We were having an absolute ball, but it was a bit like running a hostel at home, with family and friends always visiting and the assistant warden and the bunkroom volunteers in and out the whole time. Then there was the phone that rang 24/7. That phone really started to get on our nerves and I was tempted to get an answering machine, but these were a luxury at the time.
Late one night, at about 3 am in fact, a man rang me from the docks at Rosyth and told me to get over there quick to rescue a penguin from the dry dock. When I told him that we don't get penguins north of the equator, he said "Are you telling me I don't know what a f*ing penguin looks like?"
I said "Well, it looks like a penguin but it's an auk. They can fly."
A lot of expletives followed, but the gist was that he knew a penguin when he saw one, and I didn't. It was going to die in the dry dock and it would be my fault. At the time we had a wreck of little auks all along the coast and we had received a mass of calls about them. They were doomed because they were starving. The tanks at the local SSPCA centre were full of them.
By way of contrast, we had a much more polite call about an auk from a lady in St Andrews and she totally accepted my explanation. Next day we had a huge cheque from the same lady and a message saying that we were the only people who had answered her and shown any concern.One Christmas, Hanna's parents came over from the USA to stay with us, so when the visitor centre closed for the holiday we moved the tv and the decorations down to our house. Then we carried the Christmas tree down the stairs but, due to the movement and the fact it was as dead as a doornail, all of its needles fell off. After hoovering up the mess, we decided to get another tree, only it was December 23rd. Armed with a torch and a bow-saw and dressed all in black, Hanna's dad and I put on knitted balaclavas, pulled them up over our faces and set off for the new forestry plantation on the Cleish Hills. When we got there we pulled well off the road and coasted to a halt with the lights off then picked our way through the chest-high trees in pitch blackness, more or less by touch. Our senses were wound up to eleven and our eyes steadily got used to the dark, then our ears began to pick up the sound of something pushing between the young trees ahead of us. Roe deer? There were lots of them on the hills. I picked out a Fife accent, and another. The plantation probably held about 1% of the male population of Dunfermline, all on the same mission.
Our triumphant return home with the trophy tree was celebrated with a dram or two and we set the poor wee thing up in the corner. It was the most crooked tree you ever saw with one long side branch that stuck way out into the room and threatened to topple the tree over. We cut it off and turned the stub towards the corner where it didn't show.
At the time there was a huge campaign against the planting up of the highlands with non-native conifers and the RSPB was particularly vocal about this, even though some of it's patrons such as Jean Balfour, had invested heavily in the schemes. So I didnt feel too bad about rewilding a bit of the uplands. However, it was still theft. I imagined the uproar if we had been caught. "Vigilante RSPB Warden vandalizes Fountain Forestry plantation. Prison sentence expected."
We didn't mind being constantly in demand until we got the news that we were about to be parents. That changed everything.
Everyone was very enthusiastic about the idea of having a wee bairn around the place, but no-one more than Hanna and I. Our assistant warden, Gareth Morgan, was a bit worried; his card read:
"Congratulations! May the baby be born with Hanna's good looks and Jim's personality."
"PS: I've just had a terrible thought!"
Gareth was known as Garfie in the bunkroom, and we soon used that moniker too. We are still in touch with him and and he is just the same really. Garfie is a choral tenor and a cellist, so we bought him a tape of Stainer's Crucifixion for his birthday for which he sent a lovely thank-you card that read:
"Thanks for the birthday present: I don't know who Stainer was, but I now know why he was crucified."We took a trip to Holland for a Kist family gathering when Hanna's sister Katy celebrated getting her PhD from Leiden. She is now a proper art historian and runs her own translation business in Amsterdam. We were all extremely proud of her. After a memorable party in an ice-cream parlour on the beach near Scheveningen, (don't try saying that with your mouth full), and without saying anything in advance, we showed Hanna's family our photo album which included a print out of our ultrascan. It took a minute for the penny to drop, then "the room went wild", in a polite, restrained, dignified, sort of way.
