ponds in the village turned into skating rinks.
At that time there was very little machinery, although that changed as I grew older. Tractors had already taken over from the heavy shire horses—but it hadn’t been so long ago. The old horses from our farm lived in happy retirement in the meadow at the back of our cottage. There were no combine harvesters, no chemicals. The work was done by hand. Each farmer had his own workers, most of them living in simple cottages like ours, on the farms, and during the harvest, gangs of laborers were driven from farm to farm to weed and pick and bale.
My grandfather worked at Ward’s farm. Ward was one of the biggest landowners in the village, and my grandfather had had the cottage for as long as he’d had the job. There was no inside sanitation, no hot water and no heating, and the old iron window frames were rusty and ill fitting. The privy was in the garden and I remember Sunday nights were bath nights when the old copper bath tub would be brought into the living room in front of the fire and filled with water heated in a big copper pan that hung over the coals. We took turns bathing, and being the youngest, I was last.
There were people living in our village who had never left it. And they had no reason to. The village was self-sufficient. There was a butcher, where my grandparents traded vegetables from the garden for meat; a baker with delicious fresh bread at any time of the day; a dairy; a shop that sold general provisions; a hairdresser; a primary school; a fire engine; five pubs; and a blacksmith who shod horses and fixed machinery. It was a farming community through and through. And the sort of community in which everyone knew everyone else—and knew everything about everyone else.
There were no tourists in those days, no strangers wandering about the village, except when the circus came. Even the gypsies who came at harvesttime were the same ones who made the journey year after year. And there was no crime. We all left our houses open, and people would come in without knocking and put the kettle on while they were passing through to say hello. It was a genuine community. The worst that might happen was when someone had a chicken go missing and would report it to Phil, the village policeman. He knew everything; he knew exactly where to find the culprit and would pay a quiet visit. The next day two chickens would mysteriously be delivered to the aggrieved party.
Shirley, my mother, had given birth to me at the age of twenty-four, knowing that she would have to bring me up alone and unsupported. At that time and in that sort of tight-knit community, to have a child out of wedlock was extraordinarily brave, but her parents were apparently very supportive. Sadly, I don’t know the story; I don’t know whether she was in love with someone who was unattainable for some reason. I don’t even know whether my father knew I existed. All I know is that she never had or wanted another partner. So I don’t know who my father was. Even now, forty-five years later, my mother won’t talk about it.
My guess is he was a Romany—not to be confused with the tinkers and travelers who have given gypsies such a bad name over the years. The gypsies we knew were wonderful people, scrupulously clean and honest, with a very strong sense of family and strict codes of morality. They used to travel about the countryside in their traditional prettily painted wooden wagons, drawn by horses, going wherever there was work. They would pick hops and fruit in Kent and vegetables and soft fruit in Norfolk. Occasionally they would graze their horses on the village green, but they had a permanent site on a piece of common land just outside the village, next to an old Roman road called Peddars Way.
Every summer I used to go and play with them. We would go out with the dogs and catch rabbits while the farm workers were combining. They had lots of dogs, big lurchers. One in particular, I remember, was called Scruff; he was crossed with a wolfhound, so huge, and he would chase rabbits until he dropped.
A little farther up the Way was a wagon set on its own that belonged to an old gypsy woman who, it was said, bought illnesses. She was very old and wizened, with long gray hair and gold hoop earrings, and looked like the old-fashioned gypsies you see in picture books. People who were ill used to go to see her. I don’t know whether she made them better, but I don’t imagine anyone would have dared say if she hadn’t because it was said she would put a curse on anyone who spoke ill of her.
I felt very much at home with the gypsies, and although she never said anything, I have a strong feeling that my mother was pleased. I think, in retrospect, that she may have been trying to introduce me to my father’s family. It was unusual for village children to mix with gypsies. They were never liked by the village people and were made to feel distinctly unwelcome in the shops and pubs. I knew how it felt to be treated like an outcast.
I was a solitary child. I attended the little primary school in Great Massingham until the age of eleven, but I don’t remember many friends from that time although I must have had the odd one because I do remember throwing sticks into the horse chestnut tree in the churchyard to get conkers and being told off by the vicar—and I don’t imagine I’d have been doing that alone. But with no father, I think I may have been viewed as a bit of an outcast myself. Maybe I felt I didn’t need friends; I had Whiskey and the farm dogs and they were much easier than my peers. Dogs don’t pick fights or bully or make unkind remarks.
Not that I had much time for friends. I always had to hurry home after school to chop wood for the fires or bring in coal or feed the animals, and I was often taken out of school for several weeks at a time to help with the harvest or whatever farmwork needed to be done. The school never seemed to mind my absence—I was never going to be top of the class, and I wasn’t the only child at the school who was taken out to work on the land at busy times. The teachers seemed to focus on those children who obviously had an academic future and didn’t pay too much attention to the rest of us. And so I worked hard at the subjects I enjoyed, which apart from art were animal related—biology and other sciences—and sports. Those were things I really could do and I was in all the teams for soccer and rugby and cricket. I loved anything played with a ball or anything athletic.
