How long will Lucky Jim get away with it down
in darkest Somerset?
PAUL JOHNSON
Biographies of real animals are rare. You can write a novel, like Anna Sewell's Black Beauty, or a fictional documentary, like Henry Williamson's Tarka the Otter, but finding out enough about an animal to fill a volume of actual events is almost impossible. So the Duchess of Hamilton has done well to produce a life of Marengo, Bonaparte's charger, even though I take the view, unlike her, that Bonaparte was responsible for the death of more horses than anyone else, before or since, and not just in battle either. He was so keen on speed that he was once observed not only flogging his own sweating animal but also whacking the haunches of the horse of his ADC, riding alongside him. That tells you a lot about the man. However, I am not concerned with horses this week but with rabbits. Or rather, with one particular rabbit. This rabbit is small, male, pure white but not an albino, for he has browny-black eyes, and he is highly independent. He began life as a pet but escaped from his owners some months ago, and they don't want him back, thank you very much. He is not interested in joining the local gang of rabbits, which infests the area beyond our garden and fights occasion- al battles with the chickens, geese, ducks and other farmyard fowl, let alone the wild creatures such as foxes, badgers and stoats, which make a living hereabouts. This white rabbit turns his back on the rabbit commu- nity. Like Margaret Thatcher, he does not believe there is such a thing as society. But then, unlike her, he does not believe in fam- ilies either. From the age of six months, rab- bits are capable, I understand, of having from four to eight litters a year, and a litter may easily have eight babies in it, so, in theory, even a monogamous rabbit can duplicate himself 64 times every 12 months. But this white rabbit is not keen on repro- duction. He lacks philoprogenitive propen- sities. He is not a cloner but a loner.
Some weeks ago, the white rabbit decided that our house in Somerset was to be his home. You can see why. A lot of the time we are not there, so he has it all to himself. It is not a case of Peter Rabbit invading Mr McGregor's garden. Mr McGregor was there all day and every day, and always on the lookout for rabbits, being keen to make a dash at any one he saw, seize it and hand it over to Mrs McGregor. As Peter's mother told him, that is what happened to his father, who had an accident in the McGregors' gar- den' and 'was turned into a pie'. No such peril hangs over this white rabbit. It is true that Mr Sparkes, who looks after our gar- den, does not like rabbits — what gardener does? — but he is a man of exceptionally mild disposition, who contents himself with making the vegetable garden as secure as possible with nets and so forth, to keep out the ten-a-penny proletarian brown or grey rabbits from below the hedge. He leaves the white rabbit to his own devices.
So the white rabbit is lord of all he surveys. First, he has a look round the shrubbery near the wooden entrance gates, where there is much greenery all the year round. Then he tours the woodshed, piled high now in its winter plenitude, so that to scramble across it, as the white rabbit does most agilely, is liable to set off a landslide of beech and pine logs, and sawn-up bits of old palings, the kind of dramatic event a lone-ranger rabbit likes to precipitate just for the hell of it and to show who's in charge. Next he has the stables to inspect, and my studio at the end of them, though that he hasn't found a way of getting into yet. This brings him to the huge bushes of yellow forsythia and some prickly plants which cluster round the compost heap, good rabbit territory by any reckoning. Time for a nap? He can easily squeeze his way into the shed, and there repose on old sacks and com- post-bags, as in a four-poster, amid the odor- iferous comforts of well-oiled tools and seed- packets, sand and soil samples, sawdust and pungent chemicals, varnish and turps. The greenhouse is nearby and that, too, can be squeezed into at a pinch, for the white rabbit is truly small and, despite all the opportunities open to him, slender and trim. Here are succulent seedlings and bulbs, and tempting shoots and baby toma- toes and other tasty mouthfuls, and here is another convenient place to take advantage of the thin winter sunshine, amid sheltering glass walls, and have a snooze, dreaming of rabbity nirvana. But what kind of paradise can the white rabbit imagine better than the one he has already got? He has a soft lawn to play on, and fine trees to sit under, the little orchard and the big orchard to explore, and the still nicely rotting autumn apples and pears to roll over beneath the trees. He has the entire vegetable garden at his disposal, if he can effect an entrance — and he has plenty of opportunities to observe how Mr Sparkes erects his defences, thus drawing attention to their manifest weaknesses. This is a rabbit of wide domains and ample purlieus, who has come into his properties and intends to enjoy them, who has no dependants or mort- gages, no mortmains, wards in chancery, dowries to return, dowagers to support or attorneys to pay. If ever there was a real freeholder, it is the white rabbit. He is not worried, as all the other local animals are in one way or another, about the proposal to ban hunting with hounds by law. May they do their worst, says he, and let foxes multiply if they dare, I am safe from them here. He does not care about the incessant rain either, for he has a choice of warm and dry shelters. A fig for your global warming, the white rab- bit says; statistics mean nothing to me.
The white rabbit is clearly no simpleton. All the local wiseacres who know about him predicted a short life for him in the wild. He'd soon regret his safe hutch, they said, his prospects as a feral creature were slim, 'being white and all'. But he is still around. He is the first living creature we see when we come down for the weekend; the last to bid us goodbye as we drive back to London. He keeps a cautious distance from us as from everyone else, but he knows us and is quite happy to share his estate. He will take from my hands what Beatrix Potter calls a 'sopor- ific lettuce'. He is always there pottering around, enjoying life, a milky ffaneur, a touch of urbanity, an inescapable white spot amid the country green and brown. He is smart, this white one, garden-wise, hedge-cunning, thicket-clever, quick to do a disappearing act when approached too close, though he never seems in a hurry. The god who made him white gave him a brain too, and a certain boldness. There is nothing rabbity about him. But what to christen this favoured creature? Soldiers would call him Chalky or Blanco, but he is not regimental. To Charles Lamb he would be Lepus — for he is as fast as a hare — the Latin adding dignity. But he has plenty of dignity already, and Snowy is too conde- ,seending. I think I shall call him Lucky Jim, and see how long his good fortune holds.
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