by Bob
There’s no way I can outrun him with the weight I’m carrying, so I turn off into a lane – and the patrol car follows at about thirty yards. One of the men I’m with is called Roger and the other’s Cider Chris. Roger’s so frightened of the dark, his girlfriend has to walk him home of a night – and we call Chris ‘Cider Chris’ because he’s an alcoholic who later dies of sclerosis of the liver. There’s a farm track down the end of the lane.
‘When we get to the track, I’m slowing down.’
‘What then, Brian?’
‘We jump out and make a run for it across the fields.’
‘It’s dark out there.’
‘Don’t worry, stick with me and you won’t get lost.’
It’s about two in the morning and very dark – I mean countryside black. Just as I start to slow down, Cider Chris jumps out one side of the van and runs into a field. He gallops for about fifty yards and then collapses. Roger jumps out the other side and I know the coppers have seen both of them. I get out carefully, so I won’t be seen, and use the shadow of the truck to hide me from the lights of the cop car until I get into the darkness. Roger’s panicking and I know he’ll give us away if we don’t get moving. I tell him to follow close to me, but I don’t need to, because he’s practically hanging on to my leg and shivering like a plucked chicken in a gale. Other police have arrived now and they have a dog with them, so Cider Chris is a lost cause. The dog finds him hiding in a hedge and they take him away.
We have a five-mile trek to get to Wotton-under-Edge, where Roger lives and, while the police are dealing with Chris, we get a good head start on them and they never catch up with us. When we finally arrive there, Roger’s traumatised from the dark and says he’s going straight home. I’d rather hang around till the heat’s off, just in case, so I bypass the roads and stay out in a wood until morning, then I go back to my village. But, for some reason, the police are hiding close to Roger’s house and they nab him as soon as he shows himself and they take him in for questioning. He has tile dust on him and they have fingerprints and other evidence. So they’ve got the two men they saw escaping from the vehicle in the lane and the lorry ain’t registered in my name.
I should’ve been in the clear, shouldn’t I?
Unfortunately they found a rough-drawn map in the footwell of the truck, and that incriminated me. You see, the reclamation yard where we sold the tiles was having its weighbridge repaired and they sent us to a quarry to get weighed in. They drew a rough map of where the quarry was, I memorised it and told Chris to throw the map away while we were driving along. There was a hole in the footwell and, when he screwed it up and chucked it, the piece of paper didn’t go out, but went down the hole and got stuck there. The police found the map and the quarry, which made a record of every vehicle that used its weighbridge, including mine. They got a description of three men who were in that truck – and one of those descriptions fitted me.
As well as that, I’d been pulled previously in the vehicle, just after I bought it, so, even though it wasn’t registered to me I was still linked to it. They brought me in and questioned me and I denied everything. They couldn’t pin me to the tiles, because they only saw two men jumping out of the truck, but they still charged me.
Roger had already admitted to the charge, because they had him bang to rights. I said I gave him the truck to put a new exhaust on it for me and I wasn’t driving it that night – he backed that story up. Cider Chris had to go to a special pre-trial hearing, to see if he was fit to plead. He claimed he was crazy, due to alcoholic dementia. He said he didn’t know where he was most of the time and he drank a gallon of rough cider every morning and he believed it was still 1964.
It took the court twenty-two months to decide whether Cider Chris really had alcoholic dementia or if he was trying to pull a flanker and I was on bail for that length of time. In the end, they gave him the benefit of the doubt and he was found unfit to plead and the charges against him were dropped. That left me and Roger. They panicked Roger by turning the lights off in his cell and making sinister noises outside the door, and told him he’d get three years if he didn’t admit to sixteen other charges of stealing roofing tiles, to a total of £100,000 – so he did. They had no hard evidence against me, just a vague description from the quarry and my link to the truck, but nothing to place me at the scene on the night in question. So they changed the charge to one of conspiracy – conspiring to steal roofing tiles with two unnamed persons, even though Cider Chris had walked away from it scot-free.
I got myself a barrister and went along to Bristol Crown Court. The judge was another one who liked to hand out harsh sentences and who looked the sort who’d be out hunting with the Duke of Beaufort and all the other broad-bummed buggers I was stealing tiles off. I asked the barrister what I could get if I was found guilty.
‘On a bad day, four years.’
‘Shit!’
‘On a good day, on appeal, no less than three years.’
If you get a three-year sentence or over you get banned for life from having a shotgun licence – I couldn’t risk that.
‘I want to plead guilty to something.’
‘I advise against that. You have a good chance of being found not guilty.’
‘Not good enough.’
The barrister didn’t want me to, but he agreed that the prosecution might go for a guilty plea on a lesser charge, rather than risk an expensive trial where it was fifty-fifty if they’d get a result or not. So it was agreed that I’d plead guilty to ‘knowingly allowing my vehicle to be used for the theft of three loads of roofing tiles to the value of £3,000 by two unnamed persons’.
