THE LEGS OF BOOTS

Boots have legs and and long boots have long legs.   In my early days as a casual part time fisherman on the Estuary,  that is to say some forty five years ago, I was not paid in money but, after my long day or night's work,  which I was glad to do for the fun of it,  I would be invited to take a few fish home 'for my tea'.   These, generally, were undersized fish which should have been thrown back but which my skipper said would not survive,  not after they had been in the net,  and also damaged fish or fish which were of a protected species,  like perhaps one of the beautiful speckled salmon trout that now and then tore its gills in the net.   To take these home was to risk fines and confiscations and the invariable caution was, 'Take this one, Wayland, but stick it down your boot.'

It was thus that I became a bootlegger and I recall walking ashore with some difficulty at the Lympstone boat shelter, past the eyes of curious neighbours who could not know that a forbidden fish or two was stuffed down the leg of my Dunlop seaboot squashed against the length of my calf.  Being young and foolish,  I rejoiced in this delinquency which seemed to me to be rather dashing.  At home we rejoiced again in eating the freshly caught, ill gotten fish.

The Americans would have us believe that 'bootlegger' is a word first used in the American West when traders sold liquor to the Indians illegally by putting flat bottles down the legs of their boots.  The word is thus first recorded only in 1855 but the upper part of a tall boot has been called a bootleg since long before the Pilgrim Fathers sailed from Plymouth and it seems to me altogether unlikely that throughout those several centuries before the West was won, no English, Welsh, Scottish or Irish thief or poacher ever had the wit to talk about  'bootleggers' and 'bootlegging' with reference to this particular way to move and hide illicit goods