The Gamekeeper E-Book

Barry Hines

• Herausgeber: And Other Stories
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 449

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Beschreibung

George Purse is an ex-steelworker employed as a gamekeeper on a ducal country estate. He gathers, hand-rears and treasures the birds to be shot at by his wealthy employers. He must ensure that the Duke and his guests have good hunts when the shooting season comes round on the Glorious Twelfth; he must ensure that the poachers who sneak onto the land in search of food do not. Season by season, over the course of a year, George makes his rounds. He is not a romantic hero. He is a labourer, who knows the natural world well and sees it without sentimentality. Rightly acclaimed as a masterpiece of nature writing as well as a radical statement on work and class, The Gamekeeper was also, like Hines's A Kestrel for a Knave (Kes), adapted by Hines and filmed by Ken Loach, and it too stands as a haunting classic of twentieth-century fiction.

Leseprobe

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This edition published in 2022 by And Other Stories Sheffield – London – New Yorkwww.andotherstories.org

The Gamekeeper and quoted letter copyright © Barry Hines, 1975

The Gamekeeper first published in 1975 by Michael Joseph

Introduction (‘The Storyteller’s Position’) and quoted letter copyright © John Berger, 1975, and John Berger Estate

All rights reserved. The rights of Barry Hines to be identified as author of this work and of John Berger to be identified as author of the introduction have been asserted.

ISBN: 9781913505301 eBook ISBN: 9781913505318

Proofreader: Alex Middleton; Cover Design: Tom Etherington, from the print ‘Midwinter, North Yorkshire’ by Norman Ackroyd, used with permission. Typesetting and eBook by Tetragon, London. And Other Stories would like to thank Tom Overton for sending us his transcriptions of ‘The Storyteller’s Position’ and the letters between John Berger and Barry Hines, as well as to thank Sue Vice and David Forrest, authors of Barry Hines: Kes, Threads and Beyond, for their book and their research in the Hines Papers.

And Other Stories gratefully acknowledge that our work is supported using public funding by Arts Council England.

Contents

The Storyteller’s Position – Introduction by John Bergerthe gamekeeperAcknowledgements

‌Introduction

The Storyteller’s Position

He stood on the doorstep and banged the boots together, and segments of dried earth fell from the tread of their soles like typeset from a tray. The noise woke up the dogs in their pen, and they appeared from their kennel in slow procession, the springer spaniel, the black labrador and the cross-bred terrier, stretching and snuffling, and yawning clouds into the cold morning air.

Most published novels are a more intimate form of soap opera. Hines’s The Gamekeeper is more like a handbook, a manual.

The text, undivided by chapters, covers a year of a gamekeeper’s life or, rather, of the work which determines his life. Because this work follows the seasons, when we reach the end we are back at the beginning.

The gamekeeper, aged about 40, is married with two sons. Previously he was a steelworker. (The setting is probably Yorkshire.) Long before the book begins, he has left the steelworks to become one of the Duke’s half dozen gamekeepers. He is independent-minded; he feels good out of doors; he likes dogs and is fascinated by wildlife. His choice was towards a relatively larger freedom.

But the purpose of his life’s work now, with no holidays and less leisure than before, is absurd. He breeds and protects pheasants so that the Duke and six or seven of his associates can shoot 300 birds in a couple of days. Shoot and do nothing else. They do not carry or load their own guns; they do not walk; they do not train their dogs. They aim and pull the triggers. And they are not anachronisms: they are men of very considerable modern power.

To ensure these powerful men their few hours of amusement, the gamekeeper daily throughout the year – and sometimes at night – pursues poachers; intimidates kids bird-nesting or picking flowers; lays traps; ferrets rabbits; kills crows and magpies; shoots foxes; hatches the pheasants in incubators or under broody hens; feeds them absolutely regularly; administers medicine to them; releases them and watches over them so that on the prescribed day they can be driven by men with sticks towards the little line of trigger pullers.

Such is the absurdity of his chosen life. He recognizes the absurdity. Yet he accepts it and in no way allows it to undermine his singlemindedness and efficiency as a gamekeeper. He gives himself over – just as the writing gives itself over – to all the practical tasks at hand:

The gamekeeper removed the spade and placed the ferret at the entrance to the hole. He did not rush around to relieve his confinement, or dash straight down the burrow. He just stood there for a moment, extended his head, snake like, to confirm the judgement of the dog, then calmly walked into the dark. There was nothing extravagant about his movement. Yet he was all the more dangerous for his calm.

Marginally, in the vitality of some of the wild birds or animals around him the gamekeeper deposits his minimal belief that life has another dimension.

While the gamekeeper was on his rounds, and the boys were raking the rearing field, the pheasants inside the first incubator were starting to hatch. Cushioned in their sacs of water, protected by their shells, they had been growing for twenty-three days, and now they filled their shells. They stirred, they had to peck their way out, through the membrane, through the shell.

This is a book that borders on despair. No emotions or feelings are described in it. The near-despair resides in the contrast between the practicality of everything described and the unproductivity of the final outcome. A near-despair with a profoundly proletarian origin.

