The Irresistible Inheritance Of Wilberforce

In late August, Ed asked me to go and stay at Blubberwick Lodge. There was to be a shooting party there for a couple of days. Ed and his guests were going up the day before, to shoot on the Friday. They were staying that night at the lodge. Francis and I were asked to go and watch the shooting and then stay for dinner on the Saturday night. It was half understood that Ed would lend me a gun for the last drive, arrange for me to stand with a minder and have a go at shooting a grouse. Francis wanted a chance to work Campbell, and pick up grouse behind the line.

Eck had told me about Blubberwick Lodge. It had been built by the first Marquess of Gateshead in the 1860s, when the moors around Blubberwick were no longer mined for the lead that had founded the fortunes of the Simmonds family in the last two centuries. Now the moors were harvested for grouse, not lead.

It was considered inconvenient to ride twenty miles from Hartlepool Hall to Blubberwick Moor, so a lodge or shooting box had been built closer to hand. ‘It is a very comfortable set-up,’ Eck told me. ‘Enormous soft beds, huge old bathtubs, very comfortable armchairs you can fall asleep in without cricking your neck. The only concession to modern life has been the installation of an ice-making machine to speed up the production of cocktails after shooting.’

I arranged to meet Francis at Caerlyon at eight o’clock in the morning on the Saturday on which we had been invited. Francis, Campbell and I drove to Blubberwick together in Francis’s old Land Rover. I wasn’t allowed to take my Range Rover.

So we drove, early one morning in late August, deep into the Pennine uplands at about twenty miles an hour. The air had a sharp feeling to it and was so clear that one had the impression of seeing the wide horizons through a telescope. Everything seemed nearer than it really was. The heather was still in flower: its purple bloom covered every hill.

‘Eck will be there, of course. No party ever takes place that Eck isn’t invited to. There’s someone called Heini Carinthia, who comes every year. He’s an old friend of mine. He started my interest in wine. I’d like you to meet him. Ask him about Château Trébuchet: that’s his property, in Pomerol, in Bordeaux. He says it produces the best Pomerol after Pétrus. I myself think it is a moderate wine. Then there’s Philippe de Bargemon, a very charming Frenchman, who spends his life shooting: grouse in the Pennines, doves in Argentina, quail in Texas, pheasants in Hungary. He’s never without a gun in his hand. Nice man. The others are mainly locals. You’ll know some of them, I expect.’

We drove on and then Francis said, ‘You’re very privileged, you know. Getting an invitation to Blubberwick isn’t something that happens every day. It’s one of the best grouse moors in the North of England.’

Francis smiled. ‘Well, of course you have to hit one first. But if they are not shot, they get diseased. Once the number of grouse on the moor gets beyond a certain density, they start passing a parasite to one another. I believe they pick it up from sheep. That kills them off faster than anything. The only way to preserve grouse is to shoot them.’

‘There is no sport like it,’ said Francis. ‘You go and stand on the roof of the world, and the grouse come at you from all directions, faster than you would believe possible. All other forms of shooting come a distant second. Few people ever get the chance to do it. You don’t know how lucky you are.’

We were now driving along a narrow single-track road that wound through the heather. Then I saw my first grouse. A brown bird with a red comb on its head whirred out of a clump of heather close to the side of the road calling, ‘Go back, G’back, g’back.’ We came over the crest of a hill and saw Blubberwick Lodge below us. It was a large rambling building, covered in a fading cream-coloured rendering to protect it from the constant drizzle and wind of the dales. As we drove down the bank towards it, I could see activity: beaters climbing into two big ex-army lorries, guns coming out of the house and straggling towards a line of four-wheel-drive vehicles drawn up on the gravel. We drove through the lodge gates.

Ed was waiting for us on the gravel. When he saw us he tapped his watch with his finger and said, ‘Francis, if I’d known you were coming in that old banger I’d have told you to set out yesterday. What was wrong with Wilberforce’s Range Rover?’

Ed said to me, ‘Wilberforce, I don’t think you know Heinrich Carinthia? Or Philippe de Bargemon?’ I shook hands with a large, smiling elderly man and then a younger, dark-haired Frenchman. The other guns I knew. Eck greeted me with a wave of his hand. One of the party, to my surprise, was Annabel Gazebee.

Then Ed introduced me to my minder, Bob. ‘Go and stand with Francis this morning. You’ll get a better idea of what goes on from behind the line. Then, if you feel like it, you can have a go yourself this afternoon, and Bob will show you what to do. He’ll stand with you and make sure you’re safe.’ Bob had the gun that Ed was lending me slung in a sleeve over his shoulder.

Then we climbed into our vehicles and set off towards the moor. We drove in a convoy up a moorland track towards the first line of butts. An undulating landscape of heather and peat hags and small pools opened before us and we stopped and parked the vehicles on a dry bit of ground in the lee of a small hill. Then the guns and the followers, including Catherine and Francis and myself, walked slowly along the line of the wooden butts, Ed indicating to each gun in turn which butt to occupy.

Francis turned away from the line and strode across the heather with Campbell dancing at his heels. I followed him, and when we were about three hundred yards back from the line, we stopped and hunkered down in the heather.

