Faces of the field

From the red-faced head gamekeeper to the impeccably bred picker-up and the aged stop, every shoot has its own characters, as Kit Hesketh-harvey observes

The lady gun

The other guns regard her as warily as would a High Anglican a female bishop. The trouble is that she’s exploding a masculine myth. It’s not really all that difficult to shoot a pheasant. They mutter, only just good-humouredly, about pheromones and beginner’s luck. She more than holds her own in the field, despite having only recently taken up shooting in order to save her marriage. Her tenue is more dashing than theirs is ever allowed to be, no matter how cheerful their comedy stockings, which read ‘Oh’ and ‘Bugger’. That riding habit lends her a look of Elizabeth of Austria. That beautiful sombrero was a gift from an Argentinian polo player who had no public-school mistrust of women. Yes, she arguably wears more make-up than would be acceptable in Beauchamp Place, but the wind is so weathering and one wouldn’t want to be mistaken for the keeper’s wife, or—heaven forfend —a picker-up, would one?

The headkeeper

Mellors he ain’t. He pre-dates even D. H. Lawrence himself. Seventy seasons have remorselessly dulled his broken veins from purple to indigo to grey and he wheezes like a threshing machine. Nevertheless, he can roll shag tobacco onehanded in a January gale. Pintail feathers are randomly stuck into shapeless, algaecoloured tweeds that appear to have been woven from gorse. He remembers the shoot in its pre-syndicate days and, in a dialect consisting entirely of the single vowel-sound ‘oi’, he grumbles in rumbling tête-à-tête with the dowager (who adores him) about the slide in standards. Other than that, he remains mute. He deplores flashy walkie-talkies, signalling manoeuvres instead with tiny, terrifying hand motions, like a cricket umpire. His dogs, as rooted to the spot as he, harrumph wearily as they sink to the ground at his feet and sleep right through the drive. His hands are as calloused as elephant hide, but he can distinguish the £20 notes from the £50s simply by the degree of sheepishness in the tipper’s eyes. Oven-ready birds to take home? Load of yuppie rubbish. Honestly, do they think this is Ocado?

The stop

The British countryside is, despite the assaults of the urban planners and the out-oftown supermarkets, a place of unchanging constancy. Its static, landmark features are reassuringly discernable year in, year out. Lightning trees, grain silos, abandoned sofas in lay-bys, menhirs, scarecrows: these punctuated the self-same scene that Constable painted. To this list, we can add the stop. He’s been rooted to the spot for so long that he’s ploughed around and lichen is beginning to grow on his trousers. He is immutable. The very occasional, completely arbitrary flap of his fertiliser bag is therefore so startling that guns have been known to bolt like horses. You know those children’s clockwork frogs that used to be found in cereal packets? You place them on the table, nothing happens for ages and then they jump? Like that.

The tractor driver

He’s dragging round a net worth of billions. He used to drag the game cart until his promotion, trussing up the braces with the dexterity of a Belgian lace-maker. Now, although he’s capable of reversing a goods train through a hop garden, he charges towards the deepest ruts with joyful relish, revelling in the satisfying consequent bounce from the rear as a score of bankers, WAGS and wet dogs are tumbled into a tangled melee, like towels in a washing machine. On arrival, he throws open the back doors of the gun bus to reveal a scene that resembles Gericault’s great canvas, The Raft of the Méduse. Perfect.

The picker-up

She is the grandest person in the field—her dogs’ lineage is the only comparable equivalent. She whistles these to obedience as efficiently as Capt von Trapp. She never speaks: the fact that she was excluded both from entailed inheritance (her baby brother got the fabulous house) and even more inexcusably from lunch means that she can’t trust herself to do so. Out in the field four times a week, she returns to her grace-and-favour cottage, the life tenancy of which she was granted with very little grace and not much favour. These days she lives alone, after her husband abandoned her for his PA— this accounts for the swift and efficient blow on the head with which she dispatches runners. In the evenings, she settles down to something eggy on a tray and watches Monty Don.

The host

He’s diffident about giving the pep talk before the draw. His grandfather never had to: in those days, gentlemen were gentlemen and knew it already, but, nowadays, for legal reasons… Woodcock he leaves to their consciences, but rather hopes that they don’t. His shining hour comes at elevenses, when he can use the Christmas presents from Asprey and is engulfed by fawning hopefuls. Lest the silver stirrup cups and the leather trays seem too flashy, he stuffs miniature Mars Bars into his guests’ pockets at the same time. Their glistening new Range Rovers cost rather more than the land over which they are shooting: his battered Land Rover dates from about the same period as the house. With a wall of modesty, he protects himself against the barrage of schoolboy deference that he’s enduring from CEOS. His own schoolfriends he alludes to by the names of their estates. He shoots beautifully, but is never placed, instead roving the back line in order more tactfully to clean up after the misfires. He’s careful to compliment the inept, saying that ‘the main thing is to enjoy yourself’. He’s unexpectedly nice, but can’t disguise the fact that he prefers the conversation of Savage, his dog.

The beater

It’s sleeting, of course, but this is very special sleet. It travels not just horizontally, but sometimes actually upwards, in order to get right inside your armysurplus jacket. These burrs are special, too—they can affix themselves even to oilskin. And the brambles are actually predatory, coiling around you of their own will, like anacondas. All this for £20. The guns don’t have to walk: they just turn around on their butts and point the other way. It’s only the beaters who have to do the 20-mile route march through bog and thicket and anklebreaking peat hag. There is a bubbling ferment of republicanism in the beaters’ cart, permeating the foetid air and the eloquent silence and in stark contrast to the joyful braying and Havana smoke from the gun bus. Honestly, how could anybody have missed that pheasant? And doesn’t the brainless Rupert know that it’s cocks only? And that was an English partridge, you ****** plonker. Roll on February 1. At least there’ll be a hefty bag on beaters’ day.

The underkeeper

Now we’re talking! He’s Sean Bean, only a little more M25, a little more The Only Way is Essex. His tweeds still retain their crease and his haircut is as sharp as a firing pin. He calls the host by his Christian name and everybody else ‘you plonker’. However, from his perfect teeth to his off-the-shelf stocking flashes, he dazzles like one of Jilly Cooper’s most hectic young heroes and the Slovenian waitresses at the Dog and Partridge hang on his every cheesy chat-up line at the end of the day. He wears a breastplate of enamel badges denoting membership of shooting organisations, having taken advantage of their youth subscription while still a poult. He does all the actual work, of course, but in astonishingly little time, as he handles an Argocat like a Lambo. He relishes his job, which his friends from the local academy school envy: they’re packing widgets in a factory on the industrial estate. Let them tease him about Lady Chatterley and rain—it’s water off this buck’s back.