HUMBLE BY NATURE

Life, lambs and a dog called Badger

Kate Humble

Copyright © 2013 Kate Humble

The right of Kate Humble to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Apart from any use permitted under UK copyright law, this publication may only be reproduced, stored, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, with prior permission in writing of the publishers or, in the case of reprographic production, in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency.

First published as an Ebook in 2013 by HEADLINE PUBLISHING GROUP

Every effort has been made to fulfil requirements with regard to reproducing copyright material. The author and publisher will be glad to rectify any omissions at the earliest opportunity.

Cataloguing in Publication Data is available from the British Library

eISBN: 9780 7553 6425 1

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About the Author

KATE HUMBLE is a writer and presenter. Her most recent television credits include Volcano Live, Orbit: Earth’s Extraordinary Journey, Lambing Live and the long running popular wildlife series Springwatch and Autumnwatch. She is a qualified commercial diver and is the second woman to be appointed President of the RSPB.

Kate and Ludo launched their business Humble By Nature in 2012. Based on a working farm in Monmouthshire, they run courses in food, rural skills and animal husbandry. They live nearby on their smallholding with Badger and Bella, a hive of bees and various other hoofed, furred and feathered livestock.

www.humblebynature.com

 @katehumble

For Willie Wormald

Always marvellous for his age and without whom no part of this adventure would have been possible.

Acknowledgements

Writing a book is something I’ve wanted to do for a very long time, but never quite had the nerve to start. Thank you, Rosemary Scoular at United Agents, and Wendy Millyard, for your unwavering belief that I could find 80,000 words and string them into something that made sense.

To Sarah Emsley and all the Headline team, thanks goes to you, not just for believing Rosemary, but also for your invaluable support and encouragement along the way.

I owe a huge debt to Polly Morland, my friend and neighbour-across-the-river who was just finishing her wonderfully titled book The Society for Timid Souls as I was starting mine. She had an unerring knack of sending a funny email, bolstering text or invitation to the pub at just the right time.

My husband Ludo has spent the last year realising what it is like to be married to someone trying to write a book. Ludo, I don’t know how or why you put up with me, but you know I couldn’t have done it without you, and in my defence, my mum did warn you …

And finally to Badger and Bella, without whom this book would have been written much more quickly, but who always provided welcome distraction.

Kate Humble

February 2013

Chapter 1

Itchy Feet

We didn’t want to buy a farm. We only wanted a field. Or even part of a field – just a few more acres. We had thought that the four acres we got when we moved to the Wye Valley in the winter of 2007, to a house that sits on a Welsh hill overlooking English woods and fields, was enough. In fact, at the time, it seemed a daunting amount of land for which to be responsible. We had come from London and twenty square feet of terraced garden, hemmed in and overlooked on all sides, and although we had both grown up in the countryside, this was the first time in our adult lives that we had owned a piece of land that we couldn’t walk around in less than a minute.

We had no connection with this part of the country and knew no one. In the minds of a lot of Londoners Wales is ‘too far’ – another country with not enough motorways and a language with no vowels and unpronounceable words. We had braved the ‘wild west’ a few times before, crossing the border at the Severn Bridge and winding through startlingly pretty countryside to places like Crickhowell and Brecon to walk in the Black Mountains and the Beacons. Having grown up in rather flat, manicured Berkshire, the wild, stark grandeur of mountain scenery was bewitching. I loved – I still love – the breathless climbs that bring you puffing and grinning (quite hard to do at the same time) to a summit that reveals another whole range of tracks and peaks and possibilities. Like our tireless mongrel Badger, I could walk all day.

In those days Wales was the place for an occasional visit; it had never crossed our minds that we might live there. But as the years went on in London it became harder and harder for me to find any good reason to carry on living there, apart from the boring, practical necessity of work. I have a theory, backed up by nothing scientific whatsoever, that if your roots are in the country, if your childhood was like mine, one that involved making camps, climbing trees, horses, bike rides with Marmite sandwiches, permanent bits of sticking plaster and scabs, swimming in rivers, it is that – that sense of space, of freedom – more than location, that eventually, inevitably draws you back.

I had moved to London when I was twenty. After leaving school I spent a number of months living in a store cupboard in a house in Oxford, working in a hospital during the day and a pub at night and at weekends to earn the money to go to Africa. I had no plans to go to university; Africa, I thought, would serve me rather better, and it did. I returned after a year with a disintegrating rucksack and a wealth of traveller’s tales, with a notion that a career in television might be what I did next. With the help of a friend’s brother, I moved into a squat in Camden. London became my home for the next twenty years. Ten probably would have been enough. I became increasingly restless. I married Ludo, a clever, funny and endlessly patient man who I had quietly held a candle for since I was sixteen, and we moved from our respective rented rooms to a little terraced two-up, two-down in Shepherd’s Bush. Two years on, the first democratic elections were held in South Africa. Mandela had been released from his long imprisonment and everyone was expecting what only a few years before had been unthinkable and unimaginable. South Africa would have a black president.