To assess the book, one must interrogate its meanings. The meaning of its method: in place of the endlessly exchanged opinions and constantly fluctuating feelings of the middle-class novel, it substitutes jobs, causes and effects. Its social meaning: without explicit judgement it shows the difference between the lives of privileged and underprivileged. Its philosophical meaning: it describes a ‘world’ in which the ruling class has succeeded in recycling nature, the game of the woods and moors has been proletarianized, it is fed and housed so as to produce the maximum surplus value – which, in this case, is the number of brace ‘in the bag’.

The book also invents its own meaning which is stronger than any other and which Hines probably calculated less. This is the meaning of the gamekeeper’s solitude and the relation of this solitude to the will-to-live of animals. Here, I suspect, is where Hines’s heart and obsession as a writer reside. His earlier novel A Kestrel for a Knave was also about such a relationship. It is very rare to know and write about animals as well as he does in narrative form. To do so may well require a deep experience of solitude. The only modern writer I would compare Hines with, in this respect, is Louis Pergaud, who was killed in the First World War.

Applying the highest standards and bearing these meanings in mind how should his new book be assessed? The thirty-page description of the grouse shoot on 12 August is unforgettable. So are other shorter passages. But the whole may be flawed. The signs of the flaw are very few: they all imply an uncertainty about the storyteller’s exact position in relation to the story he is telling:

‘What’s up with you this time, John?’

John looked at his stomach, then marked its position with his hand.

‘I’ve got a stomach-ache.’

The gamekeeper levelled a forkful of egg at him. The portion of white, hanging over the prongs, looked as languid as a Dalí watch.

‘Stomach-ache my arse. You’re telling lies again, John…’

The reference to Dalí shatters the integrity of the scene. It belongs neither to narrator nor narrated.

Occasionally he allows an animal a time-sense which is sentimental: ‘The grouse were accustomed to mists, and for them, this was a day just like any other day.’ The comparison with any other day is false. Throughout the book there are maybe a dozen slips like this. Apparently unimportant except that the book concerns extreme technical rigour. But even so unimportant in themselves. Important only as signs of why a strength which should one day be there in a book by this writer is not yet there.

These slips suggest that Hines is not sure of his story. Yet he evidently is master of its content. So if he is not sure, it is probably because he is using the story, treating it as a means, not accepting it as an end. Occasionally he appeals over the edge of the story he is telling.

I can only guess why. I think Hines sees no way out. He lives with a sense of historical hopelessness. ‘Ar, well, there’s nowt we can do about that, George.’ In the animal world situations of ‘hopelessness’ are redeemed by the animals’ unawareness and instinctive and ferocious struggle to survive. In return for his empathy, Hines borrows this redemption from the animal world and it consoles him. But the consolation risks turning the story into a means. Hence his unsureness.

Finally animals lead any close observer into metaphysics.

One day Hines will have to write about why women and men need hope. Whether he then sees that need with full despair or with support, nobody but Barry Hines can decide. But when he writes with complete conviction about his position as storyteller – because the story is sufficient to the truth which he must write – he may well produce a great book. Meanwhile this is an outstanding one, which I read with admiration.

—John Berger, 1975

Editor’s Note on ‘The Storyteller’s Position’ by John Berger

Never before published, the text above by John Berger, here published in full, is in the Hines Papers at the University of Sheffield’s Special Collections, where it is accompanied by a letter dated 6 November 1975 from John Berger to Barry Hines, in which Berger says:

I read The Gamekeeper with excitement and much admiration. I asked to review it for New Society – and then wrote the enclosed. They cut it in an imbecile way – pruning out all the reasoning, drawing only an opinion. (The reduction of intellectuals to opinion-taps is one of the small ways in which the system ensures its continuity.) So I refused to let them publish it. But I thought you might like to see it – so I enclose it.

Whatever Hines’ thoughts about the review not being published may have been, he replied on 27 November 1975, in a letter now in the John Berger Archive at the British Library: ‘What was warming for me was that at last somebody knew what I was on about. You actually talked in details about the politics of the book.’

‌The Gamekeeper

The countryside is the stronghold of most myths about free enterprise, independence, self-reliance, but it may be, in the end, that the wheel will turn full circle – that the common land which was grabbed and enclosed by the landlords in the eighteenth century will be given back to the public, and that the whole land of Britain will come to seem so precious that the public will insist on having it for themselves.

Anthony SampsonThe New Anatomy of Britain

February. It was time to catch up the pheasants.

George Purse bent down and picked up his boots from a newspaper which his wife had put down to keep the mud off the kitchen floor. Holding the boots in one hand he unlocked the kitchen door and stepped outside to put them on.

He stood on the doorstep and banged the boots together, and segments of dried earth fell from the tread of their soles like typeset from a tray. The noise woke up the dogs in their pen, and they appeared from their kennel in slow procession, the springer spaniel, the black labrador and the cross-bred terrier, stretching and snuffling, and yawning clouds into the cold morning air. The terrier was awake first. He rolled over and rubbed his back hard against the concrete floor, simultaneously kicking his back legs into the air as though trying to brace them against something solid. Growling with pleasure, he practised a few bites at nothing in particular, then he jumped up and shook himself so vigorously that he went stiff-legged and his pads kept vibrating from the floor.