The judge sentenced me to two years, reduced to twenty-one months on account of my guilty plea. Roger got three years, reduced to two because of the length of time it had taken them to decide whether Cider Chris was demented or not. So, when you think about it, I came off worse than anyone else and I don’t know if that was because my name was Brian Tovey. Probably was. But I didn’t get a lifetime shotgun ban, and that was more important to me than doing twenty-one months in jail.
They sent me to Gloucester Prison first, but after a few months, I got moved to Leyhill. Now Leyhill, if you remember, was the open prison where I’d run across the parade ground with the goose over my back. It was right in the middle of my poaching territory and I knew every field and wood and stream and lane for miles in any direction. By the time I got sent there, the Nissen huts were gone and replaced with accommodation blocks and the regime was fairly lacksadaisy. I’d been in tougher places.
The layout of Leyhill was something like this: you had fifty-five hectares of land, with the chain-link fence at the back that I climbed over with the goose, which led to a lane and then up a bank and away to Tortworth Lake and beyond. There were gates in the fence that you could squeeze under if you were slightly built. The interior had numerous buildings, including a sports hall and a theatre and accommodation blocks like A and B and so on.
There was farmland that the prisoners worked on, and gardens and a wooded area close to the theatre, and open fields away to the sides and an administration block at the front with a low wall that led to a road. We were mostly unsupervised and, as long as we were back in the accommodation blocks before they locked them up at night, we could do more-or-less what we liked. They took a head count in the morning out on the parade ground and you had to be there for that. Otherwise it was a bit of a holiday camp for me and I was able to creep out of the prison whenever I liked and come back before lock-up.
It wasn’t long before I was sneaking things back and forth for the other inmates. They’d pay me to take out letters and the like and bring back cans of beer and bottles of spirits. No one else knew the lie of the land like I did, and if they went out they might get lost in the dark and not be able to make their way back in time for lock-up. If that happened, they’d be deemed to have escaped – although technically you can’t escape from an open prison, just abscond – and they’d get time a
dded on and be transferred to a tougher nick. But I was able to make my way up through the woods and away across the fields and streams and I knew every inch of the land in light or dark.
I arranged for this woman I knew to pick me up in her car and I’d go deliver what I had to and buy the stuff to bring back and still have time for a bit of fun, if you know what I mean. Well, it wasn’t long before some of the others wanted to come with me. I didn’t want to get slowed down by people tagging along and falling into thorn bushes and making a load of noise, but they offered to pay me well, so I agreed. I started taking them out for the evening – those who lived locally could arrange to see their wives and families, the others could go get a burger or a pizza or I’d take them to The Cross Hands pub for a few beers. Nobody said anything to us because the prison clobber was decent enough, nice shirts and good quality jeans, and we didn’t look out of place. It was alright, just as long as we got back before they locked the accommodation blocks up.
One night I planned to go out with this big bloke called Noah – he was six foot eight and built to match. There was something on in the theatre and, instead of going there, we were ready to sneak away through the woods. But then it started snowing and that made for a change of plan and a cancellation of the excursion.
‘They’ll see our footprints, Noah. Only ours will be leading to the woods, the rest’ll be going into the theatre.’
‘I don’t care, I want to go!’
You didn’t argue with Noah when he said he wanted to do something. So we went – up through the trees and out towards Tortworth Lake and the road where the woman with the car was waiting. On the way, we were nearly come upon by a keeper on a quad bike with his lights off. He was looking for poachers, not prisoners, but I didn’t want us to get too shitted up by having to make a run for it, so we hid down until he drove off. As luck would have it, I saw him before he saw us and we continued on and had a nice evening out.
When we’re coming back, I see two screws as we’re approaching the wood – this time we’re not so lucky and they see us as well. We can’t come back the conventional way, so we has to run round the back of the prison and squeeze under the gates, but Noah’s so big he gets stuck. The alarm’s sounding now and it won’t be long before they lock the whole place up. I can hear the screws coming and calling,
‘They ran round this way!’
I’m pulling at Noah and, just before the screws come in sight of us, he manages to get through and I’m thinking it might have been easier to go over the fence rather than under the gates. We make our way quickly up to A Block, but the place is locked and we can’t get in. There’s a window into the kitchen but that’s locked too, so Noah head-butts it and smashes the glass. Well, I’m through the smashed window like a ferret down a rabbit burrow, but big Noah gets stuck again. I pick up a metal tray and hit him on the head and knock him back out into the yard. The next thing, he grabs hold of the window frame and rips the whole thing out of the wall and gets himself through. Nobody hears the bashing and crashing over the noise of the alarm siren and we make our way swiftly and stealthily to our rooms without anyone seeing us.
Next morning they did a head count and noticed the cuts and bruises on Noah’s forehead. He got shipped out, along with another bloke who had nothing to do with that night and was crying like a baby at the thought of being transferred to a tough closed prison for the rest of his sentence. I said nothing.
