The Last English Poachers (31 page)

After the ’80s, all these villages got built up and commuters moved in – plastic people, bought people – following the false promise of money and mundanity. All they do is go
to work every day for their bosses, come home, sleep, go to work, and on and on and on. So, it’s not so much of the old class system any more, where everything revolved round the estate. A
lot of estate cottages got sold off and the people living there now are mostly city people who wouldn’t know anything about shooting or rabbiting or hunting or poaching.

‘I heard some banging in the night . . . what was that?’

You still get hospitality shooting, where companies will buy a day or a weekend. And corporate shooting’s big business in itself and has to pay its way and ain’t so much the
exclusive pursuit of the gentry. Although most of the estates round here are still owned in name by the aristocrats – like the Duke of Beaufort, whose family name’s Somerset, and others
as well, who try to hang on to the old days and the old ways. In reality, they were never that much different to the rest of the rabble. They’ve always been ordinary, even if they thought
they were extraordinary – and now they’re accountable to the law, just like us poachers. They’ve always blamed us for thinking we’re above the rules that they made
themselves – rules that applied to everyone else except them. And even still they believe they’re above those rules and sometimes they are.

Sometimes they get away with murder, like Lord Lucan, and sexual deviancy, like Lord Podge, and all kinds of other frauds and fiddles, like giving land away to the National Trust to save on
death duties. Have to account for it all someday I hope – because there must be more in the universe besides this contaminated little planet, full of wastrels and wishful-thinkers.

The Earl of Ducie once owned most of this village and nearly everyone in it, except for us. Berkeley Estate, with its big deer park, is still owned by the Berkeley family and there’s a lot
of other titled families still strong in this area. You still have foreign kings and queens and princes and princesses going up the estates for shoots and horse trials and stuff, and they still
have some say-so and we still have to go a bit careful. But it’s not like it used to be, when they could get gamekeepers and estate workers to come out mob-handed and patrol the village
streets armed with clubs and cudgels looking for us poachers. If they came upon us, they’d chase us and try to trap us; surround us and give us a good beating. And Bob told you about the six
police cars with dogs coming out in response to some silly saddle-bumping earl, just over a few rabbits.

You’d get in the local papers quicker now for being up before the magistrates for a simple motoring offence than you would for poaching. They’d be hard put to even know what poaching
was – probably think you were being done for grooming kids on the internet or something. But poaching was a big crime once, and we had the full force of the law against us because of who we
were taking from. I remember when that rural copper who discovered the truck used by the Great Train Robbers at Leatherslade Farm was interviewed, he said: ‘We ain’t used to this sort
of thing, just arresting poachers.’

And arresting poachers was their main occupation. What else did they have to do – stopping a fight outside the local pub? Catching kids stealing potatoes? Farm workers nicking batteries
from tractors? Drunks coming pissed out of the pub on a Saturday night and pointing their plonkers up against the church wall?

But poaching ain’t their priority no more and the lords ain’t got the same power as they used to have. There’s no local police cap-tipping to the earls now. That system got
diluted in the ’90s. All the old boys who sucked up to the toffs and worked for them for forty years or more have died off. Now it’s all commuting and credit cards and mortgages and
social media and idiocy like that, and they have too many other things on their minds. Our village ain’t such a closed community. We still got the farm workers and the hangers-on up the
bigger estates like Beaufort, where they say the King of Spain comes to shoot – and rich Yanks pay £50,000 for two days’ sport and stay in Beaufort House, then go back to America
and tell everyone they stopped with one of the bastard descendants of King Henry VII. A gamekeeper bragged to me about how much they paid. And I said, ‘I hope they left some for us; we
don’t pay anything.’

So, you see, things are changing, even though the land’s still owned by the rich – maybe not the same rich as in days gone by, but the rich nevertheless. Some would say the change is
for the better and others would say for the worse. To me it makes no matter, I still live my life the way I always did. I just have to make adjustments every now and then. These changes affect
rural areas all over England, not just south Gloucestershire, where the old agrarian feudalism of the countryside’s being swallowed up by the new economic feudalism of the towns and
cities.

