They lived in his boarding-school bedroom! These days, the inspectors might have something to say about that...
It is all gloriously bonkers – and certainly not something you can imagine happening in today’s sterile don’t-bend-the-rules world. It is the story of the Eton pupil who raised a pair of orphaned owls in his boarding-school bedroom, walked about with them on his shoulders, and bathed them at least twice a week in the bathroom down the corridor.
It caught the imagination of a publisher. So teenager Jonathan Franklin also found himself writing the story of Dee and Dum two nights a week, after lights-out. By candlelight. With the encouragement of his housemaster.
The serialisation rights were sold to the Beaverbrook newspaper empire for £350 and extracts of Two Owls at Eton appeared in the London Evening Standard in 1960.
The book was in its list of top 10 best-sellers for a fortnight and Jonathan and Dee paraded before the TV cameras for Look East.
He recalls that “a girl I’d always fancied wrote, saying that she’d just walked past Liberty’s in Regent Street and that a whole window was dedicated to my book, with at least three hundred copies on display. I hoped that my chances might improve with her. But no…”
He’s also convinced being a surrogate mother dented his A-level grades. “My indifferent results were probably due to the attention my feathered babies demanded as they scuffled around my room and teased at my pen with their talons, resulting in even more incomprehensible French than usual.”
Did all this hoo-hah and publicity seem a bit, well, amazing at the time? “I didn’t know what was happening!” he grins, sipping coffee in the kitchen of his home near Leiston. “Occasionally a boy would come up and say something.” But, in that era, no-one at Eton thought it particularly odd to see a 16-year-old walking around with a couple of owls on his shoulders.
The Evening Standard sold in the High Street in those days, and a big newspaper poster went up at the crossroads, trumpeting this “true story of nature”.
“I came down from school one evening and there it was, in the dark. My friend Tim said ‘What’s happening?’ I hadn’t a tiny clue. I was completely ignorant. They did it all, the publishers. They were seriously good at it!”
The book has never fallen off the radar. In 2006, Country Life rated it one of the five best nature books. Now it’s being given a fresh lease of life – issued as a revised edition after a publishing bigwig tracked down Jonathan via the Old Etonian Association.
The story begins one April day in 1959, when a friend rings to say he’s got a couple of tawny owls in his garden – orphaned when their mother was shot by a gamekeeper. Is Jonathan interested?
Yes. “This one word would change the whole routine of my life for a good year.”
It’s the Easter holiday and there’s the small matter of his impending return to Eton to think about.
His father (a barrister, then judge) took some convincing. But it was agreed that if Jonathan wrote to his housemaster, Bud Hill, and gained permission, he could take “the ugliest baby creatures I had ever seen” to Berkshire with him.
The reply – positive! – came too late, after the schoolboy had left Suffolk. So, for a couple of weeks or so, the owls were nursed by the daughter of the family’s gardener before being taken to Eton ? tennis ball-sized bundles of fluff and huge eyes.
“I shall never forget the next day,” Jonathan says in his book. “The owls woke me at 5.30am with squawks and twangs, complaining that they were hungry.” Buying supplies meant trips to the butcher half a mile away, “and walking there was the job I hated most”.
When they’d been at school a week “and were obviously not going to die”, the question of names arose. In a copy of Through the Looking-Glass he saw a picture of Tweedledum and Tweedledee. “I thought how similar they were to my owls with their plump, round bodies… and soon after they were known to their friends as Dum and Dee”.
Dum was reckoned to be a “she” and Dee, younger and smaller, a “he” – females usually being larger. (Later, those designations would be reversed!)
As the days went on, the schoolboy rushed hither and thither – dovetailing the demands of school life with the needs of his young charges.
“I soon found that their eyes were the most expressive that I have ever looked into… They were lovely and coupled beautifully with their vocal language, vividly portraying hunger, eagerness, excitement, anger and happiness.
