The Last English Poachers (6 page)

I was ashore in Gib on my birthday and everyone was giving me rum. I was drinking heavy by then and wanted to get to the bars in town quick from the dockyard. So I stole a motorbike and was
speeding along when I ran into a naval lorry and got thrown into the air. I wasn’t wearing a crash helmet and I suffered multiple injuries, including a fractured skull and a broken arm, and I
was messed up fairly bad. I came to in a military hospital and I was in a hell of a state – all plastered and strapped up. After a while, a military doctor came to see me.

‘Have you ever thought about your drinking, Tovey?’

‘Yes, sir, it’s all I thinks about.’

‘We pumped a washbowl full of rum out of your stomach.’

‘Waste of time drinking that, then.’

I was in a rehabilitation centre for a year, where they gave me electric shocks to the deltoid muscle to keep it alive and, while I was there, there was an inspection by the brass. I was told to
sit to attention in a chair at the end of the bed, with back straight and eyes forward. I was having none of that. The RSM came over, screaming at me to sit up and poking me in the ribs with his
fancy stick. I grabbed it and broke it in two and threw it at him.

‘If you do that again, I’ll shove your stick up your arse sideways!’ I cheeked him.

He growled away and I thought I’d be in for it. But he never came back and nobody said nothing about it.

When I was well enough, I was flown back in handcuffs on a Vickers Viscount aeroplane to a naval prison in England. There was me and another stoker on the plane and an officer in charge of
us.

‘If I remove the handcuffs, you won’t try to escape, will you?’

What a clobhead – we’re thirty thousand feet in the air, going at three hundred miles an hour, without a parachute between us. What did he expect we’d do, try to hijack the
plane? We landed for some reason at Biarritz and us two prisoners made a run for it when the doors opened. But we were grabbed by a couple of armed Gendarmes and thrown back onto the plane. At
Gatwick, we were handed over to an officer called Commander De’Ath. He scowled at us.

‘My name is De ’Ath. Remove the comma and that’s what will happen to you if there’s any messing about.’

It was the spring of 1960 and I’d just turned twenty-two. I remember Princess Margaret got married at the time, and they took us first to Notting Hill in London, where I was put in a
police holding cell, before sending me down to Portsmouth naval prison. I had to strip naked when I went into Portsmouth and shave off all my body hair. Then I was de-loused with DDT powder, which
is banned now. My bed was three wooden planks and a hollowed-out piece of wood for a pillow. I had a metal piss-pot that I had to use for shaving as well – washed out and shined with brick
dust and soap. Breakfast was half a cup of tea and two hardtack biscuits; dinner was bread and gruel and, in the evening, we had more gruel with the other half of the cup of tea from breakfast
time. They put bromide in the tea to stop us getting frisky and we had to go round an assault course every day.

Everything was done on the run – you double-timed outside and they threw a cigarette at you and you had to catch it. A marine would hold a taper and you had to jump up to get a light off
it while you were running round and you had two minutes to smoke it on the double. It was a hard place, but it got me fit again after the accident. I was like a whippet with a big head when I
finally come out of there.

But I still couldn’t do what I was told. A short while after getting out of Portsmouth, I hit a mouthy officer and, when he went down on the deck, I pissed on him and I was given sixty
days in Dorchester Prison. Dorchester was civvy jail and a doddle after Portsmouth. They put me on an outside working party and I was chopping up trees near Chantmarle Police Training Centre in
Dorset. One of the trainees was a bloke I served with on the
Jutland
. He saw me and came over.

‘What are you doing here, Bob?’

‘I’m doing time, what d’you think!’

He told me to volunteer to clean the toilets at the centre, which I did, and every morning he’d leave a flat bottle of rum and twenty cigarettes on top of a cistern. I’d get the rum
down me quick and I wouldn’t care about anything after that for the rest of the dibby day.

Once I did my time in Dorchester, I was dishonourably discharged from the Navy. I’d already sold my uniform because I knew I wouldn’t need it no more. They kept me on the mess deck
before the dismissal ceremony and the sailors were giving me rum there. I was drunk when they marched me onto the upper deck of the
Rothesay
in bare feet and overalls with marines each
aside of me, and I can’t even remember the captain reading the discharge order. But I was out!

I’ll always be glad I joined the Navy, because it made me hard and world-wise after being an only child and I got to go to places I never would have seen otherwise. But I’m also glad
I got kicked out.

4

My grandfather was a big man, round the middle. Not the same grandfather who went down on HMS
Monmouth
, the other ’un. He used to drive a dray for the Arnold
Perrett Brewery and he needed three horses to get it up over the steep village hill from the brewery at the bottom. The dray was always piled high with big barrels that he could lift on his own,
because he was a very strong man as well as being burly. Once over the hill, he’d let one of the horses go off the chains and it would find its own way back down to the brewery – then
he’d be gone for days, delivering to all the pubs for miles around. He got free beer at every stop and he could drink a great quantity of pints.

One day he was going up a steep incline called Anchor Hill and another drayman was coming down. They crashed into each other, with barrels rolling everywhere and horses neighing and rearing in
the shafts and the two men cursing and blaming each other. More than likely they was both pissed. My grandfather had to go to court and the magistrate said, ‘Were you drunk, Tovey?’

‘Impossible, your worship. I’d only had two gallons.’

So, you see, I didn’t lick it up off the ground – the drinking.

