by Bob
Bob made me work hard all my young life and he made my brother Robert work hard too, when he came along in 1973. If we were weeding the garden and he looked out the window and saw us taking a break, he be roaring down at us and threatening us with the belt. He was generally a nasty violent individual back then, always shouting and screaming at us, but it wouldn’t be right to say I hated him – it wasn’t like that. The drunkenness and violence were normal for me when I was a boy. I knew no other life, so I couldn’t say I did or didn’t like my father then. It was a sad illness he had and I don’t hold it against him now. I don’t judge him and he never judged me neither. A father–son friendship is a peculiar sort of thing – we have our name in common and the tradition of our trade. Who could ask for more? And he was man enough to change and stop drinking altogether and he was my big hero when we were out across the fields and the woods together.
The rest don’t matter.
The village was at its lowest population ever when I was a young boy, maybe less than eight hundred people all around – there’s over two thousand now. The school was small with not many children in it: only three boys and five girls in my class. But, to me, the whole purpose of school was to get me sitting up straight with my arms folded and my mouth shut. I believed they were just training me to be servile and do what I was told later on. I saw school as a place where I had to learn discipline and not much else, and where they hit me with a stick, or made me wear a dunce’s hat, or tied me to a chair, or put me outside when it was snowing if I didn’t conform. That wasn’t for me. The teachers were part of the establishment Bob hated, so I hated them too. They were the same as the lords and judges and police and farmers and were good for nothing but to grind me down. I didn’t see the point in learning what they were trying to teach me, so I didn’t learn it.
‘We’re doing English today.’
‘Not me.’
‘You have to.’
‘No, I don’t.’
Every time they asked me a question, I answered with another question. They didn’t know how to deal with that. If I’d hit them or kicked them, it would’ve been a different matter and they could’ve hit or kicked me back, or called the police. But I didn’t – it was passive resistance. I wanted to do what I wanted to do, not what they wanted me to do, so they put me in a room on my own to stop this kind of anarchy from spreading to the other children.
Outside school I was always up to some mischief. Bob had a pony and trap when I was young. He kept the horse in a field and after school I’d ride it bareback all round the place. I was a good horseman, even from a young age. I’d hack the horse round the village and across the cricket pitch, churning up the turf. The cricket club people were a bit toffee-nosed and they’d shout at me and wave their fists and threaten to call the police. But I’d just ride off and nobody could ever catch me.
I saw Bob drinking and fighting for the first eight or nine years of my life, but I never went down that road myself, even when I got older and grew to be a man. I could always take care of myself, mind you, but I was never gratuitously violent and I only ever used alcohol in moderation on social occasions. Drink was never my master, like it was with Bob. To me, heavy drinking like that’s a criminal waste of time. All I was really interested in was dogs and ferrets and snares and lamps and guns – day and night. I never smoked neither and I was a fine fit runner and could outstrip any keeper I ever came across. But, even though I was never like him in a lot of respects, when I was young I could feel my father in my blood and, in my ears, the sound of him pounding through my veins, trying to get out and evaporate and fall like red rain on a West Country field.
He wasn’t always drinking and, when he was sober, Bob taught me everything he knew about poaching – how to stretch a rabbit’s neck to kill it, fast and easy. How to squeeze the piss out and how rabbits go off quick, so you have to gut them straight away, and how to leg them to carry on a stick. He told me things that weren’t in any textbooks, about beasts and birds and how to understand the wildlife and know them like they were kin, their names and ways and how they lived – all sorts of things. Like, the red-legged partridge is sometimes known as the French partridge, to distinguish it from the grey English partridge – and he showed me how they jug on the ground in a circle, with their heads pointed outwards and, when they’re disturbed, they prefer to run rather than fly. He taught me how to catch them by laying corn round a spring-loaded clap net and I’d bike thirty-five miles and back for a bit of poaching. I’d go anywhere – private estates and wetlands and marshes and farms and woods, and wherever there was a bird to be bagged or a rabbit to be caught or a duck or a goose or a small deer.
