She won’t be Told

Andy had a bit of trouble with the geese to begin with. Judy instructed him to stalk them from the South with the sun behind him. He duly stalked. Geese are acutely sensitive to the movements of man. Whichever way he crouched and crawled, they evaded him: his camera was forever presented with a view of a host of departing tail feathers. We encircled the geese, drove them towards him, but the light was wrong. We were becoming despondent.

Judy’s husband, Geoffrey, arrived at the bottom of the field. ‘Poor darling,’ Judy commented, ‘he’s had a couple of teeth out.’ A large, laconic man, Geoffrey trudged up the field. Brushing aside dental commiserations, he explained that you can’t force geese to do as you wish. If we did nothing, they would come to us soon enough. It seemed that, much as Judy loved her geese, this fact had somehow eluded her in the thirty-odd years they have been raising what are generally considered the best geese for the table in Britain. ‘She won’t be told’, muttered Geoffrey, as Judy tucked his wayward shirt into his trousers, purely for the benefit of a photograph.