Knickerbockered Boy – Veronica Fenwicke-Clennell
Submitted by: Sally Brewis - 25th November 2021
It was the Glorious Twelfth and the sun shining, promising a hot day. Gathered on the gravel drive in front of the grey stone mansion are family, friends, excited children, dogs, keepers and beaters. Among them stands a boy in a brown checked knickerbocker suit nervously handling his gun. It is to be his first day on the moor.
The shooting party move off and are soon walking in a line through the deep tussocky heather, grey green bog myrtle and peaty bogs. There are no butts on this hill.
Cries of “mark” as the small birds rise swiftly from the heather with their heart stopping cries of “Go back, go back” weaving and whirring over the line of guns. Puffs of white smoke and some plummet to the ground while the rest fly on to live and breed again.
The dogs whimper and wait for the command of “fetch”, and then with noses down find their quarry. Holding them gently in their soft mouths, they return to release them obediently to their handlers.
The boy in the knickerbockered suit waits for no dog, but runs to retrieve his own bird, his very first grouse.
Lunch-time beneath the shade of legend’s Druid Stone. The ladies and small children, hot from their stiff climb up the steep hill with the lunch baskets, unpack them ready for the guns to arrive. Everyone is glad to rest in the shade and enjoy the repast spread before them. The dogs seek to quench their thirst in the mirrored tarn behind the Stone, and then pant among the roots of the heather, finding coolness from the damp earth beneath.
The village below is dream-like in the stillness of the midday heat. The limp brown bodies are placed under bracken fronds to shade them from buzzing blue-bottles. The hill stretches like a purple sea towards the distant horizon, rocks scattered in the deep gullies as if a giant hand had carelessly strewn them. A few stunted rowans show the first flush of autumn on their berries.
Above the quiet chatter of the picnic party, the trill of an unseen lark is heard in the cloudless blue sky. Sheep bleat sadly on the high moor, and bees drone as they search for nectar in the heather blossom.
Sitting in the springy, scratchy heather, inhaling its sweet scent enhanced by the sun’s warmth, there is a reluctance to move from this peaceful place. The shooters are not so keen to face the afternoon’s drives, nor the dogs so eager, but one young lad, hoping to emulate the morning’s success, is keen to try his luck again.
The ladies tidy up the remains of the picnic and load the morning’s “bag” into the empty baskets carrying them slowly down the narrow, peaty path streaked with silver sand, warning the running children to watch out for zig-zagged adders tgt might be camouflaged among the stones.
Back to the mansion to lay the feathered bodies with their grey downy legs and red wattles onto the stone flagged floor to await the return of the guns and the final reckoning.
They come in time for tea, the table laden with scones, honey, dark sticky gingerbread, chocolate biscuits and fruit cake.
Soon the darkening will come with the cool night air to soothe tired and aching limbs. The knickerbockered boy will be in bed re-living the day’s excitement. His dogs will yelp and twitch in their sleep.
Now, the purple hazed hill is nearly covered in series ranks of back-green conifers. The wild cries of “Go back, go back” are rarely heard. Instead the “tchik, tchik” of the pheasant, the grunt of the roe-deer and the eerie bark of foxes echo from the changed habitat.