Do the Birds Still Sing in Hell? Read Free Page A

draught of the house, a constant flow of oxygen preserving the meat by many weeks, he’d explained.
    Mabel didn’t argue for very long. She knew her husband was right and no other family in the street had meat on their table in such a plentiful supply. It just looked so unsightly, especially when she opened the door to the local vicar. The shame of it!
    A week after one kill the priest, Gerald O’Connor, came calling. Mabel asked him in and as he walked into the hall he gave a disapproving look while following her through to the lounge. He seemed happier though after his cup of tea, though, after she’d sent him away with a 3lb joint of bacon that he swore he would turn into a huge pan of bacon broth at the forthcoming Christmas fundraising fair.
    ‘Hot winter broth,’ he announced gleefully. ‘Tuppence a cup.’
    Mabel attended that fair several weeks later but try as she might, she couldn’t find the stall serving the bacon broth.
    On Horace’s 14th birthday – Christmas Day 1932 – his father presented him with his first gun: a 410 Parker Hale single-shot shotgun. It was his reward for his long hours toiling on the farm, his father’s way of saying thanks. Harold got a couple of books, an apple, an orange and some nuts, and Sybil, the oldest sister, got nothing. She was too old, his mother had explained. Daisy and Derick fared slightly better: a little wooden train for Derick and a dolly – or was it a dolls’ house? – for Daisy. Horace only had eyes for one thing… his hands trembled with excitement as he handled the gun.
    It had been torture waiting to fire the first shot. His father had made the family sit down to a Christmas breakfast of bacon and eggs, hot buttered rolls and steaming hot tea with the obligatory teaspoon of whisky that was a Greasley family tradition each Christmas morning. The Parker Hale sat atop the Welsh dresser, almost taunting him. Between each bite of bacon or a mouthful of hot bread he looked at his father, then the gun, then back to his father again.
    ‘Remember, it’s not a toy,’ his father told him as they walked up to the small copse at the far end of the farm, each footfall crunching on the frozen earth. A dusting of snow like icing sugar covered the ground and the trees.
    ‘You must treat the gun with respect. It’s a killing machine – rabbits, ducks, hares, even humans.’ He pointed to the weapon Horace held tightly in two hands while trying to ignore the penetrating cold of the steel and wishing he’d run back for his woollen gloves. But even if he’d been marooned in outer Siberia at –40 degrees, there was no way he was going back.
    ‘That gun will kill a man, remember that, and watch where the hell you point it. I catch you pointing it at me and I’ll crown you with it.’
    Over the coming weeks his father taught Horace all about his new acquisition. He taught him how to take the gun apart, how to clean it and what size cartridge to use when hunting different sizes of animal. But most of all, his father taught him to shoot. They spent hours shooting at targets pinned to the trees and tin cans sitting on tree branches and fence posts. Horace shot his first rabbit after only four days and his father took it back and showed him how to skin and clean the animal ready for the pot. The family ate rabbit pie that evening and more than once Joseph senior advised the family that the food they were eating was down to Horace. Father and son’s chests had swelled with pride.
    His father explained how important it was to kill only for meat and how wrong it was to kill just for the sake of it. Horace grew to be an expert shot and could take out a starling or a wren from 50 yards. But each time he did, and he did so only occasionally, he suffered from guilt. He’d taken a pot shot at a young robin one day, never believing he would hit something so small. The robin’s feathers exploded as the lead shot tore into its tender flesh and it fell from the telegraph cable