My Wild Life Read online

  Finally, there was Mr Booth who lived next door with his wife. He was a keen amateur photographer and gave me my first camera. Later I developed an interest in photographing birds (of the feathered kind) and Mr Booth became my mentor.

  There weren’t a lot of people my age in my life. I suspect Mum kept me away from other children to stop me from getting distracted from my school work. Being an only child and a solitary one at that, I didn’t have friends round to play and, like my parents, I wasn’t social.

  Mum and Dad were both protective of me; they doted on me and probably cosseted me too much, turning me into a close approximation of the classic only child. We never really talked about our feelings as a family. If there was a problem, it got dealt with and we moved on without the need for analysis or reflection. We certainly didn’t get into the murky business of emotions, which were a Rubicon that was never crossed. You dealt with them on your own. Even now I tend not to show my emotions to people. It is only when I am with animals that I allow myself the luxury of emotional expression.

  Family life was routine and never dramatic. We went on holiday every year to Fairlight near Hastings where we rented a caravan and would go shrimping, which was a family tradition; the three us wading through the rock pools with nets, silhouetted against the drab English Channel. It was in Fairlight that I learned my first lesson about respect for the animal kingdom courtesy of a flock of geese. I was sent to get some milk from the farm across the way. I was only around five or six at the time and as I plodded down the driveway to the house the animals descended on me in an angry mob. The thing about geese is that although they rear up, flap their wings and make a fuss, if you call their bluff and stand up to them they back down straight away and run off. As a kid I didn’t know this and turned around terrified, genuinely fearing for my life. I ran back to our caravan as the flock squawked after me, sensing an easy victory. While Mum soothed me, Dad suppressed a chuckle. He made up for the trauma a few weeks later when he came home with one of the huge wooden crates that a tractor had been delivered in. It was the size of a room and he put it up for me in the garden. It became my shed; I had my own tools on a rack along the wall and I spent hours in there on my own, tinkering away. The crate took on a life of its own in my imagination and became different things; sometimes it was a tank, sometimes a submarine.

  As a family we were very much connected to farming. We visited Dad’s side of the family fairly regularly, taking the drive to Essex in the family cars we had over the years, which included a Ford Corsair, a Ford Zephyr and a Triumph 2000. I spent most of my summer holidays with my cousin David on my aunt and uncle’s farm, where I learned about husbandry and swearing. David and I were close and as a child he was the nearest thing I had to a sibling. I loved farmers and the farm life and later, in my teens, I got work after school and at weekends at local farms near our house.

  I’ve often tried to work out where my empathy and interest in animals came from. Those early experiences of farming had much to do with it, as did family pets we owned over the years. There were also characters in my childhood who shared an interest in wildlife with me. There was Mr Booth and his photography and, in particular, a woman called Anne Cooper who lived up the road. She was as wide as she was tall, had an interesting arrangement of teeth and sported a moustache of which Groucho Marx would have been proud. She was a lovely, eccentric woman who loved wild animals and took them in when they had been injured. We got to know her well and often popped in to have a cup of tea and see what new visitors she had added to the menagerie she called home.

  ‘Come and have a look at this,’ she would call as you passed her open front door.

  She’d beckon you inside her ramshackle home where the floor was always covered in mud, and in the kitchen she would have foxes or hedgehogs running around or recovering in wire cages. People knew Anne rescued wild animals so they called her if they found a stranded badger or a bird with a broken wing. On the kitchen sideboard she kept a pile of dead rats that she fed to the carnivores and which she’d shove out the way while she prepared her dinner or made tea for visitors. Subliminally, in Anne’s kitchen, the seeds of my destiny were undoubtedly sown.

  I was a hands-on child, not an academic one, so was amazed, aged eight, when I passed the entrance exam for a private school that my parents were adamant I went to.

  On my first day at the City of London Freemen’s School, Dad drove and allowed me to sit in the front. My parents were full of pride that morning. Socially, they had arrived! I was the first and to my knowledge the only child in our road to reach such academic heights. I failed to share their enthusiasm, however, and in my blue top and blazer, grey shorts and cap, felt parental expectation weighing down on me. The drive seemed to take an age and when it was time for me to go in and meet my new classmates I locked my fingers around the steering wheel and refused to leave the car. Dad prized me free and gently coaxed me towards what he believed would be a better life.

  Freemen’s was a good school, the centrepiece of which was an imposing Georgian mansion, and it took in both boarders and day pupils. Luckily I got to return home to the warm bosom of my family each night. I don’t know if I would have survived the full-on boarding-school experience.

  The student body included the children of wealthy businessmen and public figures. There was plenty of good breeding along with other children who came from normal homes such as mine. It didn’t take long for the posh kids to find us out. They just knew when someone wasn’t on the same level as them. They could sniff out middle-income spawn and inevitably a hierarchy was established to keep the hoi polloi in its place. At first, the bullying was low level and was directed at plenty of other normal children, too. But in the second or third year something happened that took the attention I got from the bullies to another level. Inexorably and mysteriously I developed a stutter, which set me apart from the other low-ranking children. It shone out like a beacon among the plummy accents. I was S-s-stuttering S-s-Simon, the butt of many j-j-jokes. I struggled and stumbled over words, and then it developed into a physical tic. If I struggled with a word my neck would crick and my head would bend to the side, as with my mouth open and my chin jutting forward I tried to push the troublesome words out. The more aware I became of the impediment, the more it manifested itself.

