The Gamekeeper Read online

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  This edition published in 2022 by And Other Stories

  Sheffield – London – New York

  www.andotherstories.org

  The Gamekeeper and quoted letter copyright © Barry Hines, 1975

  The Gamekeeper first published in 1975 by Michael Joseph

  Introduction (‘The Storyteller’s Position’) and quoted letter copyright © John Berger, 1975, and John Berger Estate

  All rights reserved. The rights of Barry Hines to be identified as author of this work and of John Berger to be identified as author of the introduction have been asserted.

  ISBN: 9781913505301

  eBook ISBN: 9781913505318

  Proofreader: Alex Middleton; Cover Design: Tom Etherington, from the print ‘Midwinter, North Yorkshire’ by Norman Ackroyd, used with permission. Typesetting and eBook by Tetragon, London. And Other Stories would like to thank Tom Overton for sending us his transcriptions of ‘The Storyteller’s Position’ and the letters between John Berger and Barry Hines, as well as to thank Sue Vice and David Forrest, authors of Barry Hines: Kes, Threads and Beyond, for their book and their research in the Hines Papers.

  And Other Stories gratefully acknowledge that our work is supported using public funding by Arts Council England.

  Contents

  The Storyteller’s Position – Introduction by John Berger

  the gamekeeper

  Acknowledgements

  ‌Introduction

  The Storyteller’s Position

  He stood on the doorstep and banged the boots together, and segments of dried earth fell from the tread of their soles like typeset from a tray. The noise woke up the dogs in their pen, and they appeared from their kennel in slow procession, the springer spaniel, the black labrador and the cross-bred terrier, stretching and snuffling, and yawning clouds into the cold morning air.

  Most published novels are a more intimate form of soap opera. Hines’s The Gamekeeper is more like a handbook, a manual.

  The text, undivided by chapters, covers a year of a gamekeeper’s life or, rather, of the work which determines his life. Because this work follows the seasons, when we reach the end we are back at the beginning.

  The gamekeeper, aged about 40, is married with two sons. Previously he was a steelworker. (The setting is probably Yorkshire.) Long before the book begins, he has left the steelworks to become one of the Duke’s half dozen gamekeepers. He is independent-minded; he feels good out of doors; he likes dogs and is fascinated by wildlife. His choice was towards a relatively larger freedom.

  But the purpose of his life’s work now, with no holidays and less leisure than before, is absurd. He breeds and protects pheasants so that the Duke and six or seven of his associates can shoot 300 birds in a couple of days. Shoot and do nothing else. They do not carry or load their own guns; they do not walk; they do not train their dogs. They aim and pull the triggers. And they are not anachronisms: they are men of very considerable modern power.

  To ensure these powerful men their few hours of amusement, the gamekeeper daily throughout the year – and sometimes at night – pursues poachers; intimidates kids bird-nesting or picking flowers; lays traps; ferrets rabbits; kills crows and magpies; shoots foxes; hatches the pheasants in incubators or under broody hens; feeds them absolutely regularly; administers medicine to them; releases them and watches over them so that on the prescribed day they can be driven by men with sticks towards the little line of trigger pullers.

  Such is the absurdity of his chosen life. He recognizes the absurdity. Yet he accepts it and in no way allows it to undermine his singlemindedness and efficiency as a gamekeeper. He gives himself over – just as the writing gives itself over – to all the practical tasks at hand:

  The gamekeeper removed the spade and placed the ferret at the entrance to the hole. He did not rush around to relieve his confinement, or dash straight down the burrow. He just stood there for a moment, extended his head, snake like, to confirm the judgement of the dog, then calmly walked into the dark. There was nothing extravagant about his movement. Yet he was all the more dangerous for his calm.

  Marginally, in the vitality of some of the wild birds or animals around him the gamekeeper deposits his minimal belief that life has another dimension.

  While the gamekeeper was on his rounds, and the boys were raking the rearing field, the pheasants inside the first incubator were starting to hatch. Cushioned in their sacs of water, protected by their shells, they had been growing for twenty-three days, and now they filled their shells. They stirred, they had to peck their way out, through the membrane, through the shell.

  This is a book that borders on despair. No emotions or feelings are described in it. The near-despair resides in the contrast between the practicality of everything described and the unproductivity of the final outcome. A near-despair with a profoundly proletarian origin.

  To assess the book, one must interrogate its meanings. The meaning of its method: in place of the endlessly exchanged opinions and constantly fluctuating feelings of the middle-class novel, it substitutes jobs, causes and effects. Its social meaning: without explicit judgement it shows the difference between the lives of privileged and underprivileged. Its philosophical meaning: it describes a ‘world’ in which the ruling class has succeeded in recycling nature, the game of the woods and moors has been proletarianized, it is fed and housed so as to produce the maximum surplus value – which, in this case, is the number of brace ‘in the bag’.

  The book also invents its own meaning which is stronger than any other and which Hines probably calculated less. This is the meaning of the gamekeeper’s solitude and the relation of this solitude to the will-to-live of animals. Here, I suspect, is where Hines’s heart and obsession as a writer reside. His earlier novel A Kestrel for a Knave was also about such a relationship. It is very rare to know and write about animals as well as he does in narrative form. To do so may well require a deep experience of solitude. The only modern writer I would compare Hines with, in this respect, is Louis Pergaud, who was killed in the First World War.

