We hired a commercial skip. The largest they had.
A bright yellow cathedral drum.
It was scarred from skull to ankle because decades of rusting pushbike frames hurled, tons of hardcore rubble spaded, thaws of corroding white goods slid and splinters of pane glass windows had shattered into it.
But no fires. Crude, black-stenciled letters on its flanks insisted ‘No Fires'.
An equally scarred lorry lowered the skip into position, whilst coughing diesel soot from a vibrating exhaust. The chassis strained through the championship rounds of a delivery into the gateway of a field, beneath the gables of a house in the English countryside.
Directly above was the main bedroom. Its single-glazed window was opened as far as it would go, which wasn't far. It was locked into position to let the fresh air plume into the room bringing a tang of spring horse chestnut and waxy rhododendron leaves.
In the summers of the 1990's I had leaned from that window a million times with George behind me offering gentle encouragement. He urged a squeezing of the air gun trigger and a steadying of the sights on waltzes of rabbits that gamboled out near the beehives in the lea field.
I never hit one and I did try to, as I know how proud that would have made him. Even though now, twenty years later, I'm glad that I never made any kills.
He himself could easily hit arrogant cock pheasants, plainer partridges, ducks, wood pigeons, rabbits and squirrels with one shot, rarely if ever missing. He would brag about the accuracy of his shooting and his courage in a boxing ring where he broke noses, ran out of opponents and was nicknamed Buck.
I could only hit evaporated milk tins, making them spin on their posts and shower the last evaporated drops onto the pungent ivy that wrapped and clung to the chicken wire at the foot of the fence to keep the livestock out.
He was the greatest boy of them all but would never tell us if he had actually ever shot a person during the Second World War, even though we as boys would ask him regularly.
Perhaps we shouldn't have.
Instead he made us incredibly good bows with the tautest strings, tensioned in an old iron vice that bent the supple hazelnut wood to perfection. Then we would fire dangerously sharpened bamboo cane arrows into summer skies that we thought would go on forever.
Now, he certainly hadn't spent his left collecting but over ten decades life will collect around you no matter how material you are. Or material you are not.
Cabinets full of ivory elephants, crudité in the form of hand carved wooden mallard ducks, yellowing articles snipped from the Tribune, Outspan orange crates full of knitting wool, scorched teaspoons and even a detuned piano.
All of it we started to lower into the deep cathedral drum of the skip and it began to echo with the years of a life collecting.
ii
The garden was big. It became a fulltime job since his retirement in the mid-Sixties. A job with proper regimental hours. 11am coffee. 1pm Lunch. 3pm afternoon tea.
And the work was always done in a tie, often the Royal Engineers stripe. No matter how the sun beat, the rain span or the frost would cake and harden the furrows, he insisted on their weekly turning.
Columns of twine-tied Michaelmas Daisies lined the crop beds with slide rule accuracy and would vibrate with red admirals in the early autumn sun, all pink, sugar-spun and candy faced in the heat.
In the last summer of the 1970's we found a buried cannon barrel in the hoof-churned mud near to the cattle troughs out in the east corner of the lea.
We dragged it across that field leaving a scarred line across the thick, rugged clumps of grass. If the pirates whose galleon the cannon barrel had come from wanted to track us down they probably could. So we tried to blot the dragline out with the rubber zigzags of our soles.
When we reached the house we passed through the gate that connected the north of the garden with the cow field and leaned it against the windowless wall to the left of the kitchen door.
The wall was wounded with hundreds of masonry nails, many of which had lost their angular heads to rust. More were driven into the powdery cement every spring to hold the limbs of the peach tree in place with networks of baler twine.
The tree would yield maybe two peaches every year. Small, organic and misshapen they might yield an ooze of juice though their furry skin and offer a bitter twang of sweetness on a young palette.
But they held more allure, plucked from the knotted boughs of that old tree than the perfect, and engorged spheres that nestled in rows on the plastic grass of greengrocery trestles.
Every year, we would ceremoniously gnaw at those handpicked bits of peach having given them another day or so on the windowsill to properly ripen. Then rejoice in their deliciousness before planting the central stone that clung with tooth-scored fibres near an iron birdbath, beneath the blackcurrant bushes.
