“Away you go, boy,” said the farmer with a cheery smile. “Take care of her.”
“Don’t worry, sir,” I said, grinning from ear to ear, the puppy warm and wriggly in my arms. “I’ll take care of her.”
I named her Whiskey and in the next thirteen years, she scarcely left my side.
The English countryside is not an obvious place for a child to develop a passion for wolves, and it wasn’t immediate, but animals have been in my life for as long as I can remember.
One summer’s evening my mother came home from work. She had been picking carrots or some other vegetable out of the ground all day and was exhausted. “There’s a job waiting for you in there,” said my grandfather. “Shaun’s been busy again.” She opened the door and recoiled in horror. Frogs were hopping, croaking, and climbing over every surface in the room. I had spent my afternoon collecting them from the pond up the road, steadfastly walking back and forth with a bucket, and the room was alive with frogs. And I spent that evening going back and forth with the bucket once again, putting them all back.
Another time she went into the coal shed, after night had fallen, to get some fuel for the fire and screamed as five black chickens started flapping and squawking. I had found them on my travels across the fields—and the very next morning I was dispatched to take them back.
And then there was the time I brought home a Muscovy duck, complete with its nest filled with eggs. My mother was too scared to touch the duck—an ugly brute, she called it—so I carried the duck under my arm while she carried the nest and the eggs back to the pond, where we reinstated the whole lot among the reeds. My poor mother; I was always giving her heart failure, coming home with some creature that I’d find a home for somewhere about the house.
I grew up on the land and I was fascinated by the natural world. There was no money for outings, treats, or toys when I was a child; the hedgerows, fields, and forests were my playground, and the dogs were my companions. I roamed for hours; I explored the thickets for bird nests, I knew when rabbits had young, I watched hares boxing in the springtime, I knew where to look for fox dens and badger setts. I could recognize owls in flight and knew the difference between kestrels and sparrow hawks. I couldn’t have crossed a busy London street or found my way around a subway at the age of ten—and to be honest, I still feel uneasy in big cities in my forties—but there was not a lot I didn’t know about the wildlife on my doorstep.
My home was north Norfolk, a remote part of a remote county on the most eastern coast of England, famed for its fens, its pheasant shoots, and its flat, fertile farmland. Those who own the land are among the richest in the country; those who work it are some of the poorest. My family was the latter. They were farm laborers and we lived from hand to mouth, a very simple life. We caught what we ate and ate what we caught; and my job as the youngest member of the family—when I was too young for gainful employment—was to catch it, with the dogs we had on the farm. They were my friends, but they were working dogs. Apart from Whiskey, they lived outside in the barn, and I was never allowed to be sentimental about them. In our world, every animal had a purpose. We couldn’t afford to feed any creature that didn’t earn its keep—and Whiskey was a skillful courser.
Our neighbors lived in the same way. Country folk were caring but not sentimental. When I was about eight, I remember going with my grandfather to visit a gamekeeper friend of his. This man had the most beautiful black Labrador. He was the gamekeeper’s pride and joy. His coat glistened and he had the softest mouth; he could pick up an egg or anything else he was asked to retrieve without leaving a mark on it. He was immaculately trained; he seemed to know this man’s every thought. One day the man discovered that his two sons had taken the dog ratting in the barn, and all the work and training that he had so patiently done with the dog was lost in less than a morning. The first time the Lab went for a rat, the rat bit him on the muzzle and he was so traumatized he shook from then on. The dog was ruined; so the gamekeeper shot the dog and beat the two boys. He knew that he’d let the dog down, that he’d failed to protect him from his sons, but he couldn’t repair the damage and he couldn’t afford to keep a dog as a pet. I was horrified; the dog’s death seemed so meaningless. But that was the reality of the world in which I grew up.
My grandfather—Gordon Ellis, my mother’s father—taught me everything I knew. He was sixty-seven when I was born, but he and my grandmother, Rose, brought me up, and although my mother lived in the cottage with us, it seemed to me as a child that she was never there. As a result, I felt far closer to my grandparents than I ever did to my mother.
The truth, I discovered when I went back to Norfolk very recently, after years of being away, is that she was simply always out earning our keep. She was up and out of the house in the mornings, often before dawn, to work in the fields—long hard days of back-breaking drudgery for very little money. She would be collected by a gangmaster who drove her and the other women of the village to whatever farm had need of labor. Sometimes they might drive for an hour or two to the other side of the county to harvest peas or potatoes or soft fruit, whichever the season dictated, and be delivered home at the end of the day, exhausted. After a meal she would go straight to bed. If she didn’t work, she didn’t get paid and we struggled. As a single mother, she had no alternative.
I didn’t realize as a child just how unremittingly hard her life was; I didn’t appreciate what she did for me—and how I wish I had. All I knew was she wasn’t there and my grandparents were. My grandfather was my hero. He was gentle, wise, and wonderful, and if he had asked me to walk over hot coals, I would have done it for him without even asking why. He was a thin, wiry man, his face weather-beaten. His hands were gnarled and leathery from decades of hard, manual work, but inside he was a true gentleman and I reveled in every moment spent by his side.
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