Читать книгу Country Fair - Max Hastings, Sir Max Hastings, Max Hastings - Страница 7

JUST AS SWALLOWS wake up one morning and think: ‘Gosh, I ought to be migrating,’ so sportsmen sniff the late-summer air and reflect that it is time to get the gun out, maybe shoot a few clays, think about grouse if they are very lucky, or maybe the first partridges, wishing that they were wild greys. There is a rhythm about the sporting year, of which most of us become more conscious with each season of experience. This need not mean that one must be impatient for things to happen (though I have known fox-hunters who became catatonic between April and August). Rather, there is a sense of rightness about the moment when each phase of the cycle begins.

I do not think about fishing through the winter and early-spring months, nor even glance at my rods. In March and April, every spare moment is devoted to the garden. I do my best to get the borders into parade order before the river beckons, never entirely successfully. There is little temptation to fantasise about fishing when there is a nasty cold wind that must blow any fly, as well as any fisherman, off the water. Then comes a May morning when the breeze drops, spring sun warms the earth, and every instinct tells one to toss the net and bag into the back of the car, and nip down to the river. Its time has come, albeit usually a trifle late.

Much the same applies to salmon-fishing. A route to madness lies in brooding all summer about what may or may not be happening to familiar rivers when one is not oneself casting on them. I reach for my ear defenders when anyone rushes up at a party intending to describe record catches – or, for that matter, no catches at all – on the very beat one is due to visit a fortnight hence. Likewise, I have abandoned an old habit of checking the weather on a given river day by day through the week before visiting it. What happens to Jack Smith on Thursday or Friday has absolutely no bearing upon what will happen to you or me the following Monday or Tuesday. As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods, and all that. Better just to turn up on the bank when the time comes, willing, eager and oblivious of recent history.

You will not be surprised to hear me confess, of course, that it has taken fifty-nine years to become this phlegmatic creature. Patience is much easier when one enjoys many other things in life as well as sport. In my twenties I was obsessed to an unhealthy degree with shooting and fishing. These things meant more to me than anything else. I did not get many chances, and consoled myself by falling asleep every night reading about other people’s sporting doings in country books and magazines. In the unlikely event that I had been given a choice between driven pheasant-shooting and a date with Diana Rigg, it would have been a tough call.

These days, like many sportsmen I find that the prospect which stirs most vivid excitement is the chance of a grouse. There is absolutely nothing which I would not cancel – weddings, funerals, christenings – to enjoy the privilege of missing those sublime birds. And even with grouse, I have trained myself not to think about them until a magical day in August, when one glances at the calendar and says, with studied carelessness: ‘Oh well, better get ready. Yorkshire tomorrow.’

It is fortunate that grouse do not become operational until the garden is way over the top, the sweet peas hang limp and yellow, it is past time to spray the roses, and in the kitchen garden only runner beans will notice that one is away. My father believed that matters were divinely arranged so that grouse and partridges could be eaten with the last of those same beans, but this represented a touch of blasphemy on his part. What is true, I think, is that there comes a moment when we have had enough of the fag-end of summer, and embrace the coming of autumn: a new season, and in many respects the most pleasing. Summers sometimes disappoint; autumns seldom do. The first ground frosts feel absolutely right as one stands waiting for partridges – or, in a perfect world, casting across Tweed in October or November. We might, however, offer a petition to the Almighty to stop autumn gales blowing leaves all over the river while one is trying to cast a fly. It is enough to turn anyone into an atheist, when the British seasons start overdoing things in the fashion they have affected lately. Two years ago we could not even fish Tweed in mid-October, because the river was at a June drought level.

The pheasants that clatter aloft unscathed at the end of an October partridge drive, taking flying lessons for November, offer promise of good things to come. Yet pheasant-shooting has suffered more than any other field sport from upheavals in the climate. At midwinter we want to shoot on cold, crisp days with a hard frost and maybe even a little snow. That is what our forefathers did. They wrote reams of doggerel extolling the beauties of Christmas cock pheasants paddling about in the drifts.

Today, instead, we find ourselves turning out again and again on mild, soggy days when nobody, including the birds, really wants to do it. The abolition of our traditional winter, especially in the south of England, is a blow to field sports. There seems little chance that God will change his mind and restore the old weather pattern – indeed, if anything, matters will become more difficult as the effects of global warming become ever more apparent. The best we can hope for, these days, is a few sharp, chilly days in January, towards the back end. I don’t know about you, but I have had enough by then. I feel ready to stop, flee from England for a while, then turn to the garden again. I never sob for anything lost on the first of February. I am merely boundlessly grateful for the fun I have had, and happy to wait for it all to start again with the trout in late spring. ‘To every thing there is a season,’ wrote the sage in Ecclesiastes, ‘and a time to every purpose under the heaven.’ The old boy never said a truer word.