George Purse sat down on the bench underneath the kitchen window to fasten up his boots. Overnight, the leather laces had dried stiff, and although this made them easy to thread, it made them difficult to knot when he reached the top. Cursing the laces softly and passionately, he tugged hard and managed to tie a double bow in each one. But the knots had not jelled, there were spaces between them, and when he stood up, his head aching from bending over, his fingertips sore and already feeling the cold, it looked as though he had finally solved the problem with a couple of Chinese puzzles.

He looked up at the sky; it was a habit, a reflex action. What happened in the sky was important to gamekeepers. The weather and the birds which occupied the sky above their territories were important factors in their work. There was only one bird up there, a lapwing flying upwind, its broad supple wings carrying it easily through the north-east wind. George Purse saw it, identified it and forgot it. He was not interested in lapwings. They did not interfere with his work. Lapwings were not enemies of game.

He walked across the yard to let the dogs out for a run while he collected grain and water to feed the pheasants. The dogs were waiting for him at the door of the pen. He did not have to open it. As soon as he removed the lock they pushed their noses into the crack by the jamb and sent the door crashing back on its hinges. George Purse cursed them as they rushed past his legs. They came out in this way every morning, and he cursed them for it every morning. He inspected the hinges. They were still firm, but the jamb was splitting vertically above the top one.

The dogs sniffed and cocked their legs at familiar corners, then the springer and the labrador got their noses down and worked over the whole of the yard. The terrier just ran about wildly with his hackles up, barking. He kept running at the other dogs, jumping at them and growling at their throats. The labrador ignored him. He just stood still, lifted his head out of the way and looked about him until the irritant went away.

But the spaniel was less patient. He would tolerate two or three of these mock attacks then retaliate, snapping and snarling the terrier into yelping submission on his back, pink belly exposed, front paws together at his chin. Dominance reasserted, the springer continued to quarter the yard. The terrier just jumped up and started all over again. This was what he was bred for, fighting. He was just as obdurate when put down a fox’s earth. Sometimes he would come tumbling out yelping with pain, an ear torn, his face gashed, or a patch of hair ripped from his back; but after a quick examination by the gamekeeper to check that the wounds were only superficial, he was always willing to run back to the blind fight down the stinking burrow.

The labrador and the spaniel having systematically worked the ground between the outhouses and the cottage, left the yard and started to work in amongst the trees at the edge of the wood. The gamekeeper let the hens out into the yard, then unlocked the stable door of the adjoining outhouse, where he kept his feed and all the tools of his profession except for his guns.

He pulled open both doors to let the light in, and the clean whitewashed walls of the interior reflected the light, held it, and made it bright enough to use. The room was immaculate. Every object had its place.

Sacks of dog meal, hen meal and grain for the pheasants were stacked beneath the bench along the back wall. On the bench there was a box trap and two folded ferret bags, and on a shelf above the bench stood cans of vermin poison, and other cans and bottles containing medicine for pheasants.

Through the years, a succession of gamekeepers had hammered nails and hooks into the walls on which to hang their equipment. Some of these pegs had worked loose and were fragile through corrosion, and during his ten years at the job George Purse had knocked in several six-inch nails of his own. From one nail hung a selection of leather collars, leashes and rabbit skin dummies used in the training of gun dogs. From another, a dozen wire snares. A bunch of Fenn traps, suspended tautly by their chains, threatened their hook with extraction, and next to them, carefully coiled and tied, a long net, used for rabbiting. The gamekeeper’s waterproofs were hung directly above his wellington boots. On another nail hung a keep net and a fishing rod in its canvas sheath; and on the flagstones, beneath these nails, stood three buckets, two oil lamps, and in one corner, a rabbiting spade with a sharp worn blade.

The gamekeeper pulled open the mouth of a sack of grain, then fetched a bucket and started to ladle grain into it with an old enamelled jug. Load after load of teeming grain until the bucket was almost full. Then, there was such a squawk from outside that it made him jump, he jerked the jug, and grain spilled on to the floor. Furious, he hurried to the door.

The sight of the hens had been too much for the terrier. He had approached one, it had shied away, therefore he had been forced to chase it. When the gamekeeper reached the door of the outhouse the hen was still winning, just. Neck out, squawking, it strained forward with flailing wings. But its weight was unevenly distributed, the bulk of it was too far back for serious sprinting, and its action was merely a preliminary to taking off; which it did, every time the terrier snapped at its tail.

Each flight lasted two or three flaps, then it plumped down in a brown flurry and strode on again before the terrier could force it down and get its jaws across its back.

The gamekeeper let out such a roar after the terrier, the results of which could not have been more immediate if the reprimand had been physical. The terrier stopped the chase, looked back over his shoulder, then trotted away, eyes rolling for fear of something worse. It was time to join the other dogs in the wood. He would be safer distinguishing the scents of night visitors, and grumbling at their smells amongst the frozen leaves beneath the trees.

The racket had awakened the gamekeeper’s wife and children. The two boys looked out, then eased their way further into their warm beds. They knew by the degree of light in the bedroom that it was not yet time to get up for school. The gamekeeper’s wife tried to stay awake. She had to get up. Her husband would expect his breakfast to be ready when he returned from feeding the pheasants.

