Country Homes and Interiors
September 1998
By Valeria Grove
Photos by Mark Fiennes

While Joseph and Ralph struggle with fame, their gamekeeper brother is more concerned with the happiness of a partridge chick.

Jake Fiennes is, at 28, a contented man. With his girlfriend Mel and dogs Flora and Tosca, he lives in a classic Victorian lodge on a great country estate in Norfolk, where he is a gamekeeper. He does not envy the lives of his actor brothers Ralph and Joseph, with starry premieres and Hollywood parties. He prefers to tramp the fields at sunrise, watching for vixens, checking on his partrigdes.

He is much happier out in his wild woods than sitting indoors talking. Only when explaining his work does he become impassioned: his aim in life is to create the ideal habitat for ground nesting birds. Soon after I arrive on a fine May morning he took me in the Landrover to see the fruits of his labours: the wild orchids, the broadleaf weeds, the ditches and banks and ponds and nesting spots, the partridges safely breeding, the clouds of sawflies around out heads-'Look at all these sawflies, there's never enough of them. The sawfly larva is very important to the diet of the grey partridge chick.'

People are terribly ignorant of what a gamekeeper does, he says. So what had he been doing this morning? He had been out at 4am, checking his traps. 'I run 250 traps: rabbits, rats, squirrels, stoats, weasels, crows, magpies, jackdaws, jays. I did it quickly today by quad bike because it's a bank holiday.'

His childhood prepared him for this life. When blue eyed Jake and his brown eyed twin Joseph were born in 1970, their mother, the painter, poet and novelist Jini Fiennes (aka Jennifer Lash) had six children under seven- and they have all turned out rather remarkable. Apart from Jake and his two acting brothers there is Magnus, a composer, Sophie, a photographer, and Martha, a film director.

You may have seen the Fiennes family in a Channel 4 film last year: an idyllic picture of family togetherness, among flowers and animals, painting, theaticals, music. 'I was taught by my mother until I was six,' Jake says. 'She never pressurised us, never asked what we wanted to do when we grew up.'

They moved constantly- Suffolk, Dorset, Wiltshire; six years in Ireland, at Bantry Bay; Salisbury, London, Dorset again, and back to Suffolk. Jini wrote that wherever they lived, her children instantly made a camp: secret, hidden caves, where they would run after school- in tree roots, in thick hedges or old stone ruins, or under high overhanging banks. Jake was always the 'Slugs and snails and puppy dogs' tails' one, usually with his head in a rock pool. For his 16th birthday Jini gave him a stuffed fox crawling up a log.

He left school at 16 and worked as a PR for the Limelight nightclub, but left after suffering from stress related eczema. A friend had inherited 3,500 acres near Horsham in Sussex, so he went as a hired hand to help run the estate, learning from the old woodman and the gamekeeper. 'In this profession you need knowledge you can't get in college. Only hands on experience counts.'

Then he turned cowboy, in Western Australia for two years in the bush, teaching himself to ride 'by the seat of my pants' and loving the life. But one day, when he was mustering 3,000 head of cattle, a message came on the radio about his mother's terminal decline from cancer. He went home in June; Jini died in January [my note: it was December]. 'She was the strength behind all of us.' Her last book, On Pilgrimage, was a moving account of her journey to Santiago de Compostela.

After her death, he went to Wales to work on a highly commercial shoot mainly for rich Americans who 'paid silly money'. 'And that to me was a blood sport. We reared birds to be shot; we played the numbers game. I soon found out that wasn't what I wanted. It was against everything I believed in.' So he came to this wild estate in Norfolk, to be the gamekeeper to a baronet, with one keeper and two warreners under him.

'Here the main aim is not shooting game. Out of 365 days, we have 10 days' shooting, and the boss doesn't shoot at all. The aim is to encourage wildlife alongside profitable farming- controlling the predators, not eradicating them, but creating a balance. the Culling of pheasants is part of that; because if you have too many peasants you damage crops. You have to maintain a healthy stock of everything.'

