The Last English Poachers (2 page)

Brian’s still watching while I tend to my work. He knows what I’m doing – it’s bloody and brutal to some, but it’s the way of things with us. After bleeding the
beast, I open the carcass and gralloch it, which means dragging out the guts, and I leaves the pluck in the undergrowth for the scavengers. A stag’s heavy enough to drag over a distance,
without pulling the insides along too.

Me and the boy then gets hold of the antlers and starts to drag him back to the wall. It’s a long way and we need to stick to the woodland and heavy undergrowth, rather than risk being
seen in hazy daylight across the open fields. Brian’s only young and not strong enough yet to pull his full weight, so most of the work’s down to me. He’s trying to help me as
best he can, but the beast is heavy and it’s hard going through the rough woodland. He’s sweating, even though the early morning’s cool, and he takes off his woolly hat and stuffs
it into his pocket.

I’m telling him all the time how good a lad he is and how he’s always such fine company for me when it’s dark and cold at some cock-crow hour, with the wind sharp as a knife
between our ribs, or when circling rooks is signalling rain, or the tawny owl calls for a starlit night and a morning fair. We’re dragging for half an hour and it’s taking too long and
soon the keepers will be coming round with their 12-bores, maybe shooting vermin like crows and squirrels and being on the lookout for the likes of us to aim at too. So I props up the stag as best
as I can agin’ a tree and gives the gun to Brian to carry. Then I gets underneath the animal and lifts him up across my shoulders. The beast’s a dead weight and heavier than myself and
my muscles are aching from the dragging and my legs are tired, but I manage to keep going without stumbling and we finally reach the edge of the tree line where we came in. The wall’s in
sight, a couple of hundred yards away, but it’s across open ground and we’ll have to move fast.

Just then I hear the low growl of voices approaching the edge of the wood. I drops the deer into some bushes and signals for Brian to follow me. We hide a couple of yards away in good cover and
wait. If the keepers find the stag, they won’t find us with it, but we’ll still have to make a good getaway and all our hard work will be for nothing. They come close – two of
them – and I could reach over and tap ’em on the shoulder if I wanted to. Luckily there ain’t no dog with them to sniff out the kill. They stop walking not more than a few feet
away from us and decide to have a chinwag and smoke a cigarette. I signal to the boy not to make a sound. He’s holding his breath, still as a stalking fox, with my hand on his shoulder to
steady him. We’re crouched down and it won’t be long before the pins and needles make our knees go giddy. We can hear the keepers talking.

‘Bit of a racket down in that gully.’

‘What you think? Poachers?’

‘Don’t know. Not much left by the time we got there.’

‘Could’ve been foxes, maybe killed a hare or a hedgehog.’

‘Yeah, I suppose. Nothing over this side.’

We keep crouching. Motionless as mice, with the foliage all around us and sweat from the exertion of carrying the carcass running into our eyes. We’re as close as Siamese twins, me and
Brian, neither of us moving a muscle and barely letting the breath come out of our mouths. The keepers are standing on the edge of the tree line, cracking jokes and laughing, with their shotguns
broken over their arms. They’re close enough to smell. If they find us now we’ll never get away. We’re too near them to run and Brian’s too young, so I’ll have to
fight ’em and it’ll be bloody. I hope they bugger off soon, because I’m an impatient man and I might let loose at any second.

Brian’s holding on to my coat and the only thing that’s keeping us hidden is the knowing that he’ll get hurt if I has a go. The time passes slowly, minute by heavy minute. I
feel my knee joints stiffening and I need to move, but can’t. The boy’s motionless beside me, hardly breathing. Smoke from their cigarettes drifts towards us and up my nose and I hope
it don’t make Brian cough. Insects are crawling over us, spiders and beetles and little biting flies. I feel the boy move lightly agin’ my shoulder and I think maybe he might be about
to flag. I turn my head slowly and see him smile up at me, even though I knows he’s in pain from the crouching position, just the same as myself.