I also loved fishing. In the village there were three big ponds we used to fish. One of them dried out one summer and we rescued the fish in buckets and ran to put them into the other ponds before they died. North Norfolk has dozens of little ponds, or “pits,” as they were called, often in the middle of fields, with tall trees surrounding them. It was a curious feature of the landscape in that part of the county. There were all sorts of theories about how they came to be there. Some people said they were craters caused by German bombs dropped during the Second World War; others said they were left over from some sort of mineral excavation. Whatever caused them, they were full of fish, such as carp, roach, pike, and bream, and provided hours of entertainment for children like me.
Sometimes we would fish farther afield. One pit we were particularly fond of was in a field by the side of the road about four miles from Great Massingham. It was full of gold-colored fish, but every time we got ourselves set up, the farmer would come running out of the farmyard across the field, shouting angrily and waving a stick at us, and we would leap on our bicycles and race away.
I had a green Chopper, which was just the coolest bike at that time. I think my grandfather must have found it on some rubbish pile. It looked as though it had been run over by a steamroller and was all rusty but he restored it for me, painted it, found it a new seat, and it became my prize possession.
A doctor’s surgery was the only facility missing from the village. It was a two-and-a-half-mile walk away, in the village of Harpley, where Dr. Bowden had his practice. It was a route I knew well. I was seldom ill but I was accident prone and often needed to be stitched up after bad falls or being bashed during soccer and rugby games.
I didn’t care for doctors much, but dentists I loathed with a passion. I have only been to a dentist once in my life, for a checkup when I was about eleven at a practice in Fakenham, a town about twelve miles away. The dentist said I needed a back tooth removed and although he gave me a local anesthetic, I have never felt pain like it. He had his knee on my chest as he wrestled to pull out that tooth. It was the most horrific experience. I couldn’t bear it. I hated the smell, I hated the noise, I hated the injection, and I couldn’t stand the pain. I vowed I would never go near a dentist again, and I haven’t. On the positive side, it did make me clean my teeth properly and the only teeth I’ve lost since then have been knocked out by overboisterous wolves.
Hospitals have been less easy to avoid. I fell through a roof in my late teens and broke a wrist, and I went through a car windshield soon after I learned to drive, but my first hospital stay was at the age of nine. I lost my grip on the school climbing frame and fell onto the hard ground beneath, shattering an elbow. I was rushed to the hospital in King’s Lynn, where I languished in the children’s ward with my arm suspended above my head for three weeks. There was a boy in the next bed who had slipped and fallen under the wheels of a double-decker bus.
I have no memory of my mother’s visiting, but she tells me that she gave up work for those three weeks and took the bus early every morning into King’s Lynn, which was fifteen miles away, to sit by my bedside until early evening, when she took the bus home again.
One day the sister in charge of the ward came up to her and said, “You’ve been coming here every day for nearly three weeks and I have never seen you have anything to eat. Today you are going to have some lunch. I have organized it with the kitchen.” The sister had rightly surmised that having been off work all that time, with no wage coming in, my mother couldn’t afford to feed herself.
But at home we ate well. My grandmother was a good cook. Sundays were her baking days and wonderful smells would waft into the yard. In preparation she would buy eggs to supplement those our chickens laid. One Sunday she couldn’t find the eggs she had bought, and after looking all over, she had to abandon her baking. That evening my grandfather came into the house and said, “I’ve found your eggs, Ma. They’re under the chicken at the top of the garden.” I had taken them and put them under a broody hen to see if she would hatch them.
My grandmother used to sing as she baked, and I will always remember her wearing a blue floral dress. There was always a big stew or a casserole on the stove, made with vegetables that my grandfather grew in the garden and game of one sort or another that we had shot or coursed on the land. I learned to shoot at a very early age, and could always use a knife. I was never squeamish about killing and could skin and gut.
By the age of eight or nine my job was to bring home our meals. My grandmother would make me coarsely cut cheese sandwiches and some cold tea—we never had hot drinks for some reason—and send me out with a penknife, a piece of string, a ten-pence piece—what that was for I have no idea—and tell me I was equipped to conquer the world. And off I would go with the dogs and not come back until I had plenty for everyone to eat.
I didn’t kill indiscriminately. My grandfather had taught me which animals to take and which ones to leave. I knew to leave female rabbits that were nursing their young. From fifty yards, he could spot “milky does,” as he called them, by their lack of condition and the absence of fur on their underbellies. He knew they had young underground that would die if their mother was killed. Instead I learned to go for the young bucks that would otherwise overpopulate the area.
