by Bob
I was hard on the kids back then, too, shouting at them when I was drunk and smashing up the furniture and drinking all the money. One of the men I drank with hung hisself at the end of the garden – he had the shakes and the tremens and was in a bad state. And I might have ended up like that myself, if I hadn’t met Cora.
Now you’d think, being that violent, I’d have been put away – and some of the times I deserved to be put away. But, whenever I was had up, the police always helped me out and made sure I had a good solicitor. The reason being, the coppers round here back then all lived in new houses that was built specially for ’em and I nicked a lot of stuff whenever I got some work on the buildings to earn a bit of extra cash – slabs and paint and bricks and all that sort of thing. They were as partial to a bit of knocked-off gear as anyone else, the police. One copper said to me, ‘If you carry on like this, Bob, we’ll all be doing time.’
So they looked after me when I got hauled up for fighting and I never went down for none of it – or anything else for that matter. I used to drink with this big Irishman in a pub beside a coalyard and we’d nick the bags of coal when we came out drunk and then nick bags of potatoes from outside the greengrocer’s up the road. And I was never done for nothing. But they didn’t like me poaching, because that was taking from the gentry and couldn’t be tolerated. It might lead to people thinking they was as good as the lords and ladies.
Even back then there were very few true poachers. Lots talked about poaching but never done it. There was plenty of ’em in the pubs, but you’d never come across them in the fields or the woods when you was out there of a night on your own. They was as full of shit as a Christmas turkey! That’s what really got my goat when I was drinking: people talking about shooting this and trapping that and netting the other. I’d got past the stage of talking about it long ago and actually went out and done it – and kept on doing it. Mostly what I loved was shooting the pheasants and that’s the thing the lords hated me most for – taking their game birds. I’d take hundreds and either eat ’em or sell ’em, and it was my way of sticking two fingers up at the powers that be – at the people who’d ruled the land for centuries. By taking their pheasants I was showing them I couldn’t be controlled like the rest of the knee-benders. I was a law unto myself – part of my own little kinship, expecting nothing from the outside world and acting on the spur of the moment instead of making pathetic plans. Spitting on authority, with its coppers and courthouses and awful bloody conceit. And everyone knew me for my swagger and classed me by my contrariness – and me all the time playing my small part in the black bartering of a hostile society, but keeping well apart from it.
There was many ways to poach what I needed. I used to snare rabbits and set traps for pheasants as well as shoot ’em back in them days, using corn as bait for the traps. I’d use a little bit of corn on the outside and a lot on the inside. But the foxes and badgers round this area would take the rabbits out of the snare wires, and the trouble with traps is you has to go check them every day and that makes it easy for someone to see you and set an ambush for you. Another way I used to get pheasants at night, if I didn’t want to make a noise, was with a long stick with a wire snare fixed to the end of it and plenty of baler twine. I’d slowly reach up and put the loop over the bird’s head and tug on the twine. I also used clap nets to catch birds. You lay a trail of corn for bait that leads into the clap net – which is a spring-loaded net that can vary in size. The net’s kept in a furled position and when the bird follows the feed into it, I pull on a draw cord that releases the spring and the net gets thrown over the bird. All that was OK, but by far the best way was always with the .410 shotgun. Job done. No messing about. A lot of other ways is only fit for tall tales in the pub. But if you wants birds, lead’s the best way.
Poaching was essential to life for me back then – me with a family to rear and never having much money to do it with. I remember once when I was broke – no money and no food and only four cartridges – I went out with my dog into a small wood. A pheasant got up and I shot it with one cartridge. Then the dog put a rabbit out of a hedge and I shot that with my second cartridge. I shot a wood pigeon with the third cartridge and a hare with the fourth. Four cartridges, four meals. But there’s two sides to poaching: there’s the sheer necessity of it for a man like me, to eat, to survive. Then there’s the love of it, the sport of it, the beauty of it. It’s a man alone, in hostile territory, with a dog or a gun – a man agin’ the elements, agin’ the keepers, agin’ the law. Can’t you feel it? The rawness of it, the adrenaline pumping, the heart beating. The sound of a twig snapping, the hoot of an owl, the flap of a wing. There’s nothing like it in the whole world. It’s a true kind of freedom, to be doing what’s in your nature to do since the dawn of time.
It was always inside me, from the day I was born – the shadowy tradition of the poaching game. It was something I understood, following after the old woodsmen, slipping along the path of their profession. I felt it touch my heart; watched it claim me as its own. Until it was all I knew or wanted to know. From snaring and trapping to shooting and hunting with the dogs. I reigned over my crooked little kingdom like a cock pheasant – crowing out from the saddle of a hill, colours flaunting and feathers flaring and a closed fist shaking at the scowling world around me.
But the toffs didn’t give up their game easy. In the 1960s, the gamekeepers could give you a hiding and confiscate your gun if they caught you and they’d not be done for assault or anything because they had the police and the judges and the courts on their side. So I had to be nifty on my feet to keep out of their clutches. I’d roam all over the land with my gun and dogs, and the long poacher’s coat with deep pockets to stash whatever I bagged.
