The Last English Poachers (3 page)

Most work came from farming or from the Arnold Perrett Brewery, which had been around since 1820 and brewed ale until 1924, when it became a cider factory. They stopped making the cider in 1970
and started making the ale again, and they still do to this day. Some villagers travelled the short distance over to Yate, to work for the Parnall Aircraft Company. The site there was built in 1917
by German prisoners-of-war, and it were originally the home of the Royal Flying Corps. There were camps and hostels to cater for the thousands of workers and, on market days, they’d have to
plough their way through the sheep and cows teeming the streets. They made ’planes like the Parnall Pike and the Pipit and the Perch and the Parnall Pixie in the years between the wars. When
the Second World War came, they made gun turrets for bombers like the Wellington and the Lancaster and the Blenheim and airframes for Spitfires. And there were craters all around the local
countryside, where them German blackguards used to lighten their loads before heading home – if they hadn’t got rid of all their bombs upon the industrial towns of Coventry and
Sheffield and Nottingham.

As a boy, I’d ramble the land all around and I knew every inch of it. I’d climb to the top of the Nibley Monument, built in honour of William Tyndale, who translated the New
Testament Bible and who used to pray, on a Sunday morning, for the souls of all those still in bed, fornicating. Up a spiral staircase of a hundred and twenty steps and look down over the world to
the north, south, east and west. Then there was the Somerset Monument, over near Hawkesbury in honour of Lord Edward Somerset, who was the son of the Duke of Beaufort and fought at Waterloo and
was, by all accounts, said to have three testicles. It was on the lands of the Beaufort Estate and other estates like it that I did my poaching.

The art and craft of poaching goes back before the history books began. It goes back to when a few people believed they owned all the land and others had no right to the game that ran and flew
on that land. But a wild animal or a bird is nobody’s property – it’s ‘fair game’, and them who thinks different thinks they own the very air. They no more own the
land nor the air than they own the sun or the moon or the stars. Men have always been hunters, long before they became farmers or carpenters or office workers or lorry drivers. We hunted with dogs
not too far removed from their wolf ancestors and we used spears and arrows and snares. We hunted to eat and we needed to eat to live.

A lot of people who complain about poachers and the ways of the wild countryside eat meat that comes from factory farms and is mass-produced and distressing to the animals that live lives of
continuous cruelty and die undignified deaths on blood-covered concrete. But, as long as it’s out of their sensitive sight, it’s alright. Everything I hunts and kills as a poacher dies
humanely and is eaten or sold on and nothing’s wasted nor thrown away.

To stop people like us poachers, the lords and ladies and bishops and bigwigs employed roughnecks to do their dirty work for them. They called them ‘foresters’ in olden times and now
they’re called gamekeepers. They were brutal lackeys who beat and killed ordinary folk who tried to feed their families by poaching a bird or a beast. In later times, they used the law to
fine and imprison poachers, which they still do to some extent today. So, you can see how there was never no love lost between the poacher and the gamekeeper.

Nowadays a lot of the land belongs to farmers and syndicates who runs shoots for rich businessmen and foreign fat-cats who think, like the lost sailor, that they can buy the wind. And they
employ their own bully boys to keep the likes of me away from their game birds and the other wild animals that run on their property. But I’ve never been afraid of any man who takes wages to
keep his own kind away from what’s rightfully theirs to hunt and eat, if they’re of a mind to do it. And I’ve faced and fought gamekeepers and wardens as often as I’ve run
from ’em.

Anyway, to get back to my story, I was an only child and I found that to be a disadvantage because you don’t learn about other people and how to deal with this bear-baiting bastard of a
world. You don’t know what it’s like to go hungry, or what to do when they’re all about you with big sticks, trying to break your bloody neck. I’m not saying it was all
plums and soft-pedal; I had plenty of jobs to do for my father – sawing railway sleepers for firewood and carrying the coal and digging in the big garden. I had to carry water using a yoke, a
wooden beam that fitted over my shoulders, with a chain each end and buckets attached to the chain, like a medieval milkmaid. But the work made me strong and I went everywhere with my father. He
hunted with whippets and terriers, and he taught me to poach and how to work the dogs. But the first thing he taught me was how to be quiet.

‘You’ll never get nothin’ talking.’

