I’d rather gut a deer than do the ironing . . .
THE GAMEKEEPER by Portia Simpson (Simon & Schuster £16.99)
YOU’LL need a while to get over the first three pages of this book. Portia, the first woman to qualify as a gamekeeper in Scotland, has taken a punter out to shoot a stag.
The client — because stalkers are the richest and most spoilt class of predator — has decided to stroll off to the beach, leaving her to drag the dead animal down the hill, after ‘gralloching’ (disembowelling) it in the time-honoured manner.
On a hot day it was tiring work, so she sat out on the heather with her lunch and fell asleep.
until a ‘ change in the light, or maybe just an instinctive sense of danger’ woke her to a black shadow and a rush of cool air as a huge golden eagle swooped down, talons outstretched towards her torso.
lured by the stag’s entrails, the great bird had spotted ‘ an apparently dead young woman spreadeagled and motionless, her long blonde hair tangled among the heather’ and decided to eat her, too.
Phew! If you hate bloodsports, are squeamish about entrails and nervous of birds, you’re already in shock.
And yet throughout this book the vividness of Portia Simpson’s writing seduces you, evoking her passionate connection with the raw, violent beauty of nature, the texture of the heather, the strength of the beasts and the gleam of the distant sea.
We meet her as an inquisitive toddler in Stonehaven, Aberdeenshire, picking up woodlice and keeping a pet snail whose shell shone ‘like a jewel’ and whose moods she thought she could read.
She sees her first whale and is baffled by female preoccupations, watching her mother ironing underpants and resolving to turn down all proposals for fear of the dread ironing board.
She went south and trained in forestry and tree surgery, one of only two women on a chainsaw course; then moved on to gamekeeping encouraged by an uncle who gave up that dream to work in the oil industry.
That sense that it is kinder to kill wild game than close your eyes to the factory farming of pigs and chickens permeates this unapologetic book. She moves on to driven grouse shoots, with spectacular descriptions of the long treks the beaters make. She became one of the boys, though on a Balmoral shoot she picked up a grouse and cheekily handed it to Prince Harry (‘Sadly, he didn’t ask me for a date’). The Royals sit with the beaters for lunch, with their own lunch boxes, and one of her mates lights up a joint under the stony eyes of the Queen’s bodyguards while HM eats her sandwiches (crusts cut off) ‘ either ignoring him or oblivious to him’. Portia’s attitude to animals is an outdoorswoman’s: caring, admiring, understanding, appreciating and killing. She trains a puppy, adopts baby squirrels and a raven, which she feeds on fillet steak on her sparse earnings, and learns with pity how grim and starved would be the lives of deer today without natural predators such as lynx, if they were not culled by stalkers. She makes friends, lays horrible spring traps, gets her hand caught in one, and banters with friends on the moors. Once, as she hides to shoot a fox, a kestrel hops down and lands on the barrel of her gun. She jerks it clear.
‘I had only just bought my rifle and I didn’t want scratch marks from its claws on the barrel,’ she says.
‘The look of shock on the bird’s face was comical . . . I knew my camouflage was quite good, but I had not realised just how good.’
THE best description of the author is from a colleague on the Isle of Rum. Watching her covered in mud, energetically doing messy blokey jobs, he says: ‘You look more like a hairdresser or a beautician than you do a gamekeeper, but when you get to work the contrast is shocking.’
An injury ends her more robust career, so on turning 30 she takes on a less physical wildlife project, and looks back with vivid glee on those wild, wonderful youthful years.
She concludes that she’s still up for marriage, provided she never has to iron anyone’s underpants. It would be a strong man who dared ask her to.