The 120-year-old Man

By Andy Courtney

This is the story of a low-bred orphan who rose from insignificance to progress steadily through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries through his efforts in the Borer War and both World Wars. A adventurer, suffering many injuries and humiliations he became a national hero and went on to obtain enormous wealth and notoriety. A wonderful story, based on several 'British Heroes' of our past.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Andy Courtney
• Release date: Aug 19, 2018
• ISBN: 9780463673447

Andy Courtney

Author of "From the Ridiculous to the Sublime" a collection of amazing stories from around the world, Andy Courtney puts his wide knowledge of unusual facts down to a lifetime of diverse and eclectic interests. Throughout his life Andy's pursuits have included shooting small-arms and cannon, game and sport fishing, antique collecting, classic cars, specialist engineering, world-wide travel, sailing, writing and art, giving him a unique perspective of life. Now retired, he has indulged his eccentricity in this, his latest book, and hopes it will provide enjoyment to those amongst us who share his fascination with the oddities of life.

Book preview

CHAPTER 1

It was May of 1902 and the great Victorian age had dragged to its eventual end over a year before with the death of that mournful widow in black silk. And there was I, still stuck and sweating in the vast colourlessness of the arid Transvaal, lying prone in the dusty scorched grass, weaving the sights of my Lee-Metford rifle over a small gathering of Boer commandos half a mile away. Bitter-enders, they were called, as they fought on long after their cause was lost; dirty gruff bearded settlers of Dutch descent who had almost brought the might of our military Empire to its knees and shamed our great nation in the eyes of the civilised world through accusations of barbarism that were not entirely unjustified. At that distance those mounted men were barely identifiable but I knew only too well the sight of the enemy with their slung Mausers and crossed bandoliers sitting astride their ragged ponies. They were watching us too, or at least warily observing the group of mounted British Army officers behind me whose horses bit and kicked restlessly at the tufts of rank grass.

Then one of the Boers broke from the distant group and galloped forwards for a few yards, stood up in his stirrups and waved his broad brimmed hat at us, no doubt whooping in celebration that the war between us was finally over, although, of course, at such a distance his cheering could not be heard.

General Kitchener’s order came from behind me, most direct and distinctly. ‘Kill him, Atkins.’

With my rear sight already elevated to 900 yards, and with no need to aim off to counter any side wind I squeezed the trigger most carefully and so fired the last shot of the Second Anglo-Boer War. It was just one more of almost a hundred such shots - so many of them fatal - that I had fired in that conflict even though I was then still little more than a lad.

*

But that was more than a century ago when, as I say, I had not even reached my majority and, as I trust I am still alive when you read this, you might ponder over the sum of the decades and try to calculate my considerable age? Well, you may sniff and huff if you disbelieve me but I can claim to be more than one hundred and twenty years old, and there are reasons for this exceptional longevity - mysterious and perhaps supernatural - as I shall attempt to explain in these pages, assuming you do not slam this damn book shut and unkindly dismiss me so soon as a far greater liar than I am.

Yes, one hundred and twenty years! At times I doubt it too as I often think myself a few years older than that, though one should reckon age in health rather than years, and I am fortunate in that. My fifth wife, that money-grabbing bitch whose sylph-like figure lured me one last time into matrimony on my ninety-second birthday hoping to be a rich widow shortly after, failed to realise that. More fool her as I am still here as fit as ever, and the wrinkles and grey hair that she accumulated since has made her more amenable, and more resigned to her lot with me, and, in compensation, she had the enjoyment of my not-inconsiderable wealth although not, of course, as quickly as she had first hoped.

But first, back to my earlier beginnings in what was then the Great Victorian Age. I tell anyone impudent as to pry that my first memories were of being raised by my grandparents in a damp stone cottage in a West Dorsetshire market town. But by then I was eight or so and I certainly have much earlier and darker memories which even now, more than a century later, I am hesitant to reveal, but speak of them I now must.

My father and mother were social opposites - one esteemed and regarded within the privileged classes (such as they were in rural Dorset in those days) and the other pitiful and poor. I cannot, for the life of me, remember which was which or who was who as the dreadful events that terminated that early period of my life forced my mind to destroy such thoughts to protect my childish sanity. All I know to support what I now tell you, is that my childhood was a confusing juxtaposition of the big house with roaring log fires surrounded by leather armchairs, thick rugs and dozing Great Danes, and my alternative home with a cold flagstone floor, rush lights, rotting wainscoting and the occasional inquisitive rat.

What I do recall is that terrible fight between my parents. It was over many embittered things but most of all it was about me and the vehemence of their screaming words still rings in my ears, yes even now. My father struck my mother across the face - not once, but again and again - calling her words I did not understand. She thrashed and clawed back, hopelessly, while I crouched in terror and felt akin to watching a ratter as it tore apart one victim before turning to its next - me.

