IT is always hard to see a full-grown man cry. When that man is Ben the Bucket, one-time quarry shot firer as hard as the rock he pulverised, it comes as a downright shock.

I heard the first sobs when I was approaching the village allotments. At first, I could not believe my ears: it sounded like sobbing, it sounded like Ben, but that just couldn't be, could it?

By the time I got to the drystone wall that divides the plot from the public footpath and the beck, the sobs had changed to screams of rage. I almost ran to the wall in time to see Ben jumping up and down on his calabrese crop which, to say the least, was a little bit odd.

It is just two weeks from the annual show, you see, and Ben - who gets his nickname from chasing horses up and down the bridleway, bucket in hand, for garden supplements - usually walks away with Best of Show in half a dozen categories.

One of those is his calabrese and what he doesn't exhibit he sells to the Beggars' Arms for goodly sums. That goes for his broad beans, his French beans, his runner beans, his leeks and his lettuces.

Now, until recently, Ben has seen hard times. He has never had a proper job since the quarry closed some 20 years ago and those few bob from the Beggars' would buy him the odd gill of Ram's Blood, his one and only luxury in life.

However, he is now working for full time for Maggots Money-Grubber to turn, ironically enough, the old quarry into a trout fishery. It is due to open in the autumn and Ben will be the full-time bailiff, with a little cottage thrown in for him and his sister Beatrice.

And that's what led indirectly to this week's disaster. Brother and sister had never had a holiday since the quarry closed so, last week, he took Beat off to Scarborough for a few days, figuring it would be good time to get a short break before the fishing starts in earnest.

And that's when they struck, the Furry Furies of Beggarsdale. Somehow, somewhere they managed to penetrate, undermine (or overmine?) the drystone walls that make up Fortress Allotments. Inside the walls is chicken wire, dug in a good 18 inches and pegged down with tons of stones (which grow a lot more readily here than veg, I might add).

But such is the plague that has fallen on the dale this summer that this cultivated Colditz fell to the ravening hordes. And it took just four days for those rabbits to strip Ben's plot bare of every one of his potential prize-winners.

He heard me open the gate and immediately tried to pull himself together, smudging away at the tears with a rag so dirty that it left him looking like a Panda whose make-up had run.

"Ah just canna find where the bleeders got in," he grunted. "But what a so-and-so it all is. You take yer first 'oliday in twenny years and these beggars do this to ya."

No doubt the bunny-huggers will be delighted that 12 months of hard labour by an honest and genuinely green-figured countryman have gone down the pan.

There's only one good rabbit and it's a dead one. In the pot!

o The Curmudgeon is a satirical column based in a fictitious character in a mythical village.