Country Fair
Tales of the Countryside, Shooting and Fishing
Max Hastings

For Nigel and Anna, with whom I have shared so many happy sporting memories over forty years

Table of Contents

Cover Page

Title Page

Introduction

1 Country Fair

2 Rhythm of the Seasons

3 The River Keeper

4 Sunshine and Showers

5 The Young Entry

6 Life at the Trough

7 Duffers’ Days

8 Hit and Miss

9 Love Affair With Labs

10 A Future for the Countryside

11 No Eye for a Horse

12 Poachers’ Roles

13 Naver Magic

14 With the Beaters

15 Every Shot a Record

16 An Idyll in Kenya

17 Tweed at Autumn

18 Pheasants

19 The English and the Scots

20 A Fishing Party

21 Rummage in the Gun Cupboard

22 Rough and Smooth in Cornwall

23 Hitting Some Low Notes

24 Glorious Grouse

25 Arctic Waters

26 Nightlife

27 Saying Please and Thank You

28 Level Pegging

29 New Ways and Old

30 Places we Know

31 Pigeons in the Offing

32 Marauders do it in the Rough

Index

By the same author

Copyright

About the Publisher

Introduction

IN THE EYES of most people likely to read this book, as well as in my own, the countryside is fundamental to the vision of the Britain which we love, and to which we bear allegiance. This is why we find it so distressing today to be ruled by a government which not only cares nothing for the rural community, but has shown itself contemptuously hostile to it. The countryside and its inhabitants are perceived by New Labour as anachronisms, reflecting traditions of patrician paternalism, plebeian deference and bloody pastimes which have no place in the pavement society Tony Blair and his party aspire to enforce. While Labour claims to have abandoned the old ideals of socialism, it displays a disdain for rights of private ownership of a single commodity – land – which would be deemed intolerably socialistic if applied to any other form of property. New duties of care are thrust upon landowners, even as a host of new rights of access are granted to the public. The government proposes a programme of housing development which, if it is fulfilled, will carpet in concrete great tracts of fields and woodland, poisoning the green lungs of this overcrowded island, and especially its south-eastern corner. Foremost among the aspirations of rural dwellers today is a desire to see those who rule us once again acknowledge the virtue and importance of Britain’s countryside to our society, not as a mere park in which the urban population can seek recreation at appointed hours on licence, but as a place where wilderness sustains its historic freedoms, not least those of the hunter, both animal and human.

This book is intended to serve two purposes: first, like my earlier country collections, to entertain rural sportsmen with tales of the pleasures which we share, embracing fields and streams, dogs and guns, rods and horses. Second, at a time when the traditional rural community feels imperilled as never before, I have included essays on two critical issues: the struggle to sustain our landscape, and the tensions between English and Scots, a source of concern to all of us for whom the Union of the two kingdoms means so much. I hope that these more sombre pieces will not jar on readers to whom I am otherwise seeking to offer a little bedside amusement.

Even in these troubled times for rural Britain, I cherish a spirit of optimism, inspired by the happiness which so many of us still gain from the countryside. One of my favourite pastimes, while casting a fly or waiting for a drive to begin, is to muse upon the same experiences in the days of our ancestors. A sense of continuity, of doing things which they did, in the old settings, is one of the deepest satisfactions of field sports. As they look down upon our doings with horse, rod and gun, how pampered they must think us! First, mobility offers free rein. We think nothing of driving from London to Wiltshire or Hampshire for a few hours’ fishing. I set out from Berkshire the other day to shoot in Devon, and came home easily enough the same evening. I am untroubled by driving to Wales to throw a line, then returning to sleep in my own bed. We can journey to Sutherland – or for that matter, to Russia or Iceland – inside a day.

We pay a price, in that some of the thrilling remoteness has gone from these places. So, too, has the intimacy which attached to a shooting party when guns, beaters and pickers-up lived within a few miles of the meeting place. Everybody knew each other, and the coverts. Today, one often meets a picker-up who has come from thirty miles away, or beaters who travel regularly from distant towns. Shooting and fishing parties forge their own sense of community, but this is seldom now rooted in local geography.

We are much better equipped to face the elements than earlier generations. My father shot in a tailor-made tweed jacket cut loose at the elbows. Waterproof it was not, any more than were his canvas Newmarket boots. Today, conditions must be very damp indeed for water to penetrate to the places where it made our grandparents so uncomfortable. Guns have not changed at all – indeed, many of us shoot with weapons built almost a hundred years ago. As a child, I enjoyed watching my father performing alchemist’s rites with powder and shot as he loaded his own cartridges. I occasionally experimented with the process myself, much to the alarm of anyone who later found my overcharged rounds in his gun. But it would be hard to argue that sporting life is poorer now that everybody fires factory-loaded ammunition. When did you last see someone having to use a cartridge extractor?

Fishing rods are wonderfully improved. One would have to be very sentimental to prefer an old greenheart to a new Sage. I am no longer even convinced that old reels are better: I would rather play a modern salmon on a modern reel. Of my father’s old tackle, I use only a couple of cane brook rods on chalk streams. Thank heaven fishermen no longer have to grease silk lines or dry gut casts at the end of a day!

Edwardian shooting parties provided opportunities for an orgy of adultery, facilitated by the fact that in large Norfolk or Yorkshire country houses, husbands and wives occupied separate bedrooms. Nowadays, when most of us inhabit more modest quarters, it requires considerable ingenuity for a couple bent on infidelity to find space to swing a cat, never mind themselves, amid a houseful of visiting guns. A friend once told me that a billiard table provided the most discreet rendezvous that she and her weekend quarry could commandeer for naughtiness. Edward VII would have been proud of her. A big shot like Sir Ralph Payne-Galway would have deplored her bloke’s frivolous attitude to more serious purposes.

My father sought to convince me that only activities in which one engages actively and individually – notably hunting, shooting and fishing – can properly be described as sports. Soccer and rugger, he suggested dismissively, are mere games. Most of those who call themselves ‘sports enthusiasts’ are content to spectate, usually from an armchair at home. The old boy has lost that argument, I am afraid. Games reign supreme in public esteem, however dismaying the behaviour of some of those who play them.

The saddest change since father’s era is the fungus-growth of hostility towards traditional sports. The other day, I was driving a car full of guns along a bridlepath on the Berkshire Downs. Our convoy was careful to slow and steer aside from ramblers we met. I tried ‘Good mornings’ out of the window to each of them, but was rewarded only by stony stares. They had seen and heard us banging away, and did not like it. The sight of a pheasant falling wounded or dead from the sky is repugnant to many such rural visitors. It seems sensible to spare their sensitivities by seeking to shoot discreetly. It is no longer a good idea to run drives within sight of a public road.

The banning of fox-hunting signals a threat to the future of all English field sports, as well as a body-blow to the historic life of the countryside. For centuries, hunts have provided a focus for the social lives of many rural communities. At a stroke, and with malice aforethought, the great tradition reflected in the art of Stubbs, Alken and a thousand lesser brushes, and by the pens of Trollope, Surtees, White-Melville, Siegfried Sassoon, has been swept away. Now that Parliament has established the principle that it is wrong to kill one species of wildlife for pleasure, there is no logical reason why politicians should not move against shooting and fishing also.

I am not optimistic about the prospects for sustained defiance of the hunting ban. Those against whom it is directed are instinctively law-abiding people, even if they are now also angry ones. Some symbolic meets will continue for a time. Drag-hunting may prosper. Essentially, however, fox-hunting and legal hare-coursing – the Labour Party is indifferent to illegal coursing by travellers, which raises no class-war blood-lust on its Commons benches – will atrophy. Many of us whose own lives are not directly affected feel a surge of sorrow for what this measure says about the society to which we belong, in which halal butchery remains acceptable and the use of soft drugs is tolerated, but testing horses, riders and hounds in pursuit of a fox is not. The hunting ban is the act of an urban dictatorship, intolerant of minority cultures which exist outside parameters determined by itself.

There is nothing new about the contempt of intellectuals and radicals for rural pastimes. Joseph Addison remarked scornfully almost three centuries ago: ‘Hunting is not a proper employment for a thinking man.’ The unwelcome twenty-first-century novelty is the determination of an urban-based ruling political class to regard a belief in its own moral superiority as sufficient mandate to persecute a rural minority which it despises. It cares nothing for the wise observation of Plato a couple of millennia ago: ‘There can be no more important kind of information than the exact knowledge of a man’s own country; and for this as well as for more general reasons of pleasure and advantage, hunting with hounds and other kinds of sport should be pursued by the young.’ The hunting ban is the act of a government set upon creating a new Britain in its own image, confident that it faces no political opposition strong enough to frustrate its purposes.

We become a drearier and less diverse society with the loss of the pageantry of English fox-hunting, its thrusters and eccentrics, its beaux and belles, its happy meets and silly squabbles. The challenge now, for those who cherish the traditional countryside, is to do everything in our power to ensure that sport with horse and hounds is not altogether lost, and that the other great rural pastimes continue to prosper. The government assures us that it has no intention of legislating against shooting and fishing. We would be rash to swallow such bromides from an administration which has shown itself chronically deceitful on a host of other issues. I have often written about the importance of supporting the countryside organisations, both those which are responsible for sport – the Countryside Alliance, the British Association for Shooting and Conservation, the Game Conservancy – and those which fight for our rural landscape and character, notably the Campaign to Protect Rural England. Today, when so much is at risk, this seems more important than ever. Sceptics shrug: ‘What’s the point? Nobody has been able to stop the hunting ban, and nobody can stop this government attacking shooting, or building millions more houses on green fields.’ Yet, just as no thoughtful countryman regrets the struggle to save fox-hunting, which delayed legislation for years, so we cannot now succumb to defeatism about shooting, fishing and uncontrolled housing development. If we do not fight, then our sports and our landscape do not deserve to survive.