My grandfather’s whole philosophy was about sustainability and about maintaining a balance in nature. Younger farmers wanted to kill off the rabbits because they were so destructive to the crops, but he wanted to protect them, knowing that if you drastically reduced one species, another would take over. He would say that problems arose only when human beings interfered.
CHAPTER THREE (#ulink_7bff8a5b-5312-5470-8f93-e96d98f5dd02)
A Wolf at the Window (#ulink_7bff8a5b-5312-5470-8f93-e96d98f5dd02)
In bed at night, when I was small and the lights were out, I was convinced I could see a wolf outside my bedroom window. I suppose it must have been the way the branches of a tree fell. As an adult, of course, the idea of a wolf being tall enough to look in through a second-floor window is patently ridiculous, but as a young child, I was convinced. And I was terrified. Every night, to escape, I hid my head under the coarse black blanket that covered me, but then I couldn’t resist peeping to see if it had gone, and would scare myself all over again. It was just the wolf’s head, ears erect, looking to its left; but by morning, in the daylight, there was no sign of it.
I knew a lot about the wild animals around my home when I was small—probably much more than most children of my age—but I knew nothing about those in the wider world. I didn’t see wildlife programs because we had no television, and I didn’t visit a zoo until I was in my late teens because there was no money for that kind of thing. So the only knowledge I had of big and dangerous wild animals was from books and fairy stories. And all I knew about wolves was that they were sly, sinister, fierce, and deadly; and the images of the stories my grandmother told me preyed on my imagination. It was a long, long time before I confronted my fear.
Foxes, on the other hand, were familiar and although they also had a fearsome reputation, I was not scared of them. One night I was startled from sleep by the noise of the old shire horses thundering back and forth across the meadow behind the cottage. There was a full moon, as bright as I’d seen. It was almost like daylight outside, so I pulled on some clothes, told Whiskey to stay under my bed, and crept out of the house. I quietly made my way down toward the edge of the forest to see what was agitating the horses.
What I saw was pure magic. By the time I reached them, the horses had begun to settle and playing among their giant hooves was the most beautiful vixen with four young kits. They were so busy leaping on one another and tearing around that they seemed quite unaware of my presence, so I sat down a short distance away and watched their game unfold.
It was the most exciting sight. I had never watched a fox at close quarters before. All I had seen were glimpses of reddish brown from afar or a tail, with its distinctive white tip, disappearing into the hedge as the animal ran for safety when I was out with the dogs. Out there in the dark—in their environment, not mine—I felt as though I were witnessing another world.
I went home and told no one what I’d seen, but the next night I went back and there they were again. I can only assume that their den was just inside the forest and this was their playground. Once again I sat a short distance away and watched, and once again they ignored me, but allowed me to be there. This went on for several months as the kits grew bigger and stronger preparing to take their part in the world.
Every night I went out for my secret rendezvous—it was intoxicating to find myself welcome among creatures that were instinctively so afraid of man. In time, they were playing in a small semicircle in front of where I sat, but although they showed no hint of nervousness, they never seemed to pay me any attention. Until one night there was a rustling behind me and one of the boldest of the four kits had started to play in the bush behind where I sat. He burst out into the open and raced around me and playfully ambushed one of his siblings. I was no longer an observer; I had become part of their game.
I learned so much about foxes in that time. I watched the vixen bring food for the kits. It is a myth that foxes kill for fun, that they go into a henhouse and kill far more than they can eat. We think that only because they are usually caught in the act and frightened away. If left undetected, the fox will take one hen from the coop, which is all they can carry at a time, and then go back again and again until they have collected everything they killed. They will eat as much as their family needs that day and bury the remainder in the ground, where it keeps. Nothing is wasted. I know because I saw what they did and saw how well this mother looked after her young and taught them how to take care of themselves.
Six months later I saw a sight that filled me with grief and horror. Walking in the woods with the dogs I came across the limp and lifeless body of this boldest fox kit swinging from a tree. It was held by the leg in a crude trap, having died a painful and lingering death. The fact that this creature that I had come to know so well over the months, which had been so majestic, so beautiful, so full of energy, could have been deprived of life in this vile and cowardly way made me embarrassed for my species. I felt sick. I was so angry that some ignorant human being had taken this vibrant young life for no better reason than because he could.
Native Americans would say that that was the moment when my fate was sealed. They say that you sign nature’s unwritten contract to work with animals at a very young age as a result of some experience, either good or bad, that happens in early childhood. Looking back, there is no doubt that the shock of seeing that magnificent young fox—my friend—hanging from that tree left me with a feeling of revulsion for my own kind and a desire to distance myself from the human race.
My concern for foxes put me at odds with the rest of the community. The farmers hated them because in extremis a fox will take a newborn lamb, and the gamekeepers hated them because they took pheasants. So the local hunt was given a free rein to go wherever the scent took them, and it was a popular sport. The results were sickening.
