The Last English Poachers (11 page)

I’m still drinking heavy at the time, and fighting with them who gets too chopsy with me. Eventually, I gets barred out of every pub in the local area and I have to walk over to Charfield
to get a drink. But Cora bears with me and she becomes mother to all my three children. And once she even comes out poaching with me. She’s dressed in britches, with a coat and a bobble hat
pulled down over her hair. I have my little Austin car and we go up onto the Earl of Ducie’s estate. I shoot some pheasants and the dog catches a rabbit and we have a lot of fun. On the way
back to the car, we’re come upon by a land agent. I warn him away.

‘Stay where you are.’

He thinks Cora’s a man because of the low light and the way she’s dressed and there’s two poachers for him to deal with, so he stands back. When we gets to the car, old
Ducie’s there with the boot up, looking for poached game.

‘Put that boot down!’

‘Or what?’

‘Or he’ll belt you.’

I point to Cora when I say that. Just like the agent, Ducie thinks Cora’s another male poacher and he don’t like the odds of two-to-one, so he moves away while we get into the car
and drive off home.

Well done to Cora!

But the drinking was getting the better of me and was making me ill. It was affecting my liver and kidneys and every other organ in my body. I’d never admit to no one I had a problem and,
if I’d gone on the way I was going, I’d have been six foot under long before my time. And I’d have missed out on the best part of my life, seeing my boys grow up into the good men
they are today and having the company of the woman I loves for so many happy years.

I got stopped in my tracks one day, when I was labouring on a building site in Charfield for a few bob to buy something or other. It was shortly after I married Cora and I’d had a big
drinking session the night before and I felt terrible. This was unusual, because I had a big drinking session most nights and I was always alright the next day. But it was different this time. I
lasted as long as I could on the site, but I was disorientated and, in the end, a mate had to take me home. But I kept on drinking, though not nearly as much. It was another two years or so before
I gave it up completely – when I was nearly dead and we had no money in the house, because I drank it all.

It got to the stage where a few pints would put me in bed for a week with the shakes – not even the strength to sit up. I knew then if I didn’t stop I’d soon be dead. I told
Cora to pull back the carpet in the living room and lay newspapers on the bare brown tiles, then put a mattress on top of the newspapers and make a bed for me there. I knew what I had to do –
what I had to go through to save my life. I lay there shaking and shivering and not knowing where I was and the sweat from my body soaked through the mattress and the newspapers underneath and
turned the floor tiles white. I was in a terrible state altogether, with delirium tremens and the horrors and the shakes and barrel fever or anything else you likes to call it.

I was sick for a full year and couldn’t leave the house and could easily have died, if I hadn’t had Cora to take care of me. When I recovered I saw an advert in the local newspaper
for Alcoholics Anonymous. Cora rang the number and a priest came round to see me. The next day he took me to an AA meeting. I was frightened to go, because I was still shaking and very weak, but I
went, and admitted I was an alcoholic, and I’ve never had a drink since. It wasn’t difficult to give up the boozing in the end, because I was so sick, and I never had a longing for
alcohol in all the years since then. I owes it to my family to stay sober because without them I never would have made it, and I got no illusions about what would happen to me if I took a drink
again now. I used to drive blokes round to the AA meetings after I seen the light, but only one of them stopped drinking for good.

That was me!

Drink loosens the tongue, and the most dangerous thing a man has is his tongue. It can get him into all sorts of trouble. It’s best to keep quiet and stay out of arguments and just try to
enjoy life. I love my wife and family above all else – the only thing that will make me angry these days is if there’s a threat to them. I’m not very big, but there’s some
people who’ve found out the hard way not to underestimate me. I ain’t proud of the things I did while I was hard-drinking. But what’s done is done and can’t ever be taken
back and it’s a sinful shame when I think back on how I used to be. But when I was sober, I built up the bond I has now between me and my family and that bond was strong enough to hold us
together in the hard drunken times.

I ain’t had a drink since 1974 and that’s over forty years ago.

