the hingle, which then jerked up, being on a finely balanced bent wand of hazel.
Boys, many of them spending all day in the fields scaring crows and tending animals to earn a pitifully small wage, were not averse to a little poaching. Ingenuity was the name of the game: lying quietly in a ditch bottom sometimes proved lucky for them, as a rabbit ventured by. Another trick was to take a very prickly bramble stalk and push it down a hole, where you knew a rabbit was hiding. The briar was then turned round and round until the rabbit’s fur was well and truly tangled in the thorns and then it could be gingerly pulled out. Birds were also trapped for the collector and to save damaging any of the plumage, the boys killed their victims by forcing open their beaks and cutting the throat from the inside. They also trapped linnets, goldfinches and male nightingales to be sold as caged songbirds.
Snares were an effective way to catch rabbits, but the problem was that if the gamekeeper spotted the snare, he could then keep watch to see who came back to check on it.
Poachers always cut the buttons off their clothing so they did not become snagged on their nets as they dealt with them quickly in the dark. These were long nets, either a bagged net which was placed along a field edge and had rabbits driven into it, or gate nets covering the gate, usually held on by pebbles resting on top of the gate. A dog was used to drive hares towards the gate and as they reached the net, the stones were disturbed and the net dropped, entangling the hare.
One gamekeeper had two thousand stakes made, each with a twist of barbed wire on the top. These he drove into the ground, so the poachers snagged their nets as they dragged the fields at night for partridges.
In I Walked by Night, Fred recounts how his father disowned him and they did not speak for many years. John and Elizabeth must have been so disappointed in him; each had lost a son of their own, and perhaps placed undue pressure on him to be the model son they so desired. Model son he was not, though. Not only did he disgrace the family with his criminal ways, but he had also got a local girl pregnant.
CHAPTER 4
1882–86 Anna
Anna Carter was born on 21 March 1862 at Marham, a village – about two miles across the fen from Pentney. There, she was christened Ann Elizabeth. In legal documents as an adult she usually called herself Anna, so as this was obviously her preferred name, she will be called Anna in this book.
Her mother Mary Ann was a Marham girl, having been born in the village in 1840, the fifth child and only daughter of Ann and Garwood Steeles. They were a large and respectable family in the area, being wheelwrights, blacksmiths, beer retailers and carriers, travelling to and from Marham to the Maids Head, King’s Lynn, on Tuesdays and Saturdays. Later they were coachbuilders. After Mary Ann’s marriage to James Henry Carter, a journeyman shipwright, she lived in Woolwich, Kent. How the couple met is unknown: perhaps she went into service and met him there or he may have come up the River Nar on one of the lighters (barges). These flat-bottomed boats brought bone for the bone factory, where it was ground down for fertiliser. They also hauled coal inland from King’s Lynn; having arrived from northern England, this was loaded onto the lighters for distribution along the Ouse and its tributaries.
Mary Ann must have come home for the birth or been visiting her family when Anna was born. The railway had arrived at Narborough (the station serving Marham and Pentney) in 1845, so the journey from Woolwich – if that’s how Mary Ann travelled – would not have been difficult, although expensive for a working family. She registered her new daughter on 2 April 1862, twelve days after the birth, so one assumes it must have been a normal delivery. Across the fields, three weeks earlier Elizabeth Rolfe had given birth to her sickly baby, Fred.
Marham is an odd village, now overwhelmed by the RAF camp. Without a pub, it seems to have no heart and the church is neglected and unkempt. Even in Fred’s time it would have been unusual in that it stretched for over two miles almost entirely on a single road.
White’s Directory of 1845 records:
Marham or Cherry Marham is a long village with several good houses, 7 miles west of Swaffham and 8 miles north east of Downham. Its parish contains 817 inhabitants, and about 4000 acres of land, a great portion of which is in large open fields, having perhaps the finest grass-turf in the county, and is remarkable for large hares, said to be the best runners in the kingdom.
In the village and surrounding area, hare coursing went on right up until 2005 when it was officially banned, but from the number of rumours heard, and the court appearances reported in the local press, it is still a regular feature today.
Marham was formerly noted for its great abundance of cherries and walnuts; but most of the trees of the latter fruit were cut down during the late war [Napoleonic] and sold to the gun-makers, some of the largest for as much as £100 each tree.
After Anna’s birth, Mary Ann and James went on to have two boys: James Henry in 1864 and Edward in 1866. On the 1871 census young James is recorded as living with Granny Steeles and two cousins in Marham; of the rest of the family, there is no certain trace. In the 1881 census all three children are living with Granny Steeles and their uncle William, who was a wheelwright.
Mary Ann, 35, by then a widow, was also living close by in the village with a daughter, Florence, who was born on 21 April 1876, with no father named on her birth certificate. Anna, then 19, is listed in the 1881 census as a domestic servant.
In his description of their courtship in I Walked by Night, Fred said Anna was an orphan:
It was perhaps a fellow feeling as drew us together in the beginning, as she poor girl was as much persequted as I had been. She was a servant up at a Gentleman Farmers not so far away from were I was liven, and of corse she had her night out like other servants. She was just eighteen years old, the same age as myself wen I got to know her and she started bein friendly with me.
As soon as it was known that she and I was palling up, those that she worked with, and others, tried by every means in there power to stop her, thinken no doubt that I was no proper compney for her, she haven no parents, and no one to go to. But it was all to no purpose, she would have her way.
Clearly, however, Anna was not an orphan, her mother being close by in the village. Nor does it seem she was living in as a servant, but rather still residing with uncle William, Grandma and her brothers, so it was not a question of being allowed her night out from the big house, but more likely escaping from Grandma’s beady eye to spend time with Fred. At the time Fred, who had not yet served his first prison sentence, was living in the middle of a row of five dwellings known as Greys Cottages, Pentney, with his mother and father and Granny Shaftoe, who was by now a widow.
Wen ever I went to meet her I used to take my dogs with me if the night was rite – or my gun. Many and many a night she came out with me, for she was no hindrence to the game. She could run and Jump as well as me and there was few could beat me at running wen I was a Young man. She could carry as many Birds to – and carryen Birds is no light Job. Many a hare have she carried under her coat for me, and many a Phesant. As it was all Cuntry round that part we had some good sport.
Well I supose that tale got about, and wen they found that they could not stop her from me, they gave her notice to leave her place. There was sevrell Ladies round about who was intrested in her, and put themselves about to get her a place in London at good wages so she should be out of my way. But no she stayed, and stuck to me through thick and thin, wich she could do as she had no parents, and no one to controwl her, so she went what way she wanted.
Having taken his own cottage on his return