My birthday falls on March 17th, St Patrick's Day, so it's always an excuse for a party but in 1989 we held it on the 18th. Near midnight we were helping with the washing up when Hanna felt a bit strange. Perhaps she had over done it? By dawn, it was obvious that this was going to be the big day. We had made a few dummy runs to Perth Royal Infirmary. and had a suitcase ready to go. It took just a few minutes to load up the car and we parked out front and walked about on the grey, packed snow watching the sun come up over Bishop Hill. The geese lifted up off St Serf's Island and circled round and Hanna said, "We should go now." I suggested the scenic route over the hills to see the piglets at Glentarkie but Hanna grunted something about a helicopter. We whizzed up the M90 at some speed and so our son Nicholas was born into this world on March 19th with snow, sun and cherry blossom visible from the hospital window. One of his first trips out would be to see the new lambs in the Ochils at Glen Sherrup.
By the autumn Nicholas was getting used to the trials of being out with his dad . I always smelled of Barbour coats and was never seen without binoculars and I walked many miles with him in a papoose, even taking to skis when the chance came up. He thrived on it all. One day I got wind that there had been a "fall" of autumn migrants at Fife Ness, so we set out for a "keek". A walled garden was absolutely heaving with tiny birds, including goldcrests, firecrests, Pallas's and yellow browed warblers. Little Nicky didn't seem impressed, in fact he was a asleep, but I credited him with the "ticks" anyway. He woke up for a crawl on the rocks later on while eider ducks cooed close by and rafts of scoters bobbed about on the sea beyond. A grey seal popped up to say hello, and he really liked that, but then he got hungry. The problem was that he was still being breast fed, and he had already had all the milk I had brought along. Fish and chips was all I could manage. He wasn't complaining, but boy was I in trouble when we got home!
Nick used to sit in his high chair in the kitchen at the Vane and survey the courtyard in one direction and the road to kinross in the other. He couldn't talk yet but he made noises; bwerk! meant chicken and Arrrrrrrrrh meant tractor, both of which were common sightings. Hanna would say "Eat your chicken" and Nick would say "Bwerk?" When Hanna nodded, Nick would clench his lips and shake his head. Eventually he would say "Dakter-dakter" which meant tractor. I would have to draw tractors, buy toy tractors, make them out of Lego and talk about them all of the time. He would soon guide my drawings by demanding "maninit" or "diggerback".
About the time he spoke his first single words we took him to Costa Rica on the condition that we didn't move on to a new location every day and he was absolutely fine with that. We used a coffee plantation above San Jose as our base. Finca Rosa Blanca was run by Ruben the Cuban and his glamorous Californian wife and we all loved it there watching the bats and the birds.
Nick made up his first two sentences in Costa Rica. On the west coast he watched a fishing boat. "Boat, boat... white boat." he said. At Monteverde Rainforest Reserve he said "Bider, bider, big bider, poke poke." At this point a hairy spider as big as his face was rearing up at him while he prodded it with a stick.
It was also at Monteverde that he learned to annoy the howler monkeys by shaking the branches and howling back at them. The males would edge out along the branches to poo on him, but they usually hit me.
Bringing up Nick at Vane Farm was a constant delight. When Hanna returned to work as a senior ranger we didn't have to look far for carers. Geri Wright from next door stepped up first, then Alyson Wilson from the Sluices helped out. He loved them both. Life continued much as before, but our priorities changed. We realised that if we were going to have any more adventures now was the time, before Nick started school.
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We arrived close to the equator on the Seychelles island of Mahe early in the morning. It was already extremely hot and humid in the airport where we were met off the plane by a Seychellois called John Collie. "I know you" said Hanna, "You were a seasonal ranger at Lochore Meadows." It is such a small world isn't it?
By the afternoon we had dragged our four suitcases, a tube full of fishing rods, a wartime typewriter and a sewing machine to the end of the short runway on Praslin Island and there we sat on the pristine white beach and watched the sun set over the pattern of islands that dotted the horizon. We waited and waited...............eventually, as darkness fell, we heard the sound of an outboard motor and the boat approached that would take us to our new life on Cousin Island. But that's a story for another day.
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