Playing the generation game

As far as I remember – which isn’t very far – I have never before had to shoot next to my daughter. Until last weekend. And I have to say I think I probably behaved rather badly. But then what are daughters for if you can’t behave badly?

We had both been asked to the same shoot but via different generations. So we pitched up at the appointed hour, the daughter wearing rather fetching blue tweed shooting culottes (my plus fours now have a rather suspicious brown mark on the back of one leg which is actually a burn, a result of slamming them in the lid of the AGA, but open to misinterpretation).

And blow me, and rather to her chagrin, we drew pegs next to one another. On the first drive I was No 8 and she was No 7. But as we were moving up two numbers each drive we were going to be next to one another all day. Now the normal etiquette on a driven shoot is that you don’t shoot birds over the neighbouring gun or ones which are quite clearly going in his or her direction. This is known as poaching and some people can get terribly cross about it, in which case you probably don’t want to be shooting with them.

The odd poach is entirely acceptable as it can be put down as an honest mistake in the heat of the moment. Or it can be a bit of fun. Actually I am quite happy to have birds poached over my head as it looks as if I have hit them. So we formed up at the first drive and I was on the far left and unlikely to see much in the way of birds.

But a few started coming over the daughter and she started banging away to not much avail. So after a bit I did a mental, “Sod it” and poached a couple just over her head which she looked rather pleased about as she clearly thought she had shot them herself.

So having established a completely bogus “right” to poach in her territory I carried on in the next drive. Waffle in the meantime was having a whale of a time as we were short of dogs to pick up birds so she tore about the park unrestrained hoovering up birds and dumping them rather untidily somewhere near my peg.

By lunch time the daughter’s eye was in. After lunch mine was definitely out. So, languidly lining up an approaching cock bird I was surprised to see it go up in a puff of feathers and fall at my feet. Followed by another. And then another to my left. But there was no-one on my left. And then I twigged. I did not see the daughter actually blow the smoke off the end of her barrels. But you get the picture. n