In the beginning, it was just going round the hedges and flushing out quatting rabbits and catching them with a greyhound. I’d never go the same way twice, in case anyone was watching me. I always went a different way. The rabbits would be quatting in a form and the greyhound would flush them and run after them and it was good sport. Or I’d wander round and nick the traps the gamekeepers had set for vermin like stoats and weasels and squirrels and suchlike. I’d take the traps and fox wires and snares for my own use. I didn’t have any money to buy that kind of gear, so I’d steal the keepers’ instead.
I was coursing hare up by the quarry on Tortworth Estate one day. I had two bitches that were very good; they caught eighteen out of eighteen hares on the trot over ten days, without missing one. They were so clever, if a hare was in a form, they could pick it straight out of the quat. Anyway, I’m up by the downs, near the quarry, and I go into a field off the road. I have the dogs running loose and they put up a hare and catch it and bring it back. Then they put up another and catch it. Next thing, this Land Rover pulls up on the road and Lord Ducie sticks his fat head out the window but, because he’s on his own, he doesn’t get out of the motor.
‘What are you doing on my land?’
‘Minding my own business.’
‘Give me those hares.’
‘Piss off!’
‘I’ll get the police.’
‘Do whatever you want.’
He drives away.
I decide it’s time to leave, so I go up a farm track and hide the hares in a barn. I hang them up high, in case a fox comes round. About ten minutes later, I can see a police car going up and down the road, below at the field where I’ve been coursing the bitches. Up and down, up and down. They can’t see me. I’m up on the brow of a hill under a tree watching them. They come up to where I left the field, but they don’t get out because they don’t want to get their boots dirty. Then they drive away, down towards the village, and disappear.
Ducie knows me, but the coppers never come round the house. They know there’s nothing they can do unless they catch me red-handed or Ducie has a witness or they have the hares, so they don’t bother. I go back later when it’s dark and collect the kill. When I get home I go out to the kennels at the back of the house to see to the dogs. I’m getting them fresh water when I see this snarling and a flurry of tails. I drop the bucket and go running across. I try to get through the pack and manage to see a big threadbare cat curled up in a ball of blood-sticky fur. The dogs have torn a leg off and are savaging what’s left in a milling mass. I get them yelping away as best I can and into their kennels. The mangled thing on the gore-soaked ground tries to crawl away, but can’t.
I kill it with a brick.
Bob had an old Austin A35 that had to be bump-started to get it going. I remember when I was about twelve, we met up with some others on a Sunday morning. One of them was Benny, the village idiot – his name wasn’t really Benny, but we called him that after the character in the television series, Crossroads. Benny had been on the rough cider the night before and, when Bob reversed the car down The Butty, which was a narrow lane, it stalled. We all had to get out and push the car to start it again, but Benny farted and shat himself after being on the rough cider. It was a silent fart and we didn’t know until we were all back in the car and driving down tow
ards Arlingham to do a bit of hunting. All of a sudden, the car was filled with a terrible smell and we had to have the windows down and our heads hanging out so’s not to get sick.
When we got to where we were going, the animals could smell Benny a mile off and we couldn’t get near none of them. Bob made the dirty bugger wash his bum in a stream before we set off back to the village and the other men threw his trousers and underpants away. But Benny needed more than just a bum-wash to put him right. Cider was the medicine he said kept him sane in a sick society and able to function in this grunting hog of a world. A lot of local men drank the heavy brews like that, and I wonder if they knew the price they’d eventually have to pay for drowning their livers in scrumpy and flirting with an early death.
Another time I’m out with a dog and I bag a few hares. I’m on my way home and the farmer comes upon me and he’s not too happy. Now, I’m still just a boy, but I’m tough and Bob’s hard on me sometimes and he teaches me to fight as well as run. So, one word leads to another and the farmer takes a swipe at me. But I duck under it and belt him in the belly. He grabs hold of me and throws me against a fence-post and follows up with his fist, but I’m out of the way quick and he smacks his knuckles against the wood. While he’s howling, I send a left into his kidneys and a right into his gut again. He doubles over and I take off as fast as I can. I can hear him shouting after me.
