Читать книгу The World and London According to Nick Ferrari - Nick Ferrari - Страница 9

I shot a fox when I was small, and it was the right thing to do.

Foxes, you see, are not the cute little beasties they’re made out to be in Beatrix Potter books. They are not cuddly animals with wet noses and bright eyes. They are as vicious as Joe Pesci in Goodfellas and as calculating as Peter Mandelson. Well, perhaps not quite that calculating, but certainly pretty shrewd.

To be fair, I’m hardly the Judge Dredd of foxes. I’ve only ever killed one, and that was thirty years ago. I was brought up on a smallholding in Kent. It was more of a hobby for my parents than a serious concern, but we had all sorts of animals there: donkeys, sheep, ponies and, of course, chickens. So obviously we were a prime target for the conniving foxes – they would kill and steal the chickens, and even attack young lambs. A two-day-old lamb doesn’t stand a chance against a wily old fox.

Now the trouble with foxes attacking your chickens is not that you lose the occasional chicken. The problem is that you lose all your chickens: foxes have no discriminatory powers, and once you’ve got one in your henhouse, it’s going to be carnage. He won’t just kill one and take it away to eat, not even if he’s incredibly hungry – not even if he’s incredibly hungover and wants the foxy equivalent of a full English with egg, bacon, baked beans and double black pudding. He’s not going to stroll in, eye up a buxom chicken with nice big breasts, think, Hmm, I fancy that one, and leave it at that. He’s going to go into a frenzy of killing that would make Quentin Tarantino go a bit green around the gills, but then walk off with just one chicken for dinner.

They don’t just eat chickens; they eat babies, too, given half a chance. It’s them or us. So you have to kill ’em.

We kept a shotgun on the smallholding for killing rats. It was perfectly legal, but I wasn’t a very good shot. I was out shooting rats one day when I saw a fox lurking around not too far from me. Foxes, unfortunately, are a lot bigger than rats, and this wasn’t a very powerful shotgun. I took a shot, hit it – just – but only wounded the thing. It skulked off, crawling up the hill and hiding behind some trees.

Now I might have hated the animal, but even I didn’t want to leave him in pain to die a grisly death, so I decided I had to finish him off. I felt like the deerhunter – all I needed was ‘Cavatina’ playing in the background and you’d have been hard pressed to tell the difference between me and Robert De Niro. (Apart from the fact, I suppose that I was in leafy Kent hunting a fox and not in the Pennsylvania backwoods hunting a giant stag!) I started to track the fox by following the trail of blood. I wasn’t particularly looking forward to finding it and looking it in the eye, but I did wonder what it was going to be like – I knew I’d have to shoot it in the head because it was such a small gun and that would be the only way to kill it quickly, unless I clubbed it to death, which would have been pretty drastic!

Eventually I found it, and the thing was already dead. So ended my career as a fox hunter. But I would, happily and with a clear conscience, ride to hounds. Unfortunately I would be more likely to give the foxes a bloody good laugh than send them off to meet their maker, as I am about as unskilled a horseman as you are likely to find.

This was brought home to me on a recent holiday in Barbados. I was staying in a hotel and I arranged to take my two sons on a twilight horse ride along the beach. It was to be a lovely evening – we were to trot along the golden sands, past all the most expensive hotels in Barbados and then trot back as the sun sets magnificently over the horizon. I called the stables. ‘Will you be needing large horses, sir?’

‘Well, I’m sure just ordinary-sized horses will be fine for my sons,’ I told the man. ‘But for me, you’d better find the biggest, fattest horse in the whole of Barbados.’ Sure enough, when we were introduced to our steeds, I was led towards Kaleidoscope, the Frank Bruno of horses – a huge brute of an animal.

‘Don’t worry,’ said our guide when he saw me eyeing the beast with some apprehension. ‘He’s got a lovely nature.’

Kaleidoscope snorted at me.

‘Have you done any riding before?’

I coughed a bit nervously. I’d told the kids, of course, that I was an expert horseman, the dead spit of Frankie Dettori, in equestrian ability if not in frame. ‘I’ve done a bit,’ I mumbled in what I hoped was a modest-sounding voice.

‘Good,’ he replied. ‘The thing about Kaleidoscope is that he sometimes needs reining in a bit.’

‘Reining in. Right,’ I replied, wondering what the hell that meant.

Off we set. Everything was going swimmingly, although my nerves were not helped when our guide explained to me that there was a big horse-racing tradition in Barbados, and that Kaleidoscope had, on a number of occasions, won their equivalent of the Grand National and was now a sort of rescue horse. As we started the return journey, the tide started to come in and we were forced to ride closer to the edge of the beach, in spitting distance of the hotels, where there were little rough-hewn stone walls leading down to the sea.

All of a sudden, Kaleidoscope has a flashback of winning the Barbados Grand National and sees the low wall as something like Becher’s Brook. He breaks out of line and hurls himself over the jump. As I looked, terrified, to the side, I was treated to the sight of Michael Winner and Wayne Rooney, both sitting on the terrace of a hotel restaurant, open-mouthed and somewhat agog at the sight of this slightly corpulent, lobster-red man fly past on this monster of a horse, holding on for dear life and yelling, at the top his voice, ‘Chriiiiiiiiisssssttttt!!!!!!!!’

I was so frightened I seized up. The horse jumped the wall perfectly, but I was holding on to the reins so tightly that I broke the tendons in one of my fingers – so badly that the end of my finger was pointing off at an angle to the rest of it. My wine-induced attempts to knock it back into line at the dinner table that night were ill advised and, back in London, I ended up with something that looked not unlike a sex aid strapped to my middle finger – embarrassing when you find yourself on national television interviewing a highbrow politician, only to look like you’re giving him the finger in the most spectacular way imaginable.

So as you can imagine, if this is what happens when I’m taking a gentle trot along the beach, my presence in a hunt will not exactly strike fear into the heart of even the most plodding fox. But I would defend the right of fox hunters to continue their pursuit to the last. Foxes are a pest and a menace, and this ridiculous ban is a patronising assault on the country way of life by a townie government that simply does not understand the ways of the country. It is an assault on people’s liberty, and I admire those members of the government – such as Kate Hooey – who took a stand and declared publicly that she thought it was wrong.

A final thought. Every aspiring Labour government for I don’t know how long has said they would ban fox hunting. Blair did it in his manifesto, and then spent years trying to dance around it because he knew it would lose him votes in the shires. In the end he just ran out of wriggle room. But consider this: ten times more parliamentary debating time has been spent discussing the fox-hunting ban than was spent debating whether or not we should go to war with Iraq. Think about it. For every hour that was spent discussing our involvement in a war that to date has cost the lives of so many British and American servicemen and God knows how many countless thousands of Iraqis, ten hours was spent discussing foxes. No matter which side of the fence you fall on, that has to be wrong. Hasn’t it?