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