The Gamekeeper, page 21
Sam Dobie packed a hamper of young grouse for the Big House, then the keepers helped him to sort the others and tie them up in pairs according to age. These birds were destined for a game and poultry dealer in Smithfield Market in London. Some estates had contracts with exclusive London restaurants to provide a few brace for the evening of the 12th. Before the advent of express trains and fast roads, this tradition of dining in the capital on grouse which had only been shot a few hours previously, hundreds of miles away in remote parts of the North, called for all kinds of ingenious transport arrangements to ensure that the birds arrived in time. Much energy and expenditure went into the hiring and timetabling of vehicles, and some restaurants used to charter light aeroplanes in which to carry the birds from the moors. It’s there on film, with the keepers throwing the birds into the back seat, and the pilot in front, in goggles and moustache, turning round to face the camera. But this was all part of the fun. The cost was passed on to the customers, and they could afford to pay for it anyway.
And during the same period there was the General Strike, when the miners stayed out for six months and were eventually starved back to work, and the Depression, with millions of people unemployed throughout the country.
The gamekeepers were in a hurry now. They wanted to get home. The beaters had gone, so they were the only ones working. After they had packed and locked the hampers, they went into the luncheon hut, slid the shotguns out of their slips, dismantled them and fitted them into their cases. While they worked, the shooting party and their ladies stood around in groups drinking and chatting. The Duke’s chauffeur was acting as barman. He had produced the bottles and glasses from a small military chest, fitted with brass corners and inset brass handles on each end. Mr Friar was sitting on a rock drinking whisky, while his man pulled off his heavy shoes and re-shod him in a pair of slippers for the drive home. The gamekeepers had nothing to drink. They had finished all their beer at lunchtime.
Charlie Taylor picked up Senhor Aveiro’s guncase and invited George Purse to share the carrying of one of the hampers back to the lorry. George Purse declined the invitation. He said he wasn’t ready. But he was, he was waiting for something. The other gamekeepers were all ready now, and were deciding who should share the carrying of which baskets. George Purser had to be included. He was just picking up a hamper with Henry Clay, when Lord Dronfield detached himself from a group and called him over. He did not say anything. He just nodded sharply and shoved a folded five-pound note in George Purse’s palm. George Purse touched his cap.
‘Thank you very much, Sir, much obliged.’
When he got back to Henry Clay, who was waiting to lift the hamper, he said, ‘I thought the bugger had forgot.’
Mr Friar was the first of the shooting party to leave. He passed the procession of gamekeepers just over the ridge, on their way down to the lorry, and they had to step off the path and call their dogs to heel until his shooting brake had passed. The rest of the party stayed a little longer to savour the day. The sun was still out, but a pile of dark and puce-coloured clouds was tumbling towards it from the east. The thunder which accompanied these clouds seemed to be the noise of their movement, and as the party turned towards these gathering sounds, a sudden chill wind crossed the moor and whipped up the dust on the track. They turned away. It was time to go. They drank up and put on their jackets and cardigans. The chauffeur locked up the bottles and glasses in the chest, and they all climbed into the Land Rovers.
As the Land Rovers moved slowly up the track, the moor was still bright, and the sun picked out the glossy plastic cartridge cases which littered the ground around the butts. But the clouds were catching the sun. The hills to the east had taken on their dark hues, and the wind that ruffled the heather was drawing their shadow closer. And with the cloud came the thunder. Nearer. Louder. Sonorous noises, which lasted longer and travelled further than the harsh cracks of the shotguns which had been fired there earlier in the day. The moor would be a different place when the storm arrived.
The lorry and the keepers’ cars kept together on the way back, and they arrived at the Big House in convoy. Henry Clay went into the House and unlocked the gun room door, then, while the other gamekeepers unloaded the shooting tackle from the back of the lorry, he unloaded the hampers of grouse with Charlie Taylor. They stacked the hampers which were destined for London outside the door, from where they would later be picked up and taken to the station in one of the Land Rovers. Then they carried the hamper of selected young birds into the House and started down the staircase which led to the kitchens. The stairs were so wide that they could walk down together with the hamper between them. Charlie Taylor tested his nostrils as the smell of hot food became stronger.
