The king is dead

A late Easter coincides with an early season, as so many flowers have opened in Britain some three weeks before schedule. The cluster of official holidays is the ideal moment to attack the accompanying growth surge in our gardens. I will be spot-weeding all visible dandelions and ground elder with targeted glyphosate all weekend. I will also be blessing my spring garden of the past two months and laughing vengefully. Why?

Since February, long-forgotten bulbs have been flowering after years of non-performance. The lilac-flowered Crocus vernus Vanguard has never been better. Tulip bakeri Lilac Wonder has never been so prolific and I am seeing such Tulip batalinii Bronze Charm as I only remember in the 1980s. For the first time they have been left in peace. Usually their buds and young shoots are ploughed up by badgers in overdrive. At last the wildlife balance has swung in their favour.

In mid-February there was a hint that the badger quotient might change. Often when I return from the university, I catch a glimpse of my old badger boar in residence, as he trots off into the lower garden for a night of excavation where I want him least. I know it is him because his hair is yellow-stained, like the hair of those old smokers, the great professors with whom I used to spend the Oxford day. On February 21, I coincided with a very different specimen. Sleek and fit, it slipped past my car with contemptuous ease and went to ground in my old boar’s sett as if he had given it the door code a week before. It had the look of an assured female and I rather think she was carrying a clip-board. She was certainly studying for an advanced degree, to judge from the self-confident movements and the ever-so-slightly contemptuous waggle of her black-and-white tail as she disappeared below ground. I feared she might be studying human sciences. Her project might even be me.

On second thoughts I could see she might be a help. In spring, no male badger will bother with an old boar but this pert new miss might well detain him below ground. After three days there were no signs of reprisals on the grape hyacinths, so I went out at nightfall and listened at the sett. The old boar has dug it within 10 yards of my door.

I am sure I heard grunts and a contented moan. She is keeping him busy all night, I concluded thankfully, and then had a grimmer thought. When do badgers get pregnant? She looked like the sort of miss who would not take precautions and at best would play Vatican Roulette. What if my one badger becomes five or six? Would fatherhood make crocus-digging seem the silly habit of a frustrated past? Or would he teach his little ones how to do it too?

For three more weeks she seemed to be exhausting him below ground. Whole carpets of crocuses and aconites appeared in happy flower where I had forgotten planting them. When scarlet-flowered Tulipa praestans Fusilier appeared in full bud in the gaps between my paving stones, I could hardly believe my luck. This marvellous little tulip is so bright but mine are usually decapitated by badger-mischief. I admired the badgerette’s stamina. Could she please knacker the old boar until Easter and give my water-lily tulips a chance to flower?

Last week I stopped feeling envious. It is some years now since my swimming pool won a press award as the leisure story of the year. It would not win one nowadays as I have let it run to weed and bullrushes. It is the last thing I inspect in spring, but this year, among the self-sown kingcups, there was a visible furry presence. It was stripy, angled and the back leg of a badger who had never learned to swim. Better still, there was another pair of legs not far from it, sleeker and shapely but also black-and-white. Like a pair of synchro non-swimmers, my oversexed badgers had drowned.

Badgers are a protected species, rampantly out of control in our countryside. There is no legal means of killing one even if it is wrecking a garden. The only answer is for it to kill itself. I waded into the pondweed and recovered not two drowned menaces but three. Underneath my slinky young badger was the corpse of a drowned fox.

On the pool’s paved surround I carried out an autopsy. There had been no badgerette in the story. Both of my badgers were males. Beneath my garage floor, they have been engaged in badger bunga-bunga. One night, a fox must have come to the party and told them to hot it up. Shifty as ever, he had introduced them to magic mushrooms. Out of their minds, all three had rushed across the garden, jumped into the pool and forgotten they were in no state to swim. It is a saga worthy of a partying TV presenter and it could not have served them more right.

This month the novelist Philip Hensher has been receiving extended reviews for his book, King of the Badgers. Critics have been praising its use of the “gay voice”. I suspect that my badgers had read a proof-copy and learned from the activities of the human “badgers” of the title. Hensher is wrong, however. The king is dead. My prize-winning swimming pool drowned him.

I have already told a few people, mostly those who sympathised when the spring garden was wrecked. The drowning has changed their tune. They become as sentimental as a newscaster and use phrases like “poor things”. Myself, I hesitated whether to skin them and offer pinches of their fur as shaving-brushes for FT readers. Drowning had spoiled its texture, so I have given my gay badgers an honorary funeral. Like the kings of Macedon, on show in Oxford’s Ashmolean exhibition, my badgers have been cremated. I burned them on a pyre of brambles and clippings from my ornamental pears and interred their ashes beside the graveyard of the adjoining church.

One Easter worry nags me. Will animals join in the Resurrection? The Bible says nothing on the topic, except for sorting sheep from goats. If four-legged wildlife is to rise again, I hope it will be judged first. Hedgehogs and red squirrels can return to my lawn, but badgers will surely be damned. They will be sent to boil with sinners like myself.