Before he left the yard with his bucket of grain and can of water the gamekeeper put the dogs away. He never took them with him when he went to feed the pheasants. He always went alone. It made the job easier. He could have made the dogs sit at a safe distance. And they would have sat. They would have sat until the frost stiffened their fur if he had asked them to. But without them there was less chance of the unpredictable; a sudden rabbit, a chase, panic amongst the pheasants and possible desertion from the covert.

He called the dogs from the edge of the wood and held open the pen door for them to go in. The labrador and the springer came straight away and walked in. The terrier appeared reluctant to pass him, and he had to threaten it before it would come. Then it sidled up to the door, pretending not to look at him. He knew what it was going to do, and when it did rush past him, he was ready for it, and able to time a boot up the arse to help it on its way. He locked the door and looked at the split in the wood again.

‘The buggers,’ he said.

The gamekeeper picked up the bucket of grain and the watering can and walked across the yard towards the path which led to the feeding ride in the wood.

The smallholding was built in a clearing at the edge of the wood. The gamekeeper’s cottage faced outwards across arable land. Three fields away was the main road, which marked the boundary of the Duke’s estate, and across the road stood the houses and maisonettes of a new council estate. The back of the cottage faced the yard, and the outhouses, and directly behind them, the wood.

It was quiet amongst the trees. The loudest noise came from the gamekeeper’s boots crushing frost, and fracturing twigs and rigid blades of grass. As he walked he looked about him and listened. He was looking for signs of trespass; a partly eaten rabbit, a bunch of feathers or undergrowth flattened by poachers and their dogs. He was concerned with these signs, not out of compassion for the victims, but out of professional necessity to discover the killer. A rat? a fox? a stoat? a feral cat? or just a dog on the prowl? What could kill a rabbit or a woodpigeon, could do the same to a pheasant or a partridge. Whatever it was, it was an enemy of game.

As he walked he listened for bird calls. He did not know many birds by their songs. He had never had the patience to stand with binoculars and watch a bird singing, then imprint the sight and the sound so that next time he heard those notes he could name the bird without looking for it. He knew them all by sight. He knew their flight, their habits and their habitat. On his rounds in the woods and fields he found their nests, their young and sometimes their bodies. He liked song birds. He did them no harm. They were not enemies of game.

The crow family was. Their harsh notes made him look upwards immediately. The rook and the crow, the magpie, jay and jackdaw were the gamekeeper’s enemies. They sucked eggs and ate pheasant chicks. They had to be destroyed.

But walking through the wood on this dun-coloured morning, the gamekeeper heard no crows and saw no suspicious signs. He heard the high bare branches combing the wind, and he saw a blue-tit searching the wrinkled bark of an elm tree for food. Nothing more.

Before he reached the end of the path, which formed a T-junction with the feeding ride, the gamekeeper started to whistle; a staccato, one-note affair, repeated over and over. It was a functional sound, he could have been whistling a dog. But the pheasants hidden in the undergrowth, already alerted by the footfalls, now knew whom to expect. The reared birds had been fed to that whistle from birth, and the wild birds had also learned to recognize that it meant food.

When he reached the end of the path, the gamekeeper could hear the pheasants scuttling around under the rhododendron bushes which lined the ride. Along the centre of the ride he had spread thick litters of straw. A car tyre had been sliced in half to provide two drinking vessels, and close by these feeding points, slatted boxes had been positioned ready for catching up the game.

The pheasants watched him from the cover of the evergreens. The overlapping leaves formed dense green canopies. It was dark and safe under there.

First, the gamekeeper refilled the drinking vessels. There was still water in them from the previous day, but it had been fouled, so he turned both tyres over and emptied them. He reverted the tyres, then refilled them from the watering can, pouring until the water overflowed and slid down the sides, making the rubber as shiny as seals.

He did not have to water the birds. There were numerous drinking places close to the wood. There were the drains and ditches around the fields. There were the two ornamental lakes, and the old fish ponds which used to supply the Big House. But George Purse looked after his pheasants; by watering in covert he minimized the temptation to wander. By keeping them close to home, they were less available to poachers who might be stalking the hedges and fields. His job was to keep the birds alive for the official killers, not to provide a meal for a fox, or a trespasser with a gun.

The gamekeeper picked up the bucket and began to walk along the ride, whistling as he broadcast handfuls of grain. He did not throw the food on to the mat of trodden leaves where the pheasants could easily see it; he threw it into the litters of straw where it immediately disappeared from sight. This was to make the pheasants work for their food, to make them scratch about and search the straw, to prolong their meal and keep them occupied. If the grain were just thrown on to the ground, the pheasants would quickly eat their fill, and then be off, foraging along the hedgerows, and across the nearby meadows.

The straw also made it difficult for other woodland birds to get at the buried grain. Gamekeepers use various feeding methods to try to keep the food exclusively for their pheasants. Some use hoppers made from cleaned-out oil drums. They cut three or four vertical strips near the bottom of the drums and stand them up on two bricks. The slits are just wide enough to allow the grain to trickle out when it is pecked by the pheasants. They make sure that the bricks do not protrude from underneath the oil drums, or other birds might perch there and scrounge a meal.

There are variations on this hopper. An inverted screw-topped drum can be used, with a small grille like a letterbox built into the lid. The drum is then secured to a post or tree at a height which allows the pheasants to walk underneath it and feed by pecking upwards, so that the grain trickles through the wire mesh. This precludes all small birds from feeding.