Many were the times I came across a den where the vixen had gone to ground and the huntsmen had dug her out and gassed and killed the kits. The deadly smell of poison would still be lingering in the air. Sometimes it was a family I had watched for weeks, seeing the kits grow stronger and more adventurous. All of them gone, wiped out, given no chance of escape—all because of a reputation that the fox didn’t deserve and a few people’s desire for sport.
My gran used to tell a story about how she had been spring cleaning the cottage one day with both the front and back doors open, and a fox ran through the yard and straight in one door, through the house and out of the other. Moments later the entire pack of thirty-odd foxhounds followed. They were like a tidal wave sweeping through, jumping up and over tables and chairs as they followed the scent, and they wrecked the place. She had all her best china out of the cupboard and the whole lot was smashed. Shortly afterward the huntsmen came past on their horses, all dressed up in their pink coats, and when she asked what they were going to do about it, they simply doffed their hats and galloped off.
No one would listen to me when I tried to protest that foxhunting was cruel. And as a young boy it was hard to argue with my elders without being disrespectful, but it seemed to me that if you didn’t want foxes to get into your henhouse, then you needed to build an enclosure that was foxproof. It seemed totally unjust to set foxhounds to kill foxes because human beings were too lazy to take proper care of their chickens. Whenever I tried to speak to anyone about it, I was told to mind my manners, what did I know? I was just a child.
It was years before I was vindicated and foxhunting was banned in England and Wales. During the debate that raged beforehand, I was involved in researching the effects hunting had on the fox. The prohunting lobby said that they only caught old and sick animals, but that was simply not true. I examined foxes that had been caught and among them were carcasses of eighteen-month-old foxes—animals in the prime of life—too young to know how to save themselves.
Another myth was that the lead dog brought down the fox and it was all over in seconds with a single bite. The truth was they ran the fox to exhaustion until its brain boiled and swelled, its lungs bled, and the fox drowned in its own blood. They were often dead before the hounds even touched them. It was the most horrific death.
But back in the sixties, as a child no one would listen to, I very quickly grew to be deceitful. I went out with the dogs and as long as I came home with a couple of rabbits or pigeons, I could be gone from very early morning until after dark and no one asked any questions. I spent my days studying foxes, sitting for hours and hours watching and waiting; and all the wonderful things I saw and experienced and learned about foxes and their world I kept to myself. I knew that no human could be trusted, that if I told anyone where I had been watching families at play, they would go straight to the den and kill every creature inside it. Without knowing it, I became what the Native Americans call a keeper of the wild.
It was the beginning of a bad time for me. My world that had seemed so safe and secure, so happy and so loving, began to fall apart. I came home from school one day to discover that my grandfather had had a stroke that left him paralyzed down one side. I had not prepared myself in any way; it had never crossed my mind that he might ever be anything other than fit and strong, teaching me about the lore of the countryside and making the decisions for the family. I couldn’t imagine him any other way and didn’t want him any other way. But suddenly he looked old and frail and could no longer do all the things we used to do together. His mind seemed to have gone. Sometimes he remembered who I was; sometimes he seemed to have forgotten. And where once I had depended on him, he now depended upon others.
It wasn’t long before he had a second, massive stroke and died where he lay on the settee at home. My gran covered him with a jacket and sat with him, refusing to move, until the undertakers came to take him away. They must have been married for more than sixty years and had been so close and loved each other so dearly that I think his death broke her heart. They’d gone everywhere together, done everything together, and I had never once heard them argue or say a cross word to each other. If Gran went down to the shops, he would always go to meet her and they’d walk home together or he’d take his bicycle.
I remember them laughing. On washday she would always take the wet sheets up to the garden to squeeze them in the mangle. She would put them in and my grandfather would turn the handle and one day he said something to her that made her laugh so much she couldn’t get the sheets into the rollers.
I was just thirteen when he died. He was eighty and had lived and worked in Great Massingham all his life. He had been a popular man, and St. Mary’s Church, where the funeral was held, was packed, but among the familiar faces was a family of strangers sitting at the back. When the service was over, they came up to my grandmother and the stranger explained why they had come. He said that many, many years earlier he and his sister, as children, had been hungry, starving, and my grandfather had taken a loaf of bread for each of them from the back of the baker’s cart and told them to stuff it inside their jackets. The man no longer lived in the area but said he had never forgotten the kindness and had wanted to come and pay his last respects.
My grandfather was buried in the churchyard under the shade of the horse chestnut tree where I used to collect conkers.
