The Last English Poachers (9 page)

6

When I was born we lived in the butcher shop with my grandfather. My grandmother died a long time before and I never really knew my mother’s parents. I was four years old
when we moved to our own house, where we live now, and that’s when my earliest memories begin. I used to go back up to the butcher shop a lot back then and I found my grandfather dead up
there one day in 1968, when I was very young. He was sixty-nine and he’d had a heart attack or stroke or something and just fell over. I found him lying there, but he didn’t look dead
and I could hear him in my head, giving out his advice, like he used to.

‘Never compromise with none of the buggers, young Brian, because they’re all only in it for themselves and they’ll disappoint you in the end.’ And saying how the world
was full of unscrupulous shysters and political poltroons and sinister shadowmen.

I was but a boy and really didn’t understand what he was saying, nor what was wrong with him now. I ran back down the road to get Bob but sometimes I think I should have said something to
him. A few final words, like, ‘Hello, why did you have to go?’ Or, ‘Goodbye, why did you have to die?’

I was brought up poaching from when I could walk and I just wanted to be out across the fields and in the woods with Bob, hunting day and night. And that’s where it begins for me, when
I’m four years old and we’re on a right-of-way footpath with greyhounds and we’re approached by two policemen – a sergeant and a constable. We’re on public land, so
there’s nothing they can do us for, but they like to harass us every chance they get. You see, the coppers just want to wait by roads or pathways. They don’t really want to be out there
in the first place, and they don’t like getting their boots dirty running across mucky fields after poachers they won’t be able to catch. They want to get back to the warm station and
have a cup of tea. Anyway, Bob sees them coming and he whispers to me, ‘Tell ’em to piss off.’

The sergeant’s trying to look all stern and official-like.

‘What have you two been doing?’

‘Piss off!’

They laugh at a four-year-old like me saying something like that to them. But if Bob said it they’d probably haul him in to the station on some pretext or other and let him out of the
cells later, after wasting his time for a few hours. There’s nothing they can do to me, so they let us on our way. I told them to ‘piss off’ many times after that.

I remember once in those days when I was young, maybe about four or five, I saw this woman pushing an old man in an invalid chair. She was struggling a bit, so I went up and asked her if she
wanted some help. Her name was Mrs Rocket and she was the sister-in-law of Archibald Vowden, a local vicar and the man in the chair. She gave me a few pennies for my trouble and we’d go for
walks on a regular basis after that and I used to push the old vicar around in his wheelchair.

This was to save me from a long stretch in prison later in life. But after my mother left when I was six, Bob’s dislike of all authority was handed down to me.

He was a very violent man with the drink in him, a chronic alcoholic, and he’d come home lathered on a Sunday and there’d be trouble if his dinner wasn’t on the table. Or, if
the fire wasn’t to his liking he’d smash up the furniture and burn it. If I wasn’t out of bed quick enough in the morning I’d have to walk the fifteen miles down to Bradley
Stoke, where he rented kennels and looked after about a hundred greyhounds for people who ran them on independent tracks. He charged £3 a week for looking after a dog and it was my job to
clean out the kennels. If I wasn’t up in time, he’d drive off and make me walk. I’d have no grub in me and I’d be nicking apples off the trees on the way.

Bob made me work hard all my young life and he made my brother Robert work hard too, when he came along in 1973. If we were weeding the garden and he looked out the window and saw us taking a
break, he be roaring down at us and threatening us with the belt. He was generally a nasty violent individual back then, always shouting and screaming at us, but it wouldn’t be right to say I
hated him – it wasn’t like that. The drunkenness and violence were normal for me when I was a boy. I knew no other life, so I couldn’t say I did or didn’t like my father
then. It was a sad illness he had and I don’t hold it against him now. I don’t judge him and he never judged me neither. A father–son friendship is a peculiar sort of thing
– we have our name in common and the tradition of our trade. Who could ask for more? And he was man enough to change and stop drinking altogether and he was my big hero when we were out
across the fields and the woods together.

The rest don’t matter.

