Death in Bradbury..
Bradbury is deep in the heart of the country. Nature is
everywhere, red in tooth and claw and usually involving a crushed and
bloody corpse. If I’m not stepping over a mangled bit of roadkill on
my doorstep, I’m bumping into gun-toting gamekeepers in the woods,
hell-bent on shooting anything.
READ ON for my close encounters with death in Bradbury in the last few days, PLUS a strange encounter with the local post box…
READ ON for my close encounters with death in Bradbury in the last few days, PLUS a strange encounter with the local post box…
I’m walking in a neighbour’s field with the dog when a tree suddenly speaks to me, and I jump out of my skin. The voice, it transpires, is not emanating from the boughs of the walnut tree, but from the village plumber, Stephen Brain, who is sitting cross-legged beneath its branches, clutching his gun, ready to shoot passing squirrels. I give him a glassy smile, and hope fervently that all squirrels are busy doing other things. Hoovering their squirrel homes. Cooking their squirrel lunches. Dropping their baby squirrels at the school gates – anything other than foraging for walnuts in Bradbury…
Later, I visit my good friend Pat Fenny, who is in the stable behind her house preparing one of her horses for the hunt tomorrow morning. This involves a vigorous shampooing of Tatters, a beautiful Connemara, with a scrubbing brush, which he evidently does not enjoy. I’m a little puzzled as to why he has to be clean in order to spend tomorrow thundering about in muddy ditches getting filthy, but I guess it’s some mysterious hunt etiquette. I’m not going to ask, because I don’t want to think about what Pat and her red-coated friends will be doing tomorrow, so I steer clear of the subject. I read somewhere that they’re still killing foxes, and if they are, I don’t want to know. I like Pat, and we have a tacit agreement to smile brightly at each other when the subject of hunting comes up, and respectfully agree to disagree.
The day is dazzling, Autumn-bright, the land dry and pale, with great dust clouds suddenly rising up from the fields into the cloud-laden sky. But at the very point when the harvest is over and the stubble fields offer themselves as perfect dog-walking venues, visitors appear. Suddenly the roads are full of hysterical, ugly young pheasants, milling about in little panic-stricken gangs and getting themselves under the wheels of passing tractors, where they die horrible, mangled deaths. The damn farmer has just released them all from their pheasant nursery on the other side of the old airfield, and they’re trooping about in anxious feathery coteries, just asking for it. A friend of mine once compared them to young, over-eager kamikaze pilots who haven’t completed their training but are ready to die anyway. My dog (part spaniel, and given to eagerly flushing the poor creatures out of the undergrowth and chasing them to near extinction) would be happy to oblige; but I’m giving the pheasants a few weeks’ grace before the green-wellied oiks from London arrive in their shooting parties and blast them out of the sky.
Finally- a strange moment at the village post box when I’m posting a letter. Given that there's a postal strike on, I'm shocked to see that the small metal plate that tells you when the next collection will be, reads NOW. I look around. The village street is as deserted as it always is. Then I realise – it’s in upside down. It should read MON. Shame. I rather liked the concept of an eternally IMMEDIATE postal collection...
Later, I visit my good friend Pat Fenny, who is in the stable behind her house preparing one of her horses for the hunt tomorrow morning. This involves a vigorous shampooing of Tatters, a beautiful Connemara, with a scrubbing brush, which he evidently does not enjoy. I’m a little puzzled as to why he has to be clean in order to spend tomorrow thundering about in muddy ditches getting filthy, but I guess it’s some mysterious hunt etiquette. I’m not going to ask, because I don’t want to think about what Pat and her red-coated friends will be doing tomorrow, so I steer clear of the subject. I read somewhere that they’re still killing foxes, and if they are, I don’t want to know. I like Pat, and we have a tacit agreement to smile brightly at each other when the subject of hunting comes up, and respectfully agree to disagree.
The day is dazzling, Autumn-bright, the land dry and pale, with great dust clouds suddenly rising up from the fields into the cloud-laden sky. But at the very point when the harvest is over and the stubble fields offer themselves as perfect dog-walking venues, visitors appear. Suddenly the roads are full of hysterical, ugly young pheasants, milling about in little panic-stricken gangs and getting themselves under the wheels of passing tractors, where they die horrible, mangled deaths. The damn farmer has just released them all from their pheasant nursery on the other side of the old airfield, and they’re trooping about in anxious feathery coteries, just asking for it. A friend of mine once compared them to young, over-eager kamikaze pilots who haven’t completed their training but are ready to die anyway. My dog (part spaniel, and given to eagerly flushing the poor creatures out of the undergrowth and chasing them to near extinction) would be happy to oblige; but I’m giving the pheasants a few weeks’ grace before the green-wellied oiks from London arrive in their shooting parties and blast them out of the sky.
Finally- a strange moment at the village post box when I’m posting a letter. Given that there's a postal strike on, I'm shocked to see that the small metal plate that tells you when the next collection will be, reads NOW. I look around. The village street is as deserted as it always is. Then I realise – it’s in upside down. It should read MON. Shame. I rather liked the concept of an eternally IMMEDIATE postal collection...
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