His death changed everything. We had to leave the cottage because it was tied to my grandfather’s job, and for some reason that was never explained, we split up as a family. My grandmother, whom I looked upon as a mother, went to live on her own in a council house on Jubilee Terrace, where she was near her oldest son and his family, and my mother and I went to a tiny new bungalow, owned by the council in Summerwood Estate at the end of a cul-de-sac. I was miserable and angry, and I was grief stricken. I felt as though I had lost everything. My mother had never been the one who cared for me or cooked for me; she hadn’t been the one who spent time with me, who’d taken me for walks, or who’d taught me what I needed to get through life. It had been my grandparents and they were both gone. I didn’t want to be with my mother and I blamed my grandfather for dying and leaving me when I needed him most. I was terrified; I didn’t know how I was going to cope without him.
It was only when I went back, at the age of forty-four, and looked at the headstone on my grandfather’s grave that I discovered my grandmother had lived for another thirteen years after his death. I thought she had died within months of him. I have no memory of seeing her again after we moved. All I remember was the need to get away from anything that reminded me of what I’d lost.
I must have been very difficult for my mother. I took out my anger and my grief on her. I was at a secondary school in Litcham by then, which was about seven miles from Great Massingham, and she was out at work every day, working long hours as usual. I became very independent and shut her out of my life. I traveled back and forth on the school bus, which was a big blue double-decker run by Carter’s of Litcham. It was the oldest bus in the company’s fleet and the only double-decker. The kids from all the other villages came on single-deckers, and whenever there was snow, which could be five feet deep or more, there was just one bus that managed to struggle through, bypassing stranded cars and lorries along the way. To our annoyance, it was ours.
I seldom saw my mother. When I came home from school and on weekends, if there was work going, I went harvesting, baling, driving tractors, plucking turkeys, castrating pigs, helping cows give birth—anything and everything. And if there was no work, I would go off with Whiskey, my dog. I would go off for days sometimes, sleeping in barns, not thinking about how worried my mother might be. I became a bit of a recluse, a bit feral, wandering in the woods, being at one with the wildlife in a world where, increasingly, I felt I belonged—the only place where I was able to cry.
CHAPTER FOUR (#ulink_489ceb70-01d5-5fb2-831f-cfd56d2d61ff)
A Misspent Youth (#ulink_489ceb70-01d5-5fb2-831f-cfd56d2d61ff)
A part from playing on the school sports teams, which I loved, my time at Litcham Secondary School was undistinguished. I had friends, but my best friend died of an asthma attack. I remember the headmaster calling the whole class together one morning and breaking the news. I felt at that moment as though I were destined to lose everything.
I was a regular visitor to the headmaster’s office, so it was unsurprising that I left with no qualifications at the earliest moment I legally could, when I was barely sixteen. I needed to get out and earn a living and I wanted to get away from home. I was still angry and hurting and wanting to forget. So rather than look for jobs on the land, I joined a roofing company called Western and Bolton Roofing. It was hard work, carrying tiles and running up and down ladders all day, but it made me strong and fit and it took me to building sites all over the county. Sometimes we would be on a job for weeks if not months and I’d stay in a bed-and-breakfast or in hostels, only going back at weekends, and then I wouldn’t necessarily go home but often would stay with friends.
It was through work that I began to make my first friends and develop a social life, which largely revolved around pubs. There were a lot of good pubs in the area and once every three months, on a Saturday night, there was a disco in the little community center in Fakenham. It was the place to go. All the top DJs in Norfolk played there and people came from miles around to hear them. There was great music, drink, pretty girls that we’d take outside and kiss against the wall, and plenty of fights—all the good things in life. Then we’d make our way haphazardly home.
I remember one night the fog was so thick you could scarcely see your hand in front of your face and one of my mates said he knew the road so well, he could do it blindfolded. We all followed him on our little 150 cc motorbikes—I was on the back of one, as I usually was—and he missed a bend. He drove straight into a deep ditch and we all followed him into it one after another, no one noticing until we were up to our axles in water.
Fakenham was the fashion capital of Norfolk. On disco days, we would go into town in the morning and buy all the gear we needed, have a few pints, go home, play soccer for a couple of hours, change into the new clothes, go back to Fakenham, have some fish and chips in the early evening, then move on to The Crown for some beers, then to the Rampant Horse, which was as rough as hell—anytime you wanted a fight, you’d go there—before hitting the disco later.
One of my best friends was a tiler named Benny Elson, who lived in Weasenham, a neighboring village, and through him I met my first girlfriend, Michelle Pearce. Benny was older than I was, as most of the guys I worked with were, and Michelle was his wife Jac’s niece. She was visiting their house one day when he and I were getting ready to go out and asked who I was.
I started frequenting the Fox and Hounds in Weasenham, where she lived, and she would come in after school and hide behind the bar, and Skiffy, the landlord, would signal to me and we’d go off into the woods together and sit and talk for hours. We wrote each other little notes and I used to walk her dogs for her. She said all the things I needed to hear, and life didn’t get much better. Her father was one of the Queen’s pigeon keepers—I built him a pigeon loft in their garden—and I remember arriving at their house one day to collect Michelle and finding everyone in a state of great excitement because the Queen had just been to visit.
