Aidan Hartley Aidan Hartley

Wild life | 1 June 2017

The sheep and cattle must have been stoned all the way to Hatherleigh that day

The guests at my brother-in-law Rick’s 70th birthday lunch party were distinguished, silver-haired, well heeled. Long before Rick rescued the Rothschild’s giraffe from extinction, and did so many other things for wildlife conservation in Africa, I remember him and his friends in the 1970s. The chap sitting opposite me at table, now big in IT, had once been a hard-core hippie with heavy-lidded eyes like the stoned rabbit in Magic Roundabout. A coffee baron, now discussing ‘aromatic compounds’, once wore a headband, blue-tinted shades and hair down to his bum, and a man who is today a company chairman I picture still in his Afghan fur-trimmed coat, going barefoot. They were once like characters out of a Giles cartoon, or the Camberwell carrot scene in Withnail & I. As a boy I adored being with this crowd on my exeats from prep school, listening to Led Zeppelin and reading the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers.

Rick and my sister Bryony were married in the village of Iddesleigh near our Devon farm. A psychedelic congregation of hippies descended on the tiny St James’ church. My brother Kim appeared in a massive Afro and flares and did a pimp roll up the aisle. At the reception in the Duke of York Inn, my grandpa Reginald, a veteran of two wars and a life in India, gave a wonderful speech. I flirted with women in high-cut boots and low-slung pants. After several days of partying in Iddesleigh and at home on the farm, the freaks dispersed. What a sight they must have been. Rick and Bryony took off for America.

A few days after all the guests had gone, my mother was in the garden and my semi-retired old dad, CMG, OBE, was mucking out a cattle byre.

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