The Dun Cow Rib: A Very Natural Childhood

John Lister-Kaye

Canongate, £20

Review by Nick Major

WHEN John Lister-Kaye was 12 years old his boarding school headmaster noted, with heavy sarcasm, that “Lister-Kaye seems to know nothing about arithmetic but everything about crows.” At this point in his schooling, the young nature child was looking after an injured rook called Squawky who used to sit outside the classroom window, watching his adoptive parent fail to do his sums. This story appears in Lister-Kaye’s previous book, Gods of the Morning: A Bird’s Eye View of a Highland Year. Arguably, it should be in The Dun Cow Rib too, a memoir in which he seeks to answer the question: “where did this predilection for wild nature come from?”

It certainly did not come from school. Lister-Kaye is now one of Scotland’s most well-respected conservationists; he runs the Aigas Field Studies Centre in the Highlands. After reading this flawed but wildly entertaining book, we now know he is also a one-man argument against formal education. Lister-Kaye learnt very little from school. But he taught school a thing or two about corvids. As for teachers, his most inspiring was probably a vagabond called Old Mulch he met whilst searching for barn owls on the Somerset Levels. Old Mulch had lived off the land for decades. He taught Lister-Kaye how to bake hedgehogs in mud, catch eels late at night, ensnare wildfowl and ferment cider in “lemonade bottles thrust into the heat of a haystack.” Old Mulch was also conservation-minded, always allowing nature’s store to replenish itself before raiding the shelves again.

The truth is that Lister-Kaye learnt so much about wildlife because from a young age he was “gloriously out of control”. How much of this is down to character and how much is down to circumstance is hard to tell. Lister-Kaye’s ancestors were Yorkshire aristocrats who went on to make a tidy profit out of coal mining during the Industrial Revolution. But his direct family line is in Warwickshire. His home for much of his childhood was called the Manor House. During the 1950s this Edwardian “Xanadu” was “a private kingdom all my own and everything a country child could hope for.” The only person who might have reined him in was his mother, but she was too ill to be overly concerned with discipline.

The Dun Cow Rib is, in part, an elegy for Lister-Kaye’s mother, Helen, who suffered from rheumatic heart disease (Lister-Kaye’s birth almost killed her). The “rib” – a minke whale’s lower jaw in reality – of the title hung in the oldest quarter of the Manor. It was connected to a local legend that proclaimed removal of the rib would bring death upon the family. This spectre of actual and imaginary death hangs over the story of Lister-Kaye’s childhood, and adds a pathos to his boyhood adventures. The hope comes from the story of Paul Wood and Russel Brock, two cardiac specialists at the cutting edge of heart surgery who help prolong Helen’s life.

Lister-Kaye goes into great detail about Wood and Brock’s medical advances, but their long story is not wholly necessary for Lister-Kaye’s to cohere. A difficulty of autobiographical writing is in distinguishing what is interesting only to yourself from what is interesting to others. Lister-Kaye too often gets carried away with his own life, down to the very fine details. He can’t be faulted for enthusiasm, but he can be for his hyperbolic and repetitive prose. Reading his mother and father’s letters, he learns that “they were ardent lovers, full-blooded, bonded, rapt. Helen was an unshakeable Romantic, loving and demonstrative by nature, and my father, although reserved, even aloof by inclination, was unquestionably all male. And they were in love.” On one page, Lister-Kaye tells us his father is a “hard-shelled pragmatist.” Two pages later, we’re are told that his “response to a problem was instinctively pragmatic – find a quick and practical route to fixing it.”

Lister-Kaye sometimes writes like the long-lost sixth member of the Famous Five: “Oh cripes!” Blimey!” “Good old mum…” This is endearing for a while, but once you have finished your ginger beer and popped your jam sandwiches back in your picnic basket, you thirst for language with a little more punch and sentences that strike a little harder at life. His exuberance extends to typology. One of his current projects is to return the Scottish wildcat to its former glory in the Highlands. Currently, “It’s Britain’s most endangered mammal – that’s bad, capital BAD. And it’s wild, wild, WILD, with its own marque of spitting, feline wildness – that’s far beyond good, it’s brilliant.”

If you can scramble through syntactical thickets like these, you will find some fine nature writing. At prep school, Lister-Kaye often skipped cricket matches to watch birds or explore waterways. One day, he found a coot’s nest in some reedbeds. He watched the adults sitting on their brood, knowing incubation would be 21 days, and he was there to see the chicks hatch. Then, oddly, the adult fled the nest, calling in alarm. The nearby waters rippled. “At first, I thought it must be a fish but a second later a flat, angled, weed spotted head emerged at the nest rim and rose stick-like out of the water. I held my breath. Like an unstopped wind-wave rippling through a hay field, a large, long grass snake wove its effortless way up the side of the mound and onto the top.” He watched as the reptile devoured all the young. His writing is at its best when he is simply observing the natural world like this and reflecting on its cruel beauty.

Lister-Kaye finished boarding school with ambitions to write. His father was unimpressed and fixed him a job at an industrial stockholding company in Bristol. Luckily, through knowing the television presenter Terry Nutkins, he was invited to drive to Scotland and meet Gavin Maxwell, author of Ring of Bright Water and another naturalist to the manor born. It was Maxwell who brought Lister-Kaye to Scotland to work as his assistant on Kyleakin, but Maxwell was to die before they could complete much work. The final few chapters of The Dun Cow Rib are a moving recollection of the last days of both Maxwell and Helen Lister-Kaye. Lister-Kaye went on to set up a natural history guiding service in Scotland with Richard Frere, Maxwell’s friend. Its motto was taken from the foreword to Ring of Bright Water: “I am convinced that man has suffered in his separation from the soil and the other creatures of the world.”

We now live at a time when anyone who has ever picked up a pair of binoculars bemoans our ‘disconnect’ from nature and complains about how little time children spend outdoors. And they are right, in a way. But we also live at a time when children are lectured about respecting nature and told to keep their distance, lest they disrupt a nest or step on a toad. What endures after finishing Lister-Kaye’s memoir is the fact that few people encouraged him in his love of the natural world. He was simply allowed to roam the countryside, unsupervised, for days on end. How many of today’s children are given that dangerous and necessary freedom?

John Lister-Kaye is at the Edinburgh International Book Festival on Monday August 21