Never Such Innocence Again

Chapter 2

TWO

Gone off the same night, following the drum.

As Jack Garforth and the other miners walked across to the pitheads to start their morning shift, Jeb Fulcher eased open the warped back door to his tied farm cottage and slipped out into the dark pre-dawn stillness, a stillness that wrapped itself around the row of mangey labourers’ hovels of Highfield Farm like a cold wet cloth.

As the name might suggest, Highfield Farm stood high on the south, facing slopes of the valley and was still buried in deep shadow as Jeb climbed over the dry stone wall at the corner of the houses and dropped down into the fields, and skirted past the herd of Shorthorn cattle that were the pride of Highfield. Jeb sometimes fancied that Hector Whitehead, the owner of Highfield, thought more of his Shorthorns than he did of his wife and children—certainly he spent more time with them and seemed to take more care of them, forever checking on them and writing up all the details in his stock book.

Scurrying crabwise downhill towards the copse at the base of the valley, Jeb hunched over like a mole-skinned Quasimodo in the hope that this would make him less visible.

Jeb Fulcher was a stout, stunted man with disproportionately long arms and the gnarled appearance and complexion of an ancient olive tree. Clumps of mousey hair grew on the top and sides of his head like clots of marsh grass in a swamp, and the most prominent aspect of his face was a great hooked nose, standing out from the blandness of his face like a granite outcrop on a sandy plain. He thought this nose to be a noble ornament, Romanesque, patrician even, the distinguishing feature of an imposing visage, whereas everyone else simply thought that he had a big conk and called him Nebbie Jeb or Jeb the Neb behind his back.

Jeb the Neb crossed over seven more fields, eight more walls, so that by the time he reached the copse, he had left Highfield property and was onto Exham lands. As always, he felt a little grim smile of satisfaction creeping across his face; Jeb loved to poach from His Lordship, even though it would mean a heavy fine or even prison if he were ever caught. He had nothing against His Lordship, it was simply that his elder brother Samuel, miserable old bastard that he was, was Lord Exham’s head gamekeeper and Jeb was always eager to get one over on him. Jeb and Samuel had never got on, even as children, and even though they still lived barely four miles apart, they hardly ever saw each other and could barely speak civilly to each other when they did.

There had always been trouble between them; they had been forever scrapping in bloody-nosed scuffles over nothing, nothing that is except the fact they did not like each other, had never liked each other, and never would like each other. Blood might be thicker than water, but in their case, the fratricidal gore was curdled—thick-sour and rancid.

Samuel had left Highfield Farm at 14 to go and work for Lord Exham as an apprentice gamekeeper and, ever since, Jeb had taken perverse pride in poaching on Exham land, poaching from right under his brother’s nose, setting wire snares along the rabbit runs, lifting a pheasant or two from here and there, and always taking grouse from the high moors beyond the dale before the 12th July, the glorious twelfth when all the nobs came to stay with Lord Exham and shoot.

Jeb reached the edge of the copse, and stood very still for a good five minutes, listening for alien sounds that might indicate gamekeepers, not that he expected there would be, Samuel had not caught onto him yet, but caution and sharp ears were the hallmarks of a good poacher and Jeb Fulcher was the best in the valley.

'Aye, no doubt bugger Sam’s still ploughing that scrawny chicken-necked b***h of a missus of his, else snoring his big gob off,' Jeb said sourly to himself and, satisfied at last, eased himself silently into the copse, moving as smoothly as a shadow over polished marble, and checked out his snares.

The snares were loops of wire tied to a peg, driven into the ground, and strategically placed along the rabbit runs that crisscrossed the woods, inviting the bobtail beasts to garrotte themselves as they scampered along the dung-pellet strewn paths.

He was in luck, three of his seven snares had taken, a fat doe, pregnant by the feel of her belly, a long-legged leveret, which was a surprise; hares normally kept to the open fields but perhaps this youngster had been driven into the copse by a fox on the prowl. The third catch was an exhausted buck, which had somehow managed to ensnare himself by his back leg. Struggling to get free from the tightening wire noose, the big buck had all but flayed his leg down to the bone. Fur and matted blood were liberally spread around in a circle about the snare.

‘Lucky all that thrashing about and the smell of blood didn’t bring that vixen in from Bottom Hollow to see him off,' Jeb thought as he snapped the rabbit’s neck with a crunch that seemed to echo deafeningly loud around the thick murky strakes and tree trunks of the copse.

