Rain on the garden. Rain on the saltmarsh. Rain forming shining lakes on the lane to the harbour. Four geese in formation clatter overhead. A white egret, looking absurdly exotic, stands in the mud and dips its long beak in the ebbing stream. The mud must be crawling with tiny creatures to feed the hundreds of birds.
The Isle of Wight is wrapped in gauzy mist. The ferry from Lymington to Yarmouth, white, symmetrical like a tiny Taj Mahal, glides to and fro across the Solent.
Last night the full moon painted a golden path over the water and the massed masts of the dinghies in their enclosure shone like the spears of an ancient army. On the footpath to the water brambles reach out to offer their shining black fruit and grab your clothes.
Keyhaven is the creek in the saltmarshes where Colonel Peter Hawker created the sport of wild-fowling. Sport, as he saw it, though today we would see his daily bags of hundreds of birds as simple slaughter. He kept a highly readable diary of his exploits, his getting up at four, even in winter, to manoeuvre his gun-punt through the marshes (he and his man in the water, pushing) near enough to a flock of ducks or geese to blast them with his blunderbuss and kill scores at a time.
Hawker had been badly wounded in the thigh in the Peninsula War but lived on to shoot – and play the piano – into his seventies. He had an estate at Longparish on the River Test. He recounts how he travelled, to Scotland for the shooting and Paris for the Opera, where he knew all the musicians and taught piano-playing using a device of his own invention. His inventions included designs for new guns, one of which he presented to Queen Victoria and Prince Albert at the 1851 Great Exhibition before offering it to the War Office. As an exhibitor he had to bring his exhibit and queue to get in to the Crystal Palace every morning. His novel gun then went into service with the army.
His diary also methodically details all his expenditure; the fare to Southampton, from Southampton to Cherbourg, Cherbourg to Rouen, then by train to Paris, not excluding the price of his meals. His house, now known as Hawker’s Cottage, still stands near the Gun Inn in Keyhaven, still a little fishing port, with a fleet of eight or nine boats going out daily round the Needles.
Hawker was a great Victorian. They were tough in those days.
