No children, pets and other animals.

We sold our little Victorian terraced house in Littlehampton before we moved to Kinross where the RSPB provided us with accommodation on the Reserve.

Vane Farm, our home.

The warden's house consisted of a long bungalow that formed the west side of the rectangular farm steadings. The RSPB took 17% of my salary to pay for our lodging, which seemed fair enough and as young "DINKs*" we lived quite well and enjoyed some spectacular holidays in Scotland, Europe and the USA. A more sensible couple would have put money into a holiday cottage that they could rent out, but we were too blissfully happy living in the present to plan a different future.

It was a great place to live and we loved it, blithely ignoring the high heating bills and the damp caused by long winters in the cold shadow of the Sleeping Giant that was Benarty. We ignored a lot of things.

Our lease contained dozens of clauses that I don't think we ever read, but one stood out and made us laugh. It said that "children, pets or other animals" were not allowed except by permission from the Society. Well, rules are made to be broken aren't they? Without ever planning to, we soon had chickens, goats and a cat. The baby would come later and then we would have the full set. If anyone came up from the Scottish HQ in Regent Terrace to see us, we would do our best to hide the beasties from view but we were eventually found out due to Buster the cat.

We didn't want a cat. We were bird people and could not see how a cat could fit in on a nature reserve, so when a ragged ginger tomcat started slinking around the outbuildings our plan was to trap it, shoot it or run it over. After a few attempts he seems to get the message and left of his own accord, or so I thought.

Buster opens his Christmas stocking.

By then, Hanna had a job as a countryside ranger at Lochore Meadows, which meant that she had to go away on ranger-training courses all over the Scotland in order to learn fire-fighting, first aid, malt whisky appreciation and that sort of thing. I was left alone to hold the fort, man the phone and sulk. It was on a stormy, dark night with rain streaming down the windows that Buster came back. I was in my pyjamas and dressing gown, lounging in our expensive sofa with a good book and with a roaring log fire on the go when Buster put his flat face against the pane and wailed and wailed for an hour or more. I let him in and he never left again.

If Buster wasn't in the house and we couldn't find him, it was because we never went looking. He took to going into the assistant warden's bothy or the volunteers' bunk-room and that was fine by us. He was in our bad books a lot of the time because he had shredded the sofa that we had bought from a very posh shop in Edinburgh. Princess Anne had one just like it, they said, producing a glossy photo from Hello Magazine. Her's might have had a few dog hairs on it; maybe a horse slept on it, but it looked in good nick. Buster made short work of ours.

Vane Farm was the nearest RSPB reserve to Edinburgh and therefore a handy place for staff to meet up to discuss everything relating to birds in Scotland. Our director, Frank Hamilton often popped in at weekends with his policeman son Rory for a bit of birdwatching and there were regular scottish staff meetings that brought in people from Edinburgh, Glasgow, Inverness, Orkney and Shetland. It was an honour to play host to such an elite bunch of conservationists, all legends back then, and still today. Sometimes we would get a visitor from The Lodge (RSPBs HQ in Sandy, Bedfordshire).

Hanna and Buster.

Ian Prest (the Chief Exec) used to come up for the Scottish Members' Day and other big occasions and sometimes his wife would come too. One day, for some reason, Hanna and I ended up serving dinner in our bungalow to the Prests and the Hamiltons and it all went very well until Buster strolled in and dragged his bulky frame up onto Ian's lap.

"That's torn it!"  I said to Hanna in the kitchen, "Buster's going to shred Ian's pants!"

We looked around the door to see Mr and Mrs Prest cooing over Buster who gave us one of those looks that spoke volumes.

With us both working long hours and travelling a lot, we were quite often away. In summer, we would work for days or weeks on end without a break and then go off to the highlands for four days, visiting other staff or rangers. Buster would move into the Bothy. For a night out, Hanna and I would meet in the Balgedie Toll house once a fortnight to marry up our diaries, have a pint or two and eat burgers.

