The Last English Poachers (10 page)

Anyway, as you know by now, I was brought up anti-authority. I hated anyone in uniform, or who spoke with a plummy accent, or who had a title – farmers and joe-cockys and gamekeeper
bullies and all that lot. I believed, like Bob, that I had a right to the plentiful game that abounded in the English countryside back then; it belonged to everyone, not just the privileged few. So
it was even sweeter to think I was taking something from the lords and earls as well as helping to feed the family.

One of the greatest pleasures in my young life was running away from them and telling them to ‘piss off ’. I even used to go onto the Earl of Ducie’s estate and hide in cover
and watch him and his keepers shooting rabbits. They’d shoot the coneys and hang them up in a tree and move on. As soon as they were out of sight, I’d nick the rabbits and be off. I
would’ve loved to have stayed and seen their faces when they came back and found the rabbits gone, but that would’ve been too risky – they might have taken a shot or two at
me.

Once I had my guns I rarely went anywhere without them. After the first coney up at the local quarry, I found this orchard where I knew there’d be some more rabbits. I crept through the
hedge and shot a couple of them. Then I put the gun down and went to collect them when the bedroom window goes up and this big fat face peers out wearing one of those old-fashioned nightcaps.

‘Drop them rabbits!’

I put my fingers up at the man and shouted back at him.

‘Piss off!’

Then I grabbed the gun and ran back through the hedge and away. I was to learn later, going through life, how to be invisible – not to be seen if at all possible – that a poacher
must be like a ghost; you know he’s been there but you can never see him. But a lot of the fun of it when I was young was being able to run off and knowing none of the buggers could catch me.
I was fit and fast and I loved the laughing sport of it.

I’d pushbike out and around the streams in April, searching for duck nests and taking the ducklings with a homemade landing net. I’d box them up and take them home and put them in
pens. Then I’d fatten them up and sell them. We had a big flock of ducks in our garden at home – two hundred Aylesburys. We’d drive them down to the fields to graze and waddle in
the pond-water and the neighbours were always complaining about the quacking as we passed along the way. But we didn’t care; it wasn’t much to moan about, compared to every day some new
story about the total lack of morals among the rich and powerful. So why take it all out on our ducks?

As well as the ducklings, I’d go stealing pheasant eggs in summer and put them under broody bantam hens. A broody hen will sit on anything, even a smooth stone. They’d hatch out the
pheasant eggs and then I’d bring them on and we either ate them or sold them to local people or game dealers. You could get £2.50 for a pheasant back then and you could sell as many as
you could catch or rear, and more besides. Of course, the estate managers didn’t like me stealing their eggs and I could get into big trouble if I got caught. They came after me once and I
made it onto a public highway where they couldn’t touch me, but the keeper knew I had the eggs in my pocket.

‘Alright, Tovey, you’ve outsmarted us.’

Then he smacked the pocket with his hand and smashed the eggs, rather than give me the satisfaction of having them. He went on his way, smirking, and I said, under my breath –

‘Next time, I’ll take twice as many.’

I’d take the red-legged partridge with a spring-loaded clap net, like Bob taught me to, and I’d fish and go lamping the pheasants at night. Now, there’s two kinds of lamping,
so don’t get confused: for pheasants you just need a small torch to shine up in the trees, and a gun; for rabbits and hares, you need a lamp with a strong beam that mesmerises them for
greyhounds to chase and catch them. It was a life of wildness, of ferrets and fenn traps and guns and greyhounds and foxes and pheasants – and cotton-ball clouds scudding on a summer sky and
the sleeting rain blowing horizontal into my face in the wind-wailing winter. It was new life in spring and old life in autumn and I was always keeping clear of the world around me, that was trying
all the time to catch me or con me in one way or another. Like, when this farmer called Jack Fleming used to get me setting traps for rats in his cow barns. I caught loads of vermin for him but he
was a mean bugger and never wanted to pay me. He’d go missing when it was time to shell out and I’d have to traipse round looking for him.