Birds of the crow family can be discouraged by hanging the body of a dead rook over the hopper, but even this draconian measure does not deter finches and sparrows, which when hungry, still try their best to eat.

The gamekeeper threw several handfuls of grain into the rhododendrons, and it rattled on their leaves like hailstones. He scattered food in and around the catchers, so that the pheasants, to whom these slatted boxes were as familiar as the bushes and the trees, would step through the doorways and feed contentedly inside.

The following morning, after he had baited the catchers, he inserted wire-netting funnels into the doorways. Then he picked up his bucket and watering can and returned home through the wood, leaving the pheasants feeding busily on the ride.

Some of the birds worked their way around the catchers, pecking and scratching for the grain amongst the leaves. They poked their heads between the slats to get at any grain they could reach inside, and then they approached the doorway to go in. But they balked at the funnel, they were unfamiliar with it. They strutted around the entrance, eyeing it. Some poked their heads into the funnel, and some even had a peck at the wire. But they would not go in to feed.

But, during the morning, when there was no grain left in the shrubbery, and it was hard work finding it in the straw, one hen pheasant ventured down one of the funnels for easy pickings inside. And during the afternoon, a second hen entered another one.

Once they were inside, and they had eaten all the grain, they did not know how to get out. They strode around the boxes poking their heads out between the slats. They jumped on and off the funnel, and occasionally tried to explode their way out by flying. One thing they did not do was walk out through the funnel, the way they had come in.

And they were both still there the next morning, when the gamekeeper arrived with his sack to carry any captured birds back to the laying pen.

The pheasants panicked as he approached the catchers. They ran two strides back. They pushed their heads between the bars as far as they would go, eyes staring, necks so taut that spaces appeared between the feathers, and the skin on their necks was visible. Then, as they withdrew their necks the bars backcombed the feathers, and they overlapped into place like a row of dominoes going down.

But the gamekeeper did not allow them to dash around for long, he did not want the birds to injure themselves. Injured pheasants were no good for breeding. He quickly bent down at one of the catchers, lifted it high enough to slot his other hand underneath and grabbed the bird across the back, clamping its wings to its sides. He stood up, holding the brown mottled hen in both hands to examine it for signs of disease or injury before placing it in the sack.

Its eyes were big and bright. It was well-feathered, and when the gamekeeper stroked one hand firmly down its back, the bloom came up on the plumage. He scuffed up the breast feathers to look for lice on the skin, spread both wings to examine the flights, then checked the legs and toes. He nodded. It had passed its medical; it was fit to breed. He opened the mouth of the sack and placed it inside. It would be quiet in there, it would not panic in the dark.

The laying pen had been built in line with the gamekeeper’s cottage and allotment, along the boundary fence which separated the wood from the fields. It had been sited in the clearing so that the pheasants could get the sunshine, yet it was still close enough to the wood for the trees to take the sting out of the cold winds which blew from the north and the east.

The pen was made of rolls of wire netting six foot high, which had been nailed to posts spaced out to cover an area the size of a tennis court. Sheets of corrugated iron had been laid end to end around the bottom of the pen to give further protection from the wind and the rain. The more protection the pheasants received, the more reliable the egg production would be. Clumps of evergreen and conifer branches had been placed around the pen, some in the grassy central space, others against the corrugated iron walls. These branches formed little tunnels and retreats, which provided necessary privacy and cover for the birds.

The laying pen had no roof. A roof was unnecessary because the pheasants would be unable to fly out. They would have one wing brailed before they were put into the pen.

The gamekeeper put the sack down in the yard, and walked across to the outhouse where he kept his tackle. As he opened the door he turned round and called across to the house,

‘John!’

He stood poised to enter the building, waiting for an answer.

‘John!’

‘What?’

‘Come here! I want you to give me a hand with these pheasants!’

‘I’m having my breakfast!’

‘Now! You can finish your breakfast when we’ve done!’

He went inside and walked across to the bench. He seized the knob of the middle drawer and yanked it. It did not budge, and this immobility jerked him forward against the bench. He tried again, this time bracing his left hand against the bench, and flexing his knees, his force directly in line with the pull. The wood squealed. He pulled again. He could now get hold of the sides of the drawer with his thumbs inside, and, jerking it from side to side, he fought it open.

The drawer contained the leather brails and tapes, which the gamekeeper fastened to the pheasants’ wings to prevent them flying out of the laying pen. He had checked the numbers and the condition of the brails the previous week, but apart from that occasion the drawer had not been opened for months, and the wood had swollen with the winter damp. The gamekeeper picked out two brails and half a dozen paper fasteners, left the drawer open, and went out into the yard.

Two boys were crouching over the sack. Ian, the youngest one, was just untying the string to peep inside.

‘That’s it, Ian. Let the buggers out.’

Ian left the string alone, and both boys quickly stood up and stepped away from the sack.

‘We were only having a look, Dad.’

‘You’d have been having a look at summat else, if they’d have got out and taken off.’

Both boys were quiet, and thought about this. And although the threat remained unspecified, they were glad that the two pheasants had not escaped.

‘Anyway, Ian, you go back inside. I only want our John.’