“Their vocal language was varied and frequent; some I am sure, if translated, was not too pleasant. When hungry they would just squawk in rather a loud and raucous tone. If merely conversational, their squawk dropped to a murmur. This would continue for great lengths of time when they lay on my shoulder or sat on my lap.
“They showed acute anger with a volley of Tch, tch in a very high tone, and nervousness and fear by clicking their beaks together… And so, with their expressive eyes and varied language, Dee, Dum and I soon came to understand each other.”
Many at Eton helped him out. Parcels appeared in his pigeonhole: mice and moths for the owls. One morning, a larger packet yielded “the largest dead rat I had ever seen” – caught, apparently, by a master’s cat and passed on as a gift. Dum and Dee were actually quite scared of it. Jonathan had to cut it up with a penknife so they would eat it!
The daily routine began at about 6.30am, when the hungry siblings began making a racket. They’d make a bolt for it once the door of their cage was opened, invariably wedging themselves stuck as two owls into one hole wouldn’t go. Jonathan would nip back to bed for a while.
After breakfast he had 45 minutes before chapel to clean the cage and run down Eton High Street to the butcher’s to buy liver or whatever cheap meat was available. He’d cover it with feathers to make it look like prey.
They were ravenous at lunchtime and again at teatime. At 6pm Jonathan would go out to dig for worms; or, once they’d learned to fly, take the owls out for exercise.
Bedtime was a madcap experience – “quite the most exhausting part of the day”. After a final feed between 9.30pm and 10.15pm things descended into a game of chase – the owls scampering on their flat feet or, later, flying.
Jonathan – who says he’d gone to Eton because his father played cricket with his housemaster and his mother knew several mothers of Etonians – had his supporters there, such as “boys’ maid” Miss Siva. His room was covered in newspaper, to catch the owls’ droppings and moulted feathers, so dealing with domestic duties wasn’t a piece of cake. “Miss Siva never once complained and seemed to enjoy doing my room and looking at those ‘two old-fashioned professors’, as she used to call them. While she cleaned she would talk non-stop to them in Irish. If ever they were to speak, it would have been with an Irish accent.”
Mind you, they did once launch a ferocious attack on her large mop!
And, going to the loo, they’d step back a couple of feet before doing what they had to do. In the Eton bedroom, this instinct could have disastrous results, Jonathan writes.
“For example, if one owl was in the middle of the table, facing the wall, and felt the call of nature, he would, following his instinct and without looking behind, begin to back, until suddenly he felt thin air beneath him and the hard floor hit him sharply on the behind, three feet below the edge of the table.
“The owl would then pick himself (or herself) up with a hurt expression, straighten out feathers and relapse into a sulk, in which he or she would remain for at least half an hour.
“This unfortunate accident left me speechless whenever it happened, and my laughter increased their obvious embarrassment.”
Jonathan clearly had the knack of looking after wildlife, though, along with the patience, energy and devotion. He’d long been a fan of animals.
“I adored birds already,” he tells me. “I could tell you the wingspan of every bird in The Observer’s Book of British Birds.
“My mother was mad about animals. When we lived in London, my first effort at helping was with a wounded black-headed gull found in Kensington Gardens. It had a broken wing and I did things like make a splint out of matchsticks. Didn’t work. It died.
“I knew I had to improve my technique. You get fanatical about things at that age, don’t you?”
Later, he’d wander up and down Suffolk hedgerows, collecting birds’ eggs. He recognises that’s illegal nowadays, and quite rightly. Then, the rule he lived by was just one from a nest.
“I would blow the yolk and white out and fry them up with fresh eel that I’d caught in a tidal pond beside the River Deben.”
He continued to take in the wounded. By the time Dee and Dum arrived on the scene he had nursed a thrush, a jackdaw and a pigeon, as well as a baby rabbit brought in by the cat.
Dee and Dum were still only 14 weeks old when they left Eton but for Jonathan the day he dreaded approached fast: “the start of encouraging them to return to the wild and freedom”.
