The Man Who Lives with Wolves. Shaun Ellis
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Название: The Man Who Lives with Wolves
Автор: Shaun Ellis
Издательство: HarperCollins
Жанр: Биографии и Мемуары
isbn: 9780007327195
isbn:
My grandfather was buried in the churchyard under the shade of the horse chestnut tree where I used to collect conkers.
His death changed everything. We had to leave the cottage because it was tied to my grandfather’s job, and for some reason that was never explained, we split up as a family. My grandmother, whom I looked upon as a mother, went to live on her own in a council house on Jubilee Terrace, where she was near her oldest son and his family, and my mother and I went to a tiny new bungalow, owned by the council in Summerwood Estate at the end of a cul-de-sac. I was miserable and angry, and I was grief stricken. I felt as though I had lost everything. My mother had never been the one who cared for me or cooked for me; she hadn’t been the one who spent time with me, who’d taken me for walks, or who’d taught me what I needed to get through life. It had been my grandparents and they were both gone. I didn’t want to be with my mother and I blamed my grandfather for dying and leaving me when I needed him most. I was terrified; I didn’t know how I was going to cope without him.
It was only when I went back, at the age of forty-four, and looked at the headstone on my grandfather’s grave that I discovered my grandmother had lived for another thirteen years after his death. I thought she had died within months of him. I have no memory of seeing her again after we moved. All I remember was the need to get away from anything that reminded me of what I’d lost.
I must have been very difficult for my mother. I took out my anger and my grief on her. I was at a secondary school in Litcham by then, which was about seven miles from Great Massingham, and she was out at work every day, working long hours as usual. I became very independent and shut her out of my life. I traveled back and forth on the school bus, which was a big blue double-decker run by Carter’s of Litcham. It was the oldest bus in the company’s fleet and the only double-decker. The kids from all the other villages came on single-deckers, and whenever there was snow, which could be five feet deep or more, there was just one bus that managed to struggle through, bypassing stranded cars and lorries along the way. To our annoyance, it was ours.
I seldom saw my mother. When I came home from school and on weekends, if there was work going, I went harvesting, baling, driving tractors, plucking turkeys, castrating pigs, helping cows give birth—anything and everything. And if there was no work, I would go off with Whiskey, my dog. I would go off for days sometimes, sleeping in barns, not thinking about how worried my mother might be. I became a bit of a recluse, a bit feral, wandering in the woods, being at one with the wildlife in a world where, increasingly, I felt I belonged—the only place where I was able to cry.
A part from playing on the school sports teams, which I loved, my time at Litcham Secondary School was undistinguished. I had friends, but my best friend died of an asthma attack. I remember the headmaster calling the whole class together one morning and breaking the news. I felt at that moment as though I were destined to lose everything.
I was a regular visitor to the headmaster’s office, so it was unsurprising that I left with no qualifications at the earliest moment I legally could, when I was barely sixteen. I needed to get out and earn a living and I wanted to get away from home. I was still angry and hurting and wanting to forget. So rather than look for jobs on the land, I joined a roofing company called Western and Bolton Roofing. It was hard work, carrying tiles and running up and down ladders all day, but it made me strong and fit and it took me to building sites all over the county. Sometimes we would be on a job for weeks if not months and I’d stay in a bed-and-breakfast or in hostels, only going back at weekends, and then I wouldn’t necessarily go home but often would stay with friends.
It was through work that I began to make my first friends and develop a social life, which largely revolved around pubs. There were a lot of good pubs in the area and once every three months, on a Saturday night, there was a disco in the little community center in Fakenham. It was the place to go. All the top DJs in Norfolk played there and people came from miles around to hear them. There was great music, drink, pretty girls that we’d take outside and kiss against the wall, and plenty of fights—all the good things in life. Then we’d make our way haphazardly home.
I remember one night the fog was so thick you could scarcely see your hand in front of your face and one of my mates said he knew the road so well, he could do it blindfolded. We all followed him on our little 150 cc motorbikes—I was on the back of one, as I usually was—and he missed a bend. He drove straight into a deep ditch and we all followed him into it one after another, no one noticing until we were up to our axles in water.
Fakenham was the fashion capital of Norfolk. On disco days, we would go into town in the morning and buy all the gear we needed, have a few pints, go home, play soccer for a couple of hours, change into the new clothes, go back to Fakenham, have some fish and chips in the early evening, then move on to The Crown for some beers, then to the Rampant Horse, which was as rough as hell—anytime you wanted a fight, you’d go there—before hitting the disco later.
One of my best friends was a tiler named Benny Elson, who lived in Weasenham, a neighboring village, and through him I met my first girlfriend, Michelle Pearce. Benny was older than I was, as most of the guys I worked with were, and Michelle was his wife Jac’s niece. She was visiting their house one day when he and I were getting ready to go out and asked who I was.
I started frequenting the Fox and Hounds in Weasenham, where she lived, and she would come in after school and hide behind the bar, and Skiffy, the landlord, would signal to me and we’d go off into the woods together and sit and talk for hours. We wrote each other little notes and I used to walk her dogs for her. She said all the things I needed to hear, and life didn’t get much better. Her father was one of the Queen’s pigeon keepers—I built him a pigeon loft in their garden—and I remember arriving at their house one day to collect Michelle and finding everyone in a state of great excitement because the Queen had just been to visit.
I fell madly in love with her, but she was too pretty for me and in the end she left me for someone else and broke my heart. We were both very young, but there was definitely something there and I often wonder how things might have been if I’d pushed a little harder or been less of a prat.
Skiffy’s real name was Freddy Scarf and he was a character. He didn’t turn a hair when I celebrated my eighteenth birthday in the pub—after years of illegal underage drinking—but then he had been regularly paying me in beer for the game he had on the menu that I and a couple of mates had brought in through the back door in sacks! I had been taught to poach by Pete, someone I knew from working on the land. He was married with a family—I never really knew much about him except that he was an expert on pheasants and how to get them illegally, which he had learned from his grandfather.
Pete had a brother and the three of us used to go out with an old 4-10 double-barreled shotgun, a genuine poacher’s gun that broke apart so you could conceal it. It had been handed down in his family from one generation to another. It went off with a terrible crack and smoked like mad, so the safest night of the year to fire it was November 5, Bonfire Night, when everyone was setting off fireworks.
Pete tried to make a silencer for the gun but the first attempt, out of copper СКАЧАТЬ