‘I have to go back!’ I said to Ludo. The country was still ostensibly in the grip of apartheid but there were rumblings and mutterings, protests and marches, not just from the black community, but from whites too. Something was happening, change was coming. We could be part of that change.

‘We can’t,’ said Ludo. ‘We have a house, a mortgage, we’re freelance – if we leave we might never find a job again.’ At this time he was making children’s programmes for ITV. I was just starting out; making a lot of tea and doing a lot of typing for very little money and not much sense that this was a career that was going to go anywhere.

The pull to go back to Africa was insistent. ‘Well, I’m going.’

Given little choice, Ludo gallantly agreed to my madcap plan and we flew to Cape Town in October of 1994. Our work permits had been turned down that morning, but by then it was too late. We’d rented out our house, sold our car, said goodbye to our friends. We moved to a little rented place with no furniture in a Cape Town suburb. Our neighbours were black. The new South Africa. We tried to work, tried contacting production companies back in Britain to offer programme ideas or help if they were planning shoots in South Africa. We were spending more of our meagre savings than we were making. ‘This is ridiculous,’ said Ludo one morning. ‘If we want to work in television we should have stayed in London. We’re in Africa. Let’s make the most of it.’ We gave up the house, bought a Ford Cortina pick-up with a yellow ‘go-faster’ stripe and a gear stick that would detach itself from the rest of the car when changing between second and third, and headed north.

We left South Africa, crossing the border into the newly independent Namibia with its long, straight, dirt roads and other-worldly vegetation. We discovered an abandoned mining town almost swamped by the shifting sands of the desert. We scrambled down a vertiginous path to the bottom of Fish River Canyon, envying the soaring eagles and the sure-footed little klipspringer antelope that skipped effortlessly down an almost sheer rock face and disappeared into the shadows. We climbed giant dunes, marvelled at the cruel majesty of the Skeleton Coast and narrowly missed being swept away in a flash flood. We drove through Etosha National Park, where giraffes stalked across the landscape, lions lazed in the shade and hyena skulked at the edge of the waterholes, scattering warthogs and making the antelope snort and stamp. We travelled the length of the Caprivi Strip, pausing to let marching columns of elephants cross the road in front of us.

Passing briefly through the border with Botswana we went on into Zimbabwe and the romance of Matopos (now Matobo) National Park, the final resting place of Cecil Rhodes, and the mysterious ancient site of great Zimbabwe. On Christmas Day, camping near Lake Kariba, we were woken by a herd of buffalo filing past our tent and later got a magical glimpse of a rare wild dog as it raced across the road in front of us in pursuit of an unseen prey. In Harare we applied for visas to Mozambique, newly emerged from decades of civil war. We went to the AA office to ask how much petrol was available in Mozambique and whether we would be wise to take our own supply.

‘We don’t advise our members to go to Mozambique at all,’ said the woman in the office.

‘OK,’ I said, ‘but we are going, so can you tell us whether we can buy petrol there?’

‘We don’t advise…’

We climbed a mountain while waiting for our visas to come and then headed across the border to a desolate land devoid of almost all wildlife. The roads were rutted and broken, the few towns we passed through were a dilapidated jumble of disintegrating buildings, blocked drains and hastily set-up stalls selling Johnny Walker Black Label and contraband cigarettes. Food seemed in desperately short supply. We camped on beaches beside the hot brown waters of the Mozambique Channel, sweltering in our tent from the tropical heat and unforgiving humidity. We drove south and then turned to the west over the border to Swaziland and our first shower for a fortnight.

Three months and 30,000 kilometres later we were back in Cape Town where we picked up a message from Ludo’s old boss. He had had a series commissioned that would go into production in a couple of months’ time. He was offering us both a job. We sold the pick-up, used the proceeds to spend the two intervening months on the extraordinary island of Madagascar and returned to Shepherd’s Bush, penniless but employed.

We moved house a few years later, buying an uninhabitable wreck in Chiswick and living first with one friend, then another, then, with almost all our possessions in various garages and attics and our essentials in a few plastic bags, alongside the dust and the builders in the hope that that would encourage them to get on with it. Finally they moved out and we could move in, by which time my tentative flirtation with city life was well and truly over. I didn’t want to be there.