On one such night we returned to an empty house and proceeded to brew up and settle in when we heard a strange noise from the pantry, which was also our back door-way. We had put in a cat-flap so Buster could get in and out that way so I guessed he was messing about out there. I thought that he was probably stuck in the flap as he was very over-weight and not very bright. I turned on the light but there was no sign of him.

Hanna digging the garden. The white door led to our pantry.

Then came that noise again, a scratching and a sort of whining, almost human. This freaked us out and Hanna handed me a brass poker and made me look again. Still nothing... Then I was sure I heard a muffled voice say "Meow, this is Buster. Feed me. Feed me."

I don't believe in human ghosts and certainly not ghost cats, but I was pretty spooked and so was Hanna.

The sound was definitely coming from the pantry so I went back in and dragged out all the bottles, potatoes and other stuff we stored there. Still nothing. I brought out our wellies and shook them out....... and there was a walkie-talkie handset, hissing with static that almost, but not quite, covered the sound of young men choking themselves while trying not to laugh out loud.  One more victory to the bunk-room boys.

Buster's suicide.

At least once a year we would take a long trip to visit Hanna's folks in Chicago. One year we left Buster in the hands of Gareth, our assistant warden-cum-houseboy. When we got home, the first thing we saw was Buster sprawled flat on the carpet with a bloody knife and a suicide note that read something like. "I kannot take it no mor. He are krule to me and he do not fede me. Buster." 

Of course this was another prank, but this time the points went to Gareth.

Buster was a latecomer to the Vane Farm menagerie. By the time he arrived, we already had two goats and a lot of chickens that laid their eggs all over the yard and the garden.

One of the hens was called Stretch. She was particularly easy to catch and the bunk-room boys used to experiment on her. Someone had told them that you could hypnotise a chicken by making a mark on the ground and then holding her beak to it. I would never have believed it, but it worked. In fact, you could draw an imaginary line and that worked too. Stretch would stay there for ever and they could pick her up and walk around with her while she was in a trance. The goats were much more tricky.

Stewart Hamilton and the goats.

Nanny was a big, white, bad-tempered goat with a beard and crooked teeth, but thankfully no horns. She had been mistreated and her jaw had been broken at some point. She was never in great health, but, boy, was she strong? It took four of us to milk her. We soon gave up on that she dried off. We would take her up the hill on a lead and tether her to an iron stake in a place where we wanted to clear a bit of grass. The public would pat her and some started to bring food, and she got pretty good at mugging visitors for treats. We got quite a few complaints, not about the muggings but about Nanny's jaw which we were accused of causing. Some kind soul later brought Nanny a "friend" in the form of a tiny grey goat with horns. They lived together in a stone outhouse and never really got on. The little one often butted Nanny in the ribs, so we called her Zola Butt (after the olympic runner, Zola Budd).

Jon Wilson and Zola Butt.

Every day would start with getting the goats out, and end with putting them away. Sometimes we would forget, until either they called for us to come and get them, or they literally "upped stakes" and bolted for home.  We would sometimes send a rookie volunteer up the hill to walk them home and they would often come into the yard like Ben Hur, dragged along the ground behind a Roman chariot. The regulars would simply let them go and they would make their own way back.

The Press Officer from Edinburgh was David Mitchell. He would pop by quite often on his way to and from RSPB film shows and events around the Highlands. We quite often had a housefull and the regulars would play Trivial Pursuits, which Gordon the Warden always won, unless David was in town.  Well, no one likes a know-it-all do they? We sent David up the hill to get the goats and waited for the inevitable. And we waited. Eventually he came into the yard with both goats on leads, walking to heel!  We always called him the Lonely Goatherd after that.

It eventually became obvious that Hanna was pregnant and everyone was thrilled about this, especially us. Gareth made us a card that read. "Congratulations to you both. I hope the baby has his mother's good looks and his dad's easy-going personality.... Oh my God, Ive just had a terrible thought. G." 

* DINKs = Double Income, No Kids.