The Last English Poachers (14 page)

Another two fall out of my other sock.

They give me a thorough search after that and lock me up to wait for my father because I’m still a juvenile. When they interview me, I tell them I was out shooting pigeons where I had
permission and I was cycling around, knocking on farmers’ doors to see if I could shoot some rabbits. I deny I shot the pheasants.

‘I found them in the lane; must have been hit by a car.’

‘All ten of them?’

‘A lot of careless drivers in these parts . . .’

They let me go in the end, but bring me back a couple of days later and charge me with poaching, armed trespass and something else that I can’t remember now. I go to see a solicitor, but
can’t get legal aid and, what I don’t know at this stage, the same solicitor acts as the prosecutor in the magistrate’s court and he doesn’t tell me when I’m giving
him the full story. As far as I’m concerned, it’s a clear conflict of interests, but he never lets on and, when I go to court, there’s the bugger prosecuting me – or else it
was his twin bloody brother.

‘I found the pheasants.’

‘Why did you run, then?’

‘Van forced me off the road. I thought they were criminals, going to abduct me.’

‘The gun was with the birds and cartridges fell out of your socks.’

‘Can you prove that gun or those cartridges killed the pheasants?’

‘No.’

The armed trespass charge is adjourned
sine die
, but they find me guilty of poaching and I ask if this means I’m now a criminal.

‘A petty criminal, MrTovey.’

So I says by that do they mean my crime was insignificant and, if so, will my sentence also be small? I’m fined £60 and £3.75 costs and the restitution of the pheasants.
Nothing petty about that! They’re all laughing behind their hands in the court and I think it’s at the funny side of the solicitor I went to see being the prosecutor – as if
I’m thick and don’t know I should’ve appealed. Which I don’t at that age. But I had no one to advise or defend me, so I had to take it on the chin. I was only young then and
knew nothing about the law, so I promised myself I’d learn as much as I could about it as I moved along in life, so this kind of thing wouldn’t happen to me again.

And I did – how the British conscientious classes are easily outraged over the rights of dumb animals, but collude in the real injustices of the world by watching subliminal shite on the
tele vision; and how social revenge can have a strange effect on the minds of some buggers and can turn perfectly respectable morons into salivating sadists – and how bumholes appearing as
prosecution witnesses are full of their own sense of self-righteousness and couldn’t care less about the principles of probity and fair play. Most of all, I learned that the best way to avoid
all this bollocks was to not get caught.

Despite my new knowledge, I get jailed three times altogether for poaching and pinching. The first time comes in 1982, when I’m about eighteen, after I poach a fallow buck on the Berkeley
Estate. I cycle out to the deer park where a lot of deer escape and there’s always loads of them about. I go out there in the evening, with about half an hour of light remaining in the day
– enough to stalk round the perimeter of the park and get a shot. Some fallow deer are coming out and I’m using a 12-bore with BB lead shot. I come up on this big albino buck and shoot
him in the heart at twenty yards. I get up quickly and cut his throat and bleed him out and gut him, then I drag him behind some big fallen oak trees in the wood, so if anyone’s out looking
and hears the shot, they won’t be able to see the dead deer.

Now, there’s no way I can carry a big fallow buck like that home on my bicycle, so I get to a public phone box and call my mate, who has a car, and I ask him to come out and pick the deer
up. While I’m waiting, a misty fog blows in from the River Severn. It comes in real fast and I can’t see more than a few inches in front of me, it’s that dense. My mate comes and
we can’t find the kill. We search around all over the place, but we’re getting nowhere and we won’t be able to see anyone coming upon us. We drive back home and I get old Jack,
our spaniel, into the back of the car and take him out to find the deer before it’s eaten by scavengers. We park up, come across the fields in the dark dense fog, and head into the oak trees
that are hundreds of years old. The dog finds the deer straight away, within seconds – he was a great old dog, Jack – and I put the buck on my shoulders and carry him to the car.

There’s a big tin shed on the playing fields in our village and I take the deer over there and hang it, cut its head off and skin it. Next day I joint it up and make £70 on the
meat.

