As a lad in Kent I used to stand, gun at the ready, on the margin of a wheat-field while the reaper-and-binder went round in ever-decreasing circles, laying the sheaves in tidy rows and driving all the resident mammals to take refuge in the middle. Eventually the rabbits would make a break for it, sprinting straight into our line of fire.
The name of the field was Cotman’s Ash, a steep slope up from the Pilgrim’s Way. At the top of the hill lived a retired colonel, a veteran of the famous Younghusband expedition to Tibet in 1904. Colonel Hadow taught my brother Brian and me to shoot – Brian more successfully than me. I was a mere ten or eleven. Brian eventually became, among other things, a stalker good enough to be invited to a great Scottish estate to take care of a particularly elusive stag.
The colonel also gave us as presents two historic guns from his collection. One was a beautiful 18th century fowling piece with an immensely long barrel, whose lock, sadly, had long service disappeared. The other was a native Tibetan gun of savage simplicity, essentially an iron pipe attached to a slab of wood for a butt, the butt decorated with brass studs and bits of red felt.
As a soldierly precaution Colonel Hadow took the ramrod from where it lived under the barrel and slid it down to the breech, only to find that the gun was loaded – and evidently had been for half a century. Detaching the barrel from the stock, he took it into his garage-workshop and clamped it to the work bench, aiming it at a pile of sandbags against the wall. Then left in a hurry. There was a loud bang. We went in to find the ball had ricocheted up and stuck in a rafter. Tibetans make good gunpowder.
The sad sequel is that the two antiques were subsequently stolen from the gun cupboard in our cottage, along with a serviceable twelve-bore.
