The joys of rod and gun

The farmer and writer, A. G. Street, who in the 1950s co- edited with Max Hastings’s father a magazine which gives this book its title, wrote before the war:

When the countryman turns his cows out to grass in the spring, he also gets out his rod and net ready for the fishing. The turning colour of the wheat makes the countryman think of both harvest and duck-shooting. In September he will thatch his ricks and shoot his partridges. He must wait until the leaf is off the tree before he can drive his pheasants. And when winter arrives he ploughs his land, feeds his stock, and goes hunting.

Though Hastings does not quote this passage — he has never claimed to be a farmer, and hunting has supposedly been banned by the New Labour government which he used to support — his evocative collection of essays and reminiscences has the same understanding of the rhythm of the seasons. And it similarly carries the conviction that field sports should need no defending because they are part of the country way of life.

A distinguished military historian and former newspaper editor, Hastings shows his more endearing side when writing about his exploits with rod and gun. He is soppy about labradors, passionate about fishing the Naver and shooting driven grouse, and continually self-deprecating about his expertise in both sports. As a probably more erratic shot than Hastings, I know well the frustration which he engagingly describes of missing birds while your neighbouring guns appear incapable of missing anything, then the joy at killing one especially high pheasant, stone dead with the first barrel, which will live in the memory long after the season is over.

Whether shooting driven game birds or fishing for salmon in Scotland, Iceland and Russia, Hastings does not seem to have as many ‘outside days’ as he wrote about in a book of that title 15 years ago.