Anyway, there weren’t always collared doves in this part of the world, but when they came in, I started going round the lanes shooting them. It was illegal to shoot them, even though it
was legal to shoot pigeons, but they were lovely to eat and I couldn’t resist them. This farmer Jack Fleming only reported me to the police because he owed me money for catching the rats for
him and, I suppose, he thought if I got sent away to reform school, he wouldn’t have to pay me. Local copper Harris came over and told me to stop shooting the doves, but I could tell he
wasn’t all that bothered about it and only did it because of the complaint.

Fleming was known for being a nosy hedge-mumper, sneaking round the lanes to see what people were up to and not minding his own business. So I carried on shooting and eating the doves and
nothing was ever done about it. I never got my money from Fleming either and he died and left everything to Frenchay Hospital in Bristol. He had no wife nor children and he left nothing to his
extended family – or to me. The miserly bugger! I hope he died roaring.

Now, heritage and history fade fast in the brainwashed minds of the masses, with the middle-classes living in their comfort and conceit and the others either side of them on the social ladder
misled as well, convinced by popular opinion that hunting and poaching are cruel. But I’d try to make a clean kill whenever I went out, although it wasn’t always possible. Once, when I
was young and out in the winter time, I shot a pheasant and it dropped onto a frozen pond. It was flopping about on the ice like a drunken penguin, but there was no way I was going to go out there
and push my luck too far, stretched as it usually was like the thin ice on this thawing pond, ready to crack at any moment and plunge me eyeballs-deep into all sorts of trouble. I was just about to
shoot it again and put it out of its misery when it slid over to the edge of the pond and I was able to pick it up and bite into its brain to kill it immediately – like Bob showed me how. How
cruel’s that? Like throwing live lobsters into boiling water? Or a gavage stuck down a duck’s gullet to produce paté? I suppose it’s all a matter of perspective,
ain’t it?

So you can see I was a bit of a wild boy when I was growing up. I’d go through the village shooting the streetlights out sometimes, and I went round and shot all the balloons they hung up
for the Queen’s Silver Jubilee. And I’d nick the railway detonators from the huts. Railway detonators are coin-sized devices that make a loud bang as a warning signal to train drivers.
They’re used for a number of reasons – in dense fog, when signals are difficult to see, or if there’s been an accident, or if there’s engineering works ahead, or to alert
crews working on the rails. They were invented in the 1800s by an Englishman called Edward Cowper. They had lead straps either side, to fix them to the railway lines and hold them in place, and
they had gunpowder inside. Anyway, I’d pinch them from the huts when no one was looking and fix them to people’s windows and doorhandles and letterboxes, then I’d shoot them from
about twenty yards away. BANG! They could break a windowpane or shatter a letterbox and the people in the houses would run out, thinking the IRA had invaded south Gloucestershire. Then they’d
call the local coppers and I’d be chased round the village, but I was like a shadow and they never could catch me.

I got through primary school by the skin of my teeth, but I was eventually expelled from the first secondary school I went to and I got expelled from the second school after thirteen days. I
went to a third in Thornbury, which was about ten miles away from where we lived, and they got fed up with me not attending lessons. But, instead of expelling me, they just sent me out to help the
caretaker, mowing and cutting hedges and doing maintenance work in a school for the mentally handicapped, which was next door. That wasn’t too bad, because I was out and about most of the
time and I got on alright with the daft kids – they were unfortunate and I felt so sorry for them, never to have the freedom of the fields, like me. But I eventually got expelled from there
too, for swearing at someone.

They couldn’t get no good of me at any of those schools and it was agreed that it would be best for everybody if I stayed at home, but a teacher would be sent out to tutor me. That
didn’t work either. A woman came out on a Monday morning and the first thing she said to me was, ‘I’ve come to teach you.’

‘You can piss off!’

