Canny Poacher

I have grown fond of Basil Newington ,the poacher . He is older, wiser and cooler then the other miners hauled before the courts that week. The youngsters are angry, in the press reports their anger is used to make them sound foolish,he knows confrontation will get him nowhere. His friend gives a false name and gets away with it, that ploy won't work for Basil, the police and game keepers know him. But he maintains the fiction of 'Jackson's name.

Interesting that the courts never make an issue of miners naming the ones that got away.

Both the apprehended poachers are off sick , I'm guessing it would be really tough to put in a full week at Snowdon, even for a man just a bit under the weather. And there were severe pay penalties for missing a day.

I suspect that Basil is now a semiprofessional poacher, providing the miners families with the rabbit, which East Kent Memories would suggest was the major protein source for Kentish miners in the twenties and thirties.

His laconicness makes him seem different to the other miners, the Aylesham miners are extraordinary: a never ending source of energy powes them, they work in those conditions and then they come out and play football and cricket, the brassband, whist, garden, box, run a half marathon, drink, protest, sing the red flag at a Nancy Astor meeting, go to church, these guys have some mythic source of energy, but my Basil's energy reserves are running low.

Could the heat of the mine speed their metabolism? Or were all miners like this?

A fictional character based loosely on Basil has started to take root for me.

He's currently called Edmund, he was once active in the union but is tired , rather then disillusioned. He's canny,and a countryman, a birdwatcher, he has have been around a bit. Got a Flemish widow pregnant in Ypres, stayed there for a while after the war, tempted by a cow , a cottage , a horse a field. I'm not sure yet if he has returned to his English wife, or brought the Belgian girl to Aylesham.

So he has learnt some farming, is careful about crops and sheep, until that disastrous month Basil may have benefited from some of the farmers toleration. It may not have been easy to have the landowners protected game on their fields.

Maybe they even tipped him off in a manly sort of way:" if you are walking near old court tell Mr Hope(gamekeeper...)"

He will offer a more modern viewpoint off the other characters, he has the ability to lead to smooth things over a bit, I'm not sure he will, he is his own man.