Then it was in my hand - a long steel carving knife with a yellowing bone handle and the blade long since stained black through lack of polishing. Something unknown to me made me hold the blade horizontally so as to slide easily between that brute’s ribs rather than cleave through them and it was as if nothing to stop his shouting and thrashing arms as I drove it in to the hilt. I remember so explicitly the downward looks of astonishment and disbelief on both his and my mother’s faces yet even now I cannot recall, in terms of the then newly-published Mark Twain novel, who was the Prince (or the Princess) and who was the Pauper. Everything seemed to stop at that singular moment, then I fled, crashing out of the door and over every obstacle in my way until I was away, a mile or more and maybe further, breathless with a stitch in my side and a murderer at the age of eight, out into the dark endless forest.

Most country folk in those days were scared of the woods, with their demons, pixies and other nonsense. To me ghosts lived in houses and graveyards and I would rather be outside in the woods than in their domain. It was there, after a few days lapping up stream water and living off sweet chestnuts, cobnuts and raw Chicken-of-the-Woods that I came across an imbecile, about the same age as me, but several times as fat. His stupidity was amazing. When I told him I was Oberon, King of the Fairies, he bowed before me and apologised for not realising His Royal Highness was so young and the more I ridiculed him the more I came to see that the fellow was incapable of taking offence. He was, in his simplicity, a delight of cheerful innocence and I loved him for it and for the unwarranted admiration he bestowed on me. For several long weeks he would join me during the day, returning each night to his parents’ cottage in a valley along from Symondsbury where he concealed scraps of food in his clothing to bring to me, his mentor, and the only friend he apparently had. We stole all manner of fruit from the surrounding orchards, dug up and baked muddy half-grown potatoes and turnips in fire embers, rubbed ears of corn between our palms and blew the chaff away before chewing on the coarse grain. And then we progressed to better things for our woodland feasts, a quickly-wrung fowl from its roost in a wooden garden coop, a squealing coney caught by the leg in a gamekeeper’s gin at an earlier hour than anyone was about, and even a white goose that would not die and kept honking in alarm no matter how many times we twisted and foreshortened its neck. In the end we had to kneel on it and crush its skull with a rock with childish insensitivity at the cruelness of what we were doing. And, to add to this, we even accepted, laughingly and in due payment, the odd lead pellet or two in the backside from the gun of some disgruntled farmer or other.

It was I who brought those brief happy days to a close late one fireside evening by suggesting to Thomas - for that was my simple but affectionate friend’s name - that we would do better if we had a gun. He grinned at me, said he knew where there was one, and was up, off and gone in a moment. His childish devotion and cheerfulness towards me was too touching to leave me other than concerned and indeed the dawn brought a dreadful dilemma.

He returned just after daybreak so totally distraught it almost made me weep to see my dear brainless fool in such panic. Me, and no more than a child myself! He had stolen a gun, not a worthwhile sporting gun or fowler which would nowadays be termed a shotgun but an outdated single-barrelled percussion boxlock pistol, useless for anything except close range protection, and not really much good for that. It was one of those small ubiquitous dregs of the Liege armouries in Belgium and the sight of it made me angry at the horrors it now seemed to have brought to my pitiful friend. Then Thomas, amidst tears and assurances that his sole wish had been to please me, said what had happened. He had stolen the pistol from the upstairs bedroom of his favourite uncle. It was one of those common cheap pairs set up in a red velvet-lined mahogany case, along with all the loading equipment, to appear better quality than it was. He was sure his uncle would forgive him as he left one pistol behind for the man’s own protection. But his uncle suddenly awoke during the theft and both man and boy screamed at each other before Thomas, in panic, smashed his way through the glass of the first floor window and crashed to the pavement below, not five yards away from a night constable on patrol. Cocking and raising his pistol, Thomas pleaded with the officer with his blue shoulder cape and raised truncheon not to interfere but the pistol seemed to go off on its own and a blue hole appeared in the man’s forehead and his domed helmet leapt away into the gutter.

Poor, pitiful and dear Thomas pleaded with me; it was the gallows for certain and his whole body shook at the thought of that. Help me, help me - a dozen times over - or fight them off with this. He said he had managed to reload the pistol and shoved it into my hand while faint but increasing shouts, baying hounds and whistles were already approaching from the distance. I held Thomas close to me, warmly and comfortingly as I knew he wanted and felt his panic, sobs and fears subside. Then at the pitiful age of eight or nine - as kindly as I could through his temple - ended the life of the second person of the many I was to kill during my lifetime. I wrapped his hand around the discharged pistol, hoping he would appear a suicide, and slunk away like the coward I was.

