Country Fair. Max Hastings

her trustees to release the money to equip and decorate it from top to bottom for £1,190. A village dweller, Evelyn Gibbs, described how mains water was at last being connected to her hamlet, provoking head-shaking among elderly inhabitants about the consequences of this reckless innovation, when main drains were still lacking.

      Maurice Burton, the magazine’s resident naturalist, lamented the decline of the dormouse, which he blamed upon the spread of grey squirrels. The famous amateur rider and breeder John Hislop wrote about the charms and horrors of owning a racehorse. Training fees were running at an extravagant seven guineas a week, plus 10 per cent of winnings. A jockey received five guineas for a losing ride and seven for a winner. It cost £100 to enter a horse for the Derby.

      Here is some miscellaneous rural information from the same page: did you know that Northamptonshire is the only county of England to have nine others abutting on it? Or that until the late seventeenth century, July was called Jooly? Or that a Leicestershire acre used to be 2,308\\¾ square yards, and a Westmoreland one 6,760 square yards? In Anthony Armstrong’s essay on Sussex, he quotes a disobliging comment on the county by one Dr Burton in 1751: ‘Why is it that the oxen, the swine, women and all other animals are so long-legged in Sussex? May it be from the difficulty of pulling the feet out of so much mud?’

      Thank God that these days we no longer have to make fuel briquettes out of coal dust and cement to heat the house, as some people did in 1951. I sympathise with the writer who lamented the miseries of driving a tractor in winter when cabs, heated or otherwise, were unheard of. Ploughing a furrow demanded a struggle with the elements almost as taxing as that involved in driving a horse team.

      Constance Spry, who wrote a column on home entertaining, offered some tips for keeping food cool in a home without a frig (sic). She suggested hanging a damp cloth in the larder. Major Hugh Pollard contributed a recipe for cooking the harvest rabbit. Hugh, a notably eccentric friend of my father and author of that celebrated work A History of Firearms, was a keen cook in his leisure moments. In his youth after service in the First World War, he had seen action in Ireland as a Black and Tan. More dubious still, he and one of his daughters assisted General Franco’s secret passage from the Canaries to mainland Spain at the outset of that country’s civil war. As a child, I was impressed by the manner in which the Pollard house near Petworth was strewn with exotic weapons, invariably loaded.

      Today, I fear, an unamused constabulary would remove Hugh’s Firearms Certificate in about five minutes, though most of the guns he kept about the house were not the kind for which one could have gained legal sanction even in those indulgent times. I was especially keen on his machine-pistols. Come to that, in Country Fair there is a set of photos of our family cottage, showing some of my father’s guns standing unlocked in a rack at the foot of the stairs. My oh my, as Mole might have said, how the world has changed!

      Yet some things are exactly the same. Roy Beddington, the angling writer and artist, painted a picture of chalk stream fishing in father’s magazine which remains instantly recognisable to any of us: ‘July is the month of the evening rise,’ he observed. ‘It is no time for the bungler or the over-excited, but a time for circumspection.’ A host of new salmon flies has achieved primacy in our fishing lives since 1951, but the trout patterns which Beddington urged are the old faithfuls we still use today: Pale Wateries, Lunn’s Particulars, Red and Sherry spinners, Blue-Winged Olives, Silver Sedges. ‘It is time to make haste slowly,’ he wrote, ‘when every minute is precious, and every tangle and change of fly must be avoided.’ These are sensations every fisherman still knows intimately, even if other experiences of that era – rationing and National Service, disastrous floods in East Anglia and black-market petrol – are mercifully unknown.

      One of Reginald Arkell’s verses decorated the pages of Country Fair that July of 1951:

       The young men of the country

       They hurry up to town.

       In city ways they spend their days,

       A-running up and down.

       But the old men, the old men

       Can plough a furrow straight,

       In rain or shine, and still have time

       To lean upon a gate.

      Here, surely, is the greatest change since the days of father’s old magazine: the pace of life has quickened. One of my family used to assert years ago that I would never be a proper countryman, because I did not make time to hang about and gossip with people across the counter of the village shop, or when passing them in the lanes. Those strictures were just. They apply to many others of a new generation who live in rural places. Even the ploughman whom Arkell celebrated above now has a computerised schedule to meet. We inhabit a far more comfortable rural world than our parents knew, in the days when even the grandest houses were underheated and hot water was a luxury. But our own era is a hastier one. Few people now dare admit to enjoying leisure to lean upon a gate. If they did so, an agent of the Health & Safety Executive would likely leap from behind a bush, pointing out the risk that it might fall on their toes and provoke litigation.

       2 Rhythm of the Seasons

      JUST AS SWALLOWS wake up one morning and think: ‘Gosh, I ought to be migrating,’ so sportsmen sniff the late-summer air and reflect that it is time to get the gun out, maybe shoot a few clays, think about grouse if they are very lucky, or maybe the first partridges, wishing that they were wild greys. There is a rhythm about the sporting year, of which most of us become more conscious with each season of experience. This need not mean that one must be impatient for things to happen (though I have known fox-hunters who became catatonic between April and August). Rather, there is a sense of rightness about the moment when each phase of the cycle begins.

      I do not think about fishing through the winter and early-spring months, nor even glance at my rods. In March and April, every spare moment is devoted to the garden. I do my best to get the borders into parade order before the river beckons, never entirely successfully. There is little temptation to fantasise about fishing when there is a nasty cold wind that must blow any fly, as well as any fisherman, off the water. Then comes a May morning when the breeze drops, spring sun warms the earth, and every instinct tells one to toss the net and bag into the back of the car, and nip down to the river. Its time has come, albeit usually a trifle late.

      Much the same applies to salmon-fishing. A route to madness lies in brooding all summer about what may or may not be happening to familiar rivers when one is not oneself casting on them. I reach for my ear defenders when anyone rushes up at a party intending to describe record catches – or, for that matter, no catches at all – on the very beat one is due to visit a fortnight hence. Likewise, I have abandoned an old habit of checking the weather on a given river day by day through the week before visiting it. What happens to Jack Smith on Thursday or Friday has absolutely no bearing upon what will happen to you or me the following Monday or Tuesday. As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods, and all that. Better just to turn up on the bank when the time comes, willing, eager and oblivious of recent history.

      You will not be surprised to hear me confess, of course, that it has taken fifty-nine years to become this phlegmatic creature. Patience is much easier when one enjoys many other things in life as well as sport. In my twenties I was obsessed to an unhealthy degree with shooting and fishing. These things meant more to me than anything else. I did not get many chances, and consoled myself by falling asleep every night reading about other people’s sporting doings in country books and magazines. In the unlikely event that I had been given a choice between driven pheasant-shooting and a date with Diana Rigg, it would have been a tough call.

      These days, like many sportsmen I find that the prospect which stirs most vivid excitement is the chance of a grouse. There is absolutely nothing which I would not cancel – weddings, funerals, christenings – to enjoy the privilege of missing those sublime birds. And even with grouse, I have trained myself not to