We must make strategy in the consciousness that we might be ruled by Labour governments for a decade. Tony Blair’s party thinks so, too. Political arrogance fortified Labour’s enthusiasm for banning fox-hunting. It imbues the party’s MPs with a dangerous boldness about the possibilities for going further in their crusade ‘irreversibly to change the nature of British society’. On our side, in seeking to resist new encroachments, we should fight a non-party battle, on an environmental and libertarian platform. Economic arguments about jobs and rural income at stake butter few parsnips with our opponents, for the numbers are too small.

If field sports ally themselves explicitly with the Tories then, bluntly, we anchor ourselves to a party which cannot for the foreseeable future offer useful aid. We face a cultural issue, which extends far beyond field sports. Britain is changing. Those of us who live familiar rural lives amid our rose gardens and the routine of planting broad beans, casting a fly for trout, pursuing grouse, decoying pigeons, should perceive that we inhabit a precious yet increasingly isolated social capsule. It is magnificent, but in the eyes of many of our fellow-countrymen, it represents a charade rather than reality. Out there beyond the gate, there is another world far removed from ours, and politically much more powerful. It is only necessary to ride on a London tube and glance at one’s neighbours in the carriage to perceive its nature. Many inhabitants of New Britain and Young Britain possess no interest in studying Old Britain’s history or in perpetuating its culture. From our viewpoint, it is futile to waste time lamenting this state of affairs. If we want our fragment of society to survive, we must achieve an accommodation with this new world, which is mistrustful of old elites, inherently sceptical of old values.

A while back, a Field reader who proudly described himself as a ‘toff’ accused me of inverted snobbery. Yet it seems only common sense to recognise that the people banning fox-hunting are motivated chiefly by a commitment to class warfare, not animal welfare. One Labour minister has acknowledged explicitly that the measure represented, in the eyes of himself and his comrades on the Commons benches, ‘revenge for the miners’. Tony Blair and his successors may only be dissuaded from further assaults on field sports if they perceive that such action would antagonise those whom they classify as ‘ordinary people’, rather than merely an old ‘privileged class’ whom it delights them to punish.

The most admirable quality in politics, as in life, is generosity of spirit. What was done in the House of Commons in 2004 represented a great meanness. Henceforward, to paraphrase Hugh Gaitskell in a somewhat different context: we must fight, fight and fight again to save the way of life we love. We can succeed only by representing this as a battle for social liberty and for the rural environment, not by positioning ourselves behind a conservative or Conservative barricade.

Our forefathers would have recoiled, of course, from the necessity of justifying to the urban population the chosen activities of the rural community. They regarded the pursuit of wild quarry as the most natural of human activities, and they were right. Yet they might also be cheered that in the twenty-first century we are still doing many things which they did, in a manner not so different from that which they knew. Politics casts its sorry shadow, yet politics seems a wonderfully long way away on a June day at a trout lake, or on a fine December morning, when one hears beaters tapping through the wood and the first cock exploding with a clatter from the trees. The past may have seemed less complicated than the present, but our own sporting experience retains an enchantment that would cheer the shades of our ancestors.

This is the third collection of rural writings I have published. I should acknowledge a debt to Robert Lacey, my editor at HarperCollins, who does so much to smooth the eccentricities of my prose, even when these concern implausible nuances of field sports. Much of the book is adapted from pieces I have written over recent years for The Field, to whose editor Jonathan Young I owe much. He has become a cherished friend as well as one of Britain’s staunchest and shrewdest standard-bearers for the cause of the countryside. I have also included here a chapter based on speeches I have made on behalf of the Campaign to Protect Rural England, concerning the other great countryside issues – the preservation of our green spaces and the way of life of those who inhabit them. The CPRE is strictly neutral on field sports. I should stress that the views expressed in this book are personal, and do not represent those of that body, whose business and membership are fighting for our landscape. The CPRE rightly avoids engagement in such contentious matters as fox-hunting. But preserving our countryside is a challenge embracing many strands. Even if different country people fight different battles, these should be perceived as complementary, not contradictory.

I hope readers will gain pleasure from sharing some of my experiences of rural and sporting life, even if almost all of you are more skilful in their practice than myself. In describing my own doings, the only concession I make to discretion is sometimes to change the names of characters with whom I have shared them, to spare their blushes, if not my own. I am conscious that these writings reflect a privileged experience. In recent years, I have been lucky enough to visit some of the finest rivers and shoots in Britain and abroad, and to enjoy wonderful sporting opportunities. It was not always so. I spent my early sporting life, as most of us do, picking crumbs from beneath the table. My natural habitats for many years were modest day-ticket fisheries and walked-up hedges. I reached great grouse moors and salmon pools only relatively late in the day. I have fed from the silver spoon only after a long acquaintance with a wooden one, which I hope is some excuse for extolling the joys of butts and double-gun days.

I have called this collection Country Fair, which reflects the range of joys and beauties we encounter in pursuing our romance with rural Britain. The title also represents a gesture of filial affection, as my first chapter will explain.

Max Hastings

Il Pinquan, Kenya

March 2005

1 Country Fair

AS ANYONE WHO reads my writings will have noticed over the years, I am addicted to rural history. Not to nostalgia, because we should recognise that, in the countryside as elsewhere, over the last half-century some things have grown better rather than worse. There is no surer shortcut to senility than forever to be lamenting a lost past. Yet it is always pleasing to relate the world we know today to that which our parents and grandparents inhabited. I have been thumbing through the bound volumes of a now-forgotten magazine named Country Fair, which flourished for a time in the 1950s, half a century ago. It holds a special charm for me, because my father created and edited it alongside that great Wiltshire farmer and writer A.G. Street.

Successive issues of Country Fair captured snapshots of a world I can just remember, in which the combine harvester was slowly replacing the binder and thresher; BSA advertised a single-barrel shotgun (‘hitherto for export only’) at £18.2s.11d; and ‘B.B.’ in his shooting column urged the merits of a stuffed cat as a surefire lure for carrion crows. J. Hughes-Parry described how he gaffed a thirty-seven-pound spring salmon for his wife Pat on the Welsh Dee on 26 March, among a host of lesser monsters which fell to his rod that season. Jack Ivester-Lloyd wrote about hunting clothes, telling me something I never knew: ‘The custom observed by many hunts of asking farmers who come out with them to wear black coats and hunting caps came into being for a very good reason. It is done so that others may easily recognise the men over whose land they may be riding and who, therefore, should be treated with special courtesy.’ Arthur Street described, with copious diagrams, the art of setting a course to plough a field.

My mother, Anne Scott-James, wrote deploring the fashion in which old cottages in our villages were being pulled down. Landlords found this cheaper than making repairs, when statutory controls restricted many rents to three or four shillings a week. Mother’s rage was inspired by the demolition of a very old thatched cottage immediately opposite our own. ‘The Whitehall bureaucrats say people must be cleared out of sub-standard properties,’ she wrote, ‘and they declaim violently against “country slums”. They regard a man with money to spend on converting an old cottage with hatred, and talk of “the wrong people” getting homes…As fast as new houses are built in the country, old ones are pulled down. It doesn’t make sense.’

The magazine’s ‘topic of the month’ for July 1951 was that of farm holidays. Agriculture needed a lot of scarce seasonal labour between July and November – ‘It wants twelve to reap what it takes one man to sow.’ For several decades in the early and mid-twentieth century, townsmen were encouraged to take cheap holidays by boarding or camping on a farm. In high summer they paid thirty-five shillings a week for their keep – £1.75 in modern money – and could earn one shilling and sixpence an hour – around 7p – for their labour. By October and November, the rate for a week’s bed and rations on a farm had fallen to a pound, and wages had risen to one shilling and ninepence.

Ralph Wightman, a Dorset farmer who was also a well-known writer of the period, urged the virtues of the farm camper not only to provide a hand, ‘but because his labour holiday will show him the real country. He will see the fields as a workshop instead of a playground. He will go back with a different feeling about our British heritage.’ Would that it was feasible to do the same today, for a new generation of urban dwellers! Elsewhere in Country Fair that summer of 1951, Lady Patricia Ward explained how she rented a Suffolk farmhouse for £60 a year, and persuaded her trustees to release the money to equip and decorate it from top to bottom for £1,190. A village dweller, Evelyn Gibbs, described how mains water was at last being connected to her hamlet, provoking head-shaking among elderly inhabitants about the consequences of this reckless innovation, when main drains were still lacking.

Maurice Burton, the magazine’s resident naturalist, lamented the decline of the dormouse, which he blamed upon the spread of grey squirrels. The famous amateur rider and breeder John Hislop wrote about the charms and horrors of owning a racehorse. Training fees were running at an extravagant seven guineas a week, plus 10 per cent of winnings. A jockey received five guineas for a losing ride and seven for a winner. It cost £100 to enter a horse for the Derby.

Here is some miscellaneous rural information from the same page: did you know that Northamptonshire is the only county of England to have nine others abutting on it? Or that until the late seventeenth century, July was called Jooly? Or that a Leicestershire acre used to be 2,308\\¾ square yards, and a Westmoreland one 6,760 square yards? In Anthony Armstrong’s essay on Sussex, he quotes a disobliging comment on the county by one Dr Burton in 1751: ‘Why is it that the oxen, the swine, women and all other animals are so long-legged in Sussex? May it be from the difficulty of pulling the feet out of so much mud?’

Thank God that these days we no longer have to make fuel briquettes out of coal dust and cement to heat the house, as some people did in 1951. I sympathise with the writer who lamented the miseries of driving a tractor in winter when cabs, heated or otherwise, were unheard of. Ploughing a furrow demanded a struggle with the elements almost as taxing as that involved in driving a horse team.

