An Alligator in the Bathroom...And Other Stories Page 10

  Our badger volunteer had no such fears. Jennie proved herself a Bond girl in more ways than one, as she moved like lightning, grabbed Brock around his middle and stuffed him in the hole before you could say bloody Nora. I was speechless; Jennie obviously thought she’d just done what anybody would have done.

  The sow badger was treated with more respect, with extra hands holding on to the hardboard, and she went in with no trouble at all. It took three of us to roll the boulder into place to block the entrance, so we felt fairly confident that two badgers couldn’t shift it, experienced as they might be at lifting stones out of the way so they can dig up wasp nests.

  They would stay there for a week, until the road embankment had been reconstructed, this time with a tunnel through that allowed the badgers to follow their instincts and search for food without crossing the road which, I think, was the first time anybody had done this. Certainly it was the first I’d heard of such a thing.

  The old sett had been completely demolished, with no further badgers found. The animal rights chap wrote to the local paper saying we’d left badger cubs to die, but this was drivel, and the paper gave the full and true story plenty of coverage.

  The volunteers and I took it in turns over three weeks to monitor the badger traffic and everything seemed to go well. I can also say that, ten years later, our primitive converted water tank had become a thriving badger colony, active and growing, with full use being made of the tunnel, and, as far as I know, it still is.

  Badger hunting and baiting – staging fights with terriers – have been popular pursuits for centuries, all over Europe and elsewhere. In Germany, they even produced a specific breed of dog:

  the dachshund – ‘badger hound’ – developed to go into badgers’ tunnels to flush them out. Baiting was made illegal in Britain in 1835, not that that made much difference, and badger protection will remain a big part of an RSPCA inspector’s workload.

  *

  Although the RSPCA provided me with a house, there was no extra facility on the premises, purpose made, for an animal hospital and residential care home, which is what RSPCA inspectors tend to end up needing.

  So, as well as my potting shed in town, I had refitted our garage, full of all sorts and sizes of cage, basket and box, largely empty in the winter when the wild world tends to stay at home, but thronged in the summer with orphans and injured. We had everything in there, songbirds, oiled seabirds sometimes that I used to clean up in our bath, fox cubs, bats, rabbits, birds of prey … but not bears as our neighbour thought when he mis-overheard me talking about an injured hare.

  ‘You can’t keep bears in there. This is a residential area,’ he said as he stormed off to phone the police.

  Occasionally a badger would be brought in – I say occasionally because these are nocturnal animals and their clashes with humankind are usually fatal. When a badger is caught in the headlights, it will tend to adopt one of two responses. It might stand its ground, dazzled, but facing the threat. Or, it will curl into a ball, its tough, rubbery skin being a good defence against most enemies but not much use against a speeding motor car.

  On one occasion I had a youngish badger that I guess had curled and only taken a glancing blow, because all it had suffered was a minor fracture to one shoulder. The vet said it would recover fully; I was to keep it comfortable for a few weeks then release it back into the wild.

  I could have done just that, but no, I had to use this elusive animal for educational purposes. It was part of our remit, to spread the word and try to prevent cruelty and ill-treatment at source, by going into schools, youth clubs and so on. In rural areas there were always those activities loosely associated with hunting – cubbing, for instance, digging out fox cubs for terriers to kill – and there was always badger digging and baiting – out of sight, known only to the chosen few, but it was there and still is.

  Most people never see a badger except as roadkill; children, not generally nocturnal in their habits, will certainly never have been close to one. Maybe I could get the local kids on-side before one of the most unpleasant rural traditions took a hold. Maybe they might have an influence at home.

  Our village primary school was like thousands around the country – two point four teachers, thirty-nine pupils, two classes, with a vague threat of closure always hanging over it – but this one was slightly different for me because my two children went to it, and I knew the teachers very well. The head, Miss Keeble, a superb exemplar to her profession, was a bit worried about me bringing a badger into school but I reassured her that there was no possibility of anything untoward happening. In fact, so reassured was she that, thinking a bit of publicity would do the school no harm, she invited the local press to attend the unique wildlife experience that was to be me and my badger.