But now, let me tell you a little more of my youth. Somehow I was retrieved from the wild Dorset lowlands and yet - strangely to what I expected, but then again I was but a child - neither questioned nor criticised for my weeks of absence but simply taken to my grandparents’ damp end-of-terrace house in North Allington to the west of Bridport town. Much as I wished, I dared not ask what had happened to my father or whether my knife had proved fatal or, more importantly, what had become of my mother, whom I think I still loved but who was fast disappearing into the obscurity of my childish ephemeral memory. My grandmother and grandfather always smiled condescendingly at me and undoubtedly knew that I was looking for an answer - some explanation - but remained nothing more nor less than kind and protective. It was not until many decades later, when I was able to research such things, that I discovered that my mother was condemned at the Dorchester Assizes and went to the gallows for the murder of her lover, my dead father. I believe she had declared no defence, preferring the noose - or Bridport Dagger as it was colloquially termed after the town’s rope making industry - to save the future and innocence of her son who had in fact committed the murder. I think I will always hate everybody in the world - yes, you included - because I can never repay or thank her for her untold devotion to me and for the anguish she must have endured in her dreadful solitary sacrifice.

As much as I was expecting, and indeed dreading, repercussions over my part in the death of my father I was equally distraught over the consequences of killing my dear brainless friend Thomas. Then one day, as I sat playing with some lead soldiers on the fireside rug and was - so my grandparents thought - out of earshot, they started discussing the halfwit, the simpleton, that imbecile from Hedden Farm who tried to blow out his brains with a pistol but failed because he didn’t load it properly and took three days to die in agony. And what a shame that was, but what a blessing it was for his poor parents to be rid of such a pitiful cretin. That was the only time my grandparents really hurt me with their ignorance.

Living alone with grandparents was as difficult then as it perhaps is for young people today. Our front room was the parlour - for entertaining guests primarily - with an upright piano, antimacassars (napkins on the backs of armchairs to prevent staining from men’s Macassar hair oil) and carpets, curtains and wallpaper as sombre and unwelcoming as Fredrick Payne’s, the undertakers. In the back room was where we mostly lived and where grandmother used to serve tea, embracing a large white bloomer upright in her left arm, first cutting off the end crust, then buttering the bread before sawing off each slice in turn. It seemed odd to me that she never cut off a slice and then buttered it, but old folk were strange. They smelt musty too, and even as a rarely-washed youngster myself, I never hugged them unless I was ordered to, as their odour was unpleasant, like that of impending death.

On the hearth alongside the grate she kept a black Coalbrookdale cast iron cauldron constantly bubbling away with her ‘everlasting stew’. The pot was never emptied nor cleaned out, just topped up daily with a little water and whatever scraps of meat or vegetables came to hand. At times it made me wonder if she might really be a witch but, then, she never had a black cat, not unless its flesh still bubbled away in the cauldron along with all the other long forgotten ingredients.

In the conservatory - a decaying wood and glass lean-to at the back - my grandparents used to tend innumerable, nameless and uninteresting potted plants on slatted wooden shelves. My only interest there came in October with the game season and the arrival of brace after brace of pheasant to be strung up on hooks to ripen - colourful red cocks paired with smaller speckled brown hens looped together by their necks with baler twine. Over the coming weeks and months grandma used to fuss endlessly over them, occasionally deciding a bird was turning rotten through being ‘shot up the backside’ so might as well be eaten straight-away, while others were coming on nicely, just yielding up a cleansing maggot or two with a prod from a stick. She would not regard them as fully hung and fit for a gentleman’s table until the neck had rotted through and the body dropped to the floor.

I cared not a whit for the flavour of pheasant - just the maggots they produced - and fished the shady upper pools of the Brit with hook and maggot for brownies and brought home fish after fish whilst snobbish followers of Isaac Walton shooed me away and dappled and thrashed about with a fly, invariably with little success. I have, on occasion, been known to sell a brace or two of speckled trout to downcast chinless fools who, having studied endless books on fly fishing and bought the finest tackle from Hardy, couldn’t face returning empty-handed to The George for an evening of chaffing by their inebriated piscatorial betters.

Then one night I was ushered up to bed early. Grandfather had had a stroke, although it was not diagnosed in such exact terms in those days. Days passed and eventually he was brought down, thickly wrapped in blankets, waxen-faced and very weak, to spend the day - one of his fast diminishing number - in front of the warm smoky fireplace. A tub sawn from a small wooden barrel and filled with water was set in front of him and in the middle was placed a small red-painted porcupine quill float, weighted down so it stood upright. In his few remaining days he would sit unmoving and apparently senseless throughout the daylight hours, with his eyes always fixed on the float with a sort of contented look that mystified me. ‘What is the point?’ I would whisper to my grandmother. ‘There’s no hook and no bait and certainly no fishes’. But she would simply smile at me in a way that told me she loved me and that I was too young to understand. Now, in my advanced years and having accumulated many of them lost in contented idleness on the riverbank gazing at an unmoving float I think I understand what last dregs of comfort this simple act brought to my grandfather in his twilight days.