Constance Spry, who wrote a column on home entertaining, offered some tips for keeping food cool in a home without a frig (sic). She suggested hanging a damp cloth in the larder. Major Hugh Pollard contributed a recipe for cooking the harvest rabbit. Hugh, a notably eccentric friend of my father and author of that celebrated work A History of Firearms, was a keen cook in his leisure moments. In his youth after service in the First World War, he had seen action in Ireland as a Black and Tan. More dubious still, he and one of his daughters assisted General Franco’s secret passage from the Canaries to mainland Spain at the outset of that country’s civil war. As a child, I was impressed by the manner in which the Pollard house near Petworth was strewn with exotic weapons, invariably loaded.

Today, I fear, an unamused constabulary would remove Hugh’s Firearms Certificate in about five minutes, though most of the guns he kept about the house were not the kind for which one could have gained legal sanction even in those indulgent times. I was especially keen on his machine-pistols. Come to that, in Country Fair there is a set of photos of our family cottage, showing some of my father’s guns standing unlocked in a rack at the foot of the stairs. My oh my, as Mole might have said, how the world has changed!

Yet some things are exactly the same. Roy Beddington, the angling writer and artist, painted a picture of chalk stream fishing in father’s magazine which remains instantly recognisable to any of us: ‘July is the month of the evening rise,’ he observed. ‘It is no time for the bungler or the over-excited, but a time for circumspection.’ A host of new salmon flies has achieved primacy in our fishing lives since 1951, but the trout patterns which Beddington urged are the old faithfuls we still use today: Pale Wateries, Lunn’s Particulars, Red and Sherry spinners, Blue-Winged Olives, Silver Sedges. ‘It is time to make haste slowly,’ he wrote, ‘when every minute is precious, and every tangle and change of fly must be avoided.’ These are sensations every fisherman still knows intimately, even if other experiences of that era – rationing and National Service, disastrous floods in East Anglia and black-market petrol – are mercifully unknown.

One of Reginald Arkell’s verses decorated the pages of Country Fair that July of 1951:

The young men of the country

They hurry up to town.

In city ways they spend their days,

A-running up and down.

But the old men, the old men

Can plough a furrow straight,

In rain or shine, and still have time

To lean upon a gate.

Here, surely, is the greatest change since the days of father’s old magazine: the pace of life has quickened. One of my family used to assert years ago that I would never be a proper countryman, because I did not make time to hang about and gossip with people across the counter of the village shop, or when passing them in the lanes. Those strictures were just. They apply to many others of a new generation who live in rural places. Even the ploughman whom Arkell celebrated above now has a computerised schedule to meet. We inhabit a far more comfortable rural world than our parents knew, in the days when even the grandest houses were underheated and hot water was a luxury. But our own era is a hastier one. Few people now dare admit to enjoying leisure to lean upon a gate. If they did so, an agent of the Health & Safety Executive would likely leap from behind a bush, pointing out the risk that it might fall on their toes and provoke litigation.

2 Rhythm of the Seasons

JUST AS SWALLOWS wake up one morning and think: ‘Gosh, I ought to be migrating,’ so sportsmen sniff the late-summer air and reflect that it is time to get the gun out, maybe shoot a few clays, think about grouse if they are very lucky, or maybe the first partridges, wishing that they were wild greys. There is a rhythm about the sporting year, of which most of us become more conscious with each season of experience. This need not mean that one must be impatient for things to happen (though I have known fox-hunters who became catatonic between April and August). Rather, there is a sense of rightness about the moment when each phase of the cycle begins.

I do not think about fishing through the winter and early-spring months, nor even glance at my rods. In March and April, every spare moment is devoted to the garden. I do my best to get the borders into parade order before the river beckons, never entirely successfully. There is little temptation to fantasise about fishing when there is a nasty cold wind that must blow any fly, as well as any fisherman, off the water. Then comes a May morning when the breeze drops, spring sun warms the earth, and every instinct tells one to toss the net and bag into the back of the car, and nip down to the river. Its time has come, albeit usually a trifle late.

Much the same applies to salmon-fishing. A route to madness lies in brooding all summer about what may or may not be happening to familiar rivers when one is not oneself casting on them. I reach for my ear defenders when anyone rushes up at a party intending to describe record catches – or, for that matter, no catches at all – on the very beat one is due to visit a fortnight hence. Likewise, I have abandoned an old habit of checking the weather on a given river day by day through the week before visiting it. What happens to Jack Smith on Thursday or Friday has absolutely no bearing upon what will happen to you or me the following Monday or Tuesday. As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods, and all that. Better just to turn up on the bank when the time comes, willing, eager and oblivious of recent history.

You will not be surprised to hear me confess, of course, that it has taken fifty-nine years to become this phlegmatic creature. Patience is much easier when one enjoys many other things in life as well as sport. In my twenties I was obsessed to an unhealthy degree with shooting and fishing. These things meant more to me than anything else. I did not get many chances, and consoled myself by falling asleep every night reading about other people’s sporting doings in country books and magazines. In the unlikely event that I had been given a choice between driven pheasant-shooting and a date with Diana Rigg, it would have been a tough call.

These days, like many sportsmen I find that the prospect which stirs most vivid excitement is the chance of a grouse. There is absolutely nothing which I would not cancel – weddings, funerals, christenings – to enjoy the privilege of missing those sublime birds. And even with grouse, I have trained myself not to think about them until a magical day in August, when one glances at the calendar and says, with studied carelessness: ‘Oh well, better get ready. Yorkshire tomorrow.’

It is fortunate that grouse do not become operational until the garden is way over the top, the sweet peas hang limp and yellow, it is past time to spray the roses, and in the kitchen garden only runner beans will notice that one is away. My father believed that matters were divinely arranged so that grouse and partridges could be eaten with the last of those same beans, but this represented a touch of blasphemy on his part. What is true, I think, is that there comes a moment when we have had enough of the fag-end of summer, and embrace the coming of autumn: a new season, and in many respects the most pleasing. Summers sometimes disappoint; autumns seldom do. The first ground frosts feel absolutely right as one stands waiting for partridges – or, in a perfect world, casting across Tweed in October or November. We might, however, offer a petition to the Almighty to stop autumn gales blowing leaves all over the river while one is trying to cast a fly. It is enough to turn anyone into an atheist, when the British seasons start overdoing things in the fashion they have affected lately. Two years ago we could not even fish Tweed in mid-October, because the river was at a June drought level.

The pheasants that clatter aloft unscathed at the end of an October partridge drive, taking flying lessons for November, offer promise of good things to come. Yet pheasant-shooting has suffered more than any other field sport from upheavals in the climate. At midwinter we want to shoot on cold, crisp days with a hard frost and maybe even a little snow. That is what our forefathers did. They wrote reams of doggerel extolling the beauties of Christmas cock pheasants paddling about in the drifts.

Today, instead, we find ourselves turning out again and again on mild, soggy days when nobody, including the birds, really wants to do it. The abolition of our traditional winter, especially in the south of England, is a blow to field sports. There seems little chance that God will change his mind and restore the old weather pattern – indeed, if anything, matters will become more difficult as the effects of global warming become ever more apparent. The best we can hope for, these days, is a few sharp, chilly days in January, towards the back end. I don’t know about you, but I have had enough by then. I feel ready to stop, flee from England for a while, then turn to the garden again. I never sob for anything lost on the first of February. I am merely boundlessly grateful for the fun I have had, and happy to wait for it all to start again with the trout in late spring. ‘To every thing there is a season,’ wrote the sage in Ecclesiastes, ‘and a time to every purpose under the heaven.’ The old boy never said a truer word.

3 The River Keeper

THE GREAT Richard Walker once suggested dismissively that ‘The most difficult thing about dry fly-fishing is to find somewhere to practise it.’ He seems right up to a point. Now that so few of even the great south of England chalk streams offer truly wild fish, the art of the dry fly is diminished from the days Skues and Dunne knew. Yet for many of us, there remains a magic about fishing a river which is absent from still waters, save perhaps those of Scotland and Ireland. It seems worth every penny of the alarming cheques one must write, to savour the joy of casting beneath willows and among the rushes for a chalk stream trout. I would pay at least half the money each year merely for the privilege of walking the banks without a rod, watching the fish and the wildlife in summer. Even many professionals, I think, are drawn to a career in a fishery for the same reason.

The man who influences my own happiness on dry fly water more than any other lives in a modest cottage maybe half a mile from my own home, and a long cast from the river where he plies his trade – no, surely we should call it a profession. My daughter remarked the other day that she reckons only one in ten of the people she knows have jobs which they enjoy. This seems a fair guess. It does not represent mere sentiment to suggest that the career contentment quotient is higher in the country than in town. Those fortunate enough to forge a lifestyle working with nature are more likely to achieve happiness than people who merely massage money through their working days.

Our local river keeper, Stephen Jones on the Kennet at Chilton Foliat, seems one of the most fulfilled men I have ever met. Everybody who meets Stephen goes away muttering that he ought to be chairman of Microsoft or suchlike. He is forty-six, bright, decisive and fluent. But no, all his life he has wanted only to be a river keeper. This is fortunate for those of us who fish with him, because he is very good at it. And maybe it is also lucky for him. Here is a man who knows exactly what he wants, and knows that he has got it. He grew up in Southampton, where his father worked in a bank. It remains a mystery whence sprang his enthusiasm for running streams. The family used to visit the New Forest a lot, and as a teenager Stephen did some pretty unsuccessful fishing on the public water of the Itchen estuary. But somehow the idea of working on a river got into his head, and stayed there. His father always said: ‘Make sure you get a job you enjoy.’