At last the keepers move off. We wait until there’s no sound other than our slow breathing, then wait a bit longer, just to be sure. Brian tries to stand, but his legs buckle from the
numbness. I rub his calves until the blood begins to flow again, then I puts my arm under his shoulder to support him until the feeling comes back into his wobbly limbs. We watch the keepers away
in the distance and wait until they’re completely out of sight, then I lifts the stag onto my shoulders again and stumble off at a jogging gait across the open parkland to the wall.

We’re moving fast over the ground, the boy running with the gun behind and me ahead of him with the deer. I wait for the shouts of ‘stop’ to come after us, but they
don’t, and then we’re at the wall and almost away. I leg Brian up and tie the end of the rope round the deer’s antlers. Then I pull myself up onto the wall and loosen the rope
knot and use the tree branch as a pulley, checking the lane to make sure nobody’s about. I swing myself down, using the force of the drop and my weight to pull the kill up level with the top
of the wall. Brian pushes the dead animal until it swings, more and more, until it’s pitching out over the wall. I choose my moment and let go of the rope and the stag drops down on the
outside.

Brian loops the rope off the branch and I help him down off the wall. We drag the camouflage off the car and I drive it over to the dead deer. But the stag’s too big to get in the boot. We
can get the body in, but not the head and antlers. I consider cutting the head off, but it’ll take too long and, any minute now, some yawney from the estate might come along the lane.

There’s no other option: I has to drive along the back roads with the stag’s head sticking out of the boot and the antlers scraping along the ground. This is alright in the narrow
byways, but I also has to drive for a short while along the A38, the old main Bristol to Gloucester road, to get back home. There’s no other choice and I’ve got to take the chance.
It’s an odd sight, us two in the little old Austin motor and the stag looking out from the boot with its antlers sparking off the road. And I’m smiling at the faces in the windows of
the cars that pass us – them all with their mouths open speechless to catch the flies and their jaws dropping and their eyes not believing what they’re seeing. The boy’s laughing
too, at them giving us their frowning stares as they come close, as much as to say, ‘Look at them cheeky poachers’, and they’ll probably stop at the first telephone box to grass
us up. But the luck’s with us and we don’t pass no police and we makes it home safely.

I has a cool shed set up in the yard behind my house and we drag the stag in there and hangs him and then goes in to take our rest. It’s dinnertime, because we always has dinner in the
middle of the day,which is proper, with supper in the evenings. Cora and my young daughter June’s cooked us pheasant and potatoes and mashed-up swede, that we grows ourselves, and we wolfs it
down because we’re starving with the hunger of our exertions. Then I drive down to the village pub for a well-earned drink. Brian leaves Cora and June to clear up and goes out to tend to the
dogs.

We has eight greyhounds here at the house and they need walking for five miles on a hard surface to keep their pads up. Later, when they’re fed and watered, and the spaniels too,
he’ll go back inside and wait for me to come home from the pub. June knows I’ll be a bit belligerent, like I sometimes gets after twenty pints, so she slopes off to bed. But Brian waits
to hear about the arguments and the aftermath of the rows and ructions and to stop me from breaking up the furniture. Again.

Next day, after I sobers up, I skins the stag and dresses it and cuts its head off. Brian gets rid of the head and antlers by dumping them somewhere secluded, far away from the house. The
keepers on the estate know all their beasts and it won’t be long before they notice this big fella’s missing. Then the coppers will be snooping round and we don’t want ’em
finding his head and antlers anywhere near us.

The day after, the animal is jointed up and the meat sold and distributed among the people who owns that deer just as much as the earls of bloody Berkeley Castle.

2

My name is Bob Tovey and I’m a poacher. I was born on 21 February 1938 in the Royal Infirmary, Bristol. My parents were Robert and Beatrice Tovey and they came from a
small village in South Gloucestershire and that’s where I grew up. My father was a poacher before me, along with being a butcher and slaughterman. He had a small shop called ‘R S Tovey
– Butcher’ opposite the town hall clock in the High Street. The clock was very old and the only one like it in the world. The mechanism was operated by a rope and, in wet weather, it
would run three minutes slow – it ran three minutes fast in summer, because of the tautness of the rope. So it only ever told the right time in the spring and in the autumn.