In the end a cough, a few pitiful wheezes and some greenish spittle down his chin marked the death of the old man. All I got was three marzipan cakes at the miserable gathering after his funeral and a clip around the ear for being greedy.

*

To a child, and many like me, the grim wrought iron gates to our village school were the entrance to Hell itself, and within those sinister walls was a veritable underworld ruled by Hades, Satan himself, the Devil incarnate. In his earthly guise as Master, he went by the name of Mr Wise, but his grubby mixed-age rabble of juvenile charges, which he looked down upon with contempt devoid of compassion, was only ever allowed to address him as ‘Sir’. He was a cruel bully of a man - tall, scrawny and intimidating - with a swollen nose tipped with a wart that sprouted black wiry hairs as did his ears and nostrils in even more profusion. Always rough shaven, only his mottled scalp was without hairs, apart from a couple of black strands slicked-down from one side to the other. At times when angry, which was often, his bitter pronouncements filled his discoloured teeth with saliva that emanated into a spray of spittle. It was, to many a young and frightened child, as if he could truly breathe fire.

In three years of what seemed little less than the worst penal servitude imaginable in that detested institution I never saw him in other than the same threadbare grey striped suit with high-buttoned waistcoat and fly collar shirt he always wore, and seemingly never washed. And, as with his clothes, he would never appear without his thin rattan cane which he used to enforce his own interpretation of education and discipline. The Devil’s Wand, we children called it, wielded liberally with an ear-splitting crack across a child’s desk at the least sign of slouching or a wandering mind; or delivering an agonising crack on the knuckles for any minor mistake, misbehaviour or construed sign of impudence. And then, when his temper flew, he inflicted his own form of corporal punishment that left crimson wheals not just on the buttocks but down one’s back, hips and thighs. It would take many weeks for the welts to fade which meant that most children there - boys largely, but girls to a lesser degree, - carried multiple marks of diminishing hues throughout their entire schooldays.

Because he was not permitted by the governors to thrash the girls - so my schoolmates had told me - he would always drag them away into his adjoining study, before administering his punishment behind a closed and locked door. We would sit there at our desks frozen in terror for our own sakes as well as the poor girl being brutalised within that detested room. But strangely - and it always happened the same - the girl’s sobs and muted yelps could be heard for minutes, sometimes as long as ten minutes, before the swish and thwack of the Devil’s Wand and the final uncontrollable screams. The girl would finally emerge, sobbing and wretched with tears, and return to her desk. She would sit there, taking most of her weight on her feet and forearms as her backside was too painful to sit on properly while Mr Wise stood towering over us, slowly tapping his cane in the palm of his hand while gazing around with a malicious gloat over who might dare to be his next victim.

At one hundred and twenty years or more of age, I am still frequently startled awake in the early hours of the morning in a panic and sweat of terror over that man’s brutality. And despite having been through infinitely worse horrors, of which I shall tell you shortly, he was the nemesis of every child’s nightmare. I wish, with all my heart, that little children nowadays should never know such things, yet I weep that they still do and adults who should make them a priority, shame all of humanity when they turn away and choose to dismiss their plight.

Joy of Joys! Some months later the Master’s body was found wedged in the sluices where the River Brit empties into West Bay harbour at low tide. The inquest returned a verdict of self-murder - suicide - while the balance his mind was disturbed through reasons unknown. However, it was widely rumoured that three rough gypsies called at his house one evening, dragged him away and repaid him, with interest, for his violent beatings and sexual molestation of several young girls at our school. Understandably perhaps, the face of every school-kid lit up at the news and all of us hoped and relished the thought that the unofficial version was the true one.

Mrs Dunfries, an aging, wet and prone-to-tears widow of Sebastopol, and an ineffectual ruler of children, volunteered to act as the interim schoolmistress but, by then I had decided I was old enough to leave school, which I did and was glad those days of my life were over. Even to this day, I dearly love to learn but have always had a deep aversion to being taught.