‘I’ll get you, you bastard!’
‘I know who my father is, do you?’
I got my first gun licence when I was about twelve. I had two shotguns, a .410 and a 12-bore. You could walk down the street carrying a gun in those days and no one would take a blind bit of notice. Imagine what would happen if you did that now! Have the drones hovering overhead and a UN task force on its way, led by the Navy Seals. It was round the old bathing quarry on the Tortworth Estate where I shot my first rabbit. There was a burrow underneath some hazel bushes with always five or six or seven coneys out on an evening. It felt exciting – not a hundred yards from where Bob shot his first rabbit all those years before. But the best thing about it was, it was on the lands of Lord Moreton, Earl Ducie’s son. When the earl was alive, his son was called ‘lord’, and when the earl died, his son inherited the title and was the new Earl of Ducie. And the land and its animals were handed down from father to son, with no consideration at all given to the impoverished peasantry.
Anyway, as you know by now, I was brought up anti-authority. I hated anyone in uniform, or who spoke with a plummy accent, or who had a title – farmers and joe-cockys and gamekeeper bullies and all that lot. I believed, like Bob, that I had a right to the plentiful game that abounded in the English countryside back then; it belonged to everyone, not just the privileged few. So it was even sweeter to think I was taking something from the lords and earls as well as helping to feed the family.
One of the greatest pleasures in my young life was running away from them and telling them to ‘piss off ’. I even used to go onto the Earl of Ducie’s estate and hide in cover and watch him and his keepers shooting rabbits. They’d shoot the coneys and hang them up in a tree and move on. As soon as they were out of sight, I’d nick the rabbits and be off. I would’ve loved to have stayed and seen their faces when they came back and found the rabbits gone, but that would’ve been too risky – they might have taken a shot or two at me.
Once I had my guns I rarely went anywhere without them. After the first coney up at the local quarry, I found this orchard where I knew there’d be some more rabbits. I crept through the hedge and shot a couple of them. Then I put the gun down and went to collect them when the bedroom window goes up and this big fat face peers out wearing one of those old-fashioned nightcaps.
‘Drop them rabbits!’
I put my fingers up at the man and shouted back at him.
‘Piss off!’
Then I grabbed the gun and ran back through the hedge and away. I was to learn later, going through life, how to be invisible – not to be seen if at all possible – that a poacher must be like a ghost; you know he’s been there but you can never see him. But a lot of the fun of it when I was young was being able to run off and knowing none of the buggers could catch me. I was fit and fast and I loved the laughing sport of it.
I’d pushbike out and around the streams in April, searching for duck nests and taking the ducklings with a homemade landing net. I’d box them up and take them home and put them in pens. Then I’d fatten them up and sell them. We had a big flock of ducks in our garden at home – two hundred Aylesburys. We’d drive them down to the fields to graze and waddle in the pond-water and the neighbours were always complaining about the quacking as we passed along the way. But we didn’t care; it wasn’t much to moan about, compared to every day some new story about the total lack of morals among the rich and powerful. So why take it all out on our ducks?
As well as the ducklings, I’d go stealing pheasant eggs in summer and put them under broody bantam hens. A broody hen will sit on anything, even a smooth stone. They’d hatch out the pheasant eggs and then I’d bring them on and we either ate them or sold them to local people or game dealers. You could get £2.50 for a pheasant back then and you could sell as many as you could catch or rear, and more besides. Of course, the estate managers didn’t like me stealing their eggs and I could get into big trouble if I got caught. They came after me once and I made it onto a public highway where they couldn’t touch me, but the keeper knew I had the eggs in my pocket.
‘Alright, Tovey, you’ve outsmarted us.’