George appeared at the kitchen door wiping his hands on a souvenir of Hearn Bay tea towel and looked the cannon barrel up and down. Then he told us tales of skulls and planks, galleons and parrots, silver and gold on crystal Jamaican seas under deep ruby skies.
He briefly disappeared back into the cool gloom of the kitchen before returning with two teaspoons. He handed one to me and one to my friend from across the road, who's Dad kept all those homing pigeons.
Then we spent a hot summer afternoon ploughing and gouging at the hard soil packed into the tubular angle of that abandoned section of irrigation pipe that we had found out in the far corner of the lea field.
iii
The bright yellow skip slowly began to fill during that first morning of clearing the house.
Navy blue, Draylon armchairs that made your skin goose pimple if you dragged your nails across them. A pair of genuine tortoise shell spectacles with one cracked lens. An old iron vice. A quilted sewing box and a faded Hearn Bay souvenir tea towel.
As a sandwich lunch and pots of tea approached, a car slowed on the main road. It passed the skip and pulled onto an already heavily tyre-scored verge in the shadows of a hawthorn thicket just beyond the house.
I paused having lowered an iron birdbath into the skip to see a middle-aged couple looking around the head rests of their parked Ford Escort before, exchanging words. Then they reversed and arced their car into the gap in front of the skip.
The first people who had reversed to a halt today had been way too premature. They had asked if they could take from the skip before there was even anything in it.
This couple nervously emerged from the car and for a moment glanced toward the lea. Perhaps implying a walk along the public footpath as I stared straight at them.
The footpath offered a beautiful walk across the field, past the manmade Great Lake ending at the Hall and parish Church. It would have done them both good I thought. And I know George would have agreed.
The clean-shaven driver rubbed his jowls for a moment as if expecting to find a beard there before looking at me through rimless spectacles. He nodded toward the skip and asked, “OK if we take a look?”
It wasn't OK and I told him so. In fact I told him it was all going to a specialist buyer in Ludlow even though it wasn't.
I suggested that instead they take the walk across to the Great Lake and beyond, nodding at the public footpath sign as he had at the skip.
But they were far too disappointed that they had been denied an opportunity to add to their own collection from the cathedral drum of another life collecting to do that.
Instead they returned in frustration to their car, quickly pulled onto the road and disappeared in a plume of carbon monoxide fumes and orange blinking indicator lights.
Iv
The midday sun dripped from the acres of sky as we began to trawl the hallway off the kitchen where shotguns in leather cases and split cane fishing rods were stacked neatly in the corner.
A small wicker fishing basket hung from its canvas strap on a hook that had been hand turned into the wall. It was also caramelised with insulating layers of gloss paint across a near century of brass rubbed decades.
The basket was packed with layers of Balkan Sobranie tobacco tins, each filled with a single coil of 7lb fishing line with a wet fly tied in a blood knot at its one end and a perfect loop at the other.
His favourite, the Invicta, was developed by James Ogden of Cheltenham as a summer dry fly to imitate hatching caddis on dappled afternoons.
There was also a real Devon minnow, embalmed and lacquered with a triple hook at its tail in its own handmade tin. Along with a tangled swarm of black gnat, greenwell glory, bloody butcher iron blue, brown gum beetle and cochybonuhu.
All would settle on the moving waters of the shale-bottomed Worfe or spin through the afternoon sky from the jetties on Lake William.
The kitchen had an uneven, slate tiled floor that was covered with layers of rugs, perhaps one for each of the decades he had lived in the house.
As we started to lift and roll them we found that each preceding layer was more threadbare than the last and certainly damper. By the time we reached the final rug it was no more than a damp sequence of cross-threaded fibres. A blueprint of the past.
He would spend hours in that kitchen. Slitting the taut white bellies of rainbow trout from gill to tail before a claw of fingers would clean them through. Or plucking pheasants shot high in the Shropshire skies, then dressing them in readiness for Sunday ovens.