I was twelve or thirteen when I really tackled the confusion and mysterious delights of sex. Yes, I had been having increasing urges - which included endless erections which I could do little about and embarrassed me - for many months before and which had led to attempts to fumble with young girls. But most country children in those days were sewn into their long knitted underwear at the onset of winter and never changed nor washed until they were unstitched in the spring. You can imagine what a disincentive that was to any boy’s lust, especially one who was used to spending hours peeking through His Lordship’s privet hedge at a distant white marble fountain and setting his standards of feminine beauty by the forms of its two rather plump naked Greek goddesses. Besides, to add to my growing frustration, the total of every tiny young tit I had ever contrived to get my hands upon - through every deceitful lie of true undying love, preposterous oaths of eternal devotion and endless promises of marriage - wouldn’t have added up to a decent suet dumpling (in size I mean, taste don’t come into it). In those days one simply never hoped to get further than a lucky squeeze of a mammary, or at best both - anything lower on the female form was safeguarded by every unmarried maiden’s indoctrinated fear of hell and damnation - but I wasn’t making much progress in any respect. Anyway, by then I had started having other strange things happening in the night - wet dreams, my mate called them - which confused me and left embarrassing yellow stains on my bed sheets which I hoped my grandma wouldn’t notice but I’m sure she did - and all the while I became more and more frustrated with my loins demanding more of me than I could give. Finally I decided, given the chance, on a rather radical solution which suddenly became possible one chilly morning by way of a rather grubby silver half-crown I earned from some gormless Exeter toff at New Inn Stables. Try as he might he couldn’t mount his mare without it becoming skittish and unmanageable and I, claiming to be an equine expert despite my youth, simply removed the saddle and blanket, discreetly disposed of the tiny sprig of blackthorn I had secreted there earlier, and re-saddled. Half-a-crown and his words of gratitude weren’t bad - perhaps I should have asked for a dollar? - but best not be too greedy. I had specie enough, so I thought, in the palm of my hand to sort out my sexual needs.

It was shortly after and with not a little trepidation that I knocked on the door of Widow Fry, near the end of South Street. I knew she was old, probably half-way into her twenties, and that she grieved not only over her lack of offspring but for a fisherman husband whose body was lost off Chesil Beach never to be recovered or laid to rest in a Christian graveyard. But I was told, almost certainly wrongly, by laughing drunken fools in the Bridport Arms that she would let any man fuck her for five bob, so I hoped she would do a youngster like me for half of that.

She answered my knock and glared down at me. I winked at her in my best-practiced wink which simply made her stare that much more inquisitively. I raised the half-crown piece and then, rather gingerly, asked.

‘Please missus, is this enough for a fuck?’

She almost spat at me, her face contorted - hatred, spite, confusion, condemnation - every expression yet nothing I had hoped to see and all I wanted to do was run, but she grabbed me by the shoulder like the errant schoolboy I was and pulled me inside, slamming the door in her anger. She dragged me towards an armchair, sat down on the arm, puffed exasperation and, with me standing alongside, unhooked my elastic snake-hooked belt and pulled my short grey trousers down to my ankles leaving my white legs and abdomen exposed. With her left hand flat on my bare buttocks and her right hand massaging my stiff little cock she seemed to sneer at me yet pumped away. I was, as you will recall, just twelve or so years of age and the lure, the prospects, the excitement of what I was expecting, suddenly disappeared into depths of embarrassment. I feared I could do nothing in response, was unable to bring anything to a conclusion - that is, until Mrs Fry, her hand no doubt tiring from my incapability to perform - finally took one of my hands and thrust it down inside her knitted cardigan, under a layer of linen blouses and cotton chemises and onto the warm, plump, naked flesh of her breast and an unusually large nipple. Almost immediately my groin tightened as did my cock and my lower body squeezed itself into absolute ecstasy. My knob exploded in a way I was unable to control - erupted all over her now furiously pumping hand, over her apron, her stocking-ed knee, even a splash across her pale cheek. When it was over and I had stopped panting, she, without a word, wiped off the mess, took my half-crown and, as I pulled up my short trousers, thrust me towards the door. She slapped me hard across the cheek as I left, promising hell and damnation if I ever mentioned to anyone a word of what had happened. As I walked home I was happy yet somehow felt robbed. Already my urges were soaring again and why had I not dared to probe the underskirts of Mrs Fry? I knew there was a quim there and that I was a fool not to have at least tried to slip my fingers in there to find what it was all about. Still Mrs Fry had taught me the mechanics of relieving myself - and despite what clerics and schoolmarms claim is an unholy practice that will drive a young man blind or even insane, it is such a natural way of regularly disposing of sperm past its healthy best that even chimpanzees regularly wank. Yes, it’s true, though not, for some reason, do gorillas. And, when I have not had feminine assistance by way of hand or quim, I have shamelessly relieved myself in thoughts of Mrs Fry and the buttocks, breasts and mouths of many other pretty ladies, two or three times a day for the past one hundred years. It is both my blessing and my cross to be most extraordinarily fecund in that respect and, as I expect I shall have to reveal, it was to get me into an inordinate amount of trouble.