The seven-year-old ran back a few paces, to where he could enjoy a tantrum in relative safety.

‘It’s not fair. I don’t want to go in. I want to watch. I want to watch, Dad!’

His wellingtons, his brother’s cast-offs, were too big for him, and when he jumped up and down they scarcely left the flagstones. His father advanced on him, and it was surprising how well-fitting his footwear suddenly became. Safe again, near the house, he began to stamp one foot, and his leg, sliding in and out of the wellington, was reminiscent of a bicycle pump at work.

The gamekeeper turned away from him and went back to the sack, where John was still waiting.

‘The young bugger. I’ll tan his arse for him when I get hold of him.’ He bent down at the sack and looked up at John.

‘I’ll get ’em out for you, John. You know how to hold ’em don’t you? Firm, but don’t squeeze ’em to death.’

John nodded. He knew what to do. They had moved here ten years ago when he was two. He had been brought up handling animals. He knew how to handle them when they were alive, and when they were dead.

His father untied the sack, reached inside and had one of the pheasants out before the other bird realized that there had been any chance of escape. He gave it to John, who took it cleanly, with both hands spread across its back to keep its wings closed. The hen pheasant looked big in the boy’s hands, and he had to hold it close to his chest to take some of the weight off his arms.

The gamekeeper took one of the brails out of his jacket pocket and prepared to attach it to the bird’s left wing. A brail is a leather fastener with two short straps and one long strap. All three straps have holes punched in them like a belt.

‘Right, John, let’s have hold of its wing.’

John shifted his grip to release the pheasant’s left wing. His father took hold of it, wrapped the two short straps around the bird’s wing just above its elbow, checked this loop for tightness, then pushed a paper fastener through the appropriate holes to secure it. This left the long strap hanging loose. He passed it underneath the bird’s wing, slotted it up between the end two flight feathers, then bent it back to meet the other two straps, and fastened them all together with the paper clip. It was like putting the pheasant’s wing into a sling. It stopped it from straightening its elbow, which meant that it could not fly.

The gamekeeper tried to bend the sharp ends of the paper fastener under the metal head to complete the job, but his big cold fingers did not have the necessary fine touch. During the operation on the bird he had not noticed that Ian had crept up close again to watch, and when he suddenly turned round and shouted his name, the little lad thought he was going to cop it again, and he started to cry.

The gamekeeper laughed at the way he had startled the boy.

‘O, you’re there are you? Well, stop roaring, and go and fetch me them little pliers from the outhouse.’

Ian was away across the yard, as fast as his slobbing wellingtons would carry him. He was still small enough to go through the bottom half of the stable door and leave the top half closed.

There was the grind of a drawer being opened; then the sound of objects being moved around.

‘And I don’t want the pincers, or owt daft like that, Ian! I want them little pliers with the pointed ends!’

He underestimated the boy. Ian knew what he wanted. He knew the difference between pliers and pincers, and he quickly found the right tool.

‘Wonders’ll never cease,’ was all his father said when Ian handed them over. He bent the sharp ends of the paper fastener neatly under the metal head, checked the brail to make sure that the pheasant’s wing was not completely immobilized, then told John to take it up to the laying pen.

When John opened the wire-netting door and put the pheasant down, it ran away from him and tried to take off. Its right wing lifted it into the air, but without assistance from the other one, it overbalanced and came down on its left side. John stood in the doorway and watched a whole series of these lopsided take offs and landings. He did not laugh at the bird’s failure to fly; he watched its efforts seriously, concerned at its plight. He wanted to wait there until the bird had settled down, but his father called him away to help him brail the second pheasant.

When it was done, Ian wanted to carry the bird up to the laying pen. His father said he would drop it. The little boy immediately began his dance, but this time, having overestimated his bargaining power on the strength of the successful pliers errand, he did not retreat first, and immediately received a skelp across the back of his head.

He ran across the yard, and into the house, crying. John carried the second pheasant up to the laying pen. But he had not time to stand and watch it, for he was immediately called away by his father for school.

When they got into the house, Ian was sulking. He would not look at anybody, and he was not talking either. He was sitting at his place at the kitchen table with his head down, taking it out of the fried egg on his plate. He attacked the yolk so viciously with his bread, that he even destroyed the yellow clot at the bottom, leaving the egg a mere raggedy-ruff beside the untouched rasher of bacon. He pushed the mess away from him and started to climb down.

At the sound of the plate sliding, and the chair legs scraping against the tiles, his mother turned away from the stove to see how much he had eaten. When she saw, she stayed his action with one hand, and pulled his plate back in front of him with the other.

‘Finish your breakfast now, Ian, and stop being silly.’

‘I don’t want it. I don’t like white.’

‘You liked it until this morning. And what about your bacon?’

‘I don’t want it.’

The gamekeeper sat down at the opposite side of the table to the boy.

‘Just pop that bacon back in the pan. I’ll have it if he doesn’t want it.’

‘You would an’all.’

‘Well, it’s no good wasting it is it?’

‘You’re not going to waste it, are you, love?’

And she tried to tempt him by cutting his bacon up into small stickable pieces.

‘It’s no good trying to force him, Mary. He’d eat it if he was hungry.’

‘I know, but he’ll be starving by dinner time if he doesn’t eat a bit more.’