A family farming friend mentioned that Sparsholt College was starting a fishery management course. Stephen enrolled for it. Meanwhile, at sixteen, when he left school – ‘They didn’t think I was the sharpest knife in the box’ – he spent a year’s apprenticeship on the Test at Broadlands. There, he says wryly, ‘Working among men I did a lot of growing up very quickly.’ After college he spent three years at Packington Fishery in Warwickshire, which he enjoyed but found very commercial: ‘Rods really wanted their pound of flesh.’ Then as now, he himself fished very little. Like gamekeepers who scarcely trouble to shoot, Stephen is a typical river keeper in that he gains his pleasure from living with the water, and from watching others cast. He is a good entomologist, but learned about insects from watching fly on the water, rather than from books. He knows his birds, is less confident with plants, ‘But I’m still learning.’

He came to the Kennet in 1982, at a time when the Chilton Fishery was in poor health, after years in thrall to a Thames Conservancy policy designed to speed flow and improve field drainage for the only rural activity that seemed to matter in those days – growing corn. The estate syndicate could not sell all its rods, and was losing money. Stephen worked at increasing weed growth, putting bends back into the stream. He started rearing his own trout for stocking at the end of the season, ‘Which is a big plus at the beginning of the next one, because you don’t have a river full of gullible fish.’

Today, there is a long waiting list for rods, and Chilton is famously one of the prettiest stretches on the river. Stephen loves the variety of the fishing: ‘Because the main river and the carriers are so different, there’s always somewhere to get out of the wind, always somewhere to find a bit of shade, always somewhere you can get away on your own.’ His own summer day starts at seven when he feeds the fish, walks the dogs and checks his fenn traps – he catches half a dozen mink a year. There are new rods to be shown around, and duffers like me who always need advice on flies. Towards evening there are also occasional poachers, ‘white van men’, usually in their early twenties, never alone, often plying a handline which they can drop in the water if they are spotted, to remove the evidence. They are the reasons for Tiger and Lizzie, Stephen’s German shepherds, without which experience has warned him not to try consequences with intruders. He seldom bothers to call the police, because they come so slowly.

He says that his real pleasure in the job, beyond the beauty of the place, is meeting people. ‘There used to be three old boys who came every Tuesday – a High Court judge, a former Hong Kong governor who’d been in Changi Jail, and a survivor of the sinking of the Repulse. I’d see them every lunchtime, and we’d sit down for a chat. They weren’t boasting at all, but when you listened to those men and thought about what they’d seen and done…’

In summer, Stephen is a keen bowler for a local village cricket team. When there is no fishing in the winter, he loads and beats a bit. Out of season, he and his wife Fiona also travel, usually somewhere exotic. Two years ago it was Namibia, last time California. Fiona is Australian, from a country district a few hours outside Melbourne. They have been married for ten years, and she is a successful executive with Vodafone. Stephen is full of admiration for her swift rise: ‘She’s clever and she’s Australian, which means she’ll always say, “Let’s give it a go!” We don’t do that here, do we?’

I asked Stephen about the common mistakes he sees fishermen make. ‘They don’t look enough. They’ll cast to a fish without noticing there’s another one in between. Some people think that to be fishing, you’ve always got to be plying a rod. Time spent looking before you do anything is the trick. It’s always a mistake to move too quickly, to rush around the river.’ Does he never get restless? ‘Never yet. I’ve not seen anywhere the grass is greener. Maybe towards the end of a season I might start to get a bit weary, then I see a rod coming down here for the first time, really excited about fishing. There are two Americans who cross the Atlantic every year, just to fish here. I think to myself: they’re willing to come all that way, to be on this water. And I feel proud.’

His big beef, inevitably, is water abstraction. He fumes that the level of water which can be stolen upriver is assessed on the basis of the last calendar year, which means that 2003, for instance, was identified as wet because of what happened in January and February, despite the endless dry months that followed. In 2004, by early spring the river was at a June level, and matters have been worse in 2005. Yet Swindon was permitted to divert even more water than it was taking already – and none of this returned to the Kennet. Here is a sad and familiar story throughout the south of England, a grave threat to the future of our chalk streams. Whitehall planners continue to approve massive housing developments, heedless of how much water our modest river systems can spare for diversion to ever-growing conurbations. If the countryside of southern England loses its rivers – and several are desperately depleted – then a vital artery of rural life will be severed.

I suggested to Stephen that almost all the mistakes people make in life are things they miss out on, not things they do. He nodded. ‘There was this chap who had a rod here – very successful businessman. In five years, he never got to the river once. He was just too busy. Now’s he’s dead. It seems such a waste, not to have done something you really like doing.’ For himself, he says unhesitatingly that he has the life of his choice. He revels in feeling master of his own destiny: ‘This is good. The world comes to you, rather than you having to go to it.’ And those of us who fish with Stephen feel lucky that we should have the privilege of his company and his wisdom for many seasons yet.

4 Sunshine and Showers

EVERY REAL HUNTER, shooter and fisher accepts the weather as part of the game of chance that makes up sport. If we get soaked walking hedges in pursuit of a pheasant, the experience doubles the pleasure of lying in a bath afterwards with a whisky and a book. If our rivers and lakes were forever in perfect order, where would be the thrill and surprise about hooking a trout or salmon? G.E.M. Skues wrote a salutary short story about a man who died and found himself on a river where the fish were rising continuously. He thought he was in heaven, netting trout after perfect trout, until he grew to understand that this was an exquisite form of torture devised for the other place. Most of us practise field sports because we love to commune with wild things in wild places. The whimsy of the British weather is inseparable from the experience. Shooting high pheasants in a gale is difficult, because the target is usually travelling in two directions at once, but the thrill is doubled if you hit one of these superbirds.

The elements influence fishing even more decisively. William Blake observed wryly: ‘The weather for catching fish is that weather, and no other, in which fish are caught.’ One July Monday, I found myself plying a small double across a Scottish salmon river. The gillie frowned gloomily and observed: ‘It’s a fortnight since we had rain. We need the water up a couple of inches.’ On Tuesday a fierce upstream wind made casting difficult even for experts. The gillie shook his head: ‘The two best fishers I know go to sleep on the bank when there’s an upstream wind.’ On Wednesday, heavy thunderstorms stirred the current into cold chocolate soup: ‘It should be great tomorrow if the rain stops and the river starts falling,’ said the gillie in real excitement. The river rose a trifle on Thursday. On Friday, at last it was steady, though highly coloured. We caught some fish on big, bright flies, and thought eagerly of Saturday, when we would have the best beat on the river. But next morning there was more rain and more colour. We landed the odd salmon, but never reaped the sort of grand harvest that on Monday we had been sure must come.

Now, do not interpret this as a fisherman’s whinge. We enjoyed a wonderful week on wonderful water and caught a respectable number of fish. I am simply making the point that ours was the sort of climatic experience every angler knows. Only once or twice in a lifetime do most of us get the chance to fish through several successive days of weather when fish and gauge marry, to yield a bonanza.

Shooting is a bit more reliable, but not much. About one day in three, conditions are the way we want them. The wind is blowing in the right direction, rain is holding off, the sun is not too bright. By contrast, there are those mornings in August when the sun is blazing magnificently, making it a pleasure to walk the hill, but young grouse receive no help from a breeze to lift them forward. After being flushed for the first time, they drop exhausted into the heather well in front of the butts, and refuse to get up again. September and October grouse are stronger and much more challenging, but by then the threat of mist or rain is never far distant. Few sporting experiences match the misery of receiving a priceless invitation to shoot grouse, then spending two days at the foot of the hill waiting for a ‘clag’ to lift.

Come pheasant-time, most of us reckon that a perfect December or January outing means an overcast day with some wind, when in Patrick Chalmers’ phrase ‘the snow-powdered stubble rings hard to the tread’. Yet a white landscape looks more romantic to guns than to keeper and beaters. It is a tough challenge, to persuade birds to leave patches of snow-covered brambles, to keep a beating line tramping a wood in which white lumps of wetness are flopping off the branches onto every beater’s neck. On such days, the sight of dead pheasants precipitates in some of us a spasm of squeamishness. There is a pathos about a bird lying limp amid a cluster of feathers and pink spots of blood on the snow, which seldom troubles the senses in other conditions.

Yet in modern British winters, rather than snow we are likely to get mild, muddy, still, sunny days on which birds drift low over the guns with wings set, or others when torrential rain causes the water to run in streams down the barrel rib. Few of us can fib convincingly enough to make ourselves believe that we like competing in such conditions, when the stock of the gun is slipping in the hand and we are struggling to see coveys or flushes through the squalls. Gene Kelly may have enjoyed singing in the rain, but how many of us, deep down, like shooting in it? On a Saturday morning not long back, the phone rang in Hastings Towers at 8 a.m. Glancing out of the window at a torrential downpour, with more of the same promised all day, I experienced a surge of hope that my pheasant host was ringing to cancel. Not a chance, of course. Already some guns had been in their cars for half an hour, while beaters and pickers-up were congregating from all over the region. Shooting dates are fixed six or nine months before they take place. Not even a death in the family is likely to change them.

About here, hardy veterans of the Norfolk coast, the Northumbrian hills, the Cornish valleys, start muttering to each other: ‘Not much of a sportsman this chap Hastings, is he? Doesn’t like getting his feet wet!’ Yet my purpose in these jottings is sometimes to suggest sentiments which lots of people secretly share, but don’t like to admit. Of course we are all out there doing our thing, even when cats and dogs are plummeting down. But most of us, in such circumstances, wish we were at home in front of the fire. The only case for shooting in the rain is that, like looking at other people’s holiday snaps, it is so wonderful when it is over.