And he was right. I was young then and full of fidgeting like youngsters is and I couldn’t keep still. But he never lost his temper with me and I learned from his example.

I got my first greyhound when I was about six or seven and I’d take it out with a terrier. The terrier would work the hedges and the greyhound would stalk the outside and catch anything
that bolted. This was pre-myxomatosis and there’d be thousands of rabbits quatting in the grass in frosty weather. I learned how to move quietly and creep up on them, which ain’t easy
because a rabbit can see backwards as well as forwards. And it was a jumping joy to kick up a hare and have the dog catch it and bring it back without chewing it up and spoiling the meat, and
I’d be out every chance I got, roaming the land and breathing the free fresh air of this wild west country.

My first dog was called Queenie and I loved her like the leaves on the trees. Me and her was inseparable when I was a young ’un. I remember being out with her one rainy day and she caught
a rabbit in a small field. She brought it back and, as I leaned over to take it from her, I noticed a hare about two yards in front of me. It was quiet in the grass and not moving. I took some mud
off one of my boots and threw it at the hare and it ran. Queenie saw it and took off after it. It made for the hedge to escape, but the dog ran round and forced it back into the field. She was
clever enough to keep it in the field until it got tired. Then she killed it. And to see this spectacle – dog after hare, this wild battle of wits – was one of the finest sights in the
world.

The rain eased on the way home and it was just me and Queenie out there under a jet-black sky, with the moon trying to peep out of its cloud pocket and a warm satisfaction round my heart at the
young knowing inside me.

I learned from my father how to read tracks: what’s been this way and that way and how long ago. A boy can learn a lot from early cobwebs across a path or flattened grass or a snapped
branch. I learned how to lure pheasants with a drop or two of aniseed in the corn, because they likes it a lot, and how to work with ferrets and how to set snares and traps and nets and lures. Some
Gypsies made me a catapult when I was young, with a metal frame and thick, strong, square-shaped rubber and a leather pocket. That thing could do serious damage at close range with a clear view and
it was silent and stealthy. I sometimes shot four pheasants in a row with it, and plenty of pigeons at roost in the trees.

One dull drizzly evening, just as it’s getting dark, I leaves my bicycle in a ditch and creeps out onto the Berkeley Estate. I sees a pheasant at roost and shoots it with my catapult. The
bird falls, but gets stuck in a blackthorn bush. I’m about to go in after it, when I sees a keeper approaching. I legs it back to the bike and takes the chain off. The keeper follows me and
comes over.

‘What you up to, Tovey?’

They all know me by my name.

‘Bike chain’s broken.’

He looks me up and down to make sure I ain’t carrying nothing. Then he laughs.

‘Have to walk home then, won’t you?’

I wheels the bike until I’m out of sight, then puts the chain back on and comes back after dark for the pheasant. And it was a pure joy to get one over on them keepers and I’d
whistle and sing about it, like my father was always doing. I asked him once, ‘Why you always whistling and singing?’

‘I’m happy, ain’t I.’

And that was his nature; he was a happy man. But he could never stray far over the poaching line; because he ran a butcher’s shop he depended on the gentry and the farmers and the people
who worked on the land, and he couldn’t afford to go agin’ them too much. He had to tug his forelock to ’em like the rest of the village. But I didn’t, and I got hooked on
it – the poaching. It grew on me like a new skin and I couldn’t sleep at night for the urge to be out there in the wild openness. I loved it – the skill of it, the joy of it, the
excitement of it.

That ain’t to say my father was a yes-man, he weren’t. He was a very gentle man – until someone upset him, then he could mix it with the best of ’em. And he always warned
me about the monkey-men I’d meet going through life, even if I never took much notice of him at the time.

He kept ferrets – three Jills and a Hob – and he taught me to hunt with them using hemp purse nets. We’d put the nets over the entrances to rabbit warrens and send the ferrets
in. The nets’d close on a draw cord when the rabbits bolted into ’em to get away from the ferrets. We’d set up long nets to cut across where we thought the rabbits would bolt if
they got through the purse nets and the animals would get tangled in the loose bagging. The old man would bring his whippets with us and they’d run down any rabbits that escaped the nets.
Sometimes the ferrets would kill rabbits underground. When that happened, we’d have to listen with our ears to the ground to hear where they was doing the killing, then we’d dig down
with a ditching spade.

