The Last English Poachers

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The Last English Poachers Page 11

by Bob


  But that’s not the end of it.

  A couple of days previous, I’m up on Tortworth Lake feeding in some Canada geese with bread. As soon as one of them comes close enough, I grab it by the neck. But the park keeper’s hiding up by the boat house and he shouts out:

  ‘Stop!’

  I do a runner and he comes after me on a pushbike. I gain ground and get up a big bank, but the only way forward is through an open prison called Leyhill. I climb over the chain-link fence at the back and keep going. The prison was an old American army hospital in the war and the prisoners are housed in Nissen huts. They’re all out on head-count parade and I have to run through them. They don’t know what’s happening as I barge between the ranks with a goose over my back. The screws are speechless. Someone shouts, ‘Oi, where you going?’

  I shout back.

  ‘I’m a gamekeeper . . . chasing poachers.’

  Then I run away through the prison fields and over a wall and onto a road, before they can gather their wits and come after me. After about a mile I stop to catch my breath. I wait to see if anyone’s chasing, but no one is.

  A Canada goose is as tough as a farrier’s crotch and hardly worth all the running. But I sell it for £3, which is better than nothing. A couple of days later, the coppers come round.

  ‘Were you up by Tortworth Lake on Sunday?’

  ‘I can’t recall.’

  ‘Would you come to Sodbury police station?’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘You know what for.’

  I’m questioned about the goose, which I deny all knowledge of, as usual.

  ‘The park keeper saw you.’

  ‘Did he?’

  I’m charged with stealing a Canada goose to the value of £15 and let go.

  But now, in court, they add this offence to the one of hitting Moreton with the brick and the park keeper’s there to give evidence against me. The old magistrate thinks he’s a right witty bugger.

  ‘And what happened to this goose?’

  ‘We don’t know, your worship.’

  ‘Let’s hope it’s not on Sarum Plain, to be driven cackling home to Camelot.’

  Hee haw, hee haw, hee haw – they all laugh like demented donkeys at this quote from King Lear, even though none of them probably knows what he’s talking about. I certainly don’t at the time. Neither do I laugh when he adds another three months to my sentence and I’m banned from using a firearm, even an air rifle, for five years.

  By now I’ve learned enough about the law to know you always gets stitched up in magistrates’ court, because they’re all the same class of people who run the show and they think they’re superior to the ordinary man because they were born with a silver spoon up their bum and went to college and suchlike. So I appeal on length of sentence and conviction for the goose and, five weeks later, I’m in Bristol Crown Court, waiting in this codified corridor with an assortment of fallen angels – shoulder-rubbing with the pickpockets and pushers, shoplifters and shysters and indecent exposers in public places.

  ‘Next case?’

  ‘Tovey, your honour.’

  ‘A foreigner?’

  ‘A poacher.’

  ‘I see. Certainly looks the type.’

  The conviction for the goose stands, but I get three months knocked off the sentence. I’ve already done two months on remand, so I’ve only got one month to go. This is the time of Willie Whitelaw’s ‘short, sharp shock’ policy for young offenders and I’m put to making concrete blocks in Usk. But it don’t bother me too much, apart from being confined and not being able to ramble. I’m fit as a butcher’s dog and the tough regime inside the detention centre’s no problem for me.

  I get released in September and I’m back out poaching the very next day.

  May twelfth is traditionally known as Brancher’s Day, when rook fledglings start to stretch their wings in preparation for leaving the nests. Rooks are wary and sharp-sighted birds and this is the most effective way of culling them to protect the songbird population. People get together at rookeries with guns and shoot all the young rooks as they walk along the tree branches – that’s why it’s called Brancher’s Day. Rooks are also seen as pests to farmers because they destroy their crops – although I always thought they helped the farmer by keeping slugs and insects down, but what do I know about farming? I always saw the rook as a social and merry bird who keeps an intelligent eye on what’s happening around his territory. But this is tradition and rook pie was a popular dish back then, even if it’s rarely eaten now. Anyway, I’m out around Primrose Vale on Brancher’s Day, shooting the rooks. I’m walking back across a farmer’s land and I see this bloke coming along the field, shouting at me. I have a 12-bore and, like I said, after being in the detention centre, I’m automatically banned from carrying any kind of firearm for five years. I have a balaclava on and I pull it down over my face so he can’t identify me.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘Exactly as I want to do.’

