Brock

Small wonder he’s not been sighted all winter; this old brock’s been to Normandy and back through the tunnels and trenches of his subconscious. His father fell victim to mustard-gas at the Somme; one of his sons lost a paw to a gin-trap at Lisbellaw: another drills on the Antrim hills’ still-molten lava in a moth-eaten Balaclava. An elaborate system of foxholes and duckboards leads to the terminal moraine of an ex-linen baron’s croquet-lawn where he’s part-time groundsman. I would find it somewhat infra dig to dismiss him simply as a pig or heed Gerald of Wales’ tall tales of badgers keeping badger-slaves. For when he shuffles across the esker I glimpse my grandfather’s whiskers stained with tobacco-pollen. When he piddles against a bullaun I know he carries bovine TB but what I see is my father in his Sunday suit’s bespoke lime and lignite, patrolling his now-diminished estate and taking stock of this and that.