Creature comforts

As naturalist, educator and writer, John Lister-Kaye was for many years a voice in the wilderness. In 1976, when nature conservation was still considered a benign eccentricity, he moved into a crumbling estate in the Scottish highlands. Taking as its credo a text from Gavin Maxwell —‘I am convinced that man has suffered in his separation from the soil and from the other living creatures of the world’ — he set up the Aigas Field Centre. Since then, tens of thousands of people have visited it. Schoolchildren and adults alike have been encouraged to share his wonder for the natural world. He has pioneered the breeding of beavers and wild cats; he has led wildlife expeditions to several different continents; and he has written a series of charming and persuasive books about our damaged relationship with nature.

In The Dun Cow Rib he returns to his childhood. In one way it’s a fairly conventional memoir of the unconventional world of Britain’s minor nobility. Lister-Kaye himself is the holder of a baronetcy that goes back to the 17th century. There were estates in Yorkshire and Warwickshire, and Victorian wealth from the coal beneath them, but by the time John was born in 1946, the pits had gone and the prosperity had all but disappeared.

His father struggled to adapt. He was a man for whom expressing emotions and wearing pullovers were signs of the same moral weakness. He worked as a peripatetic businessman while young John was farmed out to a boarding school. The headmaster was a not-untypical tyrant who lectured the boys on humility and was quick to use the cane. He had it in for Lister-Kaye, and when the budding naturalist clipped the tail feathers of the school peacocks he was beaten severely and sent home for good.

John’s mother represented an isolated point of warmth.