I fell madly in love with her, but she was too pretty for me and in the end she left me for someone else and broke my heart. We were both very young, but there was definitely something there and I often wonder how things might have been if I’d pushed a little harder or been less of a prat.
Skiffy’s real name was Freddy Scarf and he was a character. He didn’t turn a hair when I celebrated my eighteenth birthday in the pub—after years of illegal underage drinking—but then he had been regularly paying me in beer for the game he had on the menu that I and a couple of mates had brought in through the back door in sacks! I had been taught to poach by Pete, someone I knew from working on the land. He was married with a family—I never really knew much about him except that he was an expert on pheasants and how to get them illegally, which he had learned from his grandfather.
Pete had a brother and the three of us used to go out with an old 4-10 double-barreled shotgun, a genuine poacher’s gun that broke apart so you could conceal it. It had been handed down in his family from one generation to another. It went off with a terrible crack and smoked like mad, so the safest night of the year to fire it was November 5, Bonfire Night, when everyone was setting off fireworks.
Pete tried to make a silencer for the gun but the first attempt, out of copper pipe and baffling, was too heavy to lift. The modified version was much more successful until one day Pete was shooting a bird directly above him. The silencer must have become misaligned as we climbed through a hedge and ended up right in the line of fire. So when Pete pulled the trigger, flames shot out of the barrel and the burning silencer shot into the air and came straight down on his forehead, almost knocking him out.
It was dangerous business—and not just because of flying silencers. If we had been caught, we could have gone to prison—and we came close time and time again. One night I felt a massive hand in the small of my back push me down into the hedge. I knew better than to yell. Pete and his brother were lying flat on the ground beside me, facedown, and I lay there not moving a muscle for several minutes. There was not a sound to be heard; then I saw the outline of two pairs of water boots walk past on the track less than five feet from my face—gamekeepers patrolling their patch. My heart was pounding; I was convinced they’d hear it. It must have been four or five minutes before we dared move again. I asked how on earth they had known the gamekeepers were coming. They knew all the tricks; Pete’s brother had smelled the gamekeepers’ cigarette smoke.
We always tried to avoid the areas where the birds were released because that was where the gamekeepers expected poachers—they put down traps and they patrolled. And Pete taught me never to shoot a white pheasant, although they were obviously easier to see in the dark. Gamekeepers bred them specially, he said, because they were easy to count and if one was missing, they’d know a poacher was in the area and would intensify their patrols.
So we walked for miles across fields, heading for pits, then we’d crawl through the undergrowth to the bottom, which was usually filled with water, and lie there out of sight. You could look up through the trees above you, where roosting pheasants were perfectly silhouetted against the sky and shoot them straight off the branches. As the youngest, it was my job to pick them up from wherever they fell, which was usually in the water, and put them into the bag. Pete did the shooting and his brother held the torch and did the spotting.
I was enjoying my new life, but there was always something missing. I was one of the lads and I liked getting dressed up to go out and having a good time—they used to say I looked like George Michael in my white jeans—but I never lost the need to go off on my own with the dog and roam the countryside, watching foxes, spotting birds, looking for signs of other wildlife. There was always a part of me that remained separate from my mates.
One day I took the bus and went to visit the local zoo, just outside Thetford. I saw animals I had never seen before. I was so excited I felt like a child—and then I came to the wolf enclosure, and standing less than ten feet away were the creatures that had filled me with such terror night after night.
There was one in particular, a beautiful creamy-colored male with lovely golden-yellow eyes that immediately locked onto mine. We stared at each other, and in those few seconds I felt that he touched my soul. I felt as though this magnificent creature understood everything about me, knew my secrets, could read my deepest thoughts and fears, and could see all the hurt and pain. I felt he had the power to heal those wounds and make me whole again. It was an extraordinary connection and I knew that what I was looking for in life was right there in front of me.
He probably looked at every member of the public in that way in the hope that they might throw him a piece of food, but I don’t imagine that everyone would have felt what I felt, or have seen what I saw. Maybe it was all those years spent with dogs and with foxes, living with one foot in their world, always being slightly at odds with the human world. Or maybe it was something deeper. Whatever it was, it was the beginning of a lifelong contract. I knew that everything I had been told about this creature was a lie and that he and I had a lot in common and were both living out of our time.
I felt I needed to get back to the land, so I gave up the roofing business and applied for a part-time job as a gamekeeper’s assistant on an estate that ran a big commercial shoot. It was good to be back among the hedgerows, but the work flew in the face of everything my grandfather had taught me. He had ingrained in me that you kill to eat; you don’t kill for fun. On this estate, so many birds were laid down, you could scarcely put your foot on the ground without treading on a chick; and when it came to the shoots, there was no skill involved—it was slaughter. It was harder not to hit a bird than to hit one. They didn’t want to fly; you had to throw them in the air to get them to go anywhere.