‘It’ll serve him right. He’ll eat his breakfast tomorrow then.’

Mary Purse turned away to prepare her husband’s breakfast at the stove.

‘It’s all your fault, anyway.’

‘That’s it, blame me.’

‘You hit him, didn’t you?’

‘He should do as he’s told.’

‘He only wanted to carry a pheasant.’

‘He’s not big enough.’

‘You could have helped him, couldn’t you? Anyway, what could have happened? It was taped wasn’t it?’

‘What if it had broke loose, and we’d have been chasing it all over the yard? Pheasants have been known to go sterile when they’ve been scared bad.’

‘Don’t exaggerate, George. It’d have had plenty of time to settle down. They’ll not be laying for another couple of months.’

‘I’m not taking any risks, Mary… Anyway… look, am I getting any breakfast, or what?’

And that was the end of that.

Mary Purse made as if to continue the argument; then she shrugged and turned back to the stove. She sliced a tomato into the frying pan, and the reaction of the juices on the hot fat created a furious energy, which jiggled the slices around, and produced a hissing sound like an angry cat.

John had brought a cat home once. He was five, just started school, and did not know any better. He did not know that his father was a gamekeeper.

A girl in their class had brought three kittens to school in a cardboard box, lined with an old red cardigan to keep them warm. Her dad said that if she could not get rid of them, he was going to drown them. Some of the children said they would like one, but they had already got pets, and their parents would not let them have any more. Some of the children said they would like one, but pets were not allowed in the new flats. John said he could have one. The teacher asked him if he was sure. They had got lots of animals at their house he said, a kitten would not make any difference. He did not mind which one he had. They were all nice. They were tabbies, with different-sized white bibs, and different-sized white socks on their paws. They all had blue eyes, and they seemed to smile every time they said mew. One of the girls said that the kittens could have her bottle of milk at playtime. Some more children said that the kittens could have theirs as well. Then the teacher said that there was no need to argue about it because there would be a spare bottle anyway; and she took the kittens along to the staff-room for the morning, so that they could get on with some work.

John took his kitten home at dinner time. He carried it down his jerkin to keep it warm. He kept running a bit and walking a bit, and every time he stopped running he looked down his jerkin at the kitten clinging on to his jumper.

When he arrived home his mother was hanging nappies out in the yard. The new baby was asleep in the pram. When she saw the kitten she dried her hands on her pinafore and took it from him. It pulled itself up her jumper and clung to her shoulder, mewing. She held it there, and stroked its back, and told him that he could not keep it. He started to cry and said that he would look after it. His dad did not like cats, she said. They killed the pheasant chicks if they got chance. Then his dad came out of the wood with his gun. ‘Where’s that thing come from?’ he said. His wife told him the story. ‘Well, he can take it straight back,’ he said. ‘There’s enough cats get here off that estate as it is, without bringing them here. They all ought to be drowned,’ he said. John took it back to school after dinner, and another boy took it home at four o’clock. He never saw the kitten again.

Mary Purse served out her husband’s breakfast, then took Ian’s duffel coat down from the peg behind the kitchen door, and helped him to put it on. John made no move to get ready. He just stood in front of the fire in his stocking feet, watching. A decision had been made, and he was now waiting for the outcome.

His father looked across at him from the table.

‘Isn’t it time you got your things on, John?’

John looked from his father to his mother. Still fastening the toggles on Ian’s duffel coat, she reciprocated the look; it was a kind of telepathic baton passing. She turned to her husband.

‘He says he doesn’t want to go this morning.’

‘Why, what’s up with him?’

‘He says he doesn’t feel very well.’

‘What’s up with you this time, John?’

John looked at his stomach, then marked its position with his hand.

‘I’ve got stomach-ache.’

The gamekeeper levelled a forkful of egg at him. The portion of white, hanging over the prongs, looked as languid as a Dalí watch.

‘Stomach-ache my arse. You’re telling lies again, John. Now then, what’s the matter with you? Why don’t you want to go to school?’

The boy looked to his mother for support. But she shook her head at him. The game was up. But although she would no longer comply with the deception, she was prepared to defend the fear which had caused it.

‘I’ll tell you what’s the matter with him. He’s getting picked on again at school. I’ve a good mind to go up and see Mr Newton about it.’

‘You’re not, Mam. You’re not going up there.’

The gamekeeper shook his head in agreement. Although he knew nothing of the merits of the case, he agreed with the boy in principle. Parents, especially mothers, no matter what the circumstances, should keep away from school.

‘Who’s picking on him this time?’

‘That eldest lad of Docherty’s.’

‘What, Sammy Docherty’s lad? Well, you know why that is, don’t you?’

‘Of course I know.’

‘I’ll tell you what. I’d have had his mate an’all that morning, if his dog hadn’t started growling and warned him.’

‘Who was it?’

‘Joe Price.’

‘Well, I’m glad you didn’t catch him. Our John’d be all right with Price’s team ganging up on him. How many have they got, six? Seven?’

‘I don’t know, but they all ought to be gassed in their beds like they do rabbits. And they’re all taking after their father. I’m fed up of chasing them out of the woods. And the lip they give you when you say owt to them. When I was a kid, if we were caught on private land we knew we’d done wrong and we’d just get off, thankful that we didn’t get some stick, or get reported. But these days… Pu!…’

And he took two substantial drinks of hot sweet tea to fortify himself against modern times.