She gave up in despair after ten seconds flat. Finally they summoned me before the Council’s Educational Welfare Board in Bristol. I went down there with Bob to see what the authorities
were going to do with me. I was thirteen now and we sat at a big long table with eight other people. One of them started.

‘The boy’s got to—’

‘The boy has a name!’

‘Sorry, Mr Tovey. Brian’s got to . . .’

. . . do this and do that and do the other. Bob listened patiently until the man was finished, then he spoke back.

‘If someone told you to climb up the suspension bridge and jump off, you’d have the right to refuse, wouldn’t you?’

‘Of course.’

‘Well, Brian’s got the right to refuse to go to school.’

‘No, he hasn’t.’

Another one spoke up.

‘The law says you have to send your child to school, Mr Tovey.’

‘The law also says I can educate him myself.’

This caused a flurry of mumbling and grumbling and whispering and flapping. Rules were consulted and options aired and opinions expressed and, in the end, it was agreed that I could be
self-taught, but someone would have to come and check on me every Monday to make sure I was studying and not getting into mischief. They sent an ex-policeman round to keep tabs on me, but he just
had a cup of tea and a bit of cake or toast and a chat about what we’d been poaching, then went away again. He was just going through the motions and wasn’t really bothered, because he
knew it would get him nowhere.

This went on for a few years, until I was sixteen. But the only thing I self-educated myself in was poaching – rabbiting and lamping and ferreting and shooting and coursing. I push-biked
round the countryside within a radius of thirty-five miles, with the .410 in the leg of some old army trousers, sewn up and tied to the crossbar of the bike with laces. When I wasn’t
poaching, I earned some extra pocket money doing seasonal work on the farms – potato- and stone-picking and hay-baling and a bit of labouring on the building sites for £3 a day.

And so, up and into my teenage years, I gallivanted round the countryside looking for game and having a good old time. Over the fields and hills, with the grass under my feet and the wild wind
blowing the cobwebs of the street away and the whole world smiling. The smell of the meadows and the marshes and the woodland marjoram and the air around me as fresh as spring water. The keepers
and lords and earls and teachers and coppers all tut-tutting and saying how I’d end up bad some day. But I didn’t care: Finger wet, finger dry, cut my throat before I die.

And houses are alright, the didicoy said, but they have them terrible walls!

7

I was doing a bit of hod-carrying on a building site in Yate when I met Cora. I was thirty-three by then and she was in her early thirties too. Her mother didn’t like me
much and wouldn’t have me in the house, so I’d have to sit outside in the car while I was waiting for her. I can’t say as I blame her mother, considering the state I used to get
into back then – drinking in The New Inn and The Beaufort and The White Horse and The Railway and The Gate and every other pub for miles around besides. I’d drink anything: Cheltenham
& Hereford beer or rough cider from the local factory at 4d a pint – stuff called ‘stun ’em’ and ‘splash pan’ and I could down twelve large whiskies one
after the other without hardly drawing breath.

Cora’s mother used to call Cora her ‘little bit of trouble’ and kicked up a fuss when she started going out with a bad lot like me, but that didn’t stop Cora. I
don’t know what she seen in me – maybe it was the way some women is drawn to men who’s mad, bad and dangerous to know – but, whatever it was, I’m glad she did, because
she saved my life.

One day, her father Joe came out. I could see him approaching the gate and I thought he was going to try to clobber me or run me off or something.

‘D’you want to come in for a cup of tea?’

‘I dunno. I bin sat out here this bloody long . . .’

Then I thought, I better accept the offer, and I went in for the cuppa. There weren’t much talking and the atmosphere was a bit strained and I was glad when Cora was finally ready and I
could get out of there. We was going out for about a year when she fell pregnant with my son Robert, so we got married and she wore my mother’s wedding ring and moved in with me and my two
other children, Brian and June, who were eight and six at the time. Then Robert was born in 1973. After Cora’s father died, I used to take her mother a pheasant or a rabbit and she started to
take to me a bit better, but for some reason she never came to visit us in our house.