Well pleased with himself, Jeb gathered up all his snares, stuffed the catch into the deep poacher’s pocket of his coat, and hurried back up to Highfield as the dawn light spilled more brightly across the fields.

He was later than usual this morning; normally he was back indoors well before the dawn crept over the valley crown, but he had slept until well past four. Too much cowslip wine last night had befuddled his internal clock, but he had dared not leave his snares in place. ‘Even blind-bugger Sam couldn't miss them,' he thought as he slipped back through the door of the cottage, still fairly certain that he had not been spotted.

Jeb, the second son of Thomas and Millie Fulcher, had lived in the tied cottage at Highfield Farm all his life, and never envisaged anything other than dying there. His father, Thomas, had been taken on by Hector Whitehead’s grandfather as a 14-year-old and he had lived there all the remainder of his life, taking Millie Winslop as his wife in 1878 and raising seven children in the cottage, all on 8s a week, farmworkers wages being reduced from 11s in 1889.

The cottage had been all but empty of furniture back then and remained so now. The living room floor was still scrubbed brick, although Jeb was less fastidious about scrubbing it than his mother had ever been. The same peg rug, made from scraps of old cloth pegged onto sacking that his mother had brought with her as a dowry, still lay on the floor, although it would have defied anybody’s powers of description and imagination to say what colours it had originally been.

There was a broken legged table propped by a piece of wood, a single hard chair where his father had sat to eat whilst everyone else squatted on the floor as best they could. To this ensemble, Jeb had added an old wooden rocking chair that had been thrown out of the cottage two doors down when old Martin Handyside had died.

Off to one side of the living room was a larder with four or five rude wooden shelves, the shelves never contained much more than a stale loaf of bread, a packet of tea, crinkle-skinned apples, potatoes, swedes and, if he had been lucky with his snares, a rabbit or two.

The cottage had no water, no gas, no sewers, and if it rained heavily and the wind blew from the north, not much of a roof either.

Through to the back of the cottage there were two bedrooms, one in which the children had slept and one where his parents and the youngest baby had slept, and even now Jeb still slept in that same bed he once had shared with his siblings. The bed his mother and father had used was still in the other room, a room that Jeb had only been in but once or twice since his mother had died there in 1911, his father having died the winter before.

The third son, Jubal, had been a soldier in South Africa, enlisting in 1897 when a recruiting Sergeant had passed through by Bishops Shilton on a recruiting drive. Jubal had taken some cattle to market there for old Mr Whitehead and had signed on immediately, arranged for the money from the sale of the cattle to be sent to Highfield, and had gone off the same night, following the drum. He came home only the once afterwards, in 1900, just before shipping out to South Africa.

He had caught a ride from the station on the milk-cart and walked through the door, resplendent in a bright scarlet coat, just as if he were returning from Bishops Shilton market that same day, instead of three years later. His mother had kissed him on the cheek, but his father looked up once, grunted, ‘How do, Jubal? Is't cold out?’ and carried on laboriously reading his newspaper.

A few days later Jubal left to re-join his Regiment and ship out to the Cape. His mother and sisters had watched him walk away, watching him all the way until he was out of sight at the bottom of the hill. Jubal survived all through the Boer War, but then caught a fever. Jeb never could remember exactly which fever it had been, ent-errick or ant-eric, something like that, which Jeb presumed was some form of exotic disease caught from African ants, and he died in 1902.

Jacob, the youngest boy had worked alongside Jeb in the fields, starting in 1890 as an 11-year-old boy, earning half a crown a week for 70 hours labour, Jeb, bigger and six years older, was earning 4s 6d, but then he had to work on Sundays as well.

One day in 1902, when Jacob was 23, he had an argument with Hector Whitehead about not being paid when laid off because of bad weather. He tossed his spade aside. ‘Bugger this for a f*****g lark,’ he said and walked off. The next anyone heard from him was in 1909, when he wrote a five-line letter from India to say he was in the Army with the Norfolk Regiment. How he ever got into the Norfolk’s his letter did not explain.

All three of Jeb’s sisters had married and left home and so, when his mother and father died, he remained alone in the cottage, and even though it was intended to be a family dwelling Mr Hector allowed Jeb to stay there as a gesture for all the hard work he and his father had done over the years … at least until another farmhand with a wife and family came along.

Jeb hung up his catch in the larder, munched a piece of stale bread, after first breaking off the mouldy bits, and then swilled out his mouth with cold water from an earthenware jug before setting out for his day’s labour in the fields.