The Last English Poachers (19 page)

I swim as hard as I can and get washed into a shallow stream that runs close to Avening Road and the B4014. Once I’m out on the road I’m safe, except that I’m soaked to the
skin and it might be hard to explain that away. I trudge on for a few miles, keeping close to the hedges where I can hide if any vehicles come along – and I finally find a small roadside
service station with a public telephone.

‘Can I make a call?’

‘Of course. What happened to you?’

‘Got caught in a shower.’

‘It hasn’t been raining.’

‘No?’

‘No.’

‘They throw all sorts of stuff out of aeroplanes these days.’

I call home, hoping Bob will be there and not sitting in some police cell. He is and I tell him where I am and he comes out to get me.

‘They didn’t see you up the tree, then.’

‘No.’

‘The birds?’

‘I got them, and the net.’

I don’t tell Bob about the bullets and he turns to me as we’re driving along.

‘They weren’t no gamekeepers.’

‘Who weren’t?’

‘Them who came through the copse.’

‘Who were they?’

‘Dunno, but they weren’t keepers.’

‘What would you have said if they’d seen you?’

‘That I was doing a bit of bird-watching.’

We laughed about that many times afterwards, but never did find out who it was chased me through Gatcombe Park.

We used to put crow-scarers in the woods. They’re like bangers. We set them up and ‘BANG!’ – they go off every few minutes on a timing fuse.
‘BANG!’ We put them in woods on an estate we’re poaching. If the keeper’s out and about on a night and he hears ‘BANG!’ – then a few minutes later,
‘BANG!’ – he thinks there’s somebody poaching in such-and-such a thicket. But we’ll be in another wood maybe a couple of miles away. We scatter the crow-scarers in
twos and threes in different areas around the wood, several nights in succession, to draw a lot of attention. The keepers think there’s poachers coming there regular, like, for their
pheasants. They’ll never know it’s just crow-scarers because there’s nothing left after they go off – just a bit of cardboard that drops down to the ground. So the keepers
are out there waiting and waiting, maybe for a week, with nothing to show for their trouble. All the other woods are left unguarded and we’re there, taking the birds.

Once we’ve got what we came for, we can skip safely home in the spectre-light from the moon, hearing the night cries of this wild west country. And, as we walk across the purring land, I
sometimes think it would be good to be able to fly like the birds above – shit down on top of the heads of all the hypocrites and soar over the rest of the poor fools, scuttling in their
never ending struggle to be free – just like me.

I’m out ferreting on Tortworth Estate one day and approaching a rabbit burrow in a little rocky area that I’m going to start at. Then I hear this cawing noise. The
further I go, the louder it gets.

‘What the hell is that?’

I come over the brow of a hill and, down about twenty yards away is a big crow-catcher. The keeper’s obviously doing some vermin control and this thing’s appeared overnight.
It’s about twelve feet long and eight feet wide and six feet deep – a wooden framework with a door, covered in chicken wire. There’s funnels leading into it, wide on the outside
and narrow on the inside, just like with the pheasant traps. They’re mostly on the top but the silly bugger’s only gone and put a few on the bottom as well. He’s chucked a load of
bread in there and the crows and jackdaws are going in through the funnels to get it, but can’t get back out again. There’s about a dozen jackys and a couple of crows in there, all
creating a hell of a racket. But, because he’s put some funnels down low, what’s happened is the noise of the other birds feeding has attracted pheasants and they’ve gone in as
well and can’t get back out. I can see at least four of them in there now. It’s a poacher’s payday!

I carry on ferreting and get about a dozen rabbits, gut them and leg them and put them in the bag. Then I go back to the crow-catcher and see there’s another couple of pheasants in there
now, making six in all. I open the door, which is just on a latch, and go in. The jackys and crows are all flying round my head and pecking at me while I try to corner the pheasants and wring their
necks. Then I take them out and have them as well as the rabbits. The keeper will come at some time and kill the other birds that I’ve left in there, and never know I’ve been by.

I go back to the crow-catcher and raid it every day and, over the course of a couple of months, I get a total of sixty-two pheasants from it. Easy as pigeon pie. Thanks, mister gamekeeper. Until
one day. The easiest way the keeper can get to the crow-catcher is to come up this field to a stile, twenty yards from the pen. He can’t drive to it so he has to come on foot. Anyway,
I’m in there one day and just coming out with a brace of pheasants when I hear this shout:

‘Oi, you, what you doing there?’

Here’s the keeper coming over the stile and it’s lucky I’m coming out and not in the middle of the cawing jackys and crows, or I might not have heard him. I run and he gives
chase and I leave the door of the crow-catcher open, so the birds are all flying out into his face as he passes. That gives me a good head start on him and he chases me for about three hundred
yards and then gives up. I hide the pheasants in a wood and come out round the side and across the fields back home.

Later that night I return to get the pheasants and the crow-catcher’s gone. I do a bit of poaching while I’m out and I’m on my way home in the early hours, just when it’s
getting light. I’m coming up through the churchyard when I see these three heads peeping out – two behind one of the big tombs and another behind the church wall. Now, I’m
thinking whoever it is might be getting ready to jump out and mug me for my pheasants. There’s a standoff for a few minutes, with them watching me and me watching them. I get fed up with that
and discharge my gun into the air. Well, you’ve never seen blokes run so fast in your life. Turned out later that they were three black fellas who’d come up from Bristol and broke into
a shop in Wotton, but I didn’t know that at the time. They got chased and did a runner across the fields and ended up in the village churchyard and, while I thought they were going to jump
me, they thought I was the local law, out searching for them with a shotgun. I never heard anything more about them and I don’t know where they ended up – probably down in the next
county of Wiltshire.