He would collect the fish guts and gamey gizzards in galvanised buckets and dig them into the soil out in the garden. Natural fertiliser that made the raspberries and rhubarb really flourish.
The kitchen only had what you needed in it. A simple electric cooker, with a four-ring hob where he would simmer morning porridge oats and evening potatoes and purple sprouting to go with the weekly joint that he would carve into meaty strips on top of the small refrigerator.
Other than that there was a small armchair opposite the cooker where he would dress those game birds and a small trestle table to the right of that. All beneath a window that looked out onto the washhouse courtyard of French cobblestones.
A quarter of the kitchen was given over to a walk-in pantry that remained cool and airy with its gauzed windows and shelves that had been painted white so many times. The hooks protruding from the shelves swung with the ghosts of braced pheasants, ducks and single rabbits, cakes of cheese, bunches of sweet breakfast radishes and bags of Beauty of Bath apples.
The hanging game came from the shoot.
On cold late autumn and winter Saturdays, I would join him and the captains of industry, solicitors and farmers who made up the 12 strong party and walk the frosted filigree of the Stableford countryside in parade-ground lines.
I was one of four beaters whose job it was to ‘beat' at the undergrowth, the browning bracken and stubs of sugar beet. This would send birds throttling into the sky with screaming throats and accordion wings, only to be shot into a confetti of feathers.
Chocolate and cream spaniels would then scatter like mercury to quickly fetch the twitching and bloodied fowl and return it in gentle jaws to avoid another metal studded, green Hunter wellington kick to their flanks.
Sometimes the shot birds would land in the ice-cold spangles of the River Worfe. It widened considerably throughout this farmland and was largely shallow water that licked at the fragments of shale at its bed. The dogs would still wade straight from the frost sealed bank into the icy shimmer and return the drenched pheasants, pigeons, partridge and once an owl that was quickly tossed into a hedge before the party moved on.
Lunchtimes were spent warming in front of the spits of coal fires in cobble floored pubs having spilled from the backs of Ford pickup trucks. All dogs, waterproof leggings, filtered cigarettes, profanity and shot gun cartridge belts.
The beaters would huddle with the dogs. Rubbing their damp necks and dangling thin ham peeled from the buffet sandwiches above their soft but snapping jaws between a quickly removed thumb and forefinger.
George was in his Eighties even then and though he would brag that he looked and acted like a man of 60, he really did.
Smoothing his slide rule military moustache with the ball of his thumb, he would nip from a glass of Famous Grouse whisky as he perched on an upholstered barstool in Harris Tweed. His voice rose easily above the others, never outwitted.
A collection of voices in a collected moment when all we can only ever hope for is to spend a lifetime adding to collections of our own.
v
Throughout the day more than ten cars had stopped to enquire about the contents of the cathedral drum, as if we were holding an exclusive yard sale out here, deep in the tangled undergrowth where tradition smiled.
Not everything was going into the skip of course and as I carefully packed the split cane fishing rods and small wicker creel into the boot of my rusting Volkswagen hatchback, I thought about a river that we called The Brook.
The wandering River Worfe rises at Crackleybank, meanders through the heritage lands of Shropshire and ultimately flows into the swell of the Severn delta.
George knew a plentiful oxbow as the river curved around the village of Ryton. Where brambles would forge out into the water like poacher's furtive nightlines. Those aquatic tripwires in the zesty current turbines.
We would park in a gateway in the succession of estate cars that changed with the years, from a Vauxhall Viva through to a final Ford Escort. The gateway was chained shut and beyond it lay a field that annually displayed the changing colours of crop rotation. But I recall sugar beet being the most common. George knew the farmer well, from his days as chairman of the small local assembly. Hence the privilege we had in climbing the 5-bar gate and walking the field's edge, through powdery, swaying grasses all loaded up with a small wicker creel and split cane rods in canvas bags, tied at the top with bows of ribbon.
Pungent elderberry bushes concealed this secret but incredibly fruitful fishing peg and we would have to spend some time cutting back the branches and boughs back every time we visited. Especially in midsummer.
George would bring a handmade, wooden-handled scythe for the job. Its blade was razor sharpened and brushed with oil after each trip, so preserving the metal like the day it was forged.