Modern clothing is much more effective than the kit of fifty years ago. Encased in thermals and Gore-Tex, it should be possible to avoid ever being cold or wet again. That is, if one stays perfectly still. The problem about shooting is that it requires moving our arms and legs, sometimes quite energetically. Every extra sweater makes it marginally harder to swing a gun. On a really rough day, those of us who affect enough clothing to impress a moon-walker find it difficult to raise a flask to our lips, never mind take aim at a rocketing pheasant. A majority of shooters perform best when wearing least – no, I don’t mean quite that, but shirtsleeves anyway. We become slower and clumsier with each layer of protection.

Unless it is very cold, I never wear gloves in the rain, because they become such wretched things when waterlogged. That leaves one stumping between drives clutching a dog skewer caked in mud, cartridge bag and shooting stick ditto, wiping a hand disconsolately on the grass before putting sticky fingers on the gun. My smart friends have nowadays abandoned spectacles in favour of contact lenses, especially for sport. They say that these make all the difference in the world when the heavens open, or one is trying to woo another wife. Yet goggles have been part of me for so long now that I can’t face changing.

Fine, misty rain is worst for sporting spectacle-wearers. For the first half-hour, one dries one’s glasses occasionally on a handkerchief. Thereafter, the hanky becomes so sodden that it is past doing the business. I simply peer out upon a universe shrouded in wet. When a blurred flying object appears, I point the gun roughly in its direction and fire, confident that even if it is an owl or a sparrowhawk, there is not the smallest chance it will suffer any damage. I often wonder how wildfowlers manage to kill anything, when they do not bother to venture out of doors unless there is a Force Eight gale and raindrops are battering their camouflage suits with the impact of tin tacks. I have always admired wildfowlers, while being a little frightened of them, in the way that soldiers fear officers who want to win the VC. I cherish an uneasy apprehension that a friendly wildfowler will one day cajole me into sharing his experiences. I prefer to read books about them, to savour the full pleasure of not being on the saltings myself. In 1916, the Germans placed an advertisement in the US press, designed to deter interventionists: ‘Americans! If you are thinking of participating in the European war and wish to sample the sensations of combat, you may do so without leaving home. Dig a six-foot hole in your garden. Half-fill it with water. Then live in it for a few weeks in mid-winter on a diet of cold food and muddy coffee, paying a lunatic to fire machine-guns at you.’ If one leaves out the machine-guns, that seems a pretty vivid description of wildfowling.

I have never asked a pheasant how it feels about being asked to put on a sporting performance in a deluge, but its demeanour usually leaves one in little doubt. Pheasants that have been soaked overnight scamper about in front of the beaters, looking as if they had just emerged from a swimming pool. If eventually shooed into flight, the sensible ones beat their wings half-heartedly a few times, then settle back where they came from, pleading exemption under Conditions of Labour legislation. True, I attended a heavy-rain high-bird shoot in Wiltshire last season where the pheasants performed more convincingly than the guns, but since the poor brutes were being driven off precipices, they were not given much choice. One needs only to look at a wet dead pheasant on the game cart to know that it was not feeling its best even before encountering a pattern of no. 6 shot. The truth is that we should not shoot in heavy rain, because it is not fair on the birds. It is a bit like asking a horse to race with a couple of stone overweight, or a sprinter to perform in ski boots. Some of you will think that I am being a bit – well, wet about all this. Maybe so, but the truth is that when we launch a day’s shooting in heavy rain, we are suiting our own administrative convenience or financial imperative, rather than measuring the quality of sport.

Yet after a morning of downpours on a grouse moor, all debts of discomfort are repaid if the showers clear by afternoon, the sun bursts through, the dogs shake themselves dry, the heather steams. Even the midge hatch seems bearable if God lets up on us before the last drive. Perversely, it is often the days when one has battled with the elements, casting into a cutting wind or striving to push the barrels after birds streaking across the line, that stick fondly in the memory. Sport is least interesting when it is easy. The quarry we pursue must live through all the days and seasons. We do not seek to share the full rigour of its experience, but we can at least go to meet it halfway. Even when I am moaning, I try to remind myself that a fair-weather sportsman is no sportsman at all.

5 The Young Entry

I HAVE BEEN been a young gun now for, oh, forty-something years. I have started to think of myself as quite an experienced young gun. I seem to get more shooting days than I managed a few seasons ago, in the sixties. What was that you said? Surely not. A Scottish pub landlord asked only the other evening, ‘What can I get for you, young man?’ I felt quite bucked. It is unkind to suggest that he was being satirical. One day last summer, however, I found myself in a line with half a dozen shots who were indisputably younger young guns than me. They were accompanied by wives who clapped their hands prettily as they fired, and babies in pushchairs. One of the team said: ‘I couldn’t get to sleep last night, I was so excited about shooting grouse today.’ His words pricked my heart, touching memories two or three decades old. I remembered exactly that sense of excitement and apprehension. Ruefully, I recognised that even if I am not yet an old gun, in the eyes of that man’s generation I am a Boer War veteran – well, at least a Falklands one, which is almost the same thing.

My father imbued me with a passionate enthusiasm for shooting and fishing, without providing many opportunities, because he lacked the means. In my teens I walked-up pheasants or grouse maybe half a dozen times a year, and shot pigeon a few more. At the age of twenty-four I took half a gun in a pheasant shoot, and began to rent a dogging grouse moor in Sutherland. Nowadays, if my children started doing those things on incomes as slender as mine was, I would have them put under medical supervision. Friends and even relations assumed that if I owned a sports car and took a Scottish shooting lodge, I must be richer than they thought. In truth, sporting folies de grandeur brought me within a whisker of bankruptcy. Yet I can never forget the euphoria of those wonderful early sporting days, when every grouse that rose from the heather seemed a miracle of beauty, and each shot at a driven pheasant was an adventure. Young sportsmen, like young everything elses, experience the summits of joy and the depths of despair, an emotional topography which the river of time flattens by middle age.

It is a relief to have left behind the financial horrors of those early years, which dominated my overdraft. When we quit Sutherland to drive south after summer idylls in the seventies, around Dingwall I began to think about the bank manager. By the time we passed Carlisle, I was wondering what I could sell to pay the bills. You may say that a real sportsman doesn’t think too much about what things cost. I don’t agree. Many of us, especially the young, become upset if we have a seriously bad draw on a paying day we know we cannot really afford. And in those early years I became almost hysterical about wasted opportunities when I shot really badly, as I usually did.

One of the greatest pleasures of middle-aged shooting is that one is more relaxed. If the weather is bloody on Monday, one knows that there will probably be sunshine on Saturday. Belatedly, I am even learning not to mind too much if the birds flock to the next peg, and I miss the ones over my own head. Does this represent maturity, or a loss of that ‘edge’ one needs to shoot well? You tell me.

An aspect of getting older is that my fear of doing something dangerous has increased, rather than diminished. Many of us, once in a season or two, take a shot that brings on a sudden cold chill as the report dies away. Perhaps it is because one has fired low at a partridge with a hedge behind it, perhaps when one suddenly feels uncertain where the nearest stop is. One afternoon last season, I was bawled out by a head keeper’s wife for taking an overhead grouse after the first horn had gone. I thought the shot was perfectly safe. She did not. In these matters the home team is always right. I apologised, and meant it. Whereas our great-grandparents made jokes about peppering beaters or shooting a loader, nowadays we all know that no accident with a gun is remotely funny. The deep public suspicion of firearms and field sports, which is a fact of modern life, makes us morbidly sensitive about doing anything that might increase it.

In my twenties I filled our home with sporting prints and later watercolours and paintings, as had my father. I recently heard Malcolm Innes, a veteran of the trade, say that sales of sporting art – at the popular end of the market anyway – are languishing. Malcolm suggests that this is because the young are simply not buying pictures of the kind we all loved: Thorburn and J.C. Harrison prints, Balfour-Browne stalking sketches. He suspects – and my instinct is that he is right – that while the new generation likes field sports well enough, few twenty-somethings embrace them as consuming passions. Perhaps this is partly because shooting is now almost prohibitively expensive and hard to come by for their generation. When I was twenty-two, the owners of a girls’ school near our home in Hampshire let me roam its woods, potting the odd pheasant. I can’t imagine anyone these days giving a young man with a gun that sort of licence. In the south of England rough shooting has become almost unobtainable. Yet we should recognise that driven shooting is a bastard extravagance for relatively rich men. Walking-up game with dog and gun is, and always should be, the core of sport.

But then I think again of that eager thirty-something-year-old I met last summer, who couldn’t sleep for his excitement at the prospect of the morrow on the moor. The passion persists among some of the young. Our job – the responsibility of the not-so-young – is to see that the next generation is given the opportunities to keep alive the sporting heritage. George Eliot wrote: ‘If youth is the season of hope, it is often so only in the sense that our elders are hopeful about us.’ Yet the young must be given the chance to experience the magic and catch the bug, to become steeped in the enthusiasm we have known.

Children’s shoots may sometimes be alarming experiences, but they are bedrock for the future. In our family we continue to give an annual outing that name, though all those involved are now in their twenties. My son and daughter ask three or four friends apiece to a day which I take for them on a nearby estate. Roughly the same team has turned up every year for the past six or seven. Port – which none of my own age-group seems to drink at all – is consumed in prodigious quantities at dinner the night before the action. Indeed, the general alcohol intake would have commanded respect at a Roman bacchanalia, though I don’t mind when the young are not driving anywhere. Some subsequently sleep in beds, others doss wherever they can find a corner of the house – we never ask.