But to finish off about us poachers versus the landowners – there’s enough violence in this world, without adding to it over a few rabbits and pheasants, ain’t there? What with
left and right and black and white and all the in-betweens and ups and downs and ditherers. There’s children working their lives away in the slums and side-streets for the making of cheap
rags and other rubbish, so we can say we’re civilised and we have this and we have that – and the air around us loud with the pleas of the abused and tormented and tortured, and the
moon wearing earmuffs so’s not to hear the screams. Some people have enough problems with the polluters and politicians and their shadowmen superiors lurking behind every lie, without the
smoke-screen of getting all psychotic over the catching and killing of a wild animal or two.

Which is in our nature to do.

You agree, don’t you?

13

One time I had a small lorry that was registered in the name of a dead man. I used that truck to go nicking Cotswold roofing tiles from cow barns and churches and old buildings
on the big estates – tiles that were rare, hundreds of years old. They were worth money and I knew every old barn and building where they were to be found. I had a mate called ‘Cider
Chris’; he put an ad in the paper advertising the tiles and he got a hundred replies. ’Course, he didn’t have any tiles to supply at that point; we had to go out and nick
them.

Three of us were doing it over a period of about two years altogether – so long that there was hardly a roof left on an old building anywhere in south Gloucestershire. So many Cotswold
tiles had gone missing that police and landowners were marking what was left with a special dye that would only show up under ultraviolet light. They were on such a lookout for anyone suspicious
out of a night in a van or truck that they were pulling all sorts of people over – painters and plumbers and fly-tippers and bail-skippers. But not us, we were keeping out of their
clutches.

It was our opinion that these old tiles would otherwise have blown off the crumbling buildings in a big wind and got broken. They were valued by weight and we were getting £300 a square
– up to £1,500 a time. We sold them to reclamation yards, who sold them on for repairs to listed buildings and to rich people who wanted their houses to look like old-time castles. The
tiles weathered over hundreds of years to get that unique colour and the new ones weren’t the same, so there was only a limited amount of them to be had. It was supply and demand –
anything rare is worth money.

The lorry was legal to carry one-and-a-quarter tons and, every time we went out, we loaded six ton of tiles onto it. So you can see, there was always too much weight and it was difficult to
drive. On this last night, we stripped down tiles from an old abandoned church that was in a hollow dip and we could hear the Duke of Beaufort’s dogs barking in the distance. It’s
autumn time and raining hard and I have to drive along steep windy lanes to keep away from the main roads. I can’t get any speed up to climb this particular hill and the truck starts
slipping. The only other way home is to go back and use the main A38. As I come to the end of the lane, a police car goes by. He carries on and I turn onto the A road and head in the other
direction. But the patrol car spots us and thinks we looks dodgy, because it turns round and comes right up behind me and follows me for about two miles. I assume he’s putting the plate
through the records and finding out the truck’s registered to a dead man.

There’s no way I can outrun him with the weight I’m carrying, so I turn off into a lane – and the patrol car follows at about thirty yards. One of the men I’m with is
called Roger and the other’s Cider Chris. Roger’s so frightened of the dark, his girlfriend has to walk him home of a night – and we call Chris ‘Cider Chris’ because
he’s an alcoholic who later dies of sclerosis of the liver. There’s a farm track down the end of the lane.

‘When we get to the track, I’m slowing down.’

‘What then, Brian?’

‘We jump out and make a run for it across the fields.’

‘It’s dark out there.’

‘Don’t worry, stick with me and you won’t get lost.’

It’s about two in the morning and very dark – I mean countryside black. Just as I start to slow down, Cider Chris jumps out one side of the van and runs into a field. He gallops for
about fifty yards and then collapses. Roger jumps out the other side and I know the coppers have seen both of them. I get out carefully, so I won’t be seen, and use the shadow of the truck to
hide me from the lights of the cop car until I get into the darkness. Roger’s panicking and I know he’ll give us away if we don’t get moving. I tell him to follow close to me, but
I don’t need to, because he’s practically hanging on to my leg and shivering like a plucked chicken in a gale. Other police have arrived now and they have a dog with them, so Cider
Chris is a lost cause. The dog finds him hiding in a hedge and they take him away.

We have a five-mile trek to get to Wotton-under-Edge, where Roger lives and, while the police are dealing with Chris, we get a good head start on them and they never catch up with us. When we
finally arrive there, Roger’s traumatised from the dark and says he’s going straight home. I’d rather hang around till the heat’s off, just in case, so I bypass the roads
and stay out in a wood until morning, then I go back to my village. But, for some reason, the police are hiding close to Roger’s house and they nab him as soon as he shows himself and they
take him in for questioning. He has tile dust on him and they have fingerprints and other evidence. So they’ve got the two men they saw escaping from the vehicle in the lane and the lorry
ain’t registered in my name.

I should’ve been in the clear, shouldn’t I?

Unfortunately they found a rough-drawn map in the footwell of the truck, and that incriminated me. You see, the reclamation yard where we sold the tiles was having its weighbridge repaired and
they sent us to a quarry to get weighed in. They drew a rough map of where the quarry was, I memorised it and told Chris to throw the map away while we were driving along. There was a hole in the
footwell and, when he screwed it up and chucked it, the piece of paper didn’t go out, but went down the hole and got stuck there. The police found the map and the quarry, which made a record
of every vehicle that used its weighbridge, including mine. They got a description of three men who were in that truck – and one of those descriptions fitted me.