I had gradually become familiar with the existence of foxes and badgers, otters, weasels and stoats, several species of deer and many birds, but no such rarified and thrilling excitement as a wildcat existed either in the cultural heritage of my background or out there in the English countryside.
The sporting tradition of the eighteenth-century country squire, of huntin’, shootin’ and fishin’, lay at the heart of that heritage. The staring, snapping and snarling relics of the chase adorned many of the Manor House corridors and rooms, an enduring cultural ingredient immortalised in lurid taxidermy. Fox masks with slavering tongues leered as I crept past, otters curled their bristly lips and the mad, goggle-eyes of hares stared out from passage walls, all mounted on glossy mahogany shields, duly dated and referenced on ivory plaques, like gravestones, Killed Paulton Way. 17.11.29, with the initials of the family member who had ridden home rejoicing.
Other trophies were scattered about the house so that I never knew what was going to confront me as I rounded corridor corners. At first their strange language bewildered me, a codified lexicon of their own, which, to enter the enticing world of conformity, you had to know by heart: foxes lived in ‘earths’ and their silver mounted bushy tails were ‘brushes’; otters lived in ‘holts’ and their thick, tapering tails were ‘poles’; badgers dug ‘setts’, their long-clawed paws ‘pads’; and you didn’t say deer hooves, you said ‘slots’. On white and gleaming frontal bone, red deer antlers possessed their own full glossary – important to know your tines: ‘brow’, ‘bez’, ‘trez’ and ‘tops’; ‘hummel’, ‘switch’, ‘ten pointer’ or the complete, majestic spread of a twelve-point ‘Royal’ stag – or full mounted heads of fallow ‘bucks’ with broad palmate antlers, or roe ‘bucks’ with ‘pearling’, or the freakish malformation of a ‘perruque’, all haughtily eyeing me from on high.
A whole 38 lb salmon with the glassy eye of a crazed convict stared malevolently from above the butler’s pantry door. In the hall, above a cast-iron umbrella stand bursting with thumb sticks, walking sticks, croquet mallets, ram’s horn crummacks, silver-knobbed canes and old black Briggs’ umbrellas with knobbly handles, something deeply scary called a ‘ferox trout’, all 12 lb of it, with mouth agape and multiple jagged teeth, shark-like, bared for the snap and snatch, floated its menacing grin through the rigid weed of its glass case. All these relict lives were alarmingly life-like; I tiptoed past them as much in awe as in fear that those teeth might still bite.
At the far end of the smoking-room passage was the gunroom, where immaculately oiled and polished guns and rifles gleamed alluringly from their glass-fronted cases, securely locked away from the prying fingers of small boys, territory from which I was expressly forbidden. ‘Now don’t you let me catch you nowhere near,’ Nellie would wag her finger at me, but that made it a certainty and I sneaked off there as soon as no one was about.
That long corridor, with its threadbare red runner and squeaky floorboards, lined with bookshelves, also led to my grandfather’s indoor sanctuary, his study, known as the smoking-room, which was always locked if he wasn’t there. I would not have dared even try the brass doorknob. But that corridor held an irresistible magnetism for a small boy. The whole place reeked of antiquity, the irrepressible incense of a past when nothing ever changed: tobacco, gun oil, the tangy scent of cordite, all blended with mansion polish and a whiff of mothballs.
Every August for most of his adult life my grandfather had taken off to Scotland, in the 1930s it was in his elegant, long-bonneted convertible two-litre Lagonda Tourer, driven by Nellie’s father, West, who performed the triple roles of chauffeur, personal valet and his loader. Top quality English side-lock shotguns came in pairs: Purdeys, Holland & Holland ‘Royals’, Boss, William Powell, Churchill, there are many makes, always in beautiful flat leather cases, embossed with names, initials or family crests, each piece of the dismantled guns – stock, barrels, fore-end – bedded in their own scarlet or royal blue felt-lined compartments. There would also be fitted slots for a small phial of Rangoon gun oil, two steel snap caps, a special ebony handled screwdriver which exactly matched the slot on the engraved side-lock screws, a ramrod with knurled ebony handle and threaded cleaning mops. A matching leather magazine contained the cartridges.