  I had it all planned. I would give a short talk on the wildlife in the area, ask the children a few easy questions, and then bring out my surprise exhibit and let them look at the badger in its cage, which was a large cat basket.

  My talk was based around wild animals that had come to me in my work, and that I’d photographed. Most of them had a bit of a story to them, and I could ask the children if they recognised this bird – a buzzard – or that animal – a stoat – and if they knew anything about them.

  Of course I was anxious not to let Carter and Kate show their superior knowledge of the subject, which they were bound to have being in my family, but I was equally anxious that they shouldn’t show me up, so I had carefully dropped a few subtle hints into the conversation the night before.

  ‘I had a look at that badger earth this morning,’ I said to Carol over tea.

  ‘Don’t you mean badger sett? It’s foxes that live in earths, surely.’

  ‘Sorry, I meant sett.’ And so on.

  My other tactic was in the classroom, to ignore my own children’s upstretched hands as much as possible when I asked each question, until I’d been round everybody and could ignore them no longer.

  ‘What do we call the place where badgers live?’

  ‘Dad, Dad, I know, I know, I know.’

  Miss Keeble interrupted here, to tell Carter junior, then aged about seven, that Carter senior was, this afternoon, Inspector, not Dad.

  ‘Sorry, Miss. Inspector, I know.’

  ‘All right then. Where does a badger live?’

  ‘In a hole! It is. They do. Why are you all laughing?’

  One lad, a farmer’s son, put his hand up and told us.

  ‘It’s a sett. A badger sett. You should ask your dad what it’s called.’

  The embarrassment was not going to end there.

  ‘All right. Where do rabbits live?’

  I was surprised that only three or four hands went up. One was the farmer’s son’s, and one was daughter Kate’s, then aged nine.

  ‘Me. Me, I know, I know, Dad.’

  ‘Inspector,’ said Miss Keeble.

  ‘Sorry, Miss. Anyway, I know, I know.’

  ‘All right, Kate. Where do rabbits live?’

  ‘In a hutch!’

  It took some time for order to be restored. I felt that Miss Keeble could have moved a little more quickly to quell the glee, though I was pleased she asked another pupil rather than that farmer’s son again, so she could write ‘warren’ on the blackboard.

  Never mind. I was confident that my badger would retrieve the situation. I told them that I had a special surprise, an animal that I doubted any of them had seen alive before, and I was sure they’d never been close to. I told them it had been knocked over by a car but was on the mend, I was going to release it next week so this was their last and only chance to see one, but also they had to keep quiet. A lot of noise could frighten the animal and that is not what we do.

  I went out to my van and came back with the cat basket covered in a black cloth. I was going to do a Tommy Cooper and whisk the cloth away, to reveal my prize exhibit. The audience, all the children in the school around the table, two teachers and the local press photographer,
waited in tense anticipation.

  I took the cloth off and of course they didn’t keep quiet. There were Oohs and Aahs, chatter, excited little voices squeaking, and it was a while before Miss Keeble and I could get them quiet enough to file past the basket in pairs, to peer inside and get a good look at Mr Brock.

  When all had stood and stared, it was the kids’ turn to ask questions. Can he kill a fox, how many of them live in the hole (very funny, thank you), what does he eat (maybe a hundred worms a night, super-disgust all round), does he bite?

  No, he doesn’t bite, well, not people anyway. Badgers are shy, retiring animals, wary of humans, and keen to keep out of our way. They will never have a go at you like the Scottie dog bites the postman.

  This would not do for the farmer’s son. He’d bet that the badger would bite, and he’d bet that it would eat all sorts of things, and he’d bet that it would hunt and bite and bite whatever it could.