We caught every species in that hollow, from carp and pike to roach and brown trout. There were also numerous eels that would swallow the baited hooks deep into their taut white bellies and would have to be cut free before being flung behind us into the bushes. They would also leave their glue all over the old Burberry raincoat that was spread out on the bank for us to sit on.
Later on we found a wide tree trunk amongst the brambles and rolled it into position near to the water's edge and began to sit on that like two generations of bookend on a park bench.
But it slowly began to powder like perishing sponge and a flock of woodlice burrowed a community deep into its rotting hull. So we soon returned to the raincoat, spreading it carefully amongst the delicate lavender bells, raw aromatic shoots and mushrooms fit for eating.
One spring evening George was amazed to see a flurry of mink darting into the undergrowth on the opposite bank and warned me how merciless they were as killers. Even if their pelts did make desirable coats for society ladies.
He later told me that they had been released by animal rights protestors from a nearby animal testing facility. A story that had received a few column inches in his evening newspaper.
In the summer months, the air was always a mesh of gnats, midges and spiteful horseflies that would whine at fever pitch. There were also tight armies of banded wasps who would fly drunkenly amongst them. Emerging as they did from the foaming carcasses of fallen crab apples.
George would steadily smoke one of his Meerschaum pipes to try and spite those winged bugs a little. The Balkan Sobranie tobacco curling and twisting past his wide-brimmed straw hat.
Dunn & Co. the milliners had handcrafted that beautiful hat in the 1950's.
Its bright yellow, hand-woven straw had remained perfect over the years. As had the tight silk band of swooping and diving Paisley flourishes, stitched with the glamorous finish of true silver thread.
It was George's fishing hat, both lucky and functional.
A brim to shelter from the rain on really committed expeditions. Or shade from the heat on balmy, sun-dappled afternoons. But always dashingly dandy, no matter what the weather.
On our final afternoon fishing on the Worfe, we carefully slid the split cane rods into their canvas bags, stood them on their end and then tied a loose bow in the ribbons to hold them safely in place.
I always avoided looking across to the other side of the river too much when we packed away. There was a sparse forest of silver birch trees that grew straight and tall there, with a lot of open space between them.
I didn't look because I was afraid that I might glimpse a faceless threat step out of view behind one and no one else would.
A featureless, emergence from the hedgerows of Haddonfield or the concealed threat of billowing linen sheets on washing lines, obscuring everything above ominous black work boots.
But on what turned out to be our final afternoon, I studied the opposite bank through unblinking eyes. As George packed the wicker creel with the tobacco tins of coiled trout fly leaders, I saw nothing but the shimmer of silver bark on the lithe row of trees.
And as we walked side-by-side through the tall grass back towards the parked car in the gateway, I realised that there had never been anything to fear after all.
vi
The early evening sun was starting to dip now, scattering lens flares through the knit of rhododendron bushes at the top end of the garden. Our first day of dismantling a lifetime of accidental collecting started to drift into the flickering shadows of early evening.
The cathedral drum of the skip was nearing a full congregation, which surprised us, having hired the largest they had.
We talked about hiring another, quickly dismissing the suggestion of a bonfire at the top of the garden, which would feel too much like a funeral pyre.
Especially as the only place to have it would be on a patch of ground from where we'd fired November bottle rockets and eaten baked potatoes in tin foil with forks year after year.
Standing in the shell of the old kitchen, we agreed that we should collect our own thoughts for a while, as antique ghosts coiled around us in the ancient emptying rooms.
Silence fell.
Wearing the old straw hat with a purple paisley band and flourished with real silver thread, I walked out into the warmish gloom of the evening.
The quickly disappearing sun was starting to reduce the cow parsley down so that it drooped like hanging rooks on barbed wire fences. And the dandelions, who had sprayed so violently from the verges like proud voyeurs in the day, were now closing into tight, silent buds for the night.
I took a long deep breath, tasting the green machine of night air, all low in lacy nightgowns. As rodents began to roam the rheumy darkness and the gored hearts of root vegetables lay dormant out in the fields as another night began to gather.