The village was at its lowest population ever when I was a young boy, maybe less than eight hundred people all around – there’s over two thousand now. The school was small with not
many children in it: only three boys and five girls in my class. But, to me, the whole purpose of school was to get me sitting up straight with my arms folded and my mouth shut. I believed they
were just training me to be servile and do what I was told later on. I saw school as a place where I had to learn discipline and not much else, and where they hit me with a stick, or made me wear a
dunce’s hat, or tied me to a chair, or put me outside when it was snowing if I didn’t conform. That wasn’t for me. The teachers were part of the establishment Bob hated, so I
hated them too. They were the same as the lords and judges and police and farmers and were good for nothing but to grind me down. I didn’t see the point in learning what they were trying to
teach me, so I didn’t learn it.

‘We’re doing English today.’

‘Not me.’

‘You have to.’

‘No, I don’t.’

Every time they asked me a question, I answered with another question. They didn’t know how to deal with that. If I’d hit them or kicked them, it would’ve been a different
matter and they could’ve hit or kicked me back, or called the police. But I didn’t – it was passive resistance. I wanted to do what I wanted to do, not what they wanted me to do,
so they put me in a room on my own to stop this kind of anarchy from spreading to the other children.

Outside school I was always up to some mischief. Bob had a pony and trap when I was young. He kept the horse in a field and after school I’d ride it bareback all round the place. I was a
good horseman, even from a young age. I’d hack the horse round the village and across the cricket pitch, churning up the turf. The cricket club people were a bit toffee-nosed and they’d
shout at me and wave their fists and threaten to call the police. But I’d just ride off and nobody could ever catch me.

I saw Bob drinking and fighting for the first eight or nine years of my life, but I never went down that road myself, even when I got older and grew to be a man. I could always take care of
myself, mind you, but I was never gratuitously violent and I only ever used alcohol in moderation on social occasions. Drink was never my master, like it was with Bob. To me, heavy drinking like
that’s a criminal waste of time. All I was really interested in was dogs and ferrets and snares and lamps and guns – day and night. I never smoked neither and I was a fine fit runner
and could outstrip any keeper I ever came across. But, even though I was never like him in a lot of respects, when I was young I could feel my father in my blood and, in my ears, the sound of him
pounding through my veins, trying to get out and evaporate and fall like red rain on a West Country field.

He wasn’t always drinking and, when he was sober, Bob taught me everything he knew about poaching – how to stretch a rabbit’s neck to kill it, fast and easy. How to squeeze the
piss out and how rabbits go off quick, so you have to gut them straight away, and how to leg them to carry on a stick. He told me things that weren’t in any textbooks, about beasts and birds
and how to understand the wildlife and know them like they were kin, their names and ways and how they lived – all sorts of things. Like, the red-legged partridge is sometimes known as the
French partridge, to distinguish it from the grey English partridge – and he showed me how they jug on the ground in a circle, with their heads pointed outwards and, when they’re
disturbed, they prefer to run rather than fly. He taught me how to catch them by laying corn round a spring-loaded clap net and I’d bike thirty-five miles and back for a bit of poaching.
I’d go anywhere – private estates and wetlands and marshes and farms and woods, and wherever there was a bird to be bagged or a rabbit to be caught or a duck or a goose or a small
deer.

In the beginning, it was just going round the hedges and flushing out quatting rabbits and catching them with a greyhound. I’d never go the same way twice, in case anyone was watching me.
I always went a different way. The rabbits would be quatting in a form and the greyhound would flush them and run after them and it was good sport. Or I’d wander round and nick the traps the
gamekeepers had set for vermin like stoats and weasels and squirrels and suchlike. I’d take the traps and fox wires and snares for my own use. I didn’t have any money to buy that kind
of gear, so I’d steal the keepers’ instead.

I was coursing hare up by the quarry on Tortworth Estate one day. I had two bitches that were very good; they caught eighteen out of eighteen hares on the trot over ten days, without missing
one. They were so clever, if a hare was in a form, they could pick it straight out of the quat. Anyway, I’m up by the downs, near the quarry, and I go into a field off the road. I have the
dogs running loose and they put up a hare and catch it and bring it back. Then they put up another and catch it. Next thing, this Land Rover pulls up on the road and Lord Ducie sticks his fat head
out the window but, because he’s on his own, he doesn’t get out of the motor.