  ‘No, no, that’s not right,’ said I. ‘Look at him. He’s frightened of you, curled up in a ball. He thinks you might bite him, not the other way around. Look, I’ll show you.’

  Rushing in where angels would have rapidly backpedalled, I undid the catch on the basket and slowly lifted the lid. Mr Brock didn’t even twitch. I waved my hand slowly over him.

  I’d been reading Albert and the Lion as a bedtime story the other night. ‘Now Albert had heard about lions, how they was ferocious and wild. To see Wallace lying so peaceful, Well, it didn’t seem right to the child. So straightway the brave little feller, Not showing a morsel of fear, Took his stick with the ’orse’s ’ead ’andle, And pushed it in Wallace’s ear.’

  Well, my badger lay in a somnolent posture like Wallace the lion, only I wasn’t going to push my stick in his ear. I was doing healing gestures. See? I told you he wouldn’t bite me.

  Badgers have this special ability to uncoil from their ball in an instant and lash out with their fearsome teeth, which they will do when attacked by a terrier to go upwards for its throat. They have a different sort of jaw arrangement to most mammals, which means that once they lock on, they are almost impossible to prise off. They’re as fast as a striking snake when they do this, but I saw him coming and, instead of him grabbing my whole hand he only managed to rip a deep furrow across the back of it, leaving me with a scar for life.

  I could not have arranged anything more exciting for the children, unless the badger had actually bitten my hand right off. There was blood everywhere, the press photographer’s flash gun was going at disco speed, Miss Keeble was running around with a first-aid kit, and the farmer’s boy was shouting, ‘I told you, I told you’ across the rest of the mayhem.

  Miss Keeble wanted to take me to hospital but I couldn’t face even more embarrassment. Tell me, Mr Langdale, how did you get this? Really? You put your hand in the cage?

  ‘It’s only a scratch,’ I said to Miss Keeble, about something that needed stitches, and proceeded to dig myself further into my own sett by pointing out to the children how quick the badger had been, and what a good educational lesson they’d had.

  12

  HOLIDAYS OF A LIFETIME

  The great downside of being an RSPCA inspector was lack of time with the kids. I know a lot of fathers will say the same, but mine was frequently a seven-days-a-week job, and far more often than not I was up and away in the morning before Carter Junior and Kate were out of bed, and back too late for a bedtime story. Once they got to the sort of age where I could be trusted to look after them, we formed a tradition. I would take the two of them away for a week’s holiday, while Carol shut up shop and went off somewhere pleasant for her own rest and recuperation.

  Of course, I also wanted to go somewhere pleasant, and my idea of that was camping out in the wild and woolly wilderness – and it was real camping too, bivvy bags beneath the stars, not luxury tents and camp beds. My children tell me now that they didn’t really see it as that much of a holiday; more of a survival course. At the time I thought they enjoyed it as much as I did.

  We maintained this routine from when they were five or six years old to early teenage, when they rebelled and refused to go any more, saying they’d had enough of sleeping rough, birdwatching in the clouds, looking for badgers and snakes, and trudging across hill and dale with a backpack and their wildlifer’s kit of binoculars, microscope, stick and flask of Bovril.

  One year we decided to take a softer approach and instead of the Scottish highlands or the Lake District, we’d go to the New Forest – with a tent. My salary would never stretch to meals out so we always took a week’s provisions in the van but, as a further sop to luxury, on the way I would treat us all to the finest breakfast any transport café could provide. This would be the full Monty, with eggs, bacon, sausages, beans, fried bread, the lot, and they certainly lapped it up. The problem arose when I came to pay and realised that I’d left my wallet at home.

  The lady was quite nice about it. While the kids – Carter was about nine and Kate eleven – tried to hide under the table from sheer embarrassment, I showed my ID and promised faithfully to send the money as soon as we got home.

