I was sorry to see that the Field has decided
to miniaturise itself. Indeed it gave me a nasty turn when I picked up the first October issue in the paper-shop and saw the new, small format: the old eyes, I thought, they've gone at last.
I hope there's going to be no nonsense about cutting down on the readers' letters feature. I want to go on reading for years about packs of black foxes in Hampshire, rabbits that growl and how to weigh a bee- hive. And I value too the occasional pro- nouncements on sporting etiquette, the authentic, utterly certain tone that rings through them.
Just a few months ago they were going on about the worst fate that can happen to anyone attending a shooting party as a guest, especially as a young, newly-entered shot. It was to be sent home. There were lots of ways of getting sent home, from shooting a beater down, almost, to breathing too heavily at the butts.
All to the good, no doubt. It's just as well to give young, sharp-eyed marksmen something to tremble about; otherwise they get uppity. Only I wonder sometimes whether the people who write into the Field don't inhabit some golden Edwardian otherworld where people actually would go home if they were sent, and, what's more, not five the shame of it down for twenty years.
Anyway ! was glad that no Field readers, those terrible, merciless, tweeded men, were present as fellow-guests when I shot with a us Air Force gun club a while back on a wet, windy autumn day in Huntingdonshire.
The morning's sport was indifferent, I recall. We walked up three or four kale fields and got no more than a half a dozen shots at
partridge. It was just a mild Saturday morn- ing exercise with the modest aim of pro- ducing a lunchtime appetite
Back at the Mess, though, in the sealed- off, encapsulated microcosm of America that the us airmen had created for themselves in the wet Huntingdonshire fields, lunch was a long time coming and naturally we awaited it in the bar. Some ill-starred Captain sug- gested that we drank tequila, Mexican style, with a squeeze of lemon and a pinch of salt. Experiments with varying quantities of salt and lemon, but with unvaryingly large measures of tequila, were going merrily on deep into the afternoon when a shaken officer arrived with the news that the general commanding the us Air Forces in Europe had flown in and was even now demanding an afternoon's sport.
Never underestimate Americans. These knowing lads, against just such a con- tingency as this, had in reserve a piece of well-stocked, un-shot-over country. The members of the Rod and Gun club might be swaying slightly, but they were able to pro- duce the goods.
Some short while later I was sitting next to the general in the rear of a command car, with blue-tinted windows to make it seem like California and a vast radio-console amidships that was clearly capable of loosing off flights of icsm's at Pekin any time the general felt like it. As we bucked and tore down the narrow lanes around Alconbury, the general handed me a cigar. 'You got a gun, son?' he inquired kindly.
Well, I had and pretty soon I was using it, walking through the stubble in line abreast with no fewer than six colonels, and the general of course. It was an afternoon full of noise and action. Only the general was not full of tequila but this did not seem to inhibit him as he steadily cursed his dog that would keep chasing after hares.
And all through the grey afternoon partridge and pheasant got up in front of us and we knocked them down and not a single colonel was even wounded. It was some of the finest shooting I have seen, even though the Americans did call it hunting.
As I say, I'm glad those Field readers weren't around. We all did enough, not just to get sent home, but to spend twenty years in a maximum security wing.
Thinking back, though, maybe I would have sent that general home after all. When the day was over, the bag was neatly sorted and, without exception, every bird stowed in the command car, to be whisked away to headquarters. He might, I thought, have given me a brace.
I should have written to the Field,
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