I married Violet Mayer in 1962 in a register office in Plymouth, while I was still in the Navy. She was pregnant when she came back to my village with me after I got thrown out and we went to
live with my father at his butcher shop. My son Brian was born in 1963 and my daughter June was born in 1965. Violet and me was constantly rowing and the marriage didn’t work out. She took
off in 1969 and, when she went, I was left to bring up two young children on my own. I was a hard-drinking man in them days, having learned how to booze in the Navy. I could drink twenty pints of
ale in a single sitting – or standing at the bar for that matter. Then I’d have a fight in the street with some idiot who looked at me crooked. There didn’t have to be no reason
for me to fight; it could come over anything – a remark, or a laugh, or a cough. Or nothing at all. I broke a bloke’s jaw once who’d spilled my beer and never said sorry.
It’s not something I’m proud of now, but it was the way I was back then. Sometimes I’d drink so much I couldn’t see and I’d turn into a different man with the alcohol
inside me. My eyes would turn cold and hard like marbles and I didn’t know what I was doing, even though I thought I did.

I was hard on the kids back then, too, shouting at them when I was drunk and smashing up the furniture and drinking all the money. One of the men I drank with hung hisself at the end of the
garden – he had the shakes and the tremens and was in a bad state. And I might have ended up like that myself, if I hadn’t met Cora.

Now you’d think, being that violent, I’d have been put away – and some of the times I deserved to be put away. But, whenever I was had up, the police always helped me out and
made sure I had a good solicitor. The reason being, the coppers round here back then all lived in new houses that was built specially for ’em and I nicked a lot of stuff whenever I got some
work on the buildings to earn a bit of extra cash – slabs and paint and bricks and all that sort of thing. They were as partial to a bit of knocked-off gear as anyone else, the police. One
copper said to me, ‘If you carry on like this, Bob, we’ll all be doing time.’

So they looked after me when I got hauled up for fighting and I never went down for none of it – or anything else for that matter. I used to drink with this big Irishman in a pub beside a
coalyard and we’d nick the bags of coal when we came out drunk and then nick bags of potatoes from outside the greengrocer’s up the road. And I was never done for nothing. But they
didn’t like me poaching, because that was taking from the gentry and couldn’t be tolerated. It might lead to people thinking they was as good as the lords and ladies.

Even back then there were very few true poachers. Lots talked about poaching but never done it. There was plenty of ’em in the pubs, but you’d never come across them in the fields or
the woods when you was out there of a night on your own. They was as full of shit as a Christmas turkey! That’s what really got my goat when I was drinking: people talking about shooting this
and trapping that and netting the other. I’d got past the stage of talking about it long ago and actually went out and done it – and kept on doing it. Mostly what I loved was shooting
the pheasants and that’s the thing the lords hated me most for – taking their game birds. I’d take hundreds and either eat ’em or sell ’em, and it was my way of
sticking two fingers up at the powers that be – at the people who’d ruled the land for centuries. By taking their pheasants I was showing them I couldn’t be controlled like the
rest of the knee-benders. I was a law unto myself – part of my own little kinship, expecting nothing from the outside world and acting on the spur of the moment instead of making pathetic
plans. Spitting on authority, with its coppers and courthouses and awful bloody conceit. And everyone knew me for my swagger and classed me by my contrariness – and me all the time playing my
small part in the black bartering of a hostile society, but keeping well apart from it.

There was many ways to poach what I needed. I used to snare rabbits and set traps for pheasants as well as shoot ’em back in them days, using corn as bait for the traps.
I’d use a little bit of corn on the outside and a lot on the inside. But the foxes and badgers round this area would take the rabbits out of the snare wires, and the trouble with traps is you
has to go check them every day and that makes it easy for someone to see you and set an ambush for you. Another way I used to get pheasants at night, if I didn’t want to make a noise, was
with a long stick with a wire snare fixed to the end of it and plenty of baler twine. I’d slowly reach up and put the loop over the bird’s head and tug on the twine. I also used clap
nets to catch birds. You lay a trail of corn for bait that leads into the clap net – which is a spring-loaded net that can vary in size. The net’s kept in a furled position and when the
bird follows the feed into it, I pull on a draw cord that releases the spring and the net gets thrown over the bird. All that was OK, but by far the best way was always with the .410 shotgun. Job
done. No messing about. A lot of other ways is only fit for tall tales in the pub. But if you wants birds, lead’s the best way.

Poaching was essential to life for me back then – me with a family to rear and never having much money to do it with. I remember once when I was broke – no money and no food and only
four cartridges – I went out with my dog into a small wood. A pheasant got up and I shot it with one cartridge. Then the dog put a rabbit out of a hedge and I shot that with my second
cartridge. I shot a wood pigeon with the third cartridge and a hare with the fourth. Four cartridges, four meals. But there’s two sides to poaching: there’s the sheer necessity of it
for a man like me, to eat, to survive. Then there’s the love of it, the sport of it, the beauty of it. It’s a man alone, in hostile territory, with a dog or a gun – a man
agin’ the elements, agin’ the keepers, agin’ the law. Can’t you feel it? The rawness of it, the adrenaline pumping, the heart beating. The sound of a twig snapping, the hoot
of an owl, the flap of a wing. There’s nothing like it in the whole world. It’s a true kind of freedom, to be doing what’s in your nature to do since the dawn of time.

It was always inside me, from the day I was born – the shadowy tradition of the poaching game. It was something I understood, following after the old woodsmen, slipping along the path of
their profession. I felt it touch my heart; watched it claim me as its own. Until it was all I knew or wanted to know. From snaring and trapping to shooting and hunting with the dogs. I reigned
over my crooked little kingdom like a cock pheasant – crowing out from the saddle of a hill, colours flaunting and feathers flaring and a closed fist shaking at the scowling world around
me.

But the toffs didn’t give up their game easy. In the 1960s, the gamekeepers could give you a hiding and confiscate your gun if they caught you and they’d not be done for assault or
anything because they had the police and the judges and the courts on their side. So I had to be nifty on my feet to keep out of their clutches. I’d roam all over the land with my gun and
dogs, and the long poacher’s coat with deep pockets to stash whatever I bagged.