‘What are you doing on my land?’

‘Minding my own business.’

‘Give me those hares.’

‘Piss off!’

‘I’ll get the police.’

‘Do whatever you want.’

He drives away.

I decide it’s time to leave, so I go up a farm track and hide the hares in a barn. I hang them up high, in case a fox comes round. About ten minutes later, I can see a police car going up
and down the road, below at the field where I’ve been coursing the bitches. Up and down, up and down. They can’t see me. I’m up on the brow of a hill under a tree watching them.
They come up to where I left the field, but they don’t get out because they don’t want to get their boots dirty. Then they drive away, down towards the village, and disappear.

Ducie knows me, but the coppers never come round the house. They know there’s nothing they can do unless they catch me red-handed or Ducie has a witness or they have the hares, so they
don’t bother. I go back later when it’s dark and collect the kill. When I get home I go out to the kennels at the back of the house to see to the dogs. I’m getting them fresh
water when I see this snarling and a flurry of tails. I drop the bucket and go running across. I try to get through the pack and manage to see a big threadbare cat curled up in a ball of
blood-sticky fur. The dogs have torn a leg off and are savaging what’s left in a milling mass. I get them yelping away as best I can and into their kennels. The mangled thing on the
gore-soaked ground tries to crawl away, but can’t.

I kill it with a brick.

Bob had an old Austin A35 that had to be bump-started to get it going. I remember when I was about twelve, we met up with some others on a Sunday morning. One of them was
Benny, the village idiot – his name wasn’t really Benny, but we called him that after the character in the television series,
Crossroads
. Benny had been on the rough cider the
night before and, when Bob reversed the car down The Butty, which was a narrow lane, it stalled. We all had to get out and push the car to start it again, but Benny farted and shat himself after
being on the rough cider. It was a silent fart and we didn’t know until we were all back in the car and driving down towards Arlingham to do a bit of hunting. All of a sudden, the car was
filled with a terrible smell and we had to have the windows down and our heads hanging out so’s not to get sick.

When we got to where we were going, the animals could smell Benny a mile off and we couldn’t get near none of them. Bob made the dirty bugger wash his bum in a stream before we set off
back to the village and the other men threw his trousers and underpants away. But Benny needed more than just a bum-wash to put him right. Cider was the medicine he said kept him sane in a sick
society and able to function in this grunting hog of a world. A lot of local men drank the heavy brews like that, and I wonder if they knew the price they’d eventually have to pay for
drowning their livers in scrumpy and flirting with an early death.

Another time I’m out with a dog and I bag a few hares. I’m on my way home and the farmer comes upon me and he’s not too happy. Now, I’m still just a boy, but I’m
tough and Bob’s hard on me sometimes and he teaches me to fight as well as run. So, one word leads to another and the farmer takes a swipe at me. But I duck under it and belt him in the
belly. He grabs hold of me and throws me against a fence-post and follows up with his fist, but I’m out of the way quick and he smacks his knuckles against the wood. While he’s howling,
I send a left into his kidneys and a right into his gut again. He doubles over and I take off as fast as I can. I can hear him shouting after me.

‘I’ll get you, you bastard!’

‘I know who my father is, do you?’

I got my first gun licence when I was about twelve. I had two shotguns, a .410 and a 12-bore. You could walk down the street carrying a gun in those days and no one would take
a blind bit of notice. Imagine what would happen if you did that now! Have the drones hovering overhead and a UN task force on its way, led by the Navy Seals. It was round the old bathing quarry on
the Tortworth Estate where I shot my first rabbit. There was a burrow underneath some hazel bushes with always five or six or seven coneys out on an evening. It felt exciting – not a hundred
yards from where Bob shot his first rabbit all those years before. But the best thing about it was, it was on the lands of Lord Moreton, Earl Ducie’s son. When the earl was alive, his son was
called ‘lord’, and when the earl died, his son inherited the title and was the new Earl of Ducie. And the land and its animals were handed down from father to son, with no consideration
at all given to the impoverished peasantry.