Marshalling the guns next morning, one might suppose that they had regressed to a common age of about six. Waking and feeding them, ensuring that they are properly equipped, demands a large nursery staff, rather than just me and a frying pan. Each must be quizzed before setting out, to ensure that he or she has Wellingtons, gloves, jackets, firearms. I warned two of the party to make sure they put plenty of 20-bore cartridges in the cars. We arrived at the shooting lodge to find that they had brought only a case of 12s. How do they get to the cinema on the right day, never mind earn livings?

I carry a radio rather than a gun at these affairs, taking my orders from the keeper, who fortunately knows us well and possesses a keen sense of humour. I lay on the safety warnings with special energy. A few years ago, one twenty-year-old gun – from a shooting family – terrified me. I saw him twice try to shoot a pheasant almost head-high in front before I reached his peg and lacerated him. He was not on the list this year, thank goodness. The first two drives were memorable for producing the worst exhibition of shooting I can remember since the guns were about twelve. On a sharp, cold day with a touch of wind, the partridges flew like smoke. A barrage of fire poured skywards. My dog sprang expectantly at each detonation, hoping for something to retrieve. Not a chance, ducky.

I stood behind my daughter. At the age of twenty-eight, she still cherishes a delusion that she can pick up a gun once a year, having spurned all offers of an outing at the shooting school, and expect birds to fall down. ‘You’re six feet behind every bloody one!’ I exclaimed, relishing the knowledge that nobody present had seen me shoot lately. ‘Chill out, Daddy,’ said the daughter scathingly. She was raising the gun so hesitantly that the bird was twenty yards behind the peg before she pressed a trigger. Then she stood contemplating its undamaged passage into the distance, expecting it to expire as an act of will, instead of reloading for the next flush. The boys, if one can still call them that, were throwing prodigious quantities of lead into the sky for not much better results.

After the second drive, the keeper announced with relish over the radio that 330 shots had been fired. Thirty-seven birds had been picked up. I pressed the handset and demanded, in front of the team, whether he had seen a worse showing this season. ‘No,’ he said decisively, amid a howl of mirth from the guns. In fairness, most of the boys get no more shooting than I did at their age, which was not a lot. But some do have practice. One of their daddies, indeed, features on best-shots-in-Britain lists. I said that they seemed to be hitting less than last year. ‘It was the port,’ they replied, attacking mid-morning sloe gin, soup and sausages as if they had not seen a square meal in a month.

The great thing about being boss of a day like this is that one can profess omniscience, in the absence of sceptics who know my own form. ‘By now,’ I told them confidently after the third drive, ‘a team of Chelsea Pensioners armed with walking sticks could have two hundred in the bag.’ One of our beaters had a seizure at the spectacle of a female gun, an old friend of my daughter and not a bad shot, trying to finish off a wounded pheasant by clubbing it to death with her gun butt. She suffered girlish scruples not about shooting it, but about wringing its neck or even whacking it against a tree. I told her that she should adopt my father’s favoured method, crushing its skull in her teeth. She looked like one of those young ladies in Victorian novels who came over all funny when somebody mentioned the word manure.

For us control freaks, the hardest part of entertaining the young alongside one’s own offspring is to keep one’s mouth shut. The spectacle of my son pouring himself a lunchtime gin of a size that would have impressed our dear late Queen Mother caused me to retire into a corner and gnash my teeth before rejoining the throng. I have given up knowing what does, or does not, constitute reasonable behaviour in the next generation. And in my heart, I was pleased with the son for shooting quite decently. A couple of days earlier, standing on the next peg at another shoot, he had wiped my eye at quite a tall pheasant. Most fathers like to see this happen, and I am no exception.

At the drive after lunch, the team pulled itself together and shot a bit better, though the keeper murmured to me that the birds were so wet he thought the dogs had caught several. The ‘children’ had adored every second of it. They departed leaving behind the usual random assortment of property. One year, a boy left a gun case – quite a good one. Despite ringing round the usual suspects, no one claimed it, so it has joined the Hastings equipment collection. I would murder any child of mine who left a gun case on the other side of England, but maybe some families have so much sporting kit that they don’t miss trifles.

Every year I ask myself whether I can afford to go on entertaining the children’s friends in this way. Nobody did it for me. But nowadays we all know that if we don’t help them to get started, there is no way they can make it on their own. I guess I shall go on forking out as long as the bank manager allows. I see our children’s shoot as a minuscule contribution to ensuring that the marvellous ritual of field sports survives through the next generation, and the new century.

6 Life at the Trough

FOR ALL MY part-rural upbringing, it took me much too long to appreciate that the best things to eat are to be found in the countryside. Until at least twenty, I cherished a delusion that meals came from shops. In those longgone, pre-Fayed days, Harrods was a focus of middle-class London life. From the age of about eighteen months onwards, we met in its banking hall, had our hair cut by its barbers, bought our treats from the toy department, stationery from the stationery department and food, not unexpectedly, from the food department. The Hastingses were anything but rich but, since my mother spent her days editing magazines and organising fashion shoots, food was ordered by telephone and delivered weekly by green van, each item exquisitely wrapped in grey paper and tied with string.

I was born just after the Second World War. Food rationing, together with spasmodic black-marketeering for tea, meat and suchlike, persisted until I was seven. A lifelong enthusiasm for cheap sweets stems, I fancy, from the fact that when I was in rompers our allowance was only about four ounces of bull’s-eyes and gobstoppers a week. Nonetheless, at home we ate pretty well, managing about four heavy meals a day. Nursery delicacies, administered by my adored old Yorkshire nanny in her starched grey overalls, included bread and sugar, bread with hundreds and thousands, lots of steamed puddings and Bird’s custard. Oh yes, and there was Shippam’s potted meat paste, a great treat. Part of the fun was to make toast on a fork in front of the nursery electric fire, a process which caused me to fuse the element with irksome frequency. With hindsight, it is puzzling that I was not electrocuted.

There was a famous chain of teashops named Fuller’s, which produced its own branded cakes. Heaven for every boarding schoolboy of the 1950s was to receive one in a parcel. Fuller’s walnut was the most famous, but personally I preferred Fuller’s chocolate cake. My mother occasionally reminded me that they cost six shillings apiece and therefore counted as luxury food, but in my prep school prime I could demolish a two-pound Fuller’s cake single-handed, at one sitting. We occasionally drank Coca-Cola, but irrationally Kia-Ora orange squash and Lucozade were considered healthier for us. At about twelve I acquired a secret passion for that heavily marketed second-hand car salesman’s drink Babycham. It was very sweet, mildly alcoholic, and could be bought illicitly at the back door of the village pub for one shilling and three pence for a small bottle.

We ate a lot of fish, which came from the wonderful Knightsbridge fish shop opposite Harrods where the spoils of the sea lay on an open marble slab, presided over by a genial giant with a red nose, blue-and-white-striped apron and straw hat. The butcher, too, wore a straw hat as his badge of office. I was reared in the belief that all right-thinking Englishmen lived off huge chunks of bleeding meat, a vision that has never faded. In those days meat seemed, and indeed was, very expensive. Fillet and sirloin seldom entered our house. The Sunday joint was usually a second-division cut like topside. At grown-up dinner parties my mother favoured crown of lamb, the cutlets primly decorated with little paper coronets. These were followed by the Hastings household’s absolutely favourite pudding – chocolate profiteroles with whipped cream, created with sublime artistry by my mother’s German cook, Martha. The family always managed to be broke, in a very English middle-class way. That is to say, we lived amid chronic gloom about money, but everybody seemed to chuck it about.

When I was shipped off to prep school at the age of eight, my father inaugurated a custom designed to soften the blow. On the first day of every term, before delivering me to the 3 p.m. train from Paddington, he took me to a West End restaurant for lunch. His opening shot was Le Caprice, then as now in Arlington Street. He introduced me to Mario, the head waiter, asserting reverently that I would find him one of the most important people in my life. Father also pointed out stars such as Noëpl Coward and David Niven. With some help from Mario, whom even as a stripling I found pretty oleaginous, the French menu was interpreted

None of this diminished in the smallest degree my misery and terror about being removed from Rutland Gate SW7 to a punishment camp in Berkshire named Horris Hill. There, prowess on the playing field was the only virtue deemed worthy of applause, and certain masters did not trouble to conceal their enthusiasm for the prettier small boys. At the Caprice, when I asked tremulously for an ice cream and was presented instead with a sorbet, I perceived deliberate deceit and collapsed into hysterical sobs. If father had thought to sweeten the bitter pill of Horris Hill with a mere restaurant luncheon, he failed. I was still seething when I boarded the Hogwarts Express.

Yet restaurant lunches persisted on those black days at the beginning of each term. Once we went to Simpson’s-in-the-Strand, where we ate beef off the trolley and my father instructed me on the importance of tipping the carver half a crown. We tried the Ivy, where I was briefed about all manner of writers and literary agents to be seen at the tables, none of whose names meant a thing to me. I much preferred Lyons Corner House in Coventry Street, the huge multiple restaurant complex where we usually patronised the Seven Stars, which served delicious roasts with jacket potatoes for around fifteen shillings (75p) a head. When I first started taking girls out, the Seven Stars got a lot of my custom. I never bothered to ask my dates how they felt about roasts. I just assumed, like many of my generation, that you could never go wrong with meat. The most satisfactory meal I can recall as a teenager comprised a prawn cocktail and a fillet steak, with a second prawn cocktail to follow. ‘I knew you were eccentric when you came in,’ said the waitress gloomily.

In those days I spent about 150 per cent of my weekly income on entertaining girls. At eighteen, I remember giving one of them a notably lavish, overpriced dinner at a restaurant in Swallow Street near Piccadilly Circus named the Pipistrello. She didn’t display the smallest sexual gratitude at the time, but I suppose the evening wasn’t an entirely futile extravagance, since she is now my wife.

