Shooting

After the landowner told us to be out in three weeks, then admitted we had three months to move our horses under the terms of our lease, the search began. We set about putting my house on the market and looking for a place with a few acres, but it was soon clear we were not going to find anything in budget. With the clock ticking on our notice period at the farm we’ve been renting, we had to look for livery for the horses. The timing could hardly be worse. Vacancies don’t tend to come up as winter approaches. But I always find the Good Lord provides when your back is against the wall. Sure enough, I found places for my two horses at a nearby stable yard and the builder boyfriend came across a field to rent for his cobs.

The letter arrived in a hand-addressed envelope, inside of which was a handwritten note. After everything we have been through, we were expecting something typed, from a solicitor. It began by politely thanking us for looking after the land so well. But in the next paragraph, the landowner attempted to serve us three weeks’ notice to move our horses, claiming that was all she needed to give. We texted her immediately to say our lease states three months. She replied later to say three weeks had been a mistake, she meant three months. She tried to make light of it. But we already know we are losing our smallholding because the shoot wants the land. And they want it before the shooting season starts.

Since telling the shoot we won’t let them use the land we rent, we have been beset by a series of unfortunate events. It began more than a year ago now, when we first dug in our heels and said there were to be no standing guns in the fields where we keep our horses. The lady who owns the land backed us. They didn’t help themselves by demanding to use it for free. The idea was, we pay the rent and move our horses somewhere else during the shooting season so they can shoot pheasants in it. I don’t think so. They argued that they had established a recent history of using the land, albeit unbeknown to the owner. When we took it over, we found a hole in her back fence line and a makeshift stile on to her land across a ditch from a neighbouring field.

A few years ago I was sitting on the sofa at Sandringham enjoying a ham sandwich with the Queen’s then-head gamekeeper, David Clarke. The thing about working for the royals, he said, is that if a drive’s a flop, they completely understand. What Clarke meant is that even if no royal bags a bird, they won’t complain. It’s about the day, not the numbers dead. Sandringham (unsurprisingly) provides a snapshot of a bygone sporting era, a time when most shooting syndicates were collections of friends and locals, before entrepreneurial types sussed there was a few quid to be made out of shooting. Nowadays, armed with just an iPhone, a bloke on his City law firm lunch break can book a day where a bag of 500 pheasants is guaranteed.

Earlier this year I wrote a defence of driven shooting and ended by saying I hoped my children would have a chance to participate in the sport one day. Believe it or not, I wasn’t fishing for invitations. It was intended as a piece of liberal-baiting, on the assumption that any left-wing prude who disapproves of grown men spending a day shooting game birds would find the prospect of children being inducted into this ‘barbaric’ practice even more appalling. But it has in fact led to several invitations, for which I’m very grateful. The first was to spend a day grouse shooting in Yorkshire along with my three sons – an absurdly generous offer which I obviously could not turn down. Unfortunately, there was a complication.

There's a scene in the touching Richard Linklater film Boyhood where the young Mason goes to visit the rural family of his estranged father and is given a Bible and shotgun for the first time. I felt a niggling terror watching it, remembering Chekhov's maxim, that the film would end with the boy taking the gun to himself, or his family, or his school classmates. It's understandable why the audience might fear the worst, seeing as America's spree-killing epidemic seems to has no end in sight, with a new low reached on Sunday in Las Vegas. Why doesn't America just ban the damn things, people ask, or at least make them far harder to access, like in Japan for instance, where there are just six gun murders a year?