CHAPTER 2

I found my grandmother stiff in bed one winter’s morning with the sour smell of piss and death already about her. The doctor, the vicar, the local bobby and our elderly neighbours all came whispering their condolences and fussing over me before, thankfully, the undertakers finally took the corpse away. I tried to act bereaved and begged to be left alone in my grief, but I just wanted them out of what I had long looked forward to becoming my house. In truth I felt not the least sense of loss, just a degree of gratitude that the old woman had had the decency to shuffle off her mortal coil without becoming a lingering nuisance. The last thing I had wanted was to become nursemaid to some dribbling incontinent old goat, but then again, having two dead souls already on my rather ephemeral conscience I doubt the worry of adding a third would have protected her for any length of time.

The first thing I did was to search the house from top to bottom for anything of value and, although I did not expect to find much, I was nevertheless sorely disappointed. Neither a gold nor silver coin, just a few worn coppers, nor any item of jewellery except a cheap brass wedding band and a worthless piece of Whitby jet. And not a single stick of furniture, glass, carpet or ornament worth carting down to the stalls on market day. My grandparents had indeed come into the world with nothing and departed with nothing. Still I now owned their house (there being no other beneficiaries anyone could recall) which elevated me to a man of property to the tune of some sixty pounds; a respectable amount for a young lad who had, by then, just passed his thirteenth birthday. I decided that what I needed was a wife to satisfy my persistent urges, but first, a job, preferably something undemanding and remunerative, even if it might have to be mildly dishonest, rather than anything laborious and of hard-earned reward. As it was I found a tolerable position at Crosbury Hall, set uphill from Charmouth, as an Underkeeper.

Crosbury Hall, an Elizabethan manor house with dozens of twisting red-brick chimneys set in five-hundred or so acres of parkland entirely encircled - apart from an inappropriate Neo-classical portico - by a ten foot high Portland stone wall, was the family home of General Sir Nicholas Hawley-hyphen-something and his wrinkled and pretentiously obnoxious lady wife. It was from her I secured the opportunity of an interview with her Head Gamekeeper by pretending to fuss over her two yapping pet dogs she had left tied to a lamppost in West Street in Bridport one day while she did business in the bank.

‘You thar! What are you doing?’ She asked, extremely haughtily, as she came out of the bank, and as I knelt pretending to have made friends with her two evil lapdogs while continually avoiding my fingers from their sharp snapping teeth.

‘Beg pardon, m’lady, just admiring your very fine Pomeranians.’ A remark that I immediately saw impressed her (I had previously gone to great lengths to determine the obscure breed of those dreadful little curs so I could appear knowledgeable). ‘Beautiful creatures, but this one…’ I stroked and smiled at - despite a nasty nip - the one on the left with a white mark on its forehead .…. seems to have a touch of Pepsis.’

‘What? Pepsis?’ She crowed, ‘ What is that, is it serious, is it fatal?’ and, wisely shaking my head, I hoped she would not see through my nonsense.

‘Nothing really to worry about, mi’lady, just an oncoming looseness of the bowels that should right itself in a few days if you feed it only milk. Milk mind you, nothing else’

‘Know about such things, do you?’

‘Aye. Mi’lady, have a natural magic with God’s creatures both great and small, always wanted to work with animals.’ Discretion prevented me from adding that my only wish to work with animals was in an abattoir but then, with an arrogant huff and her two diminutive yapping hounds of hell - and good riddance - she was off.

A week later a note arrived from her Ladyship’s secretary saying how grateful her Ladyship was over my diagnosis of her afflicted lapdog. Yes, it had suffered dreadful, almost interminable diarrhoea (well, I had fed it an entire bar - six doses no less - of Doctor Churchit’s Chocolate Laxative) but it had recovered on my recommended diet of milk and was now in splendid health. She thought I deserved the chance of employment on the estate and I was instructed to report to Mr Frank Hunt, Head Gamekeeper at Crosbury Hall, that Tuesday evening at five o’clock after his rounds, and to be present with my bags packed, ready to relocate there immediately should I be found suitable.

Frank Hunt took me into his tiny kitchen of Crosbury Lodge and sat me down. He was a sinewy little man with a hooked nose you could open a tin can with and, as I later learned, that apart from shoot days when etiquette demanded formal tweeds, he lived his waking hours (even on the bitterest mornings when a foot or more of snow lay on the ground) in a collarless, unbuttoned white shirt with rolled-up sleeves and braces that pulled his baggy trousers half way up his chest. He had a much younger wife, the sister of his deceased first, so I believe. What I was later to remember most about him - apart from the fact that any dammed fox, otter, crow, magpie, jay, feral cat, poacher or any other perceivable predator that settled on his domain had but a day or two to live - was that he would take as much pride in his vegetable garden as his game birds. He boasted to anyone who seemed interested - and few were - that his dinner (his midday meal) would always comprise three different vegetables and he would never eat one of the same in a week.