‘Perhaps,’ I said to Ludo, ‘we could rent or buy a little place in the countryside; somewhere we could go to at weekends or between contracts?’

In the early ‘Noughties’ – 2003 and 2004 – little places that were within striking distance of London and did not necessitate beginning and ending every weekend with several hours in stop-start traffic on a motorway were few and far between and hundreds of thousands of pounds more than we could afford. With increasing desperation, I pored over the Road Atlas of the British Isles. The home counties were way beyond our financial reach, although we did go and see a tiny, thatched curiosity, a sort of medieval hobbit house, which appealed because it was so romantic and unusual. However, as Ludo pointed out, neither of us could stand up straight in any of the rooms and it looked out on a soulless cul-de-sac of modern, red-brick horrors. ‘There is nothing romantic,’ he opined, ‘about stooping and having the sound of other people’s lawnmowers constantly whining in the background.’ Valid points, both, so I turned to another page of the map book to scan the villages of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire, Wiltshire and Dorset.

‘The problem,’ said Ludo, as we sat in static Sunday traffic on our return from another fruitless search, ‘is that the little stone shack that is in your head – the one in the middle of nowhere, with no neighbours, magnificent views and honeysuckle around the door – either doesn’t exist at all, is never going to be for sale, or is half a million quid.’

It had been a particularly depressing weekend. We had ‘discovered’ what we thought was the perfect area – pretty villages, still with pubs and post offices, sweeping open countryside and lovely walking. ‘This would do,’ I said, as we walked into one particularly pretty village. The landlord at the pub was friendly; the cider local and delicious; the ham in the sandwiches home-cooked and thick-cut.

‘Madonna was in here yesterday,’ said the landlord nonchalantly, as he waited for Ludo’s beer glass to fill.

‘Really?’ I said, trying not to sound incredulous. ‘What was she doing in this part of the country?’

‘Oh, she lives here. She and that Ritchie bloke bought a big mansion outside the village. Pops in quite regularly, actually. Likes a pint. Tiny, she is, can barely see over the bar.’

‘Wow,’ I said, dully, realising that our ‘discovery’, our ‘no-one-will-have-ever-heard-of-this’ place had almost certainly appeared with tedious regularity in Hello! magazine. ‘That must have pushed the house prices up.’

‘Through the roof!’ said the landlord, cheerily.

Back to the map for me.

‘That’s where I want to be,’ I said wistfully. ‘Look! There are hardly any roads and most of the map is brown and green; big areas with mountains, sheep and no pop stars.’

‘Wales is fine for the odd weekend,’ said Ludo, as we crawled a few metres in second gear and came to a halt again, ‘but we wouldn’t want to do it every week. It’s too far. I thought we wanted to keep the journey time to under two hours.’

‘It’s taken longer than that to get back from Wiltshire,’ I said sulkily, and at that moment realised that all this schlepping about the countryside was a waste of time. I didn’t want a ‘weekend’ place, which even in the ever-more unlikely event that we did find the perfect hideaway was going to be another thing to worry about, another place that would need cleaning and fixing, another lot of council tax and bills. And worse than all those things would be the interminable hell of endless Friday nights and Sunday nights spent in a traffic jam. However sweet-smelling the honeysuckle, however heart-lifting the view, I could already envisage the time when neither of us could quite face the journey, when we would make the excuse of a stressful week, or something unavoidable or unmissable that would keep us in London. The dust would start to settle, the honeysuckle would be swamped by ground elder, the gutter would leak unnoticed and our rural retreat would metamorphose from idyll to chore.

‘Why don’t we just move out of London altogether?’ I suggested, as Ludo, with a sigh of relief, left the motorway for a brief respite from the traffic, before promptly joining another jam on Chiswick High Road.

‘And do what? Neither of us wants to commute and as far as I know there aren’t any television production companies in the Black Mountains. I make TV programmes. I’m freelance. I need to be in a place where there are enough possibilities of finding work. It’s different for you. You could live anywhere, because when you’re working, more often than not it involves you being away anyway, but it’s not the same for me.’

He was right, of course. Unless either or both of us were to consider making a career change – and we were both in the unusual and privileged position of enjoying our jobs – London seemed the only obvious place to be. My hunger for the countryside would have to be slaked by walks in the Chilterns and the occasional weekend away. So we stopped searching. I refused to let myself trawl the property websites and instead tried to settle and to make the most of Big City Life. ‘We live’, I told myself repeatedly, ‘in a great house, in a nice area, with neighbours we love and friends, a bookshop, a deli, a butcher and greengrocer all within walking distance. There’s a farmers’ market on Saturdays, I can go running along the river and we have an allotment. Life is good.’

And it was good. It just wasn’t right.