The finest month

School, for me, was really not all that long ago but nonetheless so much of what I learned there has already slipped from my mind. There is a poem, though, that comes back to me from time to time. “April,” it begins, “is the cruellest month.”

Some days ago, I was on a barley stubble at sunset, picking pigeons I shot that afternoon. By the time I left to drive home, darkness was falling and I felt deeply happy. The nights are certainly drawing in fast but this is my favourite time of year, when partridges are on the wing and in the mornings we wake to skeins of geese noisily crossing the sky.

I can’t quite remember why my English teacher reckoned that poem begins “April is the cruellest month”, but I agree entirely. Lambs, calves and ducklings are all good and well but the weekends seem a bit sad with no days in the coverts or down on the marsh to look forward to.

Last weekend, a reader sent me a letter to tell me how excited he was about a day of shooting Canadas over a field he had been watching. I replied with equal zeal about an evening of duck flighting I’m heading up to Scotland for. The sportsman in autumn becomes a bright-eyed child. September, I think, is the finest month.