But I digress and I must tell you of that first meeting - my interview - with Frank Hunt. We sat there, under a flickering gas lamp, in the dismal kitchen of his cottage, either side of a white chipped Belfast sink. He asked me my name and age and whether I fancied the prospect of working on a game shoot and then, with barely a chance to answer, he lapsed into endless and rather pointless recollections of his youth. He told me he had been born on 18 June - then still celebrated as Waterloo Day - three decades after the monumental battle that bought peace to Europe. He bragged that his auspicious arrival had incited his patriotic parents to give him the somewhat honorific (and to my mind awkward) middle names of Wellington Blucher. He had actually visited the Great Exhibition, disbelieved with a vengeance those scurrilous students of Darwin, travelled on both steam railroads and canals and had fought his way across the River Alma, been wounded at Balaclava and witnessed the eventual fall of Sevastopol. He had, to top it all - and I’m sure his eyes were wet when he told me - seen Her Majesty, the great Queen Victoria and Empress of India in person as her carriage drove along the new riverside gardens on the Portsmouth Road at Kingston on Thames, while she made her way to Claremont (and had, incidentally, later expressed more than a little displeasure to have found herself tricked into passing through thousands of cheering subjects at an event she had previously declined to attend). He went on and on, in an increasingly demented fashion, assisted by glass after glass of his bitter home-brewed cider which I thanked him for and partially enjoyed but held back, one glass for his three. Sometime during that evening I noticed a rat poke his twitching nose through the overflow of the Belfast sink and, a moment later noticed a rat’s tail protruding from under the sink beneath my feet. Dazed with cider, I stamped my iron-shod heel on it, only to be bitten back on the ankle by an explosive monster four times the size of any rat - it was the keeper’s foul Welsh ratting terrier. Fortunately, by that time, my host’s forehead had sunk onto the sink rim and he was oblivious to all the worries of the world so I took myself off to bed.

Thankfully the keeper had told me, long before he had succumbed to oblivion, that I need not get up early on my first morning. By this I expected a lie-in until seven o’clock rather than five, but I was aroused, in more ways than one and well before daybreak, by the keeper’s young wife. Wearing nothing but the thinnest cotton shift she sidled her way between my bed-sheets, bared herself completely, and stifled any argument from my gaping mouth with one of the most bountiful breasts I have ever known. Its twin replaced it shortly after.

Twenty minutes later and after more sexual contortions than I had ever believed possible, I demanded she stop. It was so wrong, I pleaded - my job and future was at stake, as too was my (young and quite scurrilous) reputation and I even tried to convince her that cuckolding was a capital crime, by way of bringing an end to it all, but it just seemed to excite her all the more. I gave her five minutes to stop, then another ten, then yet another while or so, to desist and we shamefully made very good time of it. Then, to my horror, the door of my bedroom opened and Frank Hunt looked in on us. I was flat on my back and as bare as Adam with an equally naked Eve squat on top of me with her hands gripping my knees, her bare back towards me and her hips bouncing frantically up and down on my loins. She barely looked up and shouted…

‘Piss off Frank, we’s busy. Ain’t you got no bleedin’ manners?’ And Frank quickly closed the door and my physical ardour retracted into limpness. Despite her protestations and attempts to give that particular part of my anatomy the kiss-of-life, the near certainty of the keeper reappearing with a cocked shotgun to blow us both to kingdom-come, thoroughly dissipated my ardour. She finally gave up her attempts to continue, slapped my thigh and said she would come back when I had recovered my apology of manhood and departed, naked, dragging her shift and slamming the door behind her.

In panic I jumped out of bed, threw some clothes on, booted up, snatched up what else I owned into a bundle and made to sneak out the house. Half way out, by way of the scullery, I came face to face with my sinewy boss, who stared at me in aggressive puzzlement while I returned a look of terror.

‘Hey! Where’s you off to in such a hurry, me lad?

‘Well, er, I thought... after that… up there… I thought I’d best be off."

‘Gawd bless ‘e. Don’t you go getting y’self upset about that. If you and I can’t satisfy her, well, we’ll just have to get someone else in to help us, won’t we boy?’

Thereafter the most important and demanding part of being an assistant gamekeeper on the Crosbury estate - an hour at least each morning before the sun was up, and another half-hour or so after it had settled - was carried out on the crumpled sheets in my bedchamber. Mrs Hunt was as insatiable as I was inexhaustible. For, as I have explained, I was never over-taxed or unable to fulfil my duties in sexual matters nor did I ever fail to perform to my keeper’s and his wife’s entire satisfaction.