Our first stop was an ash and hazel coppice, loud with birdsong, where orchids were in purple bloom in the undergrowth, increasing ever year thanks to keeping down the rabbits. They trapped 11,500 rabbits last year and there are still thousands. 'Ah! A fox has left his calling card,' Jake says, picking up a dropping and examining it in his fingers. 'We cannot have foxes cubbing on the estate. A vixen with cubs causes damage beyond belief.'

He pointed out a dead squirrel he has left hanging on a tree. 'You put a rabbit or squirrel in a tree and they get flyblown and produce maggots, thus feeding the birds. We have tawny owls, kites, kestrel, marsh harriers, skylarks, lapwings...'

He is particularly proud of the strips of headland at the edge of each 20 acre field- creating a natural feeding station alongside the sunflowers, millet, mustard, kale, rape, linseed, wheat, peas and parsnips. 'Our head-lands are kept free of insecticide to provide clover, vetch, nettles and thistles and docks and all the broadleaf weeds. We want our beans to get blackfly on them, to get the aphids. Naturally regenerated stubble undersown with clover, vetch and kale is a good crop. This is gold for insects.

'What I love, is the habitat we've made,' say Jake. 'Everyone on the estate co-operates. 'The chap who does the spraying is very sensitive about where he sprays, and when they are ploughing, if there are lapwings' nests they'll move the eggs. We cut the hedges every three years instead of a yearly short back and sides- we planted six miles of hedges last year. We leave ditches with tusky grasses, good hibernation for insects, and nesting cover. Simple things, but they go a long way.'

He took me to see two pairs of nesting partridges in pens near to the gravel pits. 'The English partridge has declined dramatically. In any paddock there used to be one pair: nowadays some counties don't have any at all. Norfolk is a stronghold, thanks to the work we put in on the habitat. You could rear them in an incubator, but they don't breed: they don't know about predators or natural food. So we collect eggs and rear them under bantams, keep the hens and satch wild cocks, and the wild cock teaches the hen about predators and how to look after the young. we let them hatch off and after 10 days let them go. They are totally wild English partridges.

'My great joy on a shooting day is to hear lots of shots and come to a line of guns and find they've only managed to get one or two birds. We don't shoot hens at all, to ensure breeding success. A cock will have a harem of hens; if you have too many cocks their harems are smaller, and cocks without hens will form bachelor groups and go out on pillaging parties. That disturbs the hens; so you have to keep a sensible number of cocks.'

Later he showed me the very different field of a neighbouring farm. 'This is desert for wildlife. Hedges are cut every year, and ditches are dug out, and wheat sown right to the edge of the field, all sprayed out, and crow and magpies flying about. If any bird took her young into it they wouldn't find and food at all. Here you have blackcurrent, but they're all sprayed, so nothing grows between.' But the trend is to change all that, and he is hoping neighbours will follow their lead.

Jake has to be constantly vigilant. 'I had a trap smashed up recently by someone who thought what I was doing was wrong. But the trap was there because there were three pairs of lapwings, and crows pestering the adult lapwings. When it was smashed, the crow was released and all the lapwings lost their young. We'll never have a shortage of crows, but the number of lapwings is dropping. People are so ignorant. I'd love to show them why we do what we do, and why we have to control certain species.'

Back at home he showed me a tits' nest, ingeniously lined with rabbit fur and squirrel tail, and a pheasant's nest with nine eggs. I asked whether he missed metropolitam life: its theatre, cinema - he doesn't - or restaurants? He waved an arm over his rose filled cottage garden, with rows of spinach, spring onions, shallots, rocket, and said: 'Who needs a restaurant when you can cook your own vegetables? Why go to Sainbury's and buy three sprigs of rocket for a pound when you can grow as much as you want in your garden for nothing?'

Ralph Fiennes has said that he envies his brother Jake's life. I can see why: he is creating the kind of environment he cares about most, and the world leaves him alone.