‘That smells good, Henry. What is it?’
‘I don’t know. Some kind of soup I suppose.’
‘Well it’s not fish and chips. That is a certainty.’
They reached the bottom of the stairs and carried the basket along a high wide corridor with a red tiled floor. Doors led off either side of the corridor, and through one open doorway they saw the Duke’s valet, dressed in pinstriped trousers and a white shirt with armbands, pressing the Duke’s evening clothes. Through another door they saw another man polishing a tableful of black shoes.
The kitchen was at the end of the corridor. Even though the door and the top windows had been opened to create a draught, the lower windows were still steamed up, and the room was so hot that it was like walking into another climate. All the ovens were lit and there was a huge pan on every ring. The chef had six women to help him to prepare the dinner. They were all wearing white overalls, the women were wearing white caps, and the chef wore a tall white hat. Two of the women were scraping potatoes at a sink; two were slicing kidney beans and podding peas at a large scrubbed table in the centre of the room, and the other two were transferring pans from ring to ring under the direction of the chef, who was ladling and teeming soup in a large aluminium pan. The gamekeepers lifted the basket on to the table and went out.
‘Smells good enough to eat,’ Charlie Taylor said.
The gamekeepers cleaned the guns quickly. The smell of food which permeated the hallway at the top of the stairs had followed them into the gun room. It made them feel hungry, and they wanted to get home and eat.
George Purse wrapped a soft patch of material around the end of a cleaning rod and inserted it into one of the barrels. He pushed the rod up until it appeared out of the far end like a sweep’s brush out of a chimney, then withdrew it and pushed it up the other one. He squinted up the barrels to make sure they were clean, wiped the barrels and stock with an oily rag, then replaced them in their baize moulds. He cleaned the other gun in the same way, then closed the case and pushed it a bit further on to the table so that it would not get knocked off.
‘Right, that’s it. I’m off. Same time tomorrow, Henry?’
‘Same time, eight o’clock. And don’t be late.’
George Purse turned back from the doorway.
‘Late, I’m never late. As Alf Clark said when he came in one Monday morning at seven o’clock, and the foreman stormed up to him and said, “Hey up! What time do you call this? Do you know you’re an hour late?” “An hour late,” Alf said. “No I’m not, I’m seven hours early. I should never have bleeding come in the first place.”’
The boys were playing cricket in the yard when he got home. They were using a rusty milk churn as a wicket. John was batting. George Purse let the dogs out of the back of the van and the labrador immediately ran across to the pitch and picked up the ball. He told them to put the dogs away and feed them before it started to rain. Then he went in. There was no one in the house. His wife was up at the Big House working in the kitchen. Before she had gone she had cut him some chips and left them in a basin of water on the draining board. At the side of the basin there was a tin of peas with a note underneath it.
Pie in fridge. Do it at number 5 for 20 mins.
George Purse lit the oven and left the door open. The day had been so fine that no fire had been made in the kitchen. Yesterday’s ashes were still in the grate, and now that the sun had gone, the room was chill and gloomy. He took off his jacket and washed his hands. It was grouse for dinner at the Big House, and grouse for dinner at the Savoy Grill. For George Purse, it was chips and peas and a meat pie in a tin-foil tray from the supermarket on the council estate.
The Duke shot grouse on his three moors on alternate weeks, Friday, Saturday and Monday, and when he was not shooting on his own moors, he was touring the north of England and Scotland shooting on somebody else’s. It was a full-time job, travelling and shooting, through August, September and for the first two weeks in October. He had a change for one week in September when he went over to France to shoot partridge on Count Mauriac’s estate, and after the last shoot in October, he took a fortnight’s holiday on his estate in Ireland to recuperate in time for the pheasant shooting in November.
