Country Fair. Max Hastings
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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.
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,