Then Cider Chris decided to get a torch and my crossbow from Bob and meet me one dark evening in November. Maybe he felt guilty about getting off scot-free and me and Roger doing the time, or maybe he just wanted to make a bit of cider money. Anyway, he brought the bow and we went lamping up along Tortworth Lake, all the way to the boat house. I got twenty-six pheasants over a period of three nights and Chris took them back with him to sell. But, on the third night, he was drunk-driving home and he hit a nine-year-old girl who ran out from between some parked cars. He was arrested, but refused to blow into a breathalyser. He tried his old trick of alcohol dementia, but it didn’t work this time and he got five months in a category C prison.
Another night, I’m taking out two kitbags of jeans and prison shirts to sell, which I nicked from the laundry. The shirts are decent, like I said, and I can get £20 a pair for the jeans. I intend to sell one of the kitbags as well and fill the other with booze to bring back. I’ve arranged for the woman in the car to meet me and everything’s set up. Then this bloke comes over to me.
‘I hear you’re going out tonight.’
‘That’s right.’
‘Can you take out some packages for me?’
‘Risky, with the kitbags.’
I explain to him that if I’m come upon I’ll be dropping the kitbags and making a run for it. His name will be on the packages and they’ll find them and he’ll be shipped out. He says he’ll take the chance and he pays me £10. Well, as sod’s law would have it, when I get up by the sports hall and start going across the fields, I hear a shout behind me.
‘Stop!’
I turn and see two screws coming after me fast. I drop the kitbags and run through the prison houses to a barn where I’ve arranged to meet the woman with the car. I know the alarm will go off soon and they’ll lock the place up and I have to get back in before that happens.
‘Quick, get me round to the back of the prison.’
She drives me past the main entrance and round to the lane at the back and I squeeze under the gates again. But the accommodation blocks are already locked. Then I notice a group of blokes outside the library, which is also locked. They knock on the door and a screw emerges.
‘Can’t you people hear the alarm? Get back to your block, there’s been a breakout.’
They start traipsing back to the accommodation blocks and I file in behind them, hands in pockets. The screws unlock the door and let us in. Next morning there’s a head count and the bloke who sent the packages gets shipped out – and another innocent bloke as well.
It was like ‘Carry On Up The Clink’.
But it couldn’t last forever and one night I’m in town to get some tobacco when I’m come upon by a group of screws from Leyhill who’re out on a stag night or something. They recognise the prison clobber and I’m off down the street like a bitch on heat being chased by seven sheepdogs. Shouts of ‘Stop where you are!’ come from behind me, as I duck down this alleyway where a crowd of weird-looking winos are loitering – up to no good for sure. I zig-zag through them, with a bump in the solar plexus for an old woman with a moustache, sending her sprawling.
‘Stop that man!’
‘He tried to molest me!’
Now the down-and-outs are after me as well as the screws. Maniac on the loose, mugging methylated spirit drinkers! I round the corner and see a church across the way.
‘There he goes!’
‘Where?’
‘Into the church. I saw him run into the church!’
The hunt’s in full cry now, with all the hounds slobbering and me as the fugitive fox. The screws are out in front, being of fitter frame than the winos. There’s a late service for all the faithful in progress as the chase bursts into the place of holy worship – all howling and baying for blood. But they’re instantly subdued by the menacing voice of the vicar, as he bellows out over our sacrilegious heads, ‘This is a house of God!’ – in no uncertain terms. There is some religion left in the world, for those who know where to find it.
I duck out a side door in the confusion, but the screws have telephoned the prison and it’s locked up by the time I get back. So, next day, I’m shipped out to a category C prison on Dartmoor called Channings Wood.
But I only had a few months left to serve and then I was free as a bird again.
Two coursing dogs, after a run
14
Brian – Poaching Tricks
There’s a lot of rainbow trout in the streams around our village and up towards Kingswood. Sometimes I’d shoot them in the shallows with a .22 air rifle
– smaller fish, maybe two or three pound in weight. In even shallower water, on a night with a lamp, I’d use the .410 to get bigger fish – maybe three- or four-pounders or more. I’d travel miles to get them, mostly on private farms, but also at Damery, where there’s lovely clear water, and on the Berkeley Estate. They don’t like me poaching their fish because they have fishing clubs paying them for the privilege. But how can a fish that swims up and down a stream belong to someone who owns the land either side of that stream? It’s like saying, ‘I own that water while it’s flowing through my land.’ How bloody presumptuous is that? I could catch a couple of hundred rainbow and brown trout over a short period of time, and it makes no difference to me what side of the river bank I’m on – the right side or the wrong side.
But I don’t do so much trout fishing these days, apart from what I need for the family. People don’t want them now – wild-caught fish, they prefer their fish filleted and from a supermarket, with the head off, or battered and deep fried. They’re no good to me if they’re more than I need to eat and I can’t sell them. Why kill them in the first place if I can’t do either?
But it’s nice sometimes to be on the bank of a river, where you can hide awhile from the brute swagger of the world – with the moon pulling its reflection over the water and the scent of the earth rising up and the air dew-fresh around you. You can let your mind off its level-headed leash for a scamper – until the fish bite and you call it back into concentration.