George Purse was busy too. His main jobs, when he was not loading on the moors, were trying to prevent his pheasants from straying, and patrolling his beat to protect them from poachers. He had not spent the best part of a year raising them for anybody to shoot. The Duke would expect maximum returns when the season started, and there would be no excuses.
He fed the birds at the same time each morning, on the rearing field in his home wood, and on the ride near the release pen in the Duke’s wood. When he approached them and broadcast the grain, he whistled the same staccato notes that they had heard from their first feed as chicks.
The pheasant shooting season started on 1st October. But the Duke never started shooting until the leaves were down in November. The pheasants were bigger and stronger then. They flew higher and faster, and provided more sporting shooting with that extra month behind them.
The pheasants really looked like pheasants now; they had grown their long pointed tails, and the cocks were darkening into their adult plumage. And as their plumage changed, growing richer, and more varied in pattern and colour, the countryside around them changed too.
Through September the changes in the woods were subtle. Most of the trees were still green, the undergrowth still rank, and on sunny days it was as warm as in summer. But in amongst the leaves, acorns, beechmast, conkers and sweet-chestnuts were maturing. Birds were singing again after their summer moult, and the sun took longer to dry the dew in the mornings. The horse chestnuts lost their leaves early, but from the fields, the woods looked as green and as dense as they had done in July, when George Purse had taken the pheasant poults to the release pen.
After the pheasants had fed in the woods in the mornings, they wandered out into the fields, where the signs of the changing seasons were more obvious. They gleaned the stubbles, and when the farmers ploughed the stubbles under, they walked along the furrows seeking roots and insects. Some birds followed the plough, and in one field, pied wagtails landed on the upturned soil even as it curled from the shining blade.
And when the sun shone on those September days, and the slabs of turned earth gleamed like armour in the fields, there was a softness in the light, and a stillness across the land that meant that summer was spent. Those quiet days were summer’s embers, a respite, a last warming before the harder days to come. The robin seemed to say it in the tone of its song; and the swallows in their twittering, as they ganged up around the farms in preparation for their long flight south.
And as the sap fell in the trees, their leaves dried up, changed colour and began to fall. Sporadically at first, through the misty mornings and the hazy sunshine of the still afternoons, until, by mid October, enough leaves had fallen to reveal the span of the branches through the sketchy foliage. The farmers sowed the winter wheat. The swallows left, and in their place came redwings and fieldfares, travelling and calling through the cold clear nights, across the sea from Scandinavia. In hungry flocks they stripped the hedgerows of their late blackberries and elderberries, of their haws and rosehips, and the strings of woody nightshade berries which hung along the hedges like discarded swag.
And then the weather changed. The wind strengthened from the north-west and brought rain, and the wind and the rain accelerated the stripping of the trees. For three days and three nights the leaves slanted down in a second rain. Then the wind bated, and shifted to the north-east, and there was frost in the night, and the frost brought down leaves which the wind had not removed.
And when George Purse trod through the leaves after that week of wind and rain and frost, the woods were a different place. There was more light between the trees, he could see further, and the grassy paths and rides had been overlaid with brown. He was glad the leaves were down. He was not interested in the aesthetics of their changing tints. It meant that the first shoot was near. There was room now for the pheasants to get up between the trees, and for the guns to see them clearly from their stands in the rides.
It meant that the poachers could see them clearly as well. At night men came from the mining villages and the council estate and roamed the woods armed with .22 rifles fitted with silencers. They shot the roosting pheasants from the branches; they were so close, and the birds were so clearly silhouetted, that all the poachers had to do was blank them out with the end of their rifles and pull the trigger. It was harder to miss. They had no intention of giving the birds a sporting chance. The nearer the better for them. If they could have plucked them from the branches, that would have been better still. They were interested in the money. They could not afford the sport.