So I go up to Gloucester with my seventy quid and buy a new, powerful Weihrauch German air rifle, that’s just on the limit of being legal, and I’m eager to try it out as soon as I
can. Bob has an old Triumph car at the time and we leave it in a pub car park and make our way out onto the Tortworth Estate, where I shoot eight pheasants. I hide the birds and the gun close to
the road, so’s not to be come upon with them while we go back for the car. But some bum-licker has rung up Lord Moreton to say they’ve seen us out poaching in the woods – maybe
seen the torch or something, or maybe it’s just some nosy nobody who can’t mind their own business and wants to suck up to the lord. When we drive back up the road to make the pickup,
Moreton’s there with my new gun and his dog’s sniffed out the pheasants.

‘That’s my gun . . . and our birds!’

‘They’re my birds, you poached them.’

‘Give me my gun back, you bugger!’

‘I’m confiscating it.’

‘Give me my gun!’

‘No!’

He pulls an iron bar out of his jacket and waves it at me. So I pick up a brick and throw it at him. It hits him on the head and he falls to the ground, shouting at Bob in his posh accent:

‘Mr Tovey, help me.’

I pick up my gun and the pheasants. Bob doesn’t go near him.

‘Would you help me if I was on the ground?’

He starts screaming for his keeper.

‘Keepah! Keepah! Help me!’

This giant comes lumbering out of the night towards us.

‘I’m coming, your grace!’

When he gets close enough, Bob sticks his foot out and trips him up and he goes over on top of his grace. We throw the birds into the car and make off, while they’re trying to pick
themselves up off the ground.

When we get home, we hide the pheasants, but the coppers ain’t long in coming round and I’m arrested and taken to the station five miles away, where I’m searched, and they take
my wellingtons and socks away – but this time there’s no cartridges to be found. They question me about assaulting Lord Moreton, but I deny everything, saying it must have been someone
else who hit him with the brick.

‘Like who?’

‘I don’t know. Maybe a Gypsy or someone like that.’

‘And why would he hit the lord?’

‘The bugger was waving an iron bar about.’

They lock me up, but release me later that night.

‘Can I have my boots and socks back?’

‘No, we need them for forensic examination.’

Now, that’s just pure maliciousness, because they haven’t got enough evidence to hold me, and I have to walk the five miles home in my bare feet. I get charged with ABH, assault with
a brick, night poaching and taking game without a licence. They don’t take any fingerprints or photographs and I get legal aid to hire a solicitor to defend me. I’m taken to the
magistrate’s court and I plead not guilty. Moreton identifies me and, without any other evidence or witnesses, it’s Moreton’s word against mine. They believe him and I get
convicted and sentenced to Usk Detention Centre in Wales for three months.

But that’s not the end of it.

A couple of days previous, I’m up on Tortworth Lake feeding in some Canada geese with bread. As soon as one of them comes close enough, I grab it by the neck. But the park keeper’s
hiding up by the boat house and he shouts out:

‘Stop!’

I do a runner and he comes after me on a pushbike. I gain ground and get up a big bank, but the only way forward is through an open prison called Leyhill. I climb over the chain-link fence at
the back and keep going. The prison was an old American army hospital in the war and the prisoners are housed in Nissen huts. They’re all out on head-count parade and I have to run through
them. They don’t know what’s happening as I barge between the ranks with a goose over my back. The screws are speechless. Someone shouts, ‘Oi, where you going?’

I shout back.

‘I’m a gamekeeper . . . chasing poachers.’

Then I run away through the prison fields and over a wall and onto a road, before they can gather their wits and come after me. After about a mile I stop to catch my breath. I wait to see if
anyone’s chasing, but no one is.

A Canada goose is as tough as a farrier’s crotch and hardly worth all the running. But I sell it for £3, which is better than nothing. A couple of days later, the coppers come
round.

‘Were you up by Tortworth Lake on Sunday?’

‘I can’t recall.’

‘Would you come to Sodbury police station?’

‘What for?’

‘You know what for.’

I’m questioned about the goose, which I deny all knowledge of, as usual.

‘The park keeper saw you.’

‘Did he?’

I’m charged with stealing a Canada goose to the value of £15 and let go.

But now, in court, they add this offence to the one of hitting Moreton with the brick and the park keeper’s there to give evidence against me. The old magistrate thinks he’s a right
witty bugger.