Giving up the drink was the best thing that ever happened to me. Life in the Tovey household gets calmer then, because I’m not coming home pissed every night. I get fit again and I has
three greyhounds hunting in a pack close to a brook called the Little Avon, below where we live. I cross the water and let the greyhounds loose. I’m walking up a steep hill and the dogs is
working the hedge as we move along it. Suddenly, all three of them’s gone in there and I can’t see ’em no more. I goes through after them and can spot them away in the middle of
the next field. They’re chasing a small roe deer and they bring it down about a hundred yards from me. I’m running as fast as I can to get to them and I haul them away from the kill and
tie ’em up. I has no vehicle with me and it’s too far to carry all the way home. So I guts the deer and puts it up in a tree to keep it away from foxes and other predators. I throws the
pluck to the dogs and they makes short work of it. Soon the area’s clean and it looks like nothing’s happened.

That night, after it gets dark, I comes back and takes the deer down from the tree and I’m carrying it back to the car, about half a mile away. I’m crossing an open field to the road
when this keeper comes upon me. He’s carrying a gun and he points it at me.

‘You going to shoot me?’

‘If I have to.’

‘You ain’t got the balls for that.’

I keeps walking towards the road. He knows once I get out there he’s lost me. There’s no mobile phones back then – he can go for help or call the coppers if he likes but, by
the time he gets back, I’ll be long gone. There’s only one thing for it – if he can’t shoot me, then he’ll have to fight me and the winner takes the field. He throws
down his gun and takes his jacket off and spars with the air. I throw down the deer and roll up my sleeves. I’m only a small man and this keeper’s much bigger and he thinks he’ll
be able to get the better of me. But I’ve been fighting for seven years in the Navy and after that in pubs and on street corners and I’m no pushover.

We circle round, sizing each other up in the gloaming. He’s the first to lunge, but I easily sidestep his right cross and land one on his jaw as he lumbers past. This makes him angry, and
an angry fighter will always lose the bout. You got to stay calm and collected and wait for the right opening. He comes after me like a mad bull and I picks him off with stingers to the solar
plexus and the kidneys and the small of the back, then dart out of danger before he can connect with a killing fist. I’m telling myself to keep out from him when, suddenly, he lands a lucky
one on me. It’s a big swinging swipe and it sends me staggering back, but I don’t go over. He sees I’m dazed and senses blood and comes after me. Another brutal right to the side
of my face sends me to the ground. He’s standing over me and I wait for his boot to go in and finish the job. But this keeper must’ve learned the Marquis of Queensbury rules or
something, because he don’t try to do me on the ground – he stands back and waits to see if I’m going to get up. Big mistake. By the time I’m back on my feet, my
head’s cleared and I circle him like a snapping hound after an enraged bear. My fists is fast, flying into his sides and stomach and the big grunty begins to break down. He drops his guard to
protect his hurting body and I launches a both-feet-in-the-air blow to his chin. He stands for a second like a statue, then he falls over like a felled tree onto his face. I picks up the deer and
goes on my way.

It’ll be the last time that keeper lets a poacher back up off the ground.

When I gets home, I hangs the deer in the lean-to and skins it. Then I joints it up and keeps some for the family. The rest I distributes around the village like always, selling to them who can
afford it and giving away to them who can’t. That’s what my house is like, all the time – full of wild meat in the freezers and there’s always something for them that likes
a bit of game for their dinner and for them in need of a feed. Even so, like I said before, I still keeps myself to myself because I ain’t never been one for the complicated issue, and was
always only after the simplest of lives. But you gets caught up sometimes in things you can’t control and can be blown along like smoke, no matter how hard you tries to avoid it.

I kept a lot of dogs at one time, along with a flock of geese and the two hundred Aylesbury ducks and fifty cockerels – twenty-five in the front garden and twenty-five in
the back. We had big gardens and no money, but we had plenty of food. The toffee-noses in the village never liked the noise, thinking it lowered the value of their houses. And sometimes they was as
bad as the lords and earls. But we wasn’t next to or near any close neighbours and I didn’t give a damn even if we was. I lived my own way and let others live their way. I never
complained about nobody in the village and I couldn’t explain why they would want to complain about me when I herded my fowls down the road to the fields where they grazed and grew fat. The
council came out a couple of times and I said to them, ‘Tell the Duke of Beaufort to get rid of his pack of hounds and I’ll get rid of my dogs.’