Such English shotguns were then and still are universally recognised as the best guns in the world, nowadays costing more than an expensive car. They are also works of art. Their steel side-lock plates always intricately and beautifully engraved with acanthus leaves or sporting scenes: pointers, retrievers and spaniels, or pheasants, snipe, partridges, duck or woodcock, and the highly polished stocks sculpted from Spanish walnut root. But those guns were also de rigueur, an essential hallmark of class and wealth, a social shibboleth and a passport to the finest sporting estates in Britain. You were expected to own them and to bring ‘your man’ with you.
While shooting across most of England was principally about pheasants and partridges, in Yorkshire and Scotland it was grouse – the red grouse – one of only two (with the Scottish crossbill) endemic British bird species. Grouse were then and still are shot walking up ‘over dogs’ – pointers or setters – or ‘driven’ toward the guns by a line of flag-waving beaters. They fly fast and low in coveys of up to twenty or thirty birds at a time. To maximise the ‘bag’ requires skilful sharp-shooting with two double-barrelled shotguns – hence the pair – and a loader to stand behind and reload each gun in turn, smooth and well-rehearsed handovers between the two men in rapid succession. Nellie often told me that the expedition to Scotland for six weeks each year was the highlight of her father’s calendar. The entire household turned out to wave them off.
They were headed for Lennox Castle in the Campsie Fells, north of Glasgow, lying between the Kilsyth, Kilpatrick and Gargunnock hills, the Scottish lair of my grandfather’s greatest sporting ally, Captain Billy Kincaid-Lennox, Chief of Clan Lennox, whose purple grouse moors stretched into the heathery uplands to the north. It was an annual August migration; ‘the Glorious 12th’ an absolute fixture in my grandfather’s diary.
After the grouse, in September they moved further north to the far-flung borders of Sutherland for more grouse and for stalking red deer in the high hills, sports which, together with fly-fishing for Atlantic salmon leaping upstream to spawn, had defined the Scottish Highlands ever since Queen Victoria and Prince Albert established the famous triad of patrician sports – grouse, deer and salmon – at Balmoral in the 1850s, later immortalised by Sir Edwin Landseer’s Monarch of the Glen and by John Buchan as a ‘Macnab’, when you achieved all three in one day. When Captain Billy and my grandfather had stalked their stags, they turned south again just in time for the partridge and pheasant shooting season in England.
Heading down through Yorkshire, they always stopped off at our family’s ancestral seat, Denby Grange, where our cousin, Sir Kenelm, ran a celebrated shoot, before ending up at Captain Billy’s home pheasant shoot at Downton Castle in Shropshire. Flicking through the pages of both Sir Kenelm’s and my grandfather’s game books, I see that before and immediately after the Second World War, among the names of dukes, earls and other titled gents who attended shooting parties at Denby are Sir Aymer Maxwell and his brother, Mr Gavin Maxwell, of whom my grandfather observes in his looping copperplate hand, ‘shot extremely well’. Many years later, after becoming a celebrated travel writer and adding ‘global best-seller’ to his name, Gavin would tell me that the grey partridge shoots at Denby were a cherished feature of his upbringing.
When so many gamekeepers and estate workers, as well as their officer-class employers, went off to the world wars, these seasonal migrations temporarily halted, but the tradition was deep-rooted and by the time I was born immediately after the war it had begun to pick up again exactly where it had left off. I’m not sure how long my grandfather continued these annual shooting expeditions – he was seventy-three when I was born, and West died in 1943 and was never replaced – but throughout my formative years the enticing echo of those predatory days resounded through the corridors of the Manor House.
As I grew older and was swept