  I walk away, not looking for no trouble, but he comes up behind me and is about to punch me in the back of the head. I turn round quick, like, and hit him with the barrels of the gun and walk away again. He doesn’t try to follow me a second time.

  Four days later a police car pulls me up in the lanes.

  ‘Come with us.’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘We need to question you about an assault.’

  I go with them because I’ve got no choice. I don’t know how I was identified and I deny everything, but I’m put on remand in Gloucester Prison while they come and search the house for the gun. There’s six licensed guns in our house at the time and they can’t identify the one involved in the assault. But I’m still charged with ABH and possessing a gun within five years of release from a detention centre. I’m kept on remand and I can’t get hold of the prosecution statements until I’m taken to Crown Court in Bristol. I try to get a witness to give me an alibi, but I’m not able to. Had I been on the outside, I might have been able to sort something, but it’s too difficult from the inside.

  The judge I get has a reputation for his heavy sentences and those going up before him in front of me are coming away with the likes of ten years. I’m thinking I’m going to get a stiff one for hitting someone with a 12-bore shotgun, especially with my previous being taken into account. I’ve already pleaded guilty, as advised by my barrister, because that might get me a reduced sentence – so there’s no trial as such, just the judge’s summing up and that. Anyway, he’s waffling on from behind his bench about how measures will soon be in place to enable the forces of law and order to identify us criminals from space, while we’re innocently going about our daily business. And I’m not paying much attention, until he says –

  ‘Actually, I know your village very well. My father was vicar there for a time.’

  It only turns out that his father was the old vicar I used to push round in his wheelchair when I was a young lad. I don’t know if the judge recognises my name and remembers that time, but he gives me a year, which is very light, considering. I’ve already been on remand for four and a half months and I’m sent to Bristol Prison and given a job painting cells. Three and a half months later, I’m free again.

  Within two days of being released, I’m back out poaching.

  Out poaching on Tortworth Estate, 1990s

  10

  Bob – Lamping and Other Stories

  I think Brian already told you there’s two kinds of lamping. The first kind involves being out at night with a small handheld torch and a gun to shoot pheasants roosting in the trees, and we’ve said a lot about that. The second kind’s going out at night with a fairly powerful, solid-beam lamp and a greyhound in search of rabbits and hares. For me, this is a great way to see a sighthound in action. It takes patience and skill and you has to know what you’re doing – so does the dog. The first thing I does is go out during the day and trek the area I’m going to lamp that night. I’ll know where the quarry’s likely
to be and I’ll remember fences and barbed wire and other things that might damage the dog. The greyhound will be running at full pelt in the black dark, except for the beam from the lamp, so I don’t want it taking its head off on a wire or breaking its legs in a hole.

  The best time to lamp is on dark, windy nights with plenty of cloud and as little moon as possible. I make sure I’m downwind of the rabbits or hares and that’ll deaden the sound, as well as the smell, of me and the dog approaching. I takes the time to position myself and the greyhound where I wants to be, from the reconnaissance earlier in the day. Then I scan the field with the lamp to find the coneys quatting in the forms. A lot of people use lurchers for lamping, but I always prefer the greyhound. It’s by far the best dog going and it has to be a fast hound that’ll be quiet and do as I tells it. I’ve lamped with a brace of dogs as well as with a single dog, it makes no matter to me – though two dogs can sometimes get tangled up in each other and have a tug-o-war with the kill afterwards, where a single dog will be single-minded and bring me back the rabbit or hare in one piece. The greyhound must be trained to come back as soon as I calls it, after it makes the catch and, if the quarry ain’t dead by then, I’ll kill it myself in seconds.