  The stutter stayed with me for many years and defined my identity. In life you get over things and you move on so, looking back now, I can view it with the luxury of cool detachment but at the time it became all-consuming. While I squirmed, did my best not to talk and hated my stutter, the adult world ignored it. My parents never spoke about it, the teachers never spoke about it and I was never sent to a speech therapist (I don’t even know if they existed in those days). My stutter became my nemesis and I developed coping mechanisms to conquer it, one of which was to make myself ill.

  In class the most terrifying lessons were the ones where pupils were required to read out loud. To me it was pure cruelty. I would listen as the line of pupils sitting in front of me read their pages one by one. As each one finished and the reading got nearer to me, my heart beat faster. I allowed the panic and anxiety to grow inside me and invited the waves of nausea in. I willed myself to pass out. Sweat would pour from me and the fear and terror became intolerable until the teacher noticed and sent me to the sick bay. It happened all the time and the more stressed I got, the more the stutter took hold. If someone said to me all those years ago I would eventually present a TV show I would have laughed.

  Maybe it was the stress of those excruciating events that led me towards one of the great love affairs of my life: smoking. Dad smoked like a trooper and although he discouraged me from taking up the habit, which Mum hated, I started when I was about twelve or thirteen. The ciggies lured me in gently at first. I used to cycle from our house to a shop a mile away in a village called Strood Green where I could buy a box of two Olympic cigarettes for sixpence. Purchase complete, I would find a quiet hedge to hide behind and smoke them. It was
my little rebellion: those two cigarettes were a two-fingered salute to the rigid rules of my life.

  Despite that, I was a healthy child. I was a fit lad and apparently several of the girls at school fancied me. I enjoyed physical pursuits but was not a team player. I would do anything to get out of rugby. As far as I was concerned it was a filthy, dirty game. I liked athletics because that was just me performing on my own. I was more of a short-distance athlete and ran a respectable 100 metres. Any more than that and I tended to need a cigarette. Cricket I quite enjoyed, too, but that was often spoiled by the running gag that I had reached my tic century. Each time I ticked someone would call a six.

  I look back on my school days with fondness. I made some good friends, I cracked on and did the stuff I enjoyed. I sang (which wasn’t affected by the stutter) and played the trumpet. I took part in school productions and found sanctuary on stage but I couldn’t act because I couldn’t speak. I was in all the school choirs, performed solo comfortably and took the lead during one of the school music evenings.

  I did harbour ambitions to be a vet but it became clear as the years went on that I would never get the required grades. Within reason, if I saw someone do something once I could pretty much do it without help afterwards. I excelled at woodwork and when I was about fifteen Dad handed me my freedom in the form of a scrapped motorcycle. I’d owned a tiny one before, a 30 cc thing with the motor in the back wheel that I screamed around the garden on, but this was a 90 cc James Comet – a proper adult bike.

  Mum hated motorbikes so Dad waited until she was away visiting family one weekend. He went and got it from a scrap dealer, paid seven and sixpence for it and it was in pieces when he brought it home.

  ‘If you want to ride that motorbike you fix it,’ he said gesturing to the pile of pieces he’d laid out on the lawn.

  He left me to get on with it and work it out myself. He was always there for support and advice but he knew the best way for me to learn was to let me make my own mistakes. It took me almost a year to rebuild it but eventually I turned the heap of rusting parts into a sparkling, pristine motorbike. Dad was not an emotional man but I like to think he was proud of me. I’m pretty sure he was. I loved that bike. It had two speeds – high and low – and it had an external brass flywheel that went off around your ankle. If you went up a hill you had to get off and push because it couldn’t cope with gradients.

  I stayed at school until I was eighteen. I dread to think how much my parents had invested in me by the time I left. The return on investment was ten O levels of varying grades. I studied for A levels but never completed the exams because, about two weeks before I was due to take them, I got my only bout of adolescent illness: I was hospitalized with appendicitis and had to have my appendix taken out.

  Just before I left Freemen’s we had a careers evening at school. Each pupil sat with a careers master and discussed their options. I had realized by then there was little chance of me becoming a vet. The master started the interview with the same questions he had asked the countless budding solicitors, bankers and clinicians he’d seen before me.

  ‘So, what do you think you might want to do with yourself, Master Cowell?’

  At the time the first James Bond movies had come out and I loved the action.

  ‘W-well, I was thinking maybe a s-stuntman,’ I stuttered.

  The British movie industry was in its ascendancy and I figured it was the right time to launch myself into that career. The adviser looked at me like I had a brain that didn’t work.

  ‘A m-m-musician,’ I shrugged.

  ‘You might want to reconsider your options, young man,’ he said.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Down on the Farm

  WHAT THE . . . !’

