Three of us, old friends, were meeting to arrange a marriage. The young couple have never actually met. Indeed, they are still unaware of one other’s existence. But it is so obviously a union endorsed by the heavens. Young Florence King has already been heralded in this column. At least since the infancy — did she have one? — of Diana, Huntress and Goddess, no four-year-old girl has ever shown so much interest in field sports. In Ireland, Florence is a bisexual name. One feels that our Florry must be a kinswoman of the immortal Flurry Knox.
The bridegroom will be Charlie. At the age of seven, he climbed a tree and killed a pigeon with his bare hands. When his father regaled a club table with the story, there was general scepticism. Go for a walk, unarmed; pigeons will trill and wink at you from low branches and near fences. Appear with a shotgun and they retreat several fields. ‘It must have been a sickly pigeon,’ someone suggested. ‘Well, we all ate it, with no ill effects.’
Since then, Charlie has moved on to bigger bags. With air rifle and .410, he has hammered grey squirrels and culled magpies, leading to a sharp increase in songbird numbers. He has also slaughtered rabbits and shot a goodly number of pigeons and pheasants. Needless to say, he cleans and plucks his prey. His father is a modern man. He has three daughters. Even though he often quotes Lord Tottering’s dictum from Country Life — that the number of daughters a man has must be related to his wickedness in a previous existence — he believes in educating his girls. I have always assumed that schooling females must be cheaper; surely domestic science costs less than physics and chemistry? I am told that this is not the modern way.
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