I stuck it out for about sixteen months, but when I heard on the grapevine that Morton’s farm estate, a much smaller enterprise, was looking for an assistant gamekeeper, I went there. It was one of the farms in the village where I’d worked many times over the years, and the job came with a little one-room cottage, which was perfect. Monty, the head gamekeeper, was a craftsman of the old school, and I knew I would learn a lot from him. He trained me and was very good to me; he put a lot of trust in me, which to my shame I abused. But I was in the wrong job.
He wanted me to kill the foxes to stop them taking the young birds. Instead, I killed pheasants and the rabbits and fed them to the foxes. There was a particular vixen I had watched over for months. She had built a den on the tree line where she raised a litter, and I watched her move the entire litter to another den she built on another tree line in a different field, across a road about five hundred yards away. For some reason she must have decided they were no longer safe at the first site, and so carried them one by one, holding them by the scruff of the neck in her mouth, across the fields under cover of darkness.
It was four months before I was caught. Monty found the evidence one day and confronted me. I felt I had let him down badly. When I told the story to Pete, my poacher friend, he said, “You can’t run with the fox and hunt with the hounds.” He was right, and the episode did nothing to improve my popularity among the locals. To them, foxes were vermin and I was despised for my views.
I was out of a job and a house, but very quickly found work in the building trade again and rented a little cottage in the village, which I moved into with Sue, a girl I’d been seeing for some time. I don’t think it was a passionate love affair for either of us, but we got on well for a while and we married, without a great deal of ceremony, and had a little girl together, Gemma.
During that time I started studying foxes in earnest. I knew I wanted to work with animals, not bricks and tiles, but I couldn’t see how I was going to do it, and the laboring jobs paid the rent. So I read books and went into the forest at night and on weekends.
One evening there was a knock at the door and I discovered that not everyone in the village was against me. A woman stood there with a young fox kit hidden under her coat that she presented to me. The kit couldn’t have been more than two weeks old and she had found him starving, cold, and close to death. His mother had presumably been killed. I told her I would keep him until he was old enough to fend for himself and then release him into the wild.
I named him Barney and made a little den for him in the barn out of a large drainage pipe lined with straw and set about teaching him what I’d observed vixens teaching their young. When he was old enough for solid food, I fed him on rats, mice, and rabbits, which I skinned and minced, making the meat as much like the nourishment his mother would have regurgitated, and gradually introduced him to fur and whole animals. I then showed him how to defend his food—I opened my mouth wide and made a fast cacking sound, which is what I had seen wild foxes do. He picked it up quickly and was soon defending his food from me. I played with him as I had seen so many kits do with one another: chasing him, rolling him over, and having mock fights.
Eventually I decided he was ready to be released, but first I spent several nights out in the woods with him so he could listen to the sounds and get his bearings before I left him to fend for himself. When the moment came to release him, I had no idea whether my training would be of any use to him. He made a dash for the trees, turned for an instant to look back at me, and was gone.
Imagine my joy when I spotted him again many times in the next few years and knew that all those hours as a child spent sitting, listening, watching, and learning had saved this young creature’s life.
CHAPTER FIVE (#ulink_8eeba2ce-903f-5103-a659-782d82d11d71)
For Queen and Country (#ulink_8eeba2ce-903f-5103-a659-782d82d11d71)
Looking back, it seems that everything about my early life was preparing me for my future with wolves, though at the time there didn’t seem to be the slightest connection. Not long afterward, I was in King’s Lynn with three mates. One of them needed some money in a hurry, so we were in a backstreet stealing car radios—not something I am hugely proud of—when someone spotted a couple of policemen heading our way. We ran off into the High Street with two policemen in pursuit, desperately looking for a busy shop to disappear into. It must have been an early closing day because nothing was open except for the army recruitment office, which had a welcoming light inside. We dived in breathless and panting, and announced that we had come to sign up. I don’t imagine they had seen so many people all week; they welcomed us with open arms and ushered us swiftly into a back room to see a video about life in the army. Perfect.
We were all impressed by what we saw, and it became my life for the next seven years. We signed up that afternoon, but I was the only one who went the whole way. I had never considered joining the army and, had I not been dodging the police, probably never would have done so, but the more I learned about it, the more it seemed the perfect career for me.
My relationship with Sue was at an end. I was too wild, too angry, too disconnected. I was twenty-two and I wanted to get away from Norfolk; I didn’t feel there was anything left for me there. I liked the outdoor life, I enjoyed physical exertion, I had been used to discipline from an early age, and I was good at taking orders without question. These were all qualities I had learned from my grandfather and all were essential components of a successful soldier. In one of the interviews, I was asked why I wanted to join the army and I told them about the car radios. I think they probably thought I was joking.