  I felt the back of the vehicle skid down the embankment and heard the snapping of hedgerow.

  The inevitable tirade followed.

  ‘Simon, you prat, how the hell are we are going pull it out of the ditch now?’

  I knew one end of a cow from another but my tractor-driving skills left a lot to be desired. Sadly, the one thing I excelled at was tipping them into ditches, which always meant that the poor sod I was with would have to go back to the farm and bring out a Land Rover or another tractor to free the vehicle I had crashed.

  My friend and long-suffering workmate in that incident and all the others which involved tractors and ditches was my cousin’s husband, John Perkin, whose farm I washed up at after leaving school. I was in the Wild West (Devon to be precise) where I was getting my first taste of full-time work and I ended up there because I didn’t have a plan – it just sort of happened, like so much else that followed in my life.

  After my dreams had been cruelly crushed by the careers master at Freemen’s, I fretted over my options. Stuntman was out, musician was unrealistic, vet was academically unlikely and so, with no options that were immediately compelling, I fell back on something that I already knew plenty about and decided to pursue a career in farming. I set my sights on a future farm-manager role and I got into Seale-Hayne College, which was an agricultural college in Devon. Rather than start straight away, I was advised that I would benefit from some work experience and so I deferred the placement for a year and arranged to work with John on his farm, which meant leaving home and going to live on the Devon and Cornwall border in a village called St Giles-on-the-Heath. My work covered my food and board and any money left over was mine.

  I had the freedom of a car by then, having passed my test on my seventeenth birthday. My very first car was a second-hand 100E Anglia. I was always expected to buy my cars and pay for their running costs myself, and I bought my first from a friend of Dad. I kept blowing the gearbox up on it because it only had three speeds and not enough oomph to cope with my style of driving, which was foot-to-the-floor and has remained that way for most of my life. On regular weekends my little Anglia would end up in the workshop at Dad’s work while the mechanics fixed it because I had blown up yet another engine. When that Anglia finally gave up the ghost within a year of me buying it, I traded up and got a 105E Anglia, which got me down to the Devon and Cornwall border in about four-and-a-half hours. The poor thing was always at the end of its rev limit.

  John had a dairy herd, some sheep and some arable land. It wasn’t a big farm and it wasn’t particularly profitable. Given the amount of graft that it took to keep it running, I soon began to see that, from a business perspective, the fields of agricultural Britain were not sown with gold. Farming only really paid for people in the higher echelons – the landowners.

  I liked being with the animals, however, and was not scared or nervous when called upon to get in the barn and muck out the cows. They didn’t take much notice of me and just moved out the way with a shove when I needed to pass. I learned that as long as you avoided their horns, they were peaceful, benevolent creatures. I also liked the farming people. They were fun and foul-mouthed. They worked hard and played hard and I found a social circle there that I felt comfortable with. My stutter was rarely mentioned and, because farmers are not known for their eloquence, I didn’t feel pressured or nervous when I spoke.

  Soon after I moved to Devon I was taken out and introduced to one of the quaint local customs: getting trolleyed on scrumpy. I was not a big drinker or a regular pub-goer and the first time I got properly hammered was on a school-arranged outing to a musical. I was in the sixth form doing my A levels and my trumpet master at the time, Frank Jones, who was a really nice guy, invited me to sit in on a show he was playing at in London.

  ‘Come along, sit next to me in the orchestra and see how it all happens,’ he said. He knew I loved musical theatre and had ambitions to be a musician and he thought it would be a good opportunity for me.

  The musical was The Man from La Mancha and as we were behind the stage I didn’t have to dress up. Frank was playing the overture and I watched the trumpet part – it was all quite interesting. At the end of the overture a big number seven appeared on a screen above the musician
s, at which point they all got up and silently slunk out. Puzzled, I followed them and twigged what was going on. The screen indicated that they had seven minutes until the next number and in that time they sneaked into the bar next door and downed a drink. Wanting to fit in, I ordered myself a barley wine and knocked it back with them. Which was all fine until I got about halfway through part two. I wasn’t used to drinking and felt the effects. I lost count at fourteen glasses and do not remember much about the finale or the journey home. Luckily it has always been my blessing to pass out when drunk before I am sick. My body closes down and allows me the dignity of a graceful coma, rather than the humiliation of throwing up.

  My introduction to scrumpy was another baptism of boozy fire. John and I sat in the pub and he insisted the pints kept coming. Cider wasn’t my thing and neither were pints but peer pressure prevailed and I managed to keep up, the youth of my liver giving me a competitive advantage over some of the yellowed, sclerotic farmhands we were drinking with. When the landlord declared that there was lock-in I remained resolute and continued knocking back the drink. It must have been something to do with the unique scrumpy effect but I didn’t realize just how drunk I was getting until it was time to go home.

  ‘I can’t move my legs,’ I said as I grabbed the edge of the table and tried to stand.

  ‘C’mon, Simon, don’t be an arse. It’s two in the morning and you’ve got to get up at five to do the milking,’ John slurred.