How not to become a nighthawker.
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Filed under: Articles, My Stories — Norfolk Wolf
When I first started mettlin’ which was more moons ago than I care to think, I couldn’t get any land. Farm after farm, refusal after refusal, the farmers were kind enough to teach me a bit of basic Anglo-Saxon though; if my memory serves me right, the phraseology although differing at times in the lead up, always ended in “off”. One thing you can say about Norfolk farmers at that time was that they all to a man, the ones who still voted to keep hanging legal. I reckon their gamekeepers where instructed in the gentle art of flogging, with a large cudgel mind, nothing too fancy. It wouldn’t have been so bad if only they didn’t talk as though they had a mouthful of stones. The invitation to vacate their premises sounded vaguely like, “harrumph neigh, niow farque orf mai proper-tie, arnd be quick arbowt it”. I tried asking one or two if it would be appropriate for me to try again when they had sobered up in a day or so. Don’t uppity people go red in the face over a bit of innocent repartee!
It was five years before one kindly gentleman farmer gave me permission. The finding of a hoard (all perfectly valid) on “his” land, nearly ended up with me being taken to court, as he was only the tenant, but that’s another story.
In the meantime, I was hitting footpaths, river-banks, parks and woods; anywhere I could think of that wasn’t farmland. You really had to persevere and work hard for very little reward. I was still trying new farms each week and also some of the old ones again, and had still yet to crack getting permission.
One afternoon my older brother (we shared the detector) came flying in the house with a big grin on his face. “My mate Prickles reckon we oughta try the golden triangle near Middleton, we could give it a go tonight”. “He swears blind that there’s a bit of gold buried there an’ no-one knows about it”.
Instant gold fever! “Whereabouts is this place then?”
“Thass a bit o’ spare ground at the back o’ some houses, too small to farm; he don’t know who owns it, so he reckons we best if we do it in the dark!”
Now I don’t know about you, but a bit of spare ground don’t sound like night hawking to me; even if we had to do it in the dark. It’s not proper farmland now is it? Anyway we were a goin’.
It was late autumn, so the nights had pulled in and after a bit of driving around we found the place and parked up out of the way. Prickles was right, it was triangular in shape, the houses were along the base and we entered at the pointy bit. Do you know what Cow parsley is? It grows on the roadside grass, has hollow tubular stems with a spread of white on top; bit like a cauliflower on a stick. Well, the flowers had gone by this time of year and all the stems had dried so you could scrunch them in your hand. What we didn’t bargain for was that they were about five foot high, dry as a bone and tightly packed together on this field. Christ, the racket we were kicking up; it sounded like a herd of wild elephants rampaging through them. ’Course it was dark weren’ it? There was no way we could swing the detector, the dead plants were too big and too close to each other; on top of that, it was pitch black and we were blundering around like a couple of drunks. You wouldn’t believe the racket we were kicking up! Lights starting going on in the kitchen windows and dogs were barking and we didn’t have a bloody clue how to get out of there! Then we saw the beam of this torch coming down the road and heard this dog straining at the leash. My brother let rip with a few choice Saxon expressions of his own and did a side ways roll towards the hedge and laid flat. Unfortunately it wasn’t a hedge as such, but chain-link fencing.(It’s see- through) This damn great mutt was on one side, snarling like he hadn’t been fed for three months, trying to pull the owner through the 2 inch gaps of the fence-links and there was my brother 6 inches away on the other side.
One thing my brother’s got and that’s bottle. He leapt up and roared like a lion on heat, that bloke kicked the dog in his family jewels to shut him up and beat a hasty retreat to back where he came from.
My brother didn’t exactly say “shall we vacate the premises”, but that was the main gist of it and we both legged it for all we were worth!
We got back to the car and the first thing he said was, “where can we go now?” One thing about us old Norfolk boys, we don’t know when to give up!
“There’s a set of barns out Gayton way, an’ they’re miles from anywhere; we can park the car up with no-one the wiser.” “Right” he said, “let’s go have a butchers”. (We had t v’s in Norfolk by then and we were learning all the slang words; dead hard weren’t we?)
As we were driving along, it started to get foggy, so this would be to our advantage when we parked the car. Slipping it in a sort of courtyard, we went around the back of the barns and started detecting on real farmland. We had been at it for about an hour (nothing but nails and horse-shoes) when I smelt cigarette smoke. “There’s someone coming!”. “Don’t be sorft, who’s going to be out here this time of night?” Then we heard voices in the distance and then torch lights. Lying on the earth, I said “I count 5 torches.” I needn’t have bothered; my brother was halfway back to the car! The bathbun!!
We roared out of those barns and left the lights off for half a mile or so. (Something else I saw on the tele.)
“Thass still early-ish (1a.m.), where else can we go?”
“There’s a big lay-by on the Fakenham road, near Hillington; right beside a big field”.
“What are we waiting for, let’s give it a go”.
The lay-by had trees and bushes sheltering it from the main road, so we where tucked away a treat. Just a quick jump and a roll over the hedge and away we went. For all of ten minutes. We were just settling down to some serious (for us) mettlin’ when we heard this police siren come screaming along the road and pull into the lay-by. Christ, it just ain’t our night is it? We scrambled over this ploughed field, stumbling over the furrows, how we didn’t twist an ankle gord knows. Peeking gingerly over the hedge about 500yards down, we saw what all the commotion was about. The law had pulled over a lorry and was checking it out. Waiting for them to leave, we both decided to call it a night and go home for a very welcome cup of tea.
That my friends was the first and last time I have ever been Nighthawking. If you still feel up to it, as far as I know ’Prickles golden triangle hasn’t been claimed as of yet!
John
P.s. I hope that you enjoyed reading that little esapade from my distant past. I hope even more that you realised it was a light-hearted poke at myself and what I got up to on ONE occasion in all innocence about 40 years ago in the 1960’s. At that time my brother and I shared a detector, it was either the Arado IBA 65 or 95, can’t remember which, so it just shows my age twice over! It was a lark more than anything, done in all innocence/ignorance of youth; nighthawking wouldn’t rear it’s ugly head for at least another 15 or twenty years. Unfortunately, one or two people have tried to capitalise on the nighthawking aspect and proceeded to villify me on a well known forum! How sad can you get? ( Sad or thick, perhaps both). Luckily for me the forum administrators had the good sense to read the “offending article”on here and banned the “scurrillous troublemakers” from their own site. Why is it in life that you have a small minority of sad sacks that aren’t happy unless they can go around trying to cause trouble?
Can you imagine these herbets trying to blag their a way through the Pearly gates with St. Peter asking,” So tell me Herbie boy, what good did you do to, or for your fellow man then?” “Take yer time sunshine, there’s no rush; we’ve both got, oh let me see now, ’till infinity!
If you can’t do any good, don’t do anything; the world would be a far better place. John