The restaurants which won my heart – and for many adult years my custom – were those great fisheries: Wheeler’s in Old Compton Street, the Carafe behind Harrods and the Vendôme in Dover Street. They were owned by an exuberant friend of my father’s named Bernard Walsh, for whom oyster was a middle name. Bernard staged annual seaside parties at Colchester to celebrate the opening of the season, from which his guests returned sick but happy. Father belonged to a notorious lunching group named the Thursday Club, which met every week on the top floor of Wheeler’s, and was regularly denounced by gossip columnists as a den of all manner of misbehaviour. Its star members in the early 1950s were Prince Philip, Baron the ‘society photographer’, actors Peter Ustinov and James Robertson Justice, the Marquess of Milford Haven, mouth organist Larry Adler and Daily Express editor Arthur Christiansen. That they all got very drunk was not in doubt. I am sceptical about whether much else went on. I was put down for the Thursday Club at birth, but sadly it collapsed before I was old enough to participate.

Any day of the week, Wheeler’s was my father’s home from home, and it became mine. The menu boasted twenty variations on Dover sole. My own favourite was Normande, served with a wine and grape sauce. Lunch for two cost about £3 including wine in the early 1960s, and was eaten huddled at tiny tables which became a trifle cramped when two members of the Hastings family were in possession. It was all so wonderfully English. There was no nonsense about nouvelle cuisine at Wheeler’s. Indeed, I am doubtful whether in its heyday any mere foreigner would have got a table.

About now, thoughtful readers may ask: if the Hastings family was skint, how did they manage to do such grand eating? The same way they do now, silly. Expenses. Since both my parents were employed by media organisations, I doubt if they ever paid for a restaurant meal out of their own pockets. We had nothing in banks save overdrafts, but the Lord (Beaverbrook or Rothermere) was always good for a glass of champagne and a lobster. My father’s epicurean masterclasses triumphantly succeeded in one respect. They induced in me an enthusiasm for expensive food which has never faded. Likewise, when I started working and living in a flat on my own, I simply summoned rations by telephone from Harrods. I had no idea how else food might be obtained. The consequence, as you might surmise, was an impressive series of financial smashes in my early twenties. One of them was retrieved only by a handsome legacy from dear old nanny, when she passed on to the great nursery in the sky after seventeen years’ hard labour with the Hastingses.

I once observed at a dinner party in the 1990s that I wished I had discovered back in 1964 or thereabouts that a girl was just as likely to go to bed with you if you bought her a hot dog as if you took her to Wheeler’s. This caused a middle-aged woman to shout from the far end of the table: ‘Rubbish! If a bloke gave me a good dinner, I used to feel I owed him one.’ I said how much I wished that we had met thirty years earlier.

Nowadays, my culinary life has changed out of recognition. In deepest west Berkshire, our family try to be living exemplars of The Good Life. Scarcely a restaurant features in the programme any more. At Hastings Towers we live off the land, though this is by no means a universally popular policy. About once a week, my wife stands by the back gate crying out towards open country: ‘Mr Fox! Mr Fox! Where are you? Come on in!’ This is a demo directed at me. It is designed to emphasise how tiresome Penny finds our chickens, and especially the bother of feeding and watering them. ‘When did you last hear of Marks & Spencer running out of eggs?’ she demands crossly. I find it soothing to see a few hens scratching about in a pen. They may not be very bright, nor very rewarding conversationalists, but if you put layer’s mash in at one end, something useful emerges at the other.

In our rustic domain, the chicken controversy is only one manifestation of a wider debate: how much husbandry can we take? If we profess to be country-dwellers and sportsmen, how far does it behove us to live off the landscape, to bottle and dry and freeze the spoils of chase and garden as our ancestors did? We eat a lot of game. I would be happy to exist on a permanent diet of semi-raw grouse, if others about the house shared my enthusiasm, which they do not. Many women find grouse too gamey. There is also domestic resistance to my views about how long birds should be hung, and to my theory that a few maggots contribute added protein, a view rigorously contested by the European Union in its latest regulations on the marketing of game meat.

I release a lot of the trout I hook, sometimes deliberately, simply because nobody in the house will eat it more than three or four times in a summer. It is a problem with fish that until one tastes them it is impossible to guess how they will turn out. Some are delicious pink things, rich with shrimp, while others prove to have grey flesh, and to taste only of pellets. The latter is bad enough if one is eating alone, sorely embarrassing if there is company. Even salmon cannot be relied upon, unless they are fresh-run. In ignorant youth I killed a lot of stale fish for smoking or fishcakes, before realising that a horrible old red thing will always taste that way, however one processes it. We try to eat every fish within a month or two of committing it to the freezer, before it dries out.

We are fanatical consumers of garden produce, our big extravagance. Even the crudest calculation by most honest amateur gardeners reveals that one could have fruit and vegetables delivered weekly from Fortnum & Mason more cheaply than growing one’s own. I speak as one who has just put in a new fruit cage. Only around 2035 might the strawberries and raspberries grown therein pay back the price of the frame. But that is not the point, as we peasants tell each other. The issues are quality and self-sufficiency.

The quality bit starts looking shaky when we contemplate our asparagus. It is thin stuff compared with the fat, rich stalks from the pick-your-own place down the road. We struggle on, however, pouring onto the soil ever more dung at £65 a load, together with chemical fertilisers in industrial quantities. Cabbages, beetroot, onions, leeks and the rest flourish mightily on our acres and are eaten in bulk. The gardener cheats, however, by leaving every week at the back door baskets groaning with produce from his own allotment, rather in the spirit that Nigella Lawson might display a cake before the camera, saying smugly: ‘And here’s one I prepared earlier.’ He is especially eager to produce earlier samples of species which I have planted with my own hands. This twists the knife, or rather the trowel, about my horticultural limitations. In a cynical moment, my wife suggested that we could simply get the gardener to maintain regular deliveries from his own patch, saving the expense of doing our own tillage as well. Shame on her.

My favourite technical innovation, purchased four years ago, is an apple press. Every season now, we squeeze and freeze about forty litres of apple juice, lovingly stored in plastic milk containers. As I point out, this also saves the gardener from having to clear up thousands of windfalls. As Penny points out, however, using an apple press requires physical effort matching that of child labour in a coal mine circa 1840. I am bathed in sweat after an hour of turning the great screw, manhandling the truckloads of fruit needed to produce a litre or two of juice. I find the process therapeutic, pleasingly Hardyesque. Others, however, gaze wistfully down the road that leads to the supermarket as they mop their brows in the autumn sunshine.

We are self-sufficient in firewood, thanks partly to fallen branches, and partly to the fact that we don’t use a lot when we cuddle the Aga all winter. Like most men, I thoroughly enjoy an outing with a chainsaw and a chunk of fallen timber, though at least once a season I give myself a fright, using the saw up a tree. There was a delicate moment when I severed a big ash limb. As it plunged to the ground, the lightened butt sprang upwards, trapping my arm between itself and a rung of the ladder on which I stood, twenty feet above the ground. It took a lonely ten minutes to disengage myself, during which I contemplated my immortal soul, and reflected that these experiences are not quite so bracing at fifty-something as they seemed at twenty-something. I got no sympathy indoors, either.

Most of us get lazier with the passage of years. I no longer make my own sloe gin, nor point chimneys, hang wallpaper or demolish pigeons in the garden with a .22. The more expensive tools I install in the workshop, the less likely I am to use them for ambitious woodworking of the kind I enjoyed thirty years ago. Yet it still gives pleasure to see things around house and garden which one has built or repaired with one’s own hands. The consequence of a childhood during the rationing era is that I never feel entirely comfortable about the state of the household, unless it is provisioned for a siege. In my complacent bed at night, I go to sleep counting not sheep but game in the three freezers, poised in the epicurean waiting room en route to my plate. I do not despair of learning to pot my own shrimps. We would have to call our Hastings Towers version The Quite Good Life rather than the whole package, but we do our rustic best.

7 Duffers’ Days

NOT LONG AGO, I watched a young girl cast a fly on a Scottish salmon river. Her line fell in a bundle amid the stream, and straightened only five, ten seconds after landing – which of course meant that it was unlikely to impress a fish for half the time it was crossing potentially active water. My heart bled for her. Yet I need not have worried. She caught a fish. This turned my mind to a general question. We know that a good dry fly trout fisherman will always catch more than a bad one. Unless one is plying a river in the mayfly season, or addressing oneself to tame fish lately released, the fine caster prevails over the coarse one, because presentation is all.

Yet different rules apply to salmon fishing. Again and again, we see novices and indifferent fishers achieving startling success. I have been a beneficiary myself. Many years ago in Sutherland, I remember looks of pained disgust on the faces of others in the party, who were enamoured neither of my company nor of my casting, as they saw me land an indecent number of salmon. For sentimental reasons I was fishing with a huge old greenheart Hardy of my father’s. Returning with a fish one night, I heard a fellow-guest mutter disgustedly: ‘And with that rod, too.’ In short, I was lucky.

Luck can carry an incompetent fisher a long way on a smallish salmon river, with good water. A long cast is seldom necessary. Most beats contain pools dominated by rushes of fast water, which will rectify a poor cast very quickly, whipping the fly round into touch. Maunsell, author of one of my favourite sporting books, The Fisherman’s Vade Mecum, urges that one should never retrieve a bad cast, but leave it to complete its course. That cast can never be exactly repeated, he observes. Every now and again, however unjustly, a tangle of line will catch a fish, because some whim of the water will advance the fly in a tempting fashion. I follow Maunsell’s advice religiously, and never try to recover a poor line.