‘The way they talk back to you; you’d think they’d the right to trespass. You’d think that the woods belonged to them.’

And he was so indignant at the insolence of the Price family, who by now embodied the evils of a whole generation, that he forgot about the immediate problem confronting his own family, and continued with the demolition of his breakfast.

Ian was now ready and waiting for someone to take him to school. If John was not going, either his father or his mother would have to take him up the cart track through the wood, and see him across the main road which separated the Duke’s estate from the council estate.

The mother and the two boys stood there, watching the gamekeeper eat, waiting for a decision; until he became aware of them watching him.

‘Hey up, it’s not a sideshow you know.’

‘We’re waiting. Is our John going, or isn’t he?’

The gamekeeper was surprised at the question. He thought he had settled it minutes ago.

‘Of course he’s going. If they see he’s frightened of them, they’ll pick on him even more. I know it’s not very nice for him; it’ll be the same for our Ian when he gets older. But I’ve a job to do. Every time I catch somebody poaching I can’t stop and think to myself, has he got any kids who might bash our John up at school? He’ll just have to put up with it, that’s all. I mean, what do you want me to do, give me notice in and go and work back at Brightside Steel?’

As the two boys left the house in their wellingtons and coats the gamekeeper said to the elder boy,

‘Remember, John, you stick up for yourself. If they see you’re not frightened, they’ll stop bothering you.’

All John wanted was to be friends. He did have friends at school, but these relationships were never cemented because he saw so little of the other boys after school.

Sometimes he stayed to play at someone’s house on the estate, and sometimes, on Saturdays, he went to play football on the recreation ground. This was all right. But the trouble was, John could rarely ask anyone home in return. His father was always uneasy when there were strangers around the place. He occasionally allowed an individual friend. But a gang, never. And this frustrated the boys. They could not understand it. All they wanted was to play. So, when things went wrong between them, and John became involved in an argument, and they reached that point where reason fails and irrelevant accusations begin, John’s opponents always used his father as their first point of attack. In similar circumstances some boys have the handicap of obesity or foreign birth, crossed eyes or an impediment of speech. John’s handicap was having a gamekeeper for a father.

Because the boys loved to visit John’s house if the game keeper happened to be away for a few hours. They thought it must be the best place in the world to live. They would have gone on their holidays there. It was a real cottage in a wood. They burned logs on the fire, and there was even a wooden trestle to saw them on, like in Hansel and Gretel. There were old dark stables with creaky doors filled with ancient and mysterious tools. There were dogs and hens and hutches with ferrets in. And sometimes, when you looked warily into their rancid dens, there was the shocking sight of a dead rabbit or a bird in the sawdust, and the ferret staring up at you from the hole in the flesh.

There was usually something dead about the place; a load of rooks or woodpigeons, or sometimes a hedgehog or a hare. Something for the boys to turn over with their foot, and make them jump, when the flies exploded off it.

And in the summer, swallows zipped in and out of the outhouses, and when you peered upwards into the cool gloom you could see the mud bowls of their nests moulded to the rafters, and the high places up on the walls.

It was magic land. You could play hide and seek, and in less than a minute be crouched down in a bracken cave, so secure that nobody could find you, and eventually you were forced to crawl out to make a game of it.

But the gamekeeper could not allow this. He could not allow gangs of boys to race around the house when the pheasants were in the laying pen. The noise and the excitement would terrify the birds, and might affect their fertility. Then, when the poults had been released in covert, he could not allow the boys to rampage through the woods, Tarzaning up the trees, and adventuring in the undergrowth. They might scatter the birds and force them to leave covert, and then there would be less pheasants for the guns to shoot when they came in the autumn. He could not allow that. He was paid to keep game, not to administer a public playground.

And so the Purse boys were lonely boys. Their main companions were each other.

George Purse wiped his plate clean with a piece of bread, washed the bread and grease down with the remains of his tea, then stood up. He picked up the unopened newspaper from the table and walked across the kitchen to have a look at it by the fire. Mary Purse cleared his dirty dishes and put them into the sink with the other pots. She scalded them with water from the gas heater on the wall, and the rising steam misted up the kitchen window. She immediately wiped a clear patch on a pane. She liked to look out while she was working at the sink.

Her husband stood on the hearthrug letting the fire scorch the backs of his legs. When they became too hot he stepped forward a pace, then back a pace as soon as the heat decreased. He was secretly messing about, daring himself, experimenting with mild degrees of pain. He had nothing special to do that morning; yet while he stood there, reading the paper, taking a step forward, then taking a step back, he never considered helping his wife with the pots, even though she had a lot of work to do and would still be doing it at bedtime. There was rigid demarcation in the Purse household. He did his job. She did hers.

Mary Purse had the radio on to keep her company while she worked. It was a record request programme, and the compère talked as though the whole country was having one big coffee morning while they listened to the show. She hummed the tunes, and joined in the words when she knew them. All those songs, all about love, love, love. Some banal, some risible, some true. Relayed over tannoy systems to women in factories; over radios to mothers at home; some dreaming, some consoling themselves, all trying to make sense of the promise of it all.