So George Purse and the other keepers worked nights as well, to make sure that there were plenty of pheasants for the Duke and his party to shoot when the season started. George Purse hated poachers taking his birds. It’s like working for nowt, he always said.
He did not go out into the woods every night. If it was raining hard or foggy, he went to bed. He guessed that the poachers would stay home those nights as well. But if the nights were dry, especially in mid-week, when wages and dole money were running low, and a few brace of pheasants sold in the pubs, or in the City market, might tide a man over until pay day, then he had to work.
He left the house around eleven o’clock, when his wife went to bed. Sometimes he worked on his own and sometimes he worked with Charlie Taylor, and they covered both beats. In the two woods where most of his pheasants were, he had hollowed out little dens in the bracken, and when the air was still, and it was quiet in the wood, he would settle down in one of these dens and listen.
On windy nights when the gusts boomed through the tree tops, and it sounded as though express trains were rushing through the woods, he walked about more, visiting his dens for short periods then moving on. It was all guesswork really. He could be guarding one wood, while poachers were at work in another. He just had to keep awake, listen hard and hope he was in the right wood at the right time.
It was not pleasant in the woods at night. He was not afraid of the natural sounds of the night, like the barking of a fox, or the wavering call of the tawny owl. He knew that the little ghost sitting on the fence post was really a barn owl, and those grotesque figures with the clawing hands were only trees. But he was afraid of a natural figure stepping out from behind those monsters with a raised gun. The supernatural held no terrors compared with that.
Because he could not see well in the dark, he heard more, and certain sounds that he would have barely noticed in the daylight scared him; like the breeze rattling the dead leaves on an oak sapling, or rubbing a dried thistle head against a stone. He never learned with sounds like these, his heart lurched every time, and he swung his gun with his finger on the trigger.
He had confronted poachers several times in the woods at night. One time, he had been with Charlie Taylor, when they surprised three men who immediately ran away. The game-keepers chased them to the edge of the wood, and as the last one placed his hand on a fence post to vault over, George Purse hit it with a stick. This stopped the man and they caught him. Three of his fingers were broken. The other two poachers got away. In court, the injured poacher swore blind that he had been on his own all the time, and that the gamekeepers had attacked him when all he’d been doing was taking his dog for a walk. At two o’clock in the morning and in possession of a rifle? The magistrate said. You can’t be too careful, the poacher replied. You never know who you might come across at that time of night. The magistrate commended him on his prudence, fined him fifty pounds, and added a six-month suspended sentence as a further deterrent.
Another time, he walked up behind a man who was just bending down to pick up a pheasant off the floor. The man jumped when George Purse shouted at him, but when he saw that the gamekeeper was on his own, he relaxed and answered George Purse’s questions readily, admitting all. He was just describing where he lived, a street somewhere at the far side of the estate, which the gamekeeper had never heard of, when somebody hit George Purse on the back of the head with the butt of a gun.
When he woke up they had taken his gun. He never got it back, and he never saw the pleasant poacher again. He remembered where he said he lived, Black Street, and how to get there; you keep going ’til you reach that row of shops, turn right at the Co-op butchers, then it’s the first on your left… But he knew better than to go and try and find it.
Now he never confronted poachers, unless they surprised each other, and he had no choice. Armed men startled in the dark were too dangerous. Justifying his policy, he always said he was defending pheasants, not Fort Knox. Now, when he heard poachers shouting in whispers through the trees, or heard the splat of a rifle, or a dog scuffling in the undergrowth trying to scent a fallen bird, he stayed still until he had worked out which way they were going. He stalked them to within twenty yards, then hidden behind a tree he fired both barrels of his gun into the air, shouted all the names of the keepers he could think of, plus the names of anybody else who came to mind, and ran around kicking leaves and thrashing bushes. Surrounded by the posse of keepers, the poachers ran away. It worked every time. He dreaded the night coming when a gang of them might decide to stay and fight.