And it’s not just the social changes – the landscape around the village is evolving in step with the modern obsession with banality and conformity. A lot of the local shops and pubs
are gone, priced out of existence, and there’ll soon be a Starbucks on every sheep trail, and a Burger King on every bridle path. The village is getting bigger and bigger, with outsiders
coming in and private houses being built for people who commute to Bristol and other cities for their livelihood.

We used to know everyone in the village; now we know nobody. There’s no character to the area any more – no local coppers who understand the lore of the poacher, despite being set on
catching us for their lords and masters. The ponds are all being filled in to reclaim land for housing, and farming methods have changed, with more sheep than ever before. Nothing likes living with
sheep, no wild animal – they graze everything down to the root and stink the fields up with their piss. They attract ticks that can take the eyes out of hares and send them blind. Once the
sheep moved into this area, the hares moved out and, along with the hard winter I told you about, that might have been another cause of their disappearance. There’s no ground cover for wild
animals, with it all been nibbled down bare, and we’ve caught hares with no eyes from the ticks. Only good thing about sheep is their shit – it thickens the grass when they thread it
into the close-cropped earth. And they say a sheep’s fart’s better than a ton of farm manure.

Bob has almost come to the end of his poaching life, due to health reasons rather than any loss of interest. He still comes out as a lookout for me when I’m after the pheasant, but
he’s pushing on for eighty now and, although he’s not had a drink for well over forty years, the alcohol he drank when he was young has taken its toll. The old illnesses have come to
stake their claim on him, along with the other things that age brings. He still has the scarring on his brain from the accident in the Navy and now he can’t piss proper and has to have a
catheter. But he has no regrets. He wouldn’t have lived his life any other way. He’s always believed in treating with respect those who treat him with respect, and tried to live life a
day at a time and enjoy his family. In any case, there’s little space left in a politically correct world for men like him, who’ve spent their whole lives on the land, hunting wild
animals that people who’ve never been to the countryside now feel they need to protect.

Despite all the things that’ve changed, I still go out all the time and I’m flexible enough to adapt. In some ways it’s easier to poach now because the police station’s
been closed and there’s no village coppers keeping an eye on me. I can move about of a night and the newcomers wouldn’t have a clue what I was doing. On the other hand, the keepers have
night-sights now and mobile phones with cameras and satellite navigation systems and all sorts of electronic equipment. And there’s these constant news reports of rampant tabloid
phone-tapping and secret letter-opening and computer-bugging and all kinds of unmentionable surveillance – and apprehension growing daily among us fugitive classes that anonymity will soon be
as dead as the dodo.

And what will it be like when the buggers invent telepathy?

But what’s in the blood to begin with stays in the blood forever, and I just have to adjust my methods and my means and on I go, away into the mist beyond the hill. Between us, me and Bob
have been poaching for eight decades and I want to make it up to a hundred years before I’m finally finished.

I never got married, even though I had many a girlfriend when I was younger and even one or two now – some long time and some short time and some I might have married, but it didn’t
work out that way. The thought of losing my freedom to be able to go where I want and do what I want kept me back from marriage. I didn’t want to be tied down; I wouldn’t have been able
to stick it. It’d be like being in jail the whole time, wouldn’t it? There can’t be more to love than lust or more to marriage then madness. Can there? In any case, I was never an
ideal ticket for a woman – alright to muck about with and have a hidden huddle, but not a good long-term proposition. Not a municipal misfit like me, who didn’t want to work eighty
minimum-wage hours a week to make some tax-dodging entrepreneur rich. I’m probably too old for it now and the thought of being penned up still don’t appeal to me. There’s too many
things I still want to do before I’m on a Zimmer frame.