‘What?’

‘Tell him to get rid of his pheasants and I’ll get rid of my fowls.’

They had no answer to that. In the end they sent me a letter giving me permission to keep my menagerie and I retained my rights as a freeman of England.

Now, the Codrington family were slave-traders in the West Indies for hundreds of years and they made their money from slaves and sugar. From the middle of the eighteenth
century, they preferred to live on their estates in Gloucestershire and left the management of the plantations to overseers. They were notorious authoritarians and, in 1786, Granville Sharp, a
longstanding opponent of the slave trade, even wrote to the Archbishop of Canterbury about their ancestors. But we didn’t worry much about their reputation and we poached their estate along
with all the others, taking dozens of pheasants from them. There was always a big shoot up there and me and my boys went lamping one night near Christmas. We’d been rabbiting there before and
seen how many pheasants they had, so we thought we’d take some off their hands. We got dropped off by a mate of mine and arranged with him to come back for us at a certain time. We shot
eighty-one pheasants and had ’em all sacked up and got back to the meeting point forty minutes early.

The bloke who dropped us was late picking us up, because he was scared of the Codringtons. He’d heard about their ruthless reputation and was probably afraid of being flogged with a
horse-whip, even though they only did that to their slaves – when they was allowed to have slaves. We waited and waited and it was getting dangerous, because we could have been come upon at
any minute. We heard the keepers patrolling and we hid ourselves and the guns and pheasants. In the meantime, our lift arrived and we was nowhere to be seen. He started calling for us: ‘Bob!
Brian! Robert!’

The keepers heard him and nabbed him and took him away, but they left the motor with the keys in it behind. We jumped in and took off as quick as we could.

He spent the night in the local police cells and went back for his car in the morning, but it was gone and he had to walk all the way to the village and arrived weeping and wailing. He was
relieved when he found out we had the motor and he never got charged with anything. I said, ‘That’ll teach you to be on time.’

But he never dropped us off nowhere again. We lamped two hundred and forty pheasants from Codrington that Christmas, and another hundred and sixty from Tortworth, and sold ’em to butchers
and postmen and villagers and even to the police. Everyone loves a pheasant at Christmas time. As far as I knows, the last of the Codringtons drives a taxi now and lives in a small cottage
somewhere. James Dyson, who invented the bagless vacuum cleaners, bought the big estate.

Speaking of the Codringtons, I remember ferreting in Old Sodbury, which is near their land, with my two sons, Brian and Robert. Robert used to come out with us sometimes when he was younger, but
now he likes to do things nice and legal like – he ain’t what you might call a true poacher, like me and Brian. He also works now, at a regular job, so he don’t do it full time,
like us. He conforms to society more than us but that don’t make him no less in my eyes. He’s a strong man and he stays close to his family and never complains about anything we does
and he don’t compromise with the shysters and shadowmen.

Anyway, we’re on a bank overlooking a church, with a bridle path at the bottom. We’re after live rabbits to use for droppers and we’ll sell ’em to people who wants to do
a bit of drop-coursing for £5 apiece. We has eleven in hessian sacks when a couple of saddle-bumpers come along on hunting horses – a man and a woman. He shouts at us with a plummy
accent.

‘What are you doing?’

‘Ferreting.’

‘Ferreting?’

He says that like he don’t know what it means.

‘Aye! Can you be quiet!’

‘I’m going to ride round my land and, when I come back, you’d better be gone.’

‘Do whatever you want.’

We carry on and take no notice of the ponce. They ride round again and we can see a police car coming along the road, down near the church. Then another police car pulls up, then another, and
another, and another, and another. Six police cars altogether park in a line down on the road, with the saddle-bumpers pointing up the bank towards us. I’m thinking we better do something
here, so I let the rabbits go and we get the ferrets back out of the burrow and gather up the nets and sacks. The coppers climb up to the top of the bank and one of them speaks to me.