  I keeps a tight grip on the greyhound until I’m ready to slip him – until I sees the ruby glint of a rabbit’s eyes. If the lamp comes across anything else, like a deer or a fox or a badger, or even a cat, I might hold the dog back – or I might not. Once I see the rabbit or hare, I’ll keep the lamp beam on it until I’m sure the dog sees it too. As soon as he spots it, he’ll perk up and try to pull away. I lets him go and he’s off like a bullet out of a gun and it’s a sight to behold. It’s like being back when the prehistoric people moved through their dark world at the beginning of time. I feel what they must have felt back then, in the night – under the never ending black sky. It gives an edge to my senses and I knows I’m alive and alert.

  Adrenaline rushes through my veins and through the dog’s, and the short hairs stand on the back of my neck and it feels like I’m part of the greyhound, running with him. I’m no longer myself, so I ain’t able to explain myself. And there ain’t nothing to explain – no sense nor sentiment in the primitive night. To be able to explain it would be like being able to explain the meaning of everything. And who can do that? I just forget who I am – what I am – and every step becomes its own little lifetime as I runs through the dark field. Birth and life and death. And again. And again. Until it’s over and the dog brings me back the kill.

  If I hunts the same area a few times over, the rabbits can get lamp shy – they gets crafty after a while and run through the hedge. Soon as you shines the light on ’em, before you can shoot ’em or put a dog on ’em, they’ll bolt, and that’s when some people say to use a red filter lens to confuse ’em. But I don’t, because it don’t shine a long way, so I just leave the fields be for a while and go lamping somewhere else.

  But not everyone has the choices that I do – to go where they wants and hunt where they wants – so they got to improvise. I suppose I’m a bit like that fella in Australia I heard about once, who staked a claim to a remote bit of some red desert and declared independence from the rest of the country. He made his own money and printed his own postage stamps and paid no taxes and was completely in charge of his own little acre of land, without interference from any authority. I ain’t got the same exemption from the law, but I knows how he must’ve felt, to rise every morning to a brand new sun and to walk at night with the darkness as your friend and to feel at one with the free birds and all the wild things around you – and I stretch out my arms and say ‘Halle-bloody-lujah!’

  Slimbridge, on the Severn Estuary, is a wetland area of marshes where Siberian wildfowl spend the winter. It’s full of geese and ducks and curlews and all sorts of other birds and it belonged to the Berkeley Estate before it became a wildfowl sanctuary. The Dumbles is an area of the foreshore with gulleys going through it out into the sea and geese fly over it in the morning and sometimes feed there. The toffs used to shoot geese from the foreshore before it became a wildlife trust and a sanctuary for game birds, and they used to have a decoy down there – not a decoy you’d use to lure in geese over a stubble field – a wetland netted decoy.

  Let me explain: a wetland decoy has a big wide circular mouth, made of sticks. It’s covered in nets and it gradually gets narrower and narrower as it goes in, for about seventy or eighty yards. Wildfowl will swim happily in the mouth because there’s nothing to threaten or obstruct them. A specially trained dog flits in and out of the decoy, attracting the wildfowl and taking them further and further in. The birds only get brief glimpses of the dog and they follow it because they’re curious. The dog charms them to follow it in, just like a stoat will charm a rabbit, and they’ll go deeper and deeper, following and following. All the time, the decoy’s getting narrower and narrower and they go into a funnel at the end which can be shut off. Then the hunters get in front of the mouth of the decoy and the ducks has no place to go – so they move in there and kills ’em. The Berkley Estate decoyers caught thousands of ducks and geese over the winters for the castle and those connected with it.

  But people like me was never welcome there.