On a big river a better caster will usually catch more salmon, because he or she will cover more taking places. On the Tay not long ago, in a nasty wind, telepathically I knew exactly what my boatman was thinking: ‘Unless that big bugger can throw a better line than this, he won’t catch many fish here.’ He was right. I landed a grilse which took in streamy water directly behind the boat, but my attempts to cover a distance remained unconvincing. The salmon thought so, too. One is sometimes rescued by a wind, which can flatter casting outrageously. But it is a wry law of fishing that most winds blow the wrong way. It is dispiriting to see flies whipped round behind the line, and not infrequently knotted as well. Those are the moments when I hate suffering under a gillie’s eye. Alone, I can sometimes sort myself out, and make the best of a bad blow. With sceptical eyes present, however, I can never do so. Worst of all in these circumstances, the gillie finds an excuse to take the rod himself for a moment, and flicks the fly effortlessly across the flood as if that accursed zephyr did not exist. Those are the times when I am tempted to take up bowls.

At low water, the quality salmon fisherman comes into his own. The duffer is confounded. When the flow dwindles, the river shrinks to expose acres of rocks and pebbles on the bed, the man and woman who know what they are doing can achieve amazing results, while the rest of us are put in our places. It is an object lesson to watch a really gifted caster place a fly, and move a fish, when we lesser mortals despair of stirring the surface, save to drive salmon into flight. I fished the Naver for many years, sometimes in conditions verging on hopeless. A party fishing the next beat from us never seemed to lack something on the account. ‘The Farquharsons are the best fishers on the river,’ our gillie observed approvingly, refraining from comment upon our own doings. Likewise, I met an exceptionally skilful friend fishing a neighbouring beat of the Naver during a boiling, arid July when our own party had despaired. I found that he had taken two salmon out of a mere puddle of a pool at 6 o’clock that morning. I too was fishing at 6 a.m., but without success.

I recently suggested to Angus, a notably skilful gillie, that in all conditions and all rivers, over a period a good fisher might take 35 per cent more fish than a bad one, casting for the same number of hours. Angus thought that was about right. Contrast this with trout fishing, where a really poor caster is likely to catch nothing at all except maybe in poor light on an evening rise. That guesstimate about salmon fishing also takes account of the vagaries of playing fish which one has been fortunate enough to hook. Of course, someone who instinctively does the right things is more likely to land his catch than one who lets the line go slack, drops his rod point or whatever. But even the finest fishermen lose their share of fish, especially grilse, when these are taking short.

There seems no correlation between the quality of the man or woman behind the rod and the manner in which fish get hooked, and stay that way – with smaller fish anyway. As many gillies will assert that a salmon has got off because it was played too soft, as played too hard. Unless the fisher makes a fundamental error, once again luck seems the principal influence upon the outcome of the contest, though unsurprisingly the bigger the fish, the more likely is a bungler to mess up the landing of it.

A further interesting twist to the argument concerns the matter of morning or afternoon fishing. A gillie whom I respect said the other day: ‘Three-quarters of fish are taken in the morning. If the truth be known, you’re wasting your time casting a fly between one and six.’ Angus said that he himself, when he fishes, only goes out between 6 and 9 a.m. As he catches seventy salmon a year to his rod, which is a lot in Britain these days, I found myself brooding a good deal about what he said.

My gamebook represents the most efficient aspect of my sporting activities, sustained with morbid precision since I was nine. I have been looking back through it, to see how far Angus’s opinion seems justified by my own experience. Here are rough tallies of some British salmon-fishing expeditions over the past fifteen years, from which blanks for obvious reasons are excluded: Tweed five fish a.m., five p.m.; Helmsdale six fish a.m.; Helmsdale three a.m., one p.m.; Helmsdale two a.m., three p.m.; Tweed four a.m., two p.m.; Naver five a.m., two p.m.; Naver seven a.m., four p.m.; Laxford six a.m., two p.m.; Naver six a.m., one p.m.; Laxford three a.m., three p.m.; Naver seven a.m., four p.m.

Examining the afternoon totals more carefully, two-thirds of those salmon were caught after 6 p.m., more often than not because earlier conditions were too bright for convincing fishing. Angus’s views about the merits of taking a doze on the bank after lunch start to sound plausible. It seemed to matter much less on Tweed than on the northern rivers whether one was fishing morning or afternoon. I guess – and as usual with all matters pertaining to salmon fishing, here I am simply tossing out a few ideas to have them shot down by readers from their own experience – this reflects the fact that I fish Tweed during the short late autumn days, while I have usually visited Sutherland rivers in July or August.

I like fishing alone, early on summer mornings, if I know a river well enough to find my way about. There is a special thrill about hooking and landing a salmon without assistance, in playing out a little sporting drama amid the lonely majesty of the surrounding hills. I know some houses which discourage guests from this practice on the grounds that it is anti-social, and upsets gillies who start at 9 a.m. My attitude, however, is that we are there to catch fish if we can. Left to my own devices, all meals including breakfast would be eaten on the river between casts.

Some people also offer practical objections to early fishing – that one loses two or three hours’ sleep to no great purpose, because the salmon seldom wake up much before 9 a.m. I come home from four out of five early-morning raids empty-handed, but the fifth success pays for all. On hot days, there is surely no better prospect of catching a fish than in the hours before the sun climbs high. In October and November, with relatively little time in which to fish, it is not difficult to keep casting from nine to five. My own slender afternoon scores in the summer partly reflect the fact that, more often than not, I fall asleep after lunch. Even when I am casting a fly in the torrid p.m.s, if there is little action, concentration flags. It is in the mornings that one goes at it like a tiger, fishing with deadly intent as long as there is water under the fly. Most fishermen possess an ability to convince themselves that a morning pool is virgin, that the line is touching the current for the very first time in human history. We banish our knowledge that others assaulted the same stretch with equal vigour the previous day, and perhaps night. We see ourselves as pioneers.

By the time we return to the same pools later in the day, as we usually must, that sense of freshness and adventure has gone. We still believe that we might catch a fish. But few of us can contrive to summon up at 4 p.m. the True Believing spirit we possessed at 10 a.m., that we will catch a fish. Most rods are goaded to new exertions in the evening, on rivers where rotating beats change at 8 p.m. or 9 p.m. The belief that fresh fish must have come in since dinner, and that anyway our predecessors on the beat were duffers, provides a powerful incentive. This is especially true of the Helmsdale, where each night the bottom pools of the river, those adjoining marvels the Whinnie and the Marrel, are visited by post-prandial enthusiasts, eager to catch a fish heavy with sea lice, just in off the tide. When I get my own turn down there, I would camp overnight on the bank if I thought I could get away with it. On my final evening of salmon fishing last season, we had people to dinner at the lodge. After they went home, I reflected: at 8 p.m., we had inherited one of the most unpromising beats on the river. Ninety minutes remained until closing time. Everybody else thought I was mad, but I couldn’t resist a cast. Not a fish moved, and the brief darkness was descending. I could scarcely glimpse my fly landing under the far bank. I came home empty-handed, and I am sure I was wasting my time. Angus the gillie would think it kindest to have me committed to some kind of home. Rationally, I am sure he is right. If one confined one’s summer fishing to a few hours every morning, most of us could catch at least 70 per cent of the numbers we land after casting almost around the clock.

Yet it is different for him, because he lives on the river. For those of us restricted to occasional pilgrimages, the only way we know of fishing is to keep alive that glimmer of hope, and a fly on the water, even in the doggiest hours of the summer day. Here is my own favourite thesis about the whole business: over a period, as distinct from the chance of a single day or week, the man or woman who catches most fish will be he or she who has their rod on the water longest in good conditions. What counts most is not that the fisher should be a wizard, but that fish should be present and willing. Unfair, isn’t it?

8 Hit and Miss

WE ALL EMBRACE the red-letter days when, miraculously, everything goes right for us. When I am feeling down about sport, I lift my spirits by recalling an idyllic August outing a couple of years back. I shot quite straight. You may say: so what? That is because you shoot straight all the time. But for those of us who spend much of the season throwing lead about the sky with the promiscuity of a bridesmaid broadcasting confetti, an outing on which things really work is cause for trumpets, champagne and rejoicing within the bosom of the family as well in the gamebook.

That day, on a marvellous moor in the north of England, everything went right from the start. First, there was no rain. Anyone who wears spectacles knows that on a seriously wet day, he is doomed. For non-spectacle-wearers who wonder what the experience is like, try driving down the M4 in a thunderstorm without benefit of windscreen wipers. On this occasion, in perfect visibility I hit the first grouse that crossed me – always the start one wants. There was a wind just sharp enough to push the birds along a bit, without making them impossible. A bird flashed past my neighbour, who missed. I killed it behind. After that, a steady succession of grouse came at all angles. I hit some and missed some, but after a couple of drives I knew that I was shooting in a fashion that might not impress Percys or Strakers, but golly, it impressed me.

I made good practice at single birds and small coveys, even quite far out. I did much less well at packs. Try as one will, it is so hard to concentrate on one grouse among forty, to the exclusion of all the others. I recited aloud the familiar mantra ‘Pick your bird, pick your bird,’ every time I watched a cloud of brown bullets lifting over the heather towards me. Yet time after time, I fluffed them when they arrived. One sometimes came down, but seldom two. I killed a lot on my right in front, where I usually miss. Why? Because early in August I went to see Dylan Williams at the Royal Berkshire Shooting School. I fired 150 cartridges at his grouse layout. We quickly established that I was firing behind and above those right-handers. When it came to the real thing, I aimed ten feet in front and two feet below the grouse. Again and again, it fell. Everything is about believing that you know where to point the gun. I never understand why some people are reluctant to go back to school when their shooting goes wrong. How else can one raise one’s game?

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