Brian started coming poaching with me from the age of four. He was expelled from every school he went to because the teachers weren’t able to control him. They said he was ‘feral’, whatever that means, and I was always having the truant officer coming round.
‘Where’s Brian today?’
‘You tell me.’
‘I’ve never met people like you Toveys.’
‘I’m glad to hear that.’
‘How did you get educated, Bob?’
‘Reading the Bible!’
But he was alright, the truant officer. There was nothing he could do, and he knew it. Brian had no interest in lessons and he’d be sent out to help the groundsmen, because he was a disruptive influence in the classroom. I could understand that; I hated school myself and never had no time for book-learning, even though I did get educated. I learned what I really needed to know out in the fields and the woods. I learned how to survive outside the system. I went to work on building sites when I needed to, if I wanted a bit of quick cash for something special. But I jacked it in as soon as I had enough money to get whatever I was after. It was a means to an end, not an end in itself, like it is with most people. Most people are slaves to their jobs and bosses, making millions and billions for them who does nothing to deserve it. I was never going to fall into that trap after I got kicked out of the Navy. I’d had enough of authority by then and was determined to live a free life, accountable to no man nor master. If Brian wanted to do the same, I’d have been a hypocrite to try and stop him.
I think I already told you that I always used a long poacher’s coat with deep pockets, until one day the postman came by while I was plucking a pheasant outside on the step.
‘How much do you want for the bird, Bob?’
‘I’ll swap you for your postbag.’
He took out all the letters and we swapped over. Ever since then I’ve used postbags for stuffing game in – they’re even better than the long pockets in a poacher’s coat. Country people ate game and wild animals back then, rather than go to the shops. I was a supplier of that food and I traded it for whatever I could. There was a gunmaker who used to take game for cartridges; a coal man who’d take a bit of venison for a bag of anthracite; the man in the petrol station liked a goo
se every now and then, and you could always get a few free pints in the pub for a brace of rabbits or a widgeon or two. It was like in the old days of the barter – as good a system as any in the countryside.
Like I said, lots of people talked about poaching, but never done it; they’d catch plenty in the pub when they was full of beer. But the police knew who could do it and who couldn’t. Back in them days, if your name was Tovey, you was constantly being harassed and questioned by gamekeepers and land owners and stopped in the lanes if you had a dog with you. I was the most notorious poacher in south Gloucestershire. Even the local vicar badmouthed me behind my back and said I would rustle and steal anything that moved – take the whites from your eyes and pop back for the pupils. But I never gave a fiddler’s feck what none of them thought. They was all happy to come looking for a pheasant or two at Christmas to put on their yuletide tables. I kept myself to myself and never mixed nor socialised with none of ’em – the ones who thought they was above the likes of me. I had a few mates who were ordinary men and who weren’t members of the stinkless-shit club, but the rest I kept well clear of and wished that they’d keep well clear of me.
I remember once being out shooting rabbits with a mate called Clifford. Clifford had shooting rights on a piece of land from the farmer. So, when this man came up shouting at us, I told him to ‘piss off ’. What I didn’t know was, the farmer had died and this bigmouth was now in charge. Well, me and Clifford ended up before the magistrates, charged with taking game. Of course, rabbits ain’t game, they’re ‘coneys’ – classed as vermin. So the charge was wrong and, once Clifford pointed this out, the case would’ve been kicked out on a point of law. As Clifford had the original shooting rights, it was up to him to do the talking. I nudged him forward and he pointed out the problem. The prosecutor turned round and smiled at him and said, ‘Sorry about that, do you mind if we carry on?’
Clifford should have said, ‘Not bloody likely!’ But, instead, the idiot said, ‘Carry on, sir. It’s perfectly alright.’
The prosecutor changed the charge; we got fined ten pounds and Clifford was lucky I didn’t kill him outside the courthouse. But it just goes to show the deference with which these legal people were treated by blokes like Clifford. Not by me. They all had arses they farted through and that meant they was no different to me, so why should I think they were?
After the court, I goes out into the fields to relax with the greyhound. It’s drifting into evening when I comes upon some old Gypsies with lurchers who’re looking for a hare or two. We puts a few up and I gives my dog a run agin’ their dogs and the greyhound comes best every time. I was never a betting man, but the Gypsies are, and a bit of money is made and lost in the long-shadowed fields, with always an ear open for the gamekeepers and farmers and estate workers who don’t know how to live like us and begrudge us our freedom from the landowner’s whip.
In the later hours, we sits by the sheltered edge of a field and one of the Gypsies cooks up a hedgehog, which they calls a hotchi. He kills the animal first and cuts it off at the top of its head and slices right the way around to its tail. He then puts his fingers slightly in underneath the belly and keeps pulling until the spiky skin comes away. He leaves the feet on because, he says, he likes it that way – although you can snip ’em off if you prefers. He rolls the animal up in a ball with good clay, digs a shallow hole with plenty of dead leaf and tends a little fire on top. And while the hotchi cooks away and moths flicker in the flame-glow, the sparks from the embers drift up into the night air like fireflies.
And they say the meat’s very good for the baldness.