For a few months, all was pleasantness. In the Spring Frank and I caught up wild hen birds in chicken-wire traps built on the lobster pot principle, collected and incubated their eggs, cared for the thousand or so young pheasant chicks and in July, when they were two or so months old, clipped the feathers on one wing so they could not fly properly, and released them into outside holding pens. All we had to do then was to feed and water them twice daily and keep the vermin and poachers away until the start of the shooting season on 1st October. One particular predator we discovered - and probably the most destructive of all animals when it comes to game birds - was a cat, a new and very inappropriate acquisition by Her Ladyship. Frequently there would be a flurry of clucking birds bursting out of a hedgerow or patch of cover crop and you knew something was attacking them as pheasants will always run rather than fly, unless in imminent danger. Then out of the hedgerow would stride that damned cat, black as sin and as arrogant as its owner.

‘It’ll have to go.’ says Frank to me one day. ‘Carry a gun wiv’e when y’ do yer rounds and if y’ gets a chance when there’s no one abou’, giv’e a barrel. Don’t get damn-well caught or it’ll be all our jobs.’

Next morning, with my strength barely recovered from a particularly strenuous session with the young Mrs Hunt, I was out and about with Frank’s black Labrador checking the coveys, when out in front of us steps the wretched cat. With barely a chance to hiss its surprise it was heavier by an ounce of No 6 shot and disposed off in a patch of brambles even before the smoke had cleared.

I met Frank, who had no doubt heard the shot, a little way off.

‘ I got the bastard.‘ I smirked at him.

‘I can see that, y’stupid bugger.’ He grimaced, looking down at Nigger - for that was his dog’s name and not an uncommon one for black Lab’s in those days - while the dog stood resolute at my side, the dead cat drooping from either side of its jaws.

‘Now go get rid of him properly, yer ruddy fool, before som’n sees.’

I found a rabbit hole, booted the wretched cat deep inside and stomped in the earth. Only a fox or a badger would find him there, in which case there would soon be even less left of the remains.

The disappearance of the cat did not go unnoticed and before long Her Ladyship started calling on Mrs Hunt day after day asking if she had any news of its whereabouts. At first she expressed dread over its loss but then, after a few days she said she accepted it may well have befallen some fatal tragedy but she feigned ever-growing distress over the thought it might be still alive and suffering.

‘It’s not that the poor thing is dead, but I lay awake all night worrying it may be injured - suffering. If only I knew for certain that it was out of any misery.’

On and on she went until Mrs Hunt - one woman in sympathy for one distraught other - let slip the faintest assurance that her husband had said she had no need to distress herself and that’s how Her Ladyship manipulated the truth out of her and my game-keeping career came to an abrupt end.

I didn’t mind accepting the blame and exonerating the Hunts from any involvement as they had their home and livelihood to lose and, besides, I wanted to be off elsewhere. Frank thanked me, warned me of one important lesson I should learn – ‘Never tell yer wife nowt’. I was happy to leave; the storm of war had broken out over the South African veldt and I was off to hunt Boers.

Chapter 3

Having pocketed the considerable sum of twenty quid for my own foreseeable needs from the proceeds of the sale of my house, and paid what fees were due to the lawyer and land agent, I banked the remaining thirty-eight pounds seven shillings in the bank in Bridport and set off on the eighteen mile walk to Dorchester to sign up for the British Army. Sleeping overnight in a heap of straw dragged from a haystack just four miles short of Dorset’s county town I arrived at the recruiting office in the town hall shortly before eight in the morning expecting to be first in the queue. But there were already more than twenty young lads like me jostling and larking about in front of the locked door and I happily joined their number. Others continued to turn up and joined us in increasing jocularity and banter. At nine o’clock on the dot, affirmed by the mechanical groaning and clanking of the clock above our heads, the door opened and a man in khaki uniform and peaked hat - the recruiting sergeant as it turned out - stuck his head out and bawled at us all to bleedin’ shut up and form an orderly bleedin’ queue. We fidgeted into some semblance of order, still in spirits too high to remain silent as the sergeant called us in, one after the other.

When my ‘Next!’ came, I stepped in with full of confidence only to be barked at for my slovenliness, apparent lack of married parents (how was he to know I was indeed a bastard?) and hair longer than a bleedin’ girl.

‘And stand up straight! Name?’ Followed his opening shouts of abuse.

‘Tommy Atkins’ I lied, as I had already decided a new life deserved a new appellation.

‘What! Tommy bleedin’ Atkins? You trying to be bleedin’ funny, boy?’

‘No Sergeant.’ I said, suddenly shocked into seriousness. ’It’s me real name, Thomas Atkins, Thomas - uh - John - Atkins, Sergeant.’

The man sniffed ‘Gawd bleedin’ help the bleedin’ British Army. Age?’

‘Eighteen, Sergeant - just turned.’ I said, and even though I was three years or more younger yet he seemed to accept that easier than my doubtful name.

‘Sign here, Atkins, an’ take this form. Yer can fill out all yer details later. Now get out. Yer a Private in Her Majesty’s Army so act like one. And if you wanna be a bleedin’ comedian and ask me fer a Queen’s