  Applying the highest standards and bearing these meanings in mind how should his new book be assessed? The thirty-page description of the grouse shoot on 12 August is unforgettable. So are other shorter passages. But the whole may be flawed. The signs of the flaw are very few: they all imply an uncertainty about the storyteller’s exact position in relation to the story he is telling:

  ‘What’s up with you this time, John?’

  John looked at his stomach, then marked its position with his hand.

  ‘I’ve got a stomach-ache.’

  The gamekeeper levelled a forkful of egg at him. The portion of white, hanging over the prongs, looked as languid as a Dalí watch.

  ‘Stomach-ache my arse. You’re telling lies again, John…’

  The reference to Dalí shatters the integrity of the scene. It belongs neither to narrator nor narrated.

  Occasionally he allows an animal a time-sense which is sentimental: ‘The grouse were accustomed to mists, and for them, this was a day just like any other day.’ The comparison with any other day is false. Throughout the book there are maybe a dozen slips like this. Apparently unimportant except that the book concerns extreme technical rigour. But even so unimportant in themselves. Important only as signs of why a strength which should one day be there in a book by this writer is not yet there.

  These slips suggest that Hines is not sure of his story. Yet he evidently is master of its content. So if he is not sure, it is probably because he is using the story, treating it as a means, not accepting it as an end. Occasionally he appeals over the edge of the story he is telling.

  I can only guess why. I think Hines sees no way out. He lives with a sense of historical h
opelessness. ‘Ar, well, there’s nowt we can do about that, George.’ In the animal world situations of ‘hopelessness’ are redeemed by the animals’ unawareness and instinctive and ferocious struggle to survive. In return for his empathy, Hines borrows this redemption from the animal world and it consoles him. But the consolation risks turning the story into a means. Hence his unsureness.

  Finally animals lead any close observer into metaphysics.

  One day Hines will have to write about why women and men need hope. Whether he then sees that need with full despair or with support, nobody but Barry Hines can decide. But when he writes with complete conviction about his position as storyteller – because the story is sufficient to the truth which he must write – he may well produce a great book. Meanwhile this is an outstanding one, which I read with admiration.

  —John Berger, 1975

  Editor’s Note on

  ‘The Storyteller’s Position’ by John Berger

  Never before published, the text above by John Berger, here published in full, is in the Hines Papers at the University of Sheffield’s Special Collections, where it is accompanied by a letter dated 6 November 1975 from John Berger to Barry Hines, in which Berger says:

  I read The Gamekeeper with excitement and much admiration. I asked to review it for New Society – and then wrote the enclosed. They cut it in an imbecile way – pruning out all the reasoning, drawing only an opinion. (The reduction of intellectuals to opinion-taps is one of the small ways in which the system ensures its continuity.) So I refused to let them publish it. But I thought you might like to see it – so I enclose it.

  Whatever Hines’ thoughts about the review not being published may have been, he replied on 27 November 1975, in a letter now in the John Berger Archive at the British Library: ‘What was warming for me was that at last somebody knew what I was on about. You actually talked in details about the politics of the book.’

  ‌The Gamekeeper

  The countryside is the stronghold of most myths about free enterprise, independence, self-reliance, but it may be, in the end, that the wheel will turn full circle – that the common land which was grabbed and enclosed by the landlords in the eighteenth century will be given back to the public, and that the whole land of Britain will come to seem so precious that the public will insist on having it for themselves.

  Anthony Sampson

  The New Anatomy of Britain

  February. It was time to catch up the pheasants.

  George Purse bent down and picked up his boots from a newspaper which his wife had put down to keep the mud off the kitchen floor. Holding the boots in one hand he unlocked the kitchen door and stepped outside to put them on.

  He stood on the doorstep and banged the boots together, and segments of dried earth fell from the tread of their soles like typeset from a tray. The noise woke up the dogs in their pen, and they appeared from their kennel in slow procession, the springer spaniel, the black labrador and the cross-bred terrier, stretching and snuffling, and yawning clouds into the cold morning air. The terrier was awake first. He rolled over and rubbed his back hard against the concrete floor, simultaneously kicking his back legs into the air as though trying to brace them against something solid. Growling with pleasure, he practised a few bites at nothing in particular, then he jumped up and shook himself so vigorously that he went stiff-legged and his pads kept vibrating from the floor.

  George Purse sat down on the bench underneath the kitchen window to fasten up his boots. Overnight, the leather laces had dried stiff, and although this made them easy to thread, it made them difficult to knot when he reached the top. Cursing the laces softly and passionately, he tugged hard and managed to tie a double bow in each one. But the knots had not jelled, there were spaces between them, and when he stood up, his head aching from bending over, his fingertips sore and already feeling the cold, it looked as though he had finally solved the problem with a couple of Chinese puzzles.