The birds had been spending the night inside and the day out. About a week after the student returned from school to the family home at Knodishall Place, near Leiston, Dee refused to come down from her tree. It was decided to leave Dum out too, to keep her company, “and so with anxious hearts we went indoors and left them out all alone”.
“I slept very little that night…” Jonathan admits. “At the first streak of dawn I rushed out into the garden and whistled. There was no answer… I whistled again.
“A loud squeak just beside me made me start. There was Dee sitting on a low branch. She hopped on to my arm and walked up to my shoulder. Just then I heard Dum’s raucous voice from about a hundred yards away and there he was flying towards me. I ran to meet him and with a volume of harsh quacks he landed on my other shoulder.”
To cut a long story short, Dum attracted a girlfriend, a wild owl, and became increasingly independent, Jonathan feeling more than a bit jealous.
“Dum had found his heart’s desire and preferred her to me… But I suppose it is natural for owls to fall in love, just as it is for us humans, and I accepted it after a struggle. Dum was overjoyed when he heard the hoot and would quack with excitement.”
Poor old Dee, meanwhile, had a health scare and very nearly died.
They were always characters. Jonathan tells of a summer dinner party, when the two owls did a sort of dance on the windowsill. “They reminded me of the Bisto Kids.”
Then Dum flew into the dining room and “performed a variety of swoops among the candlesticks and chandeliers, almost blowing the candles out. At the end of these acrobatics, both owls disappeared into the darkness of the nearby trees.
“Throughout this flying display, there had been a deathly silence except for a ‘Aren’t they divine?!’ from my sister, only to be quickly silenced by the solemn atmosphere. But at the end there was a noticeable sniff as the guests resumed their dinner. I felt rather hot under the collar but managed to wink at my mother.”
In the new year, 1960, Dee decided to take up residence in the coach house at Knodishall Place, though obviously still flying off for hunting and adventures.
That April, about to return to school, Jonathan realised it was a year to the day that the owls came into his life.
“I went into the coach house, where I was greeted by the usual fully developed hoot. Dee was so pleased to see me that she could not sit still. She snuggled up under my sweater and I took her into the nursery and fed her. After she had had enough, I put her on my shoulder and we went for a walk around the garden.
“The evening was calm and without a breath of wind. I felt happy and pressed my cheek
against Dee, who I hope felt happy too.
“We were passing the cedar trees when with his clear hoot Dum and his friend flew over our heads and settled on an upper branch. I looked up at him in the tree and then at Dee on my shoulder. Both were one year old and yet so different…
“I turned around and Dee and I returned to the coach house. I could not have been happier.”
When he left Eton later that year, he was pleased to be told by the headmaster that the owls had done more for the school’s image than all the official publicity – an accolade “certainly worth a bonus mouse each for Dee and Dum”.
That wasn’t the end of it. Life took Jonathan to France and on to Brazil, where for a decade he part-owned and managed a ranch in the Amazon.
Even so, a cardboard box of one or two baby owls would often turn up on his mother’s doorstep back in Suffolk. No note, of course.
“We’d become a safe haven for distressed owls. Over fifteen years we nursed and released between eighteen and twenty abandoned tawny and barn owls.”
He tells the EADT he and his mother managed to get them all back into the wild except one. “It was a real challenge. Anybody who thinks it’s easy… it’s not. The difficult thing is getting them to hunt. Little by little they leave you, and then finally when they think in their own minds they’re competent, they’ll leave you completely.”
Owlets kept coming even after Jonathan himself returned to Suffolk from Brazil – he remembers a box of three babies being left by the door.
“We gave them names from opera (including Siegmund and Sieglinde) and they became very tame indeed, and my children adored them. When they were old enough to fly, a violent thunderstorm blew one of them away – we never found him. The two survivors would fly to my shoulder at the whistle.”
Jonathan’s heard that the popularity of the owl Hedwig in the Harry Potter books and films has led to healthy young being taken from nests as pets. Many, he expects, would die within days.