I’m easy on the way home, with the stars winking down at me and the taste of hedgehog still in my mouth and the low growl of their voices fading away across the stillness. The Gypsies talked of learning new ways and reading and writing and how asking a traveller to spell the words of his language is like asking a stone to speak. And how it’s getting harder and harder to get a touch these days and a story about this woman who had a house but had to get planning permission to park a trailer on her own land, simply because she was a Gypsy. And the farmers can give them twenty-eight days to move on if they’re working on the land for ’em, but no longer – and how the Children’s Act could sometimes prevent evictions but not always. And then they’re gone, like ghosts in the gloom, as I looks up at the infinite sky and thanks my lucky stars.
For the life I leads.
Bob’s grandfather, the drayman, seated with apron, outside The Lion pub in Yate, 1919
5
Brian – The Panther
My name is Brian Tovey and I’m a poacher. I was born on 4 October 1963, but I don’t know much about my mother because she left home when I was six years of age. I have very few memories of her, apart from the rows with my father and a lot of shouting and screaming and that sort of shenanigans. Me and my sister June were brought up by my father, Bob and, because he was a poacher, I became a poacher too. To me, poaching means more than killing wild animals for food; it’s an inclusive way of life that incorporates conservation and a dislike, bordering on hatred, of the ruling elite and their cap-tippers. Just like in Bob’s time before me, once my name was Tovey and I was seen with a greyhound or a gun, I’d be constantly stopped and harassed by farmers and keepers and lords and earls. I was known for trespassing and not giving a flying fart about anything or anybody.
You may think Bob’s influence made me what I am today, and that might be true to some extent. But I’ve always had my own free will and could’ve found something else to do if I’d wanted to – tried a training course in reality television, or become a mugger or a murderer and sold my story to the tabloids. But who’s to say what’s a safe bet in these days of media manipulation and misinformation and every silly bugger buying lottery tickets in a futile attempt to join the echelons of the upper classes.
I was about ten when a friend of my father’s bought some farmland from the Earl of Ducie. The land was beside the earl’s Tortworth Estate and the farmer gave us permission to shoot and hunt and lamp and do whatever we liked on his land. Now, there’s no pheasants to speak of on the farmland, so we set up some feed-bins hanging low in the trees to draw them in from the earl’s neighbouring estate. We get these five-gallon drums and cut thin slits in the bottoms – maybe half-an-inch by four inches – and we cover the slits with metal gauze. Then we fill them with corn and tie them up to the trees and nutbushes. We lay a trail of corn from the edge of the estate to the feed-bins and the earl’s pheasants all follow the trail and peck at the bottoms of the bins to get more corn out. Pheasants get clever during the shooting season; they don’t like getting driven over guns and shot at every week, so they spread out to the edges of the estates where they’re warm and dry and think they’re safe – and that’s where we get them. They keep coming and coming all the time and Bob and me hide and he shoots them before it gets dark. Or, if he wants a sporting shot, he’ll send in our spaniel to flush them up to flight.
This area of farmland, where me and Bob set up our feed-bins, has good cover that naturally draws game birds, and they soon learn that pecking at the bottoms or sides of the bins will release more corn for them. We have a steady supply of birds and Bob uses what he wants for our own little family and sells the rest or distributes them among those whose need is greatest. Now, the Earl of Ducie ain’t taking too kindly to us having his birds like that. One day, me and Bob are out there shooting with the long coats that have the big pockets, and we’re watching the pheasants feed from the corn bins and then flying back to their release pens, and we think we might just nip onto the estate and get a bit of other game and then nip quickly back to where we have permission if anyone hears the shots. You see, if they can’t get us bang to rights actually trespassing, then they can’t do anything to us. So me and Bob skips across the fields and fallow land and shoots a few rabbits and we’re laughing at the sport we’re having and the game we’re taking at the earl’s expense.
Anyway, Ducie and
his gamekeepers are hiding down by the local quarry and they see us getting the rabbits. Ducie goes off to get the police while the gamekeepers come after us. But by now we’re back where we have permission. We have four pheasants and a few rabbits in the coats when the keepers start bawling at us. We can see them coming about fifty yards away and normally we’d be off running and they probably wouldn’t catch us. But this time it’s different. I drop the game where it can’t be seen in the long grass and we stand and wait for them.
‘Come with us!’
‘Where?’
‘The earl is on his way with the police.’
Bob winks at me and we say nothing, but go with them towards the quarry, where Earl Ducie has arrived with the coppers. The earl always has a loaded double-barrelled 12-bore shotgun with him. Always. And he gets away with it because of who he is. A big smirk comes all across his aristocratic puss. He thinks he has us.
‘Got you at last!’
Bob faces up to him.
‘Break your gun.’
He hesitates for a second or two, not used to being spoken to in that tone, but he does what he’s told. Then the coppers step in and take Bob’s gun.
‘Been poaching, have we?’
‘No.’
‘What’s this, then?’
They search our long coats and find nothing, but the keepers have a dog with them and it sniffs out the game I dropped in the grass. Ducie’s nearly doing a double-jig he’s so pleased with himself.