John North: Marching with the rat pack

The lady of this house says that she must have been dreaming of the cavalcade of coaches, because she's woken up singing Four and Twenty Virgins Came Down From Inverness.

This is the London march, Liberty and Livelihood. Among those awaiting Lord Lambton's bus is John Harker, long time manager of Witton Castle, near Bishop Auckland. "Last time I went down with a train load of fox hunters but fox hunters are ruddy pillocks," he says.

The column is heading south with the Shildon Countryside Movement, good down-to-earth lads, whose chairman Mike Hardy is warm in his still somnolent greeting.

"Bloody hell," he says, "the things you see when you haven't got a gun..."

NO fox hunters ride with the Shildon Countryside Movement, the only red coats from Marks & Spencer's sale. They are ratters and rabbiters, ferret keepers and nature lovers. Some - if you can't join 'em, beat for 'em - also work for the shoot. "The closest I've ever been to a hunt is when I've twice passed one in the car. It's freedom that this is about," says Eric Wrightson, who owns a small bakery in Shildon.

Though from Labour's horny-handed heartlands, they would never have recognised the New Statesman's strident stereotype of the marchers - "a final rally by a tribe that has lorded over us for centuries but is now doomed". Ruling class? Half of this lot aren't even masters in their own homes, except when their lass is out at bingo.

It should be said, however, that Mike Hardy is also secretary of Old Shildon Workingmen's Club.

MUCH the highlight of the M1 journey is a video called The Rat Catchers, owned by Bedlington terrier breeder Paul Kirtley and filmed on a pitta bread dump - a veritable ratters' castle - in Ashington.

"They reckon that wherever you are, you're never more than six feet from a rat," says Paul, though an awful lot more appear to have infested in Ashington.

There's no Jimmy Cagney - "You dirty rats" - just men with spades they call spades and a lot of very excited dogs. Most are terriers or lurchers, though one appears once to have been a poodle - if not exactly a pussy cat.

The technical term is worrying the rats, apparently, though those in this film seem so worried they could get six months off with stress. It is not something to watch before church, nor the sort of in-transit entertainment generally preferred by British Airways.

Steve Horner, a professional pest controller from Cockfield, says there are several effective ways of killing rats, depending on environment and circumstance. "Working dogs can often be the most humane. Making them illegal would be like your editor saying you can write for the paper, so long as you do it in pencil."

Paul also enters, and wins, working dog shows. It's about both control and sport - "adrenaline" - he says. "Ratting is better than ferreting because with dogs you can see almost everything that's going on, but if Blair gets his way there'll be no working dog shows because there'll be no working dogs."

There's also talk of a working dogs protest outside the Prime Minister's Trimdon home. "I wouldn't care," says Mike Hardy, "but at one time if you wanted a good lurcher, you never looked past Trimdon."

The Rat Catchers is followed by a video about Jack Charlton, another Ashington lad, going deer stalking.

"This year, Lee will kill 12 stairgs..."

A BIT like wartime evacuees, only heading in the opposite direction and without the gas masks and the brown paper picnic, everyone's given a bit of paper with instructions on what to do if lost. Some of these Saturday night and Sunday morning lads can hardly find their way around the pee stop at Ferrybridge services.

At Watford Gap, where there are folk in plus fours - to us Shildon lads, plus fours is five - Mike Hardy gets his first text message from the Countryside Alliance, admirably organising the big event.

"Be peaceful, be proud, we're winning," it says. "Nee kickin' heads in," the chairman translates.

We're dropped near Hyde Park Corner shortly after noon, will walk to the far end of Whitehall but must find the bus again at White City, six miles west.

The driver issues meticulous instructions. "Failing that," he adds, "follow the crowds."

THE crowds are simply incredible, and that's just the hawkers selling penny whistles for a pound. It's a bit like FA Cup final day, though by comparison makes Wembley appear like a wet Wednesday in Willington.

A pompous placard carries a message about liberty being written in the blood of our forefathers; the Shooting Times placard, more prosaically, simply says "Bang out of order".

An Elvis Presley lookalike bears a message for Mr Blair - "You ain't never caught a rabbit and you ain't no friend of mine" - another poster advocates keeping the cow shit in the country and the bullshit in the town. The best, though, urges eating Cumbrian lamb - "Ten thousand foxes can't be wrong."

Though a divided land, it is a united country - a day on which Britain is collectively whetting its whistle.

THE start, through Hyde Park's red dust and early autumn leaves, is less than a mile from where we leave the bus. It is not so much Liberty March, more Freedom Shuffle.

"We expect you to reach Whitehall by next Thursday," says a mounted policeman, smiling like every other Metropolliss on a day wholly free from trouble. "We're queuing to queue," says Mike Hardy.

"On the last London march we were home by seven o'clock," says Mary Parvin, from Middleton Tyas.

There are beagle and bassett packs, mink hounds and coursers, even the Bromyard Rat Pack who either have similar problems to Ashington's or a splendid sense of humour.

At 1.35pm there's another message on Mike's mobile: "200,000 and counting."

The pipers play Scotland the Brave, the Irish band takes the Long Way to Tipperary. To keep the Welsh happy, there are a few choruses of Oggy-oggy-oggy, as well.

The queue stretches beyond telescopic sight. "I've never seen a crowd like this since the karaoke night at Elm Road club," someone says. Perhaps it's called the countryside march because it takes 31 days.

Near the Department of Transport, Mike Hardy remembers one of its more infamous e-mails. "It would be a very good day to go poaching," he says.

IT'S nearly three o'clock before we officially start, and hardly galloping down Horseguards Parade even then. A placard is propped outside the Ritz Hotel. "We will fight them in the coverts, we will fight them in the whins."

Along Park Lane, Piccadilly and Pall Mall like some slow motion Monopoly game, past the gentlemen's clubs where they stand - solid? - on the balconies but stone-faced on the door, beneath Nelson's knowing eye and past the end of Downing Street, where they've gone away for the weekend but could still hear the tumult in Trimdon.

We're followed throughout by the Glaisdale Hunt, though the scent may be different from usual.

Tightly disciplined, the air horn concerto is silenced past the Cenotaph, more raucous when faced by a small band of agony antis at the end.

There's another text message for the Shildon lads: "400,000 and counting."

VICTORIA underground station is jammed utterly, the ultimate Tube most fearfully overcrowded. Were battery hens treated like rush hour Londoners, there'd be a national uproar.

It's another two hours before the bus can get away, 90 more minutes before it clears London. Things are quieter on the bus now, not even a re-run of The Rat Catchers.

There are important messages, nonetheless, most of them from ordinary, disillusioned people about what they'd do - or, strictly, wouldn't do - if the Prime Minister were on fire.

They talk too of concerns for democracy and freedom, and of fears that the New Statesman-like nonsense will make the class divide still wider.

Mike Hardy says that Blair may be stupid but he's not deaf though few, hands on heart, believe that he's really going to listen.

It's turned one o'clock before we're dropped back off at Scotch Corner, and all too briefly to bed. In the blessed stillness of the countryside, a good night for poaching, an' all.