  The next mistake I made was to tell them that camping was not allowed in the New Forest, and there were special men called Agisters who rode around on horseback like a sort of police force, so we would have to hide from them. These agisters are also called marksmen, I told them, which was not to do with firing rifles but just because they marked all the ponies’ tails in a certain way to tell where they were from.

  Carter got quite excited about this undercover camping but Kate had a rather po look to her. She was always the sensible one and my idea of a super holiday, already palling in the eyes of a near teenage girl, was not made any more attractive by it being illegal. She made her objections quite clear, along with her views on parental responsibility but, to her credit, did not demand to be taken home immediately. She helped put up the tent in what I believed was a quiet spot, and we spent the last knockings of the day thoroughly enjoying ourselves, looking for adders and grass snakes.

  We crept into our tent – a good, well made two-man ridge tent – and fell asleep, to be awoken at about three in the morning by the most tremendous, inexplicable noises. It sounded as though we were in the middle of our very own private cyclone. The tent was being buffeted and ripped, with lots of accompaniment from heavy breathing and different sorts of thud. I scrabbled around for the torch, crawled half out of the tent, and was confronted by a pair of large eyes. I knew there were no bears in the New Forest; what was I so worried about?

  The animal backed away from the torch and tried to make off. It almost succeeded, but was held by the tangle of guy ropes and shreds of fabric that had recently been our tent, and which it had now lifted in its entirety from those sheltering within.

  So, we spent the next hour in the dark, gradually untangling a New Forest pony from the remnants of our holiday home. Once free, it hurtled away without a word, and left us sitting, wrapped up in what we could salvage, awaiting the dawn. We didn’t have long to wait but unfortunately it was signalled by thunder, lightning and a downpour of tropical proportions. We had our waterproofs, and a few bits of tent, so we didn’t get quite as wet, cold and miserable as we might have, but my jokes fell rather flat about how lucky we were to be having these interesting experiences when we could have been like normal people, in a nice warm bed in a boring old Filey boarding house.

  Come morning, the rain cleared away, the sun shone, and with renewed spirits we set forth to explore. We came across a very pretty stream, nine or ten feet wide, with steep banks and a fast flow of water. I said if we sat there a while, we’d be sure to see something. The kids were well trained in this sort of waiting, without fidgeting or making noises and so we sat in the sun, listening to the birds in the trees, when a flash of electric blue went past.

  This is usually it when you see a kingfisher. You know you’ve seen it, because you saw the blue flash at high speed in level flight, at a precise height above the w
ater, but you didn’t really see a bird. I was a little surprised, because kingfishers prefer slow moving or still water, so I assumed that our little river was in something of a flood after the thunderstorm and would normally be more gentle.

  I suggested looking for the nest. Kingfisher territories are rarely more than a mile on a river so we should be able to find it, and we did. The tunnel was about halfway up the river bank, too high to see into it from below, and too far down, four feet or more, to see from above. Not that I should have expected to see much anyway, as the tunnels can be six feet long, lined with smelly fish bones and bird muck made of reconstituted fish. Kingfishers are not very houseproud.

  I tried to get a look in but it was impossible, so I said I’d lower the children over the bank, holding on to their legs, so they could maybe see something even if I couldn’t. Kate was having none of it and, muttering something about having a mad idiot as a father, stalked off and sat under a tree, arms folded and face set in disapproval.

  Carter was just the opposite, very excited, desperately keen, and so I lowered him over the edge. I did have one reservation, hoping that the kingfisher would not decide to fly out just now, right into Carter’s face, with accompanying criticism from Kate plus her full description to Carol about how her brother had got two black eyes and a puncture wound.

  We’d slightly underestimated the distance from bank top to tunnel, and Carter kept saying, ‘A bit further, Dad, a bit more, nearly there,’ then he didn’t say anything because he was in the river and I was lying flat out on the bank with a small blue wellington boot in each hand. I wasn’t too concerned – the boy was a good swimmer – but the water was flowing fast and he was being swept away.