“I implore that this book does not encourage any such robbery. Owls are wild animals and we must do our best to protect them, especially in these times of intense agricultural practices.”
He adds: “If you want to help, put up owl boxes. They are effective. Every owl that my mother and I brought up was an orphan or damaged, and our object was to get them back into the wild as soon as possible.”
The rights to this new revised edition of the book have actually been sold to Japan.
“You know why? In Japan, apparently, it’s very fashionable to go and have a drink in an owl bar. You can sit at the bar and have a chat to a live owl. There are lots of environmentalists who want to ban that one, and I don’t blame them.”
* Two Owls At Eton is published by John Blake at £12.99
More about Jonathan
He was born in London, in the middle of an air raid – his mother having to be moved from one hospital to another because of the threat from bombing.
His family came to Suffolk in 1952, when Jonathan was about 10. Although he’d grown up in London, he considers himself a Suffolk boy.
It was his mother’s links that brought them to East Anglia. She had several relatives in Suffolk, including the well-known Quilters at Bawdsey.
“When we came down to Suffok – heaven. We rented a cottage beforehand, near the River Deben, and in those days people collected birds’ eggs. I’d catch eels in little tidal pools on the Deben, come home, blow the egg I’d got, skin my eel, fry it.”
The family later moved into Knodishall Place, a Georgian former rectory, with Victorian additions.
Jonathan’s father, Walter, was a cricketer of note: He made his debut for the MCC (Marylebone Cricket Club) in 1914 and after the war played for and captained Buckinghamshire, also making first-class appearances for the MCC. He retired from county cricket in 1946 and died in Suffolk in 1968.
Walter had been selected to play for England in Australia, says Jonathan, but his father wouldn’t let him go. Nevertheless, he had captained the minor counties side when it beat the Aussies. “Pretty proud about that.”
Walter was a barrister and a judge, sitting in Ipswich and Norwich.
Jonathan was 13 when he went to Eton, remembering being scared stiff at first. He describes the discipline in the second half of the 1950s as still being “terribly severe”, with senior boys allowed to beat others.
Generally, though, “gloriously eccentric” was the right label for life there. You didn’t have to be particularly clever to get there, he reckons. “In those days they wanted someone who was going to muck in and have fun. There were something like 35 or 40 societies, from film to wine to natural history, debating…”
Jonathan didn’t have his father’s cricketing skills. “Rugger and football, fine, but cricket, you’ve got to have a cool nerve. Loved my horses. All I wanted to do in the holidays was go to the local gymkhana and chase the girls!”
In 1960, when he was completing the book, he had to make sacrifices to get the job done. “I was madly chasing girls at the time but didn’t go out at all in the following two holidays.” He got things finished at the end of the spring holidays.
He didn’t have much idea what he wanted to do after leaving Eton, and the decision was made for him.
“My father beat my mother in the argument and I went to work for an old family firm. My father wasted his time at university and said ‘I’m sure you will as well.’ He played cricket and thought I would do the same. But I wouldn’t have done the same. I was mad keen on books and English, and writing.”
Instead, Jonathan found himself in “the world’s most boring job ever invented by man”. Quantity surveying. “I left before the results of my final exam. I did them in cracking-quick time. I was desperate to get out.”
He did qualify, though, but went to a business school just outside Paris, where he enjoyed a tremendous year.
He married a Brazilian lady and they had plans to move to Australia, but a German friend from the college suggested that if you wanted to run a ranch, Brazil (which had water) was a better bet than a nation where it’s in short supply. So Brazil it was.
“I wanted to make money, if I could. I should never have done that, really. Odd place, Brazil.” He found it terribly racist back then, with bribery a way of life, and Jonathan employed as many black workers as he could, as a matter of policy.
He lived there for 10 years, with another five spent travelling back and forth. And in 1979/1980 he moved to the house near Leiston where he still lives.
Jonathan remarried – 35 years ago, to the artist Annabel Gault – and has three sons, two daughters and nine grandchildren.
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