We ate what we needed and my father sold the rest in his shop. The pluck was fed to the dogs and the ferrets, and the skins were sold off to be cured and tanned and used for hats and the collars
of coats. Those we caught live were used for spot coursing, to give the dogs a run and keep them up for it – and it ain’t cruel, if that’s what you think, because a greyhound will
kill a rabbit quickly, a lot quicker than it rotting away for months from some man-made disease.

I learned how to set hingles for hares and rabbits, with a noose made of copper wire attached by a cord to a stake driven firmly into the ground. A pricker stick would hold the noose about six
inches off the ground for a hare and four fingers for a rabbit. Another stick would be bent over the hingle to make the animal lower its head. Hares run, so the position of the snare weren’t
never a big fuss, but rabbits hop and there’s daps in the run. The wire had to be set about three inches above the dap, so the forepaws went under the wire and the head went through, breaking
the neck for a quick kill. Them who didn’t know how often set the snares wrong and the forepaws went through and the rabbit was caught round the stomach and it tore all the fur and flesh off
itself trying to get free.

I’d run down my snares in the daytime, in case they was spotted. I’d take the wires off the pricker sticks and hide them in the grass and I’d reset ’em of an evening. But
having to visit the snares twice a day was dangerous – double the chance of getting caught. As well as that, if I got a kill, a fox, stoat or badger might take it before I got to collect it.
Predators like that would always be out hunting in the dark and would take one or two of my rabbits. So I had to go round a couple of times during the night, take out what I’d caught and
reset the wire.

I could even catch a quatting hare by hand. I was so stealthy I’d pretend not to see it, then snatch it up by the loose skin on its side and back and break its neck. I could catch a
pheasant with a slip snare, which was similar to a hingle. I’d set the snare and start tapping further down the hedge. When the pheasant went to its run, it got caught in the snare and the
lot went up and left the bird dangling in the air.

As I grew older, I learned my own lessons – like, never to drink alcohol and poach at the same time. Never to take on something that didn’t seem right. Always to work alone –
until Brian was old enough to come out with me. I learned to have contempt for landowners and their lackeys and to believe I had as much right to the wild game of this country as any lord or
freemason or vicar or magistrate or billionaire businessman. And I became a bit of a wild boy, roaming the land with my dog and my catapult and ferrets, catching rabbits and hares and pheasants and
white-fronted geese and widgeon and duck and anything that moved and could be eaten. What we couldn’t eat got put into my father’s little butcher shop and sold to the passing
pilgrims.

Of course, the people who owned the land and the estates and who thought they owned the wild animals as well didn’t take kindly to me and I was often on the receiving end of a beating from
a warden or a gamekeeper. If it was a man they caught, they might not try it on and just take his name and address and set the law on him, but a boy like me was good for a hiding instead of the
courthouse and I sometimes came back home bleeding and bruised.

I had to go to school, too, and keep going till I got an education. But I hated every day of it and I regret ever going to school at all. I went to the local Primary and a nearby Grammar after
that, but I mitched from there regularly and I was always taking off across the fields whenever I could get away without anyone seeing me. Maybe if I’d took to the learning a bit better, I
might’ve been something different – gone to work in the cider factory or been a farmer’s boy or a drayman like my grandfather. But I never wanted to be nothing other than what I
became – a professional poacher!

I didn’t just stick to the land. I poached fish with gaffs and four-pronged spears. My father taught me how to make the spears by cutting a tall straight sapling that
weren’t too thick. Then he’d split one end with a knife, carefully, just tapping the blade so the split didn’t run the full length of the wood. He’d make another split
across the first ’un, so the end of the sapling was divided into four. At that point, he’d lash some jute twine around the wood, about eighteen inches from the split end, to make sure
the splits didn’t travel down the shaft as he cut ’em right up to the lashing. I’d find two twigs for him that were a couple of inches longer than the width of the sapling and
he’d slide them up as close to the lashing as possible, spreading out the four prongs. Then he’d lash the twigs into place with more jute twine. All that was left to be done was to
sharpen the end of each prong and you had your spear. If a keeper came along, you could just throw it away because it cost nothing but a bit of time, and you could fetch it back or make another
’un later.