I’m over fifty now, but I can still run and climb a mountain and wrestle a stag and fight a gamekeeper. Once I’m over seventy I probably won’t be able to do so much of that any
more – so maybe I’ll get married then. But, for now, I’m doing the same at fifty as I did at five. And I like the freedom of it. I’ll carry on poaching till the day I die.
I’ll never stop. There’ll always be land and wild animals – rich buggers with their gormlessness and their game – and there’ll always be me, taking it from them. And
if I can’t walk I’ll get myself a wooden leg.

We’ve always been known as men who stood up for what we believed in and were never afraid to say what we thought. I hate freemasons, lords, earls, vicars, yes-men, and anyone else who
believes they’re better or bigger or bullier, who think they’re special in some way. But we’re in a minority these days, free-thinkers – people who ain’t been
brainwashed by the system, who see things a different way from the stampeding herd. And most of the old poaching skills are being lost. Young people ain’t brought up to have to kill animals
for food any more, so they don’t know how to hunt with dogs or nets or traps – and all they want to do with guns is shoot each other. Times are different, just like Bob’s before
me, and I remember the village the way it was. Nothing much changed between his time as a boy here and my time as a boy here. His time was in the 1940s, before he went into the Navy, my time was
the 1960s – twenty odd years apart – and nothing much changed in those twenty years, apart from going from horses to motors.

We held the same parties at Christmas in the village hall, to make sure every kid got at least one present, no matter how poor they were. But it stopped when the population grew and the
middle-class kids were seen chucking the toys away and saying, ‘I don’t want that rubbish’ – spoilt kids from the new houses; a different kind of kid. With their mountain
bikes and mobile phones and promises – gifts of greed and gimme and gollop, to stand them in good stead for their future in the never ending cycle of slaving and shopping. Hark, the herald
angels sing, glory to the Christmas fling! We never had anything much, so it was nice to go to a Christmas party and get stuff you wouldn’t get at home – jelly and ice cream and cake,
and everyone excited about the present they were going to get at the end of it. There was an annual outing to Weston-super-Mare and we all looked forward to paying our couple of shillings to Mrs
Blizzard up the road and getting taken to the seaside on a coach once a year. There were rambles in the woods, all the way round and back for a big tea. Jelly and ice cream means nothing now,
everyone can have it any time they want, but we used to run hopping and skipping for such a rare treat.

The village held a sports day once a year, just like in my father’s time, and you’d get a shilling for coming first in a race – egg-and-spoon or sack or piggy-back or
three-legged. I’d enter every race I could, because I was a good runner and a lot of the time I won. And then there was a big communal nosh-up out on the playing field. There was fancy dress
and me and two of my mates once went as the butcher, the baker and the candlestick maker. I was the butcher, like my grandfather; or we’d go as Bill and Ben the Flowerpot Men, or Laurel and
Hardy. Cora always made the costumes for us and you got a prize if you won. We had pram races in the summer and ‘penny for the Guy’ in November and carol-singing from the back of a
trailer at Christmas. And nothing much changed for years and years and years.

But it all has now.

Everything lost its character with the mass influx from the cities and towns. The village, the land, the people – it all became sterile and anonymous. Everything became consumerised,
televisionised, cloned with no individuality and no real heart. Once we were known here as poachers; the police kept a sharp eye on us, the landowners hated us, the village people knew us and had
game off us. Not many people really know us now. You might say anonymity’s a good thing in our game, and maybe it is, but it comes at a high price. And, anyway, I never really cared about
being called a blackguard – a few months in jail never bothered me, a fine never bothered me, and what people thought never bothered me neither.

I’m one of the few who’s been able to stay in this village and whose family goes back generations here, to the 1800s and even before. Whereas most of the kids I grew up with have had
to move because there’s no social housing here and you need half a million quid to buy a property, or up to £1,500 a month to rent one. You need to be a banker or a fancy football
player or a confidence trickster to be able to afford to live here now, so where can ordinary village kids go? They all had to move to places where accommodation’s cheaper – shithole
towns and urban areas and city slums.