My father taught me many things about animals: how to castrate a cat and de-bristle a pig and shoot a dog and kill a sheep with a piece of rope. Now, you might be thinking these things is cruel
and inhumane but, in the ways of the countryside, they ain’t. If the tomcat don’t get castrated, he goes about trying to service the queans in heat and howling his head off at night and
spraying everywhere and roaming and fighting and getting stud-tailed and blood poisoned – which is probably what he deserves. But it’s kinder to castrate him.

Pigs is de-bristled after they’re dead, so that ain’t cruel now, is it? My father would lay a bed of straw and get the pig onto it and shoot it with a humane killer. He’d cut
its throat and tip it up to get the blood out, then sprinkle straw all over the carcass and burn it. It was a lovely smell. I used to help clean the chitlin, then boil and plait ’em, so
nothing got wasted, not even the trotters. He’d cut the pig in half and lay it on two flat tombstones that he’d nicked from the local churchyard and rub a mixture of salt, saltpetre and
brown sugar into it. The liquor would run down and be collected underneath and he’d pour it back over the bacon – over and over. Then he’d joint it and wrap it in muslin cloth and
it’d keep for ages. Mother would soak it before cooking and make Lazarus pie from bits of backbone the size of your fist with the meat still on, cooked with stock and pastry on top –
and I never tasted nothing like it in my whole life.

Butchering a sheep was done with a rope; he’d tie two back legs and one front leg and put his fingers up the animal’s nose, then he’d pull its head back and cut its throat, tip
it up to get the blood out and gut it and skin it. It was quick and considerate and, despite what people might think, my father taught me to respect life and to do what was needed to be done
without getting all sentimental over it. During and after the war, when there was rationing, he’d go round the farms and I’d keep watch while he slaughtered and butchered black-market
animals that the farmers hadn’t declared to the ministry men. He’d be paid sometimes with money and other times with meat.

One time he killed a pig for a farmer and carried it a mile and a half on his shoulders back to the slaughterhouse and went to hang it up, but there was a woman already hanging there on the
hook. She’d killed herself. The old man dropped the pig and cut her down and checked she was dead and went to get her husband. Nobody knew why she did it, apart from her husband being a
miserable bastard and maybe she just couldn’t stick living with him no longer.

So I knew a bit about death and animals right from an early age. All kinds of animals, including dogs. And dogs to me is for working, not for pets. If a dog can’t earn its keep it needs to
go. Better to shoot it than ill-treat it or turn it out to starve to death like some does. Shooting’s more humane than taking a dog to the vets – it’s quicker and the dog
don’t know what’s coming until it’s over. You take a dog to the vet and it knows something bad’s going to happen. It gets to fretting long before the injection kills it. So
there’s no use saying to me I got no appreciation of animals. It ain’t true – I got more than you!

But this book ain’t about domestic animals, nor farm animals neither. It’s about wild animals and the kinship between a poacher like me and the creatures that live and roam wild in
this country we calls ours.

The village where I grew up was a small place before people spilled out here from Bristol and other towns besides. It was just one street and butts for archery surrounded by land –
farmland and big estates belonging to the aristocracy, earls and lords and dukes and the like. There was no television back in my boyhood days, just newspapers and radio, and I could tell whose
horse it was by the sound of the hooves coming down the street.

We had a Christmas party in the village hall every year and all the children got a little present, along with jelly and ice cream. And celebrating on Saint Stephen’s Day with a wren
dangling from a stick and the lads dressed like Morris men and calling and carousing with a dance and a dingle and a little jingle or two:

They’d be waving a bunch of bee nettles and blind-eyes and creeping jinny. And the robin would whistle-call to its little chicks in the snow and the grown-ups had bellies
full of whisky and warm feelings.

Everybody knew everybody else and there were village fêtes in summer and outings to the seaside and fairs and sporting days, and nothing much changed for years and years. But it’s
all gone now, except for the odd memory and melancholy.