  Then Slimbridge was taken over by the Wildfowl Trust and now the castle crowd have a shoot once a year down there – but, as a rule, there’s no shooting allowed. In Scotland, anyone can shoot from foreshores when the tide’s out, but in England you have to belong to a club, because they’ve paid for the rights to shoot from what was, and still should be, free fowling ground. Gloucester Wildfowl Club has the shooting rights to the foreshore near Slimbridge between low and mean high tide and you got to do a course in bird identification to become a member. I’ve been shooting birds for longer than any of them and I don’t need no identification course to know what I’m shooting. All foreshores is Crown property between low and high tides and anyone can go fishing there without a licence – but these clubs have exclusive shooting rights from the councils so ordinary people like me, who want to shoot a duck or a goose for dinner, have had that right taken away from them – without even being asked!

  But it never bothered me whether I was welcome or not, and the Dumbles was always one of my favourite hunting haunts. I’d go over there, hit and run, sneaking in through the dykes and gulleys and reed beds, get a few shots away, bag ’em up and get out. We liked to go down there at Christmas time and, one year, Brian went over on his bike when it was dark. He walked along the canal then slipped down into a dyke, where he couldn’t be seen by anyone in the bird towers, watching with their binoculars. He waited for the morning flight off the estuary and shot ten geese, but they was too heavy to carry home on his pushbike, so he made it back to the towpath, hid the birds, then walked into the village and found a phone. He rang me up and I drove over there and picked him and the geese up. Ten shots from a 12-bore makes a lot of noise but, on that occasion, no one came out and he got away with it.

  On another Christmas Day, I sneaked out on the foreshore to do some shooting and this time I brought a dog. He was the old springer called Jack, who found the albino deer for Brian, if you remember, but he was nearing the end of his usefulness. I shot a few geese and one of them fell into the nearby Sharpness to Gloucester Canal. By the time I got over there, old Jack had gone in after the goose but couldn’t get back out, because the water level was about two foot lower than the edge of the canal. The dog wouldn’t let go of the kill and he was paddling to keep hisself afloat and was nearly dead with the cold by the time I pulled him out. Once he was out of the water, the spaniel got the life back into him and dried hisself out in the long grass. But it just goes to show, a good dog won’t give up what it’s retrieved, no matter what. Jack was twelve years old when I shot him, because he was ill and dying. He’d done enough work to shame a bulldozer and retrieved tons of game in his dog’s life. But when it’s time to go it’s time to go. No use hanging about trying to prolong this life – better to move
on into the adventure of the next.

  And it’s things like that what makes life such a sweetness – the excitement of poaching, the not knowing what might happen next, the whistling gladness of it all. When the family was growing up, I had to poach to feed them. And I was very successful at it – pheasants and partridge and rabbits and fish and deer and anything I could get. I remember once I went down to Bristol with a bit of scrap metal and made about fifteen quid. On the way back, I spotted a cock pheasant behind a barn, so I went home and got my gun and came back and shot it. It was close to one of the big estates and, as I was making my way back to the car, the estate agent came through a hedge with a threatening scowl on his ugly mug. I knew he was going to blame me for shooting the pheasant on the estate, which I didn’t, it was just outside it. He was a big bugger and I wasn’t going to give him the chance to come at me, so I raised my gun and shouted at him.

  ‘Stay where you are!’

  He backed off, into the hedge he’d come out of. But when I got to the car, the earl who owned the estate was there with the boot open. I didn’t take too kindly to that.

  ‘What d’you think you’re doing?’

  ‘Looking for game.’

  ‘And did you find any?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘My car’s on a public highway; you’ve no right to be meddling with it.’

  But they thought they could get away with anything, and most of the time they could, because of the undue deference shown to them by the forelock-pulling public – and the police. He knew me and I knew him. He came towards me with a walk that once might have been used to follow funerals.

  ‘What’s in your bag, Mr Tovey?’

 

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