Then he smacked the pocket with his hand and smashed the eggs, rather than give me the satisfaction of having them. He went on his way, smirking, and I said, under my breath –
‘Next time, I’ll take twice as many.’
I’d take the red-legged partridge with a spring-loaded clap net, like Bob taught me to, and I’d fish and go lamping the pheasants at night. Now, there’s two kinds of lamping, so don’t get confused: for pheasants you just need a small torch to shine up in the trees, and a gun; for rabbits and hares, you need a lamp with a strong beam that mesmerises them for greyhounds to chase and catch them. It was a life of wildness, of ferrets and fenn traps and guns and greyhounds and foxes and pheasants – and cotton-ball clouds scudding on a summer sky and the sleeting rain blowing horizontal into my face in the wind-wailing winter. It was new life in spring and old life in autumn and I was always keeping clear of the world around me, that was trying all the time to catch me or con me in one way or another. Like, when this farmer called Jack Fleming used to get me setting traps for rats in his cow barns. I caught loads of vermin for him but he was a mean bugger and never wanted to pay me. He’d go missing when it was time to shell out and I’d have to traipse round looking for him.
Anyway, there weren’t always collared doves in this part of the world, but when they came in, I started going round the lanes shooting them. It was illegal to shoot them, even though it was legal to shoot pigeons, but they were lovely to eat and I couldn’t resist them. This farmer Jack Fleming only reported me to the police because he owed me money for catching the rats for him and, I suppose, he thought if I got sent away to reform school, he wouldn’t have to pay me. Local copper Harris came over and told me to stop shooting the doves, but I could tell he wasn’t all that bothered about it and only did it because of the complaint.
Fleming was known for being a nosy hedge-mumper, sneaking round the lanes to see what people were up to and not minding his own business. So I carried on shooting and eating the doves and nothing was ever done about it. I never got my money from Fleming either and he died and left everything to Frenchay Hospital in Bristol. He had no wife nor children and he left nothing to his extended family – or to me. The miserly bugger! I hope he died roaring.
Now, heritage and history fade fast in the brainwashed minds of the masses, with the middle-classes living in their comfort and conceit and the others either side of them on the social ladder misled as well, convinced by popular opinion that hunting and
poaching are cruel. But I’d try to make a clean kill whenever I went out, although it wasn’t always possible. Once, when I was young and out in the winter time, I shot a pheasant and it dropped onto a frozen pond. It was flopping about on the ice like a drunken penguin, but there was no way I was going to go out there and push my luck too far, stretched as it usually was like the thin ice on this thawing pond, ready to crack at any moment and plunge me eyeballs-deep into all sorts of trouble. I was just about to shoot it again and put it out of its misery when it slid over to the edge of the pond and I was able to pick it up and bite into its brain to kill it immediately – like Bob showed me how. How cruel’s that? Like throwing live lobsters into boiling water? Or a gavage stuck down a duck’s gullet to produce paté? I suppose it’s all a matter of perspective, ain’t it?
So you can see I was a bit of a wild boy when I was growing up. I’d go through the village shooting the streetlights out sometimes, and I went round and shot all the balloons they hung up for the Queen’s Silver Jubilee. And I’d nick the railway detonators from the huts. Railway detonators are coin-sized devices that make a loud bang as a warning signal to train drivers. They’re used for a number of reasons – in dense fog, when signals are difficult to see, or if there’s been an accident, or if there’s engineering works ahead, or to alert crews working on the rails. They were invented in the 1800s by an Englishman called Edward Cowper. They had lead straps either side, to fix them to the railway lines and hold them in place, and they had gunpowder inside. Anyway, I’d pinch them from the huts when no one was looking and fix them to people’s windows and doorhandles and letterboxes, then I’d shoot them from about twenty yards away. BANG! They could break a windowpane or shatter a letterbox and the people in the houses would run out, thinking the IRA had invaded south Gloucestershire. Then they’d call the local coppers and I’d be chased round the village, but I was like a shadow and they never could catch me.