‘And what happened to this goose?’

‘We don’t know, your worship.’

‘Let’s hope it’s not on Sarum Plain, to be driven cackling home to Camelot.’

Hee haw, hee haw, hee haw – they all laugh like demented donkeys at this quote from
King Lear
, even though none of them probably knows what he’s talking about. I certainly
don’t at the time. Neither do I laugh when he adds another three months to my sentence and I’m banned from using a firearm, even an air rifle, for five years.

By now I’ve learned enough about the law to know you always gets stitched up in magistrates’ court, because they’re all the same class of people who run the show and they think
they’re superior to the ordinary man because they were born with a silver spoon up their bum and went to college and suchlike. So I appeal on length of sentence and conviction for the goose
and, five weeks later, I’m in Bristol Crown Court, waiting in this codified corridor with an assortment of fallen angels – shoulder-rubbing with the pickpockets and pushers, shoplifters
and shysters and indecent exposers in public places.

‘Next case?’

‘Tovey, your honour.’

‘A foreigner?’

‘A poacher.’

‘I see. Certainly looks the type.’

The conviction for the goose stands, but I get three months knocked off the sentence. I’ve already done two months on remand, so I’ve only got one month to go. This is the time of
Willie Whitelaw’s ‘short, sharp shock’ policy for young offenders and I’m put to making concrete blocks in Usk. But it don’t bother me too much, apart from being
confined and not being able to ramble. I’m fit as a butcher’s dog and the tough regime inside the detention centre’s no problem for me.

I get released in September and I’m back out poaching the very next day.

May twelfth is traditionally known as Brancher’s Day, when rook fledglings start to stretch their wings in preparation for leaving the nests. Rooks are wary and
sharp-sighted birds and this is the most effective way of culling them to protect the songbird population. People get together at rookeries with guns and shoot all the young rooks as they walk
along the tree branches – that’s why it’s called Brancher’s Day. Rooks are also seen as pests to farmers because they destroy their crops – although I always thought
they helped the farmer by keeping slugs and insects down, but what do I know about farming? I always saw the rook as a social and merry bird who keeps an intelligent eye on what’s happening
around his territory. But this is tradition and rook pie was a popular dish back then, even if it’s rarely eaten now. Anyway, I’m out around Primrose Vale on Brancher’s Day,
shooting the rooks. I’m walking back across a farmer’s land and I see this bloke coming along the field, shouting at me. I have a 12-bore and, like I said, after being in the detention
centre, I’m automatically banned from carrying any kind of firearm for five years. I have a balaclava on and I pull it down over my face so he can’t identify me.

‘What are you doing?’

‘Exactly as I want to do.’

I walk away, not looking for no trouble, but he comes up behind me and is about to punch me in the back of the head. I turn round quick, like, and hit him with the barrels of the gun and walk
away again. He doesn’t try to follow me a second time.

Four days later a police car pulls me up in the lanes.

‘Come with us.’

‘What for?’

‘We need to question you about an assault.’

I go with them because I’ve got no choice. I don’t know how I was identified and I deny everything, but I’m put on remand in Gloucester Prison while they come and search the
house for the gun. There’s six licensed guns in our house at the time and they can’t identify the one involved in the assault. But I’m still charged with ABH and possessing a gun
within five years of release from a detention centre. I’m kept on remand and I can’t get hold of the prosecution statements until I’m taken to Crown Court in Bristol. I try to get
a witness to give me an alibi, but I’m not able to. Had I been on the outside, I might have been able to sort something, but it’s too difficult from the inside.

The judge I get has a reputation for his heavy sentences and those going up before him in front of me are coming away with the likes of ten years. I’m thinking I’m going to get a
stiff one for hitting someone with a 12-bore shotgun, especially with my previous being taken into account. I’ve already pleaded guilty, as advised by my barrister, because that might get me
a reduced sentence – so there’s no trial as such, just the judge’s summing up and that. Anyway, he’s waffling on from behind his bench about how measures will soon be in
place to enable the forces of law and order to identify us criminals from space, while we’re innocently going about our daily business. And I’m not paying much attention, until he says
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