I was sent for about eight weeks of basic training at the Woolwich Arsenal, where two of the three trainers were from the 29 Commando Regiment of the Royal Artillery. The one in charge was a man named John Morgan, who had been through the Special Forces selection but had been injured in the last lap. He was a strong man, fair and balanced, never ruffled, able to deal with whatever life threw at him, but he was someone you didn’t mess with. If I had to name the role models in my life, and the men I’ve looked up to—heroes in the mold of my grandfather—he would be one of them.
His colleagues were Lugsy Williams, so called because of his big ears, and a very short man named Corbet, known as Ronnie, after the comedian. Corbet was a human dynamo. The man never stopped—I’m sure he did cartwheels and push-ups in his sleep. They used to take turns taking us out on what we called Bergen runs of four, five, or six miles, wearing boots and all the gear, carrying anything up to sixty pounds in a backpack. These were in addition to the normal training and were designed to get our fitness up. It was crippling and I used to pray for John Morgan’s turn because he was slow and steady, as I was. The others ran us all into the ground.
I did sufficiently well in my written tests to be given a choice of which service I wanted to join. Having seen photographs of people rappelling out of helicopters and walking through snow and skiing, and having spoken to John Morgan and Lugsy Williams, I opted for the 29 Commando Regiment of the Royal Artillery. It was based at that time at HMS Drake, naval barracks on the south coast about three miles south of Plymouth. The regiment’s usual home was in the Royal Citadel, a beautiful seventeenth-century building in the center of Plymouth, with seventy-foot walls designed to fend off the Dutch in the wars of that century. It had provided England’s most important defense for the following hundred years, but when I arrived in 1986 the building was being renovated and all 29 personnel had moved to the modern facility (built in the 1880s) down the road.
The 29 Commando was a close support artillery regiment, part of the heavy-weapons division that supported the 3 Commando Brigade of the Royal Marines. In laymen’s terms, when the marines took the beaches, we were there to draw fire; but it felt as though we lived in no-man’s-land, between two worlds. We weren’t quite the navy and we weren’t quite army and neither seemed particularly fond of us. We went anywhere and everywhere the marines went, and since 3 Commando specialized in operating in extreme temperatures and conditions—in frozen wastes, jungles, and deserts—those were the places and conditions in which we trained.
The initial training took place at the Commando Training Centre Royal Marines near Lympstone in Devon. It was the toughest thing I had experienced—this from someone who had spent years as a roofer, running up and down ladders carrying stacks of tiles. We didn’t stop; we were running or doing push-ups, sit-ups, or pull-ups—strength and stamina training—all day. It made runs with Lugsy and Ronnie feel like child’s play.
It was relentless; day after day after day our bodies were pushed to the limit. We had tests sometimes as often as three times a day. We were worn down, exhausted, beyond exhaustion physically and mentally. I would get into a bath at night and feel as though I’d never be able to walk again—tomorrow couldn’t come slowly enough. But it was all done with a purpose. As commandos, we needed not only the physical fitness to get through hostile terrain, we also had to have the mental stamina to be able to fight and defend ourselves once we got there. If we weren’t up to it, we were no use to the unit.
And when we weren’t pushing our bodies to the limit, we were map reading, doing survival training in extreme weather conditions, taking military tactical awareness courses, learning to look after our kit, taking bearings, and preparing to be dropped into an enemy zone at night “by sea, by air and by land”—the force’s motto.
During the training we were known as hats, which was short for crap hats because we wore undistinguished black berets. The final test to win the coveted green beret was a thirty-mile trek across Dartmoor that had to be completed in eight hours. It was a combination of running and walking in full gear. The dropout rate at this stage was between 40 and 45 percent. It was as tough as anything we had done, but our team came in on time. There was no heroes’ fanfare, no ceremony. The instructors were at the finishing point waiting for us, and as we limped in on the verge of collapse, they flung our green berets at us. I can still remember the feel of the material, the excitement of holding it tightly in my hands as we returned to base in the back of an open truck, tired and freezing cold—and the feeling of incredible pride. It was a sense of achievement unlike any I had ever had.
There was no resting on our laurels. That was just the beginning. We were away from base for eight and a half to nine months a year, and the training we were given in that time and the places we went to were phenomenal. I had thought I knew about outdoor living, but being out in the wild in Norfolk was a far cry from the frozen wastes of Norway in midwinter, when it can be minus twenty degrees centigrade. That place will kill you if you don’t know how to take care of yourself. I learned all about survival. I learned how to keep myself warm, how to be healthy by eating the sort of food that the body could use rather than food that simply satisfied hunger or was comforting. I learned how and where to cross frozen lakes, and how to use the environment to my advantage. In those conditions it’s possible to go from subzero temperatures to plus two degrees by something as simple as digging a hole in the snow for shelter. I learned where and how to make those holes in the quickest time and using a minimum amount of energy.
