The poacher of the title is the author’s father. Joe Tibbetts senior. His father, Robert Little Tibbetts, was killed in an accident when he was eight. The horrific circumstances of his father’s death, witnessed by the boy ~ The Boy on the Train ~ deeply and permanently traumatised him. It formed his character and influenced his life choices. He lived to be ninety and his life was largely characterised by silence and secrecy.

For four or five years, between the ages of nine and fourteen, he ran wild and was a poacher. He had a dog, a lurcher, a cross between a Whippet and a Lakeland Terrier and a poacher’s coat with a deep and hidden pocket. In the Autumn on Thursday evenings when he was supposed to attend The Boys Brigade for band practice he went poaching. In summer he bunked off school most Wednesday and Thursdays and stayed out sleeping in hedges or barns only coming home on Friday morning. He learned to hide, like a man on the run, watching the house, waiting for hours to see if strangers were watching and waiting for his return. His mother despaired and beat him with a stick.

At home he paunched* the rabbits and the hares and hung them with the Pigeons and the Pheasants in his mother’s coal shed. On Saturdays he took his handcart ~ which he had purchased with money provided by the Bishop of Carlisle ~ and spent the morning carrying loads of fresh vegetables to Carlisle Covered Market from the market gardens a mile or so to the north of the city. And after he had delivered the carrots and potatoes he sold the game he had taken in the week to one of the butchers with a stall in the market.

* The first known use of the word paunch meaning to clean the guts from a dead animal is in Rede Me and Be Nott Wrothe a verse satire lambasting the Catholic Church and particularly Cardinal Wolsey written by William Roy and Jerome Barlow published in 1528 and suppressed by Royal Proclamation in 1529 by King Henry VIII who soon enough would start his own campaign against Wolsey and the Church of Rome.