To Whom Sent
ISUPPOSE that hardly anybody keeps a game-book nowadays. I have done so. with one or two regretted lapses, since 1918, and the other day I came across the little brown book in which I began these annals at the age of eleven.
It is called The Pocket Game Register and bears the even earlier date of 1901; an inscription on the fly-leaf shows that it was handed on to me by an aunt. Other evidence makes it clear that these pocket-books were given away free to their customers by the Schultze Gunpowder Company, whose motto—Inter Fulmina Securus—no doubt expressed the hope rather than the conviction of a grown-up on finding that he had the youthful Strix for a neighbour at the covert-side.
Textual evidence suggests that even in those early days my addiction to the sport had an unbalancing effect. For instance, the entry for August 16, 1918, reads : '15 rabbits, 1 BuzsARD'; in the Remarks column appears the Bunterish and surely rather non-U monosyllable, 'Gloat! ! '. I was an intelligent and well- lettered little boy, and the emotions consequent upon shoot- ing a buzzard with a 28-bore must have been powerful indeed to make me write its zz the wrong way round.
* * * Seven years later my mother gave me a proper game-book, a strong leather-bound volume whose pages are free from the plugs which the sponsors of the Pocket Game Register felt justified in inserting : Col Cody (Buffalo Bill) writes : We have used Schultze Powder with the Wild West Show for the past five years, add it has given entire satisfaction.' . . . In 1892 the Grand Prix du Casino, Monte Carlo, was won by Count 7'. Trautesmandorf, who writes : 'I won all my prizes last year with Schultze Powder.' To this game-book I trans- ferred the more memorable of my early records, and I am still using it today.
It was devised and printed by A. Webster and Co., 44 Dover Street, Piccadilly, WI (established 1780 at 60 Piccadilly, W1), in an era when, clearly, bags were expected to be large and every day's shooting to be followed by a display of feudal munificence. On the left-hand pages the narrow columns headed Grouse, Pheasants, Partridges, Woodcock, Hares and so on are preceded, as usual, by wider columns headed Date I Where Killed 1 No. of Guns and are followed by a generous space for Remarks. The right- hand pages are a replica of their counterparts except that for Where Killed and No. of Guns is substituted a single capacious column above which appear the words To Whom Sent. I have to confess that in my game-book for the past thirty years these words have been scratched out and replaced by the headings on the left-hand page, thus allowing both pages to be used for the same unbountiful purpose.
* * * You are at liberty to believe, on this evidence, that I am the sort of curmudgeon who habitually eats twelve teal at a sitting instead of dispatching two or three of them to his old governess in a basket. But this belief would, not survive scrutiny of the terse but ample records which (now I come to think of it) would provide a biographer with the only solid documentary foundations on which to reconstruct my career. These records show that my sporting activities have not followed the pattern which A. Webster and Co. had in their minds when they designed my game-book. The pages abound in entries to which the words To Whom Sent would make an inapposite sequel; for often there has been nothing to send. `Not a bad day, as blank days go' is one fatalistic comment: but many of the days on which nothing, or next to nothing, was shot were exceptionally arduous and inclement. I see that on one of them—in the Outer Hebrides in September. 1926—`the spring tide cut us off from the boat. This involved a rather cold swim, followed by a long, hard row home in the dark.' The whole book is full of entries like 'Torrential rain. Walked from 9.30 till 6 but only saw 3 snipe.' These are not merely the follies of youth (like, for instance, such distant echoes of one's Hunt Ball days as 'Shot v. moderately after the usual 2 hrs. sleep plus a 60 mile drive'); on one day last season two guns brought back from '7 hrs. solid climbing and walking in mist and rain with half a gale blow- ing' only three grouse and three ptarmigan. To Whom Sent, indeed!
Keeping a game-book is my only good habit. Many people, who disapprove of or despise shooting. would' not regard it as a good habit at all, but as an uncultured and even barbarous aberration. Yet I persuade myself that it is at the worst a harmless thing to do. The disappointments and elations which are prosaically chronicled would make the dullest possible reading for anybody else; and even for me, because I have a bad memory. a lot of the details have faded into an almost meaningless blur. Not all the place-names in the Where Killed column still conjure up a landscape; Crockatee and the Devil's Spittoon, Uillt Fearna and Loch Middle. Stronafian and the Abingdon Sewage Farm—these and many more are no longer valid passwords to the past.
But other place-names—partly because I am still lucky enough to live on the land where I was brought up—recur again and again down the years, and with them the names of my friends, and latterly of their sons—and my son—as well. So I continue stolidly, without misgivings, to tot up the often exiguous bags and to write beside them such unevocative com- ments as 'V. wet. Not much seen. Missed a stoat in Dead Man's Lane,' sustained by the vague conviction that this unexacting life-work has some purpose.
What that purpose is 1 could not possibly tell you. I suppose it is merely to give myself pleasure, to stitch a kind of faded tapestry on which, when I look at it, figures of men and dogs, the outlines of woods and cliffs and lochs and mountains, reveal themselves, odd incidents and small triumphs are re-enacted, and beauty is here and there mistily apprehended.
If this is the object of the exercise, it can do nobody any harm; and although I dare say that keeping a game-book is not in truth a good habit, I do not think it is a bad one and I hope I shall never give it up. STRIX
Previous page
