As I’ve mentioned previously my father hated most animals, but, his least liked were badgers. These were his favoured prey and were the one thing he tried in vain to eradicate from the estate using numerous imaginative methods. The first thing my father tried to exterminate these bothersome badgers was to pour a large quantity of petrol down their set using a length of rubber tubing and a funnel. This rather rudimentary method ended in disaster however as when father ignited the petrol, the fumes had built-up to such an extent that a huge fireball shot out from the entrance to the set and burnt off his eyebrows and most of his moustache. Not one to give in however, father’s next experiment for badger genocide was a little more imaginative. One summer afternoon in the late seventies father and I were inspecting the latest damage done by badgers in a wooded area on the estate “fetch me the servant’s child” he shouted, whilst furiously ramming a large tree branch down the hole of a badger set, to try and antagonise the occupants. I immediately ran back to the house to instruct the cook, Mrs Miggins that father and I needed to borrow her child for some pest control. Rather reluctantly she agreed. The cook was in her late fifties, a short rotund woman with tightly permed hair and round spectacles. Curiously, she never married even though she called herself Mrs but mysteriously she had a five-year-old son. The rather callous rumour that spread throughout the village, was that she’d been too fat and ugly to find herself a suitable spouse and had bought the child as a baby from a group of gypsies. This is probably true however, as I’ve heard from a reliable source that he’s now in prison for the theft of a large amount of tarmac, so conclusive proof that he came from bad blood. We both hurried back to father in the woods where he explained his cunning plan. As the child was very small for his five years, he had been used at the house to crawl up the chimneys to clean them, so this made him the ideal candidate for father’s experiment. Father instructed the child to strip to his underpants, he then tied a rope around the child’s waist, stuck a large hunting knife between the child’s teeth and gave him a brief lesson in self-defence. The small child then, rather reluctantly started to crawl down into the badger set. Everything was going smoothly until the boy must have got stuck about halfway down the hole. We could hear some muffled screaming coming from down below, as the child must have got jammed and started to panic as he couldn’t turn around and make his way out. We both tried pulling on the rope as hard as we could to try and free the child, but to no avail. He was well and truly stuck and by this time my father was starting to get worried as to how we could get the now sobbing child out. My father them came up with a rather cunning plan to finally free the boy from what could have easily been his tomb. “Quickly boy, get the Land Rover” he shouted. I grabbed the keys from father and ran over to the vehicle. I reversed the Land Rover up to about twenty feet from the hole and tied the rope to the back of the vehicle’s tow bar. Father instructed me to get back into the cab and gently give it some revs to try and pull out the now screaming child. As I lightly pressed the accelerator pedal the rope tightened and started to make some rather alarming creaking noises but the child would not budge. We both began to realise that the child was well and truly wedged, so father instructed me to floor the accelerator and hope for the best. As I pressed down on the pedal as hard as I could, the engine started to scream and all four wheels began to spin in the mud. As I was about to think that this was a hopeless situation and the boy would be stuck down there forever, the Land Rover lurched forward and crashed straight into the trunk of a large oak tree. As I looked in the mirrors of the vehicle I could see the screaming child fly through the air approximately ten feet over the top of the vehicle’s cab and land in a nearby hedge that thankfully broke his fall. As we both retrieved the blubbering child from the hedge and tried to placate him, father came up with a daring plan to finally rid the estate of the troublesome badgers. all three of us got into the now slightly damaged Land Rover and drove back to house to collect something my father said he’d saved for a special occasion such as this – dynamite! This was something else my father acquired after leaving the army. We carefully loaded the dynamite and a ramrod from a cannon into the back of the now badly smoking Land Rover and headed back to the badger set. With utter glee, father thrust a few Sticks of dynamite down the badger set with the long wooden ramrod. “I’ve never had the need to use any of this stuff before, but hopefully it should go off with a bit of a pop“ he explained, as he took his silver Dunhill lighter from his waistcoat pocket and proceeded to light the fuse. We all immediately ran to take cover behind a mound of earth, approximately fifty or so yards away and waited patiently for the fuse to burn down. As the fuse of the dynamite fizzed and crackled, thick acrid white smoke filled the air. In what seemed like an age, the sticks of dynamite eventually exploded in an ear splitting bang that echoed around the grounds of the estate. As I peered nervously over the mound of earth where we’d all been taking cover, I saw a huge column of earth, debris and black and white fur climb majestically into the air before raining to the ground all around us. As I brushed off the dust and badger remains from my clothes, I looked over to see Mrs Miggins’ son, who was sitting next to my father; he’d wet his pants. “Well, that seems to have well and truly taken care of those troublesome blighters”, my father exclaimed with a broad smile on his face. As I stood up from behind the mound where we’d all been taking cover, I looked over at my father. I don’t think I ever saw him look happier than how he did at that very moment. We had many more problems with badgers on our land in the years after that memorable day, however, when my father’s secret stash of dynamite eventually ran out, we had to resort to gassing them instead. This practice was, I have to say probably a lot more efficient, but nowhere near such good fun. Mrs Miggins wasn’t too pleased that her son was used as badger bait. She told my father that he’d come running home in tears in a bedraggled state and was covered in badger bites. My father told her to stop mollycoddling the child as his experience would ‘make a man of him’. My father then lost his temper with her and berated her by violently slapping her across the face with his leather gloves that I thought was rather reminiscent of an SS officer that I’d seen in one of those old black and white war films. She fell to the hard flagstone floor of the kitchen “How dare you criticise me you impudent bitch” I heard him say. He ordered her to make him a large gin and tonic and take it to him in his study. As I’ve mentioned before, he didn’t suffer fools gladly.