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.