The Decline of an English Village by Robin Page

Author:Robin Page [Page, Robin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781846893148
Publisher: Quiller Publishing
Published: 2019-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

7

The Shoot

Myxomatosis seemed a hideous disease to me; an infection introduced by men completely callously, causing the rabbits to die and their bodies to rot in the fields or underground, all to no purpose. Right from my very earliest days I had always hated death, or the humiliation of life, when there was no real justification. During an early visit to Gills Hill, Cousin John had amused us in the harvest field by catching harvester spiders and pulling their legs off one by one, just to see the limbs twitch, and he would leave one- or two-legged spiders rolling helplessly on the ground. He did the same with ‘daddy long legs’, causing them to try to land on legless bodies or, for a change, he pulled their wings off so that they could not fly; after the initial fascination had worn off, the sport filled me with disgust.

I experienced similar feelings when, on a Sunday school outing to Whipsnade Zoo, we saw a group of children throwing empty ice cream tubs into the ostrich enclosure; with the ungainly birds trying to swallow the containers. Some succeeded and the shapes of empty cartons slowly moved down their long thin necks, while the throwers shrieked with delight and clamoured for more money from their parents to buy another lot of ice cream.

But I, too, was far from innocent, for once while pursuing mice ‘up the threshing tackle field’, I managed to trap a live mouse in a large steep-sided puddle. There I forced it to swim backwards and forwards; each time it reached one side I prodded it back into the water with a stick to make it swim again.

Unfortunately, my fascination was greater than its reserves of stamina, for gradually its frightened swimming slowed, its fur and body became weighted with water, and it stood huddled and shivering at the water’s edge. Not satisfied I forced it back once more, until it finally dragged itself to the side, life left its eyes, water trickled from its mouth and sodden coat, and it died; I squeezed water from its lungs, but it would not revive and I moved away, full of guilt at the miserable death I had caused.

Later, after John had been given an air gun, we were joined by Michael on a sparrow shoot, and again we did something which made us all feel ashamed. Unfortunately, around the farm buildings we could find no sparrows, so we took the gun over to Warner’s Corner spinney. There we saw only blue tits, chaffinches and robins until, just as we were getting bored, a dark brown tawny owl flew from an elm and settled in the top branches of another. As soon as it perched one of us fired a pellet into the foliage above its head, making it fly off again in alarm. This, we thought, was fine entertainment and we followed it through the spinney and sent a slug whistling past every time it settled. We took it in turns to fire, each one trying to shoot nearer than the last.

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