  He looked up at the sky; it was a habit, a reflex action. What happened in the sky was important to gamekeepers. The weather and the birds which occupied the sky above their territories were important factors in their work. There was only one bird up there, a lapwing flying upwind, its broad supple wings carrying it easily through the north-east wind. George Purse saw it, identified it and forgot it. He was not interested in lapwings. They did not interfere with his work. Lapwings were not enemies of game.

  He walked across the yard to let the dogs out for a run while he collected grain and water to feed the pheasants. The dogs were waiting for him at the door of the pen. He did not have to open it. As soon as he removed the lock they pushed their noses into the crack by the jamb and sent the door crashing back on its hinges. George Purse cursed them as they rushed past his legs. They came out in this way every morning, and he cursed them for it every morning. He inspected the hinges. They were still firm, but the jamb was splitting vertically above the top one.

  The dogs sniffed and cocked their legs at familiar corners, then the springer and the labrador got their noses down and worked over the whole of the yard. The terrier just ran about wildly with his hackles up, barking. He kept running at the other dogs, jumping at them and growling at their throats. The labrador ignored him. He just stood still, lifted his head out of the way and looked about him until the irritant went away.

  But the spaniel was less patient. He would tolerate two or three of these mock attacks then retaliate, snapping and snarling the terrier into yelping submission on his back, pink belly exposed, front paws together at his chin. Dominance reasserted, the springer continued to quarter the yard. The terrier just jumped up and started all over again. This was what he was bred for, fighting. He was just as obdurate when put down a fox’s earth. Sometimes he would come tumbling out yelping with pain, an ear torn, his face gashed, or a patch of hair ripped from his back; but after a quick examination by the gamekeeper to check that the wounds were only superficial, he was always willing to run back to the blind fight down the stinking burrow.

  The labrador and the spaniel having systematically worked the ground between the outhouses and the cottage, left the yard and started to work in amongst the trees at the edge of the wood. The gamekeeper let the hens out into the yard, then unlocked the stable door of the adjoining outhouse, where he kept his feed and all the tools of his profession except for his guns.

  He pulled open both doors to let the light in, and the clean whitewashed walls of the interior reflected the light, held it, and made it bright enough to use. The room was immaculate. Every object had its place.

  Sacks of dog meal, hen meal and grain for the pheasants were stacked beneath the bench along the back wall. On the bench there was a box trap and two folded ferret bags, and on a shelf above the bench stood cans of vermin poison, and other cans and bottles containing medicine for pheasants.

  Through the years, a succession of gamekeepers had hammered nails and hooks into the walls on which to hang their equipment. Some of these pegs had worked loose and were fragile through corrosion, and during his ten years at the job George Purse had knocked in several six-inch nails of his own. From one nail hung a selection of leather collars, leashes and rabbit skin dummies used in the training of gun dogs. From another, a dozen wire snares. A bunch of Fenn traps, suspended tautly by their chains, threatened their hook with extraction, and next to them, carefully coiled and tied, a long net, used for rabbiting. The gamekeeper’s waterproofs were hung directly above his wellington boots. On another nail hung a keep net and a fishing rod in its canvas sheath; and on the flagstones, beneath these nails, stood three buckets, two oil lamps, and in one corner, a rabbiting spade with a sharp worn blade.

  The gamekeeper pulled open the mouth of a sack of grain, then fetched a bucket and started to ladle grain into it with an old enamelled jug. Load after load of teeming grain until the bucket was almost full. Then, there was such a squawk from outside that it made him jump, he jerked the jug, and grain spilled on to the floor. Furious, he hurried to
the door.

  The sight of the hens had been too much for the terrier. He had approached one, it had shied away, therefore he had been forced to chase it. When the gamekeeper reached the door of the outhouse the hen was still winning, just. Neck out, squawking, it strained forward with flailing wings. But its weight was unevenly distributed, the bulk of it was too far back for serious sprinting, and its action was merely a preliminary to taking off; which it did, every time the terrier snapped at its tail.

  Each flight lasted two or three flaps, then it plumped down in a brown flurry and strode on again before the terrier could force it down and get its jaws across its back.

  The gamekeeper let out such a roar after the terrier, the results of which could not have been more immediate if the reprimand had been physical. The terrier stopped the chase, looked back over his shoulder, then trotted away, eyes rolling for fear of something worse. It was time to join the other dogs in the wood. He would be safer distinguishing the scents of night visitors, and grumbling at their smells amongst the frozen leaves beneath the trees.

  The racket had awakened the gamekeeper’s wife and children. The two boys looked out, then eased their way further into their warm beds. They knew by the degree of light in the bedroom that it was not yet time to get up for school. The gamekeeper’s wife tried to stay awake. She had to get up. Her husband would expect his breakfast to be ready when he returned from feeding the pheasants.

  Before he left the yard with his bucket of grain and can of water the gamekeeper put the dogs away. He never took them with him when he went to feed the pheasants. He always went alone. It made the job easier. He could have made the dogs sit at a safe distance. And they would have sat. They would have sat until the frost stiffened their fur if he had asked them to. But without them there was less chance of the unpredictable; a sudden rabbit, a chase, panic amongst the pheasants and possible desertion from the covert.