The silence was, for a time, absolute. Francis did not speak, and Campbell sat quivering beside him, once letting out a small moan of excitement. A great white sky arched over us. In every direction the moors rolled away, like a huge sea. Not a house or a road could be seen, nor any human figure. Then I saw a line of moving dots on the distant horizon. They did not appear to get any closer for a while, but then I realised it must be the beating line, and I began to hear, in the stillness, the snap of the flags they carried to drive forward the grouse. Occasionally shouts would arise from the line of ‘Flag up! Flag up!’

Now I saw a cloud of birds in the sky wheel and turn over the beating line, and then drop low again so that I could not pick them out against the heather. Then a shot rang out from one end of the row of butts; then shots were being fired up and down the line. I saw a pack of grouse coming straight towards us and, as it flew over the butts, I saw two or three birds tumble and then those that were not hit went past us in a rush of wings almost before I had realised they were coming.

The little dog surged through the heather, his head appearing from time to time with its ears flapping as he searched for fallen birds. In a few minutes he came back with one in his mouth.

After everything had been picked up, we walked on to the next drive, and then a third. Each was as exciting to watch as the first one and, by the time the last drive was over, it was afternoon. A pale sun was trying to burn its way through the overcast and not succeeding. It was warm and still. Francis and I walked back to the line of butts and joined up with the guns, and then we all walked together for a few hundred yards down the hill to where a small burn trickled between soft, grassy banks where the sheep had grazed off the heather. There we had a picnic beside the stream, and the keepers and the beaters took themselves off into a huddle with their Thermoses and sandwiches fifty yards away. The rest of us sat or lay on the grass surrounded by wicker hampers and wine coolers from which Horace, clad in a tweed jacket and twill trousers instead of his customary dark suit, dispensed all manner of good things.

She laughed. ‘You’ll soon find out for yourself. I expect you’ll hit something. You are going to shoot after lunch, aren’t you? Try to remember not to shoot more than Ed. He won’t like it if you do.’

Before we finished lunch Ed pulled a camera out from his pocket and took photographs of everybody sitting on the grass, eating their lunch. Then Catherine asked me to take a photograph of herself with Francis and Ed. The three of them got to their feet for the picture. Francis stood in the middle with an arm around Ed and an arm around Catherine. The heather stretched behind them to the milky sky, and the air was so clear that whenever I looked at that photograph afterwards - for Ed gave me a copy - it seemed to me as if the three of them might at any instant step out of the picture, or that I might step into it and return to the innocent happiness of that moment.

The shooting began again after lunch. Bob the minder followed behind me, carrying my gun in its sleeve and a bag of cartridges slung over his shoulder. We followed Ed towards another line of butts, about half a mile from where we had sat and eaten our picnic. As we came to the butts Ed directed the guns where to stand. Halfway along the line he stopped and said, ‘This’ll do for you, Wilberforce. You should get some shooting here. There are plenty of grouse about on this bit of the moor this year.’

I could hear them all around us, their liquid bubbling music occasionally broken as a cock bird would flutter up for a moment to see what was going on, uttering its cackling admonition: ‘Go back! G’back!’

Bob and I entered the butt, and Bob took the gun out of its sleeve and began to instruct me. ‘Now then, sir,’ he said, ‘I’ll put these two canes on either side of the front of the butt. Never swing your gun past them, otherwise you’ll shoot one of the other gentlemen in the line, and they never enjoy being shot, sir. And when you hear horns blowing, that will mean the beating line will be within range, and then you must only shoot grouse that have gone past us and are behind the butt, otherwise you’ll shoot one of the keepers, and they definitely dislike being shot, sir.’

Then he showed me how to break the gun and present it to him so that he could reload for me after I had fired it, and we settled down to wait. Various other pickers up and flankers walked past, and the flankers settled themselves in the heather at each end of the line of butts, with sticks on to which were stapled sheets of white plastic from old bags of fertiliser.

‘When the grouse start coming through, they’ll get up and flag them to make sure they go over the line of guns and don’t get out the side. There’ll be a bit of a wait now, sir. The beating line starts the drive quite a long way away.’

I stood in my butt, a wooden hurdle with heather along the top to give the illusion of camouflage, with my gun resting on the lip, waiting for the grouse to appear. My heart was beating faster than usual. I half-hoped I wouldn’t hit anything; but a deeper urge made itself felt: I knew I would want to shoot the grouse when at last they came.

‘Look at that, sir,’ said Bob: ‘that’s a hen harrier. They eat the grouse chicks in the breeding season and pick off any wounded birds we don’t find. They know what’s going on today, sir.’

The great raptor soared and wheeled against the pale sky, waiting for its chance. Strange-looking flies drifted past in front of the butt, locked in amorous embraces. A solitary bumblebee droned past in search of heather honey. The milky sky and the horizon seemed indivisible, as if the land rose up to meet the white light of heaven, as if it went on for ever. Somewhere far to the east were the urban sprawls of Tyneside and Wearside: now it seemed as if those places, and everything in them - my work, my life so far - were an unguessable distance away.

‘That’s the beating line,’ said Bob. ‘In a few minutes we should start to get busy. Remember, when you see the grouse, pick your bird and stay on it. Shoot it in front as far out as you dare. They travel that fast, if you wait, it’ll be on you and past you before you can shoot.’

A moment or two ticked by. I could hear the occasional flap of a flag, as the beating line snapped them to and fro, to move the packs of grouse forward. Once or twice I heard again the screams of ‘Flag up! Flag up!’

My heart started to beat a little faster. I still had not seen a grouse on the moor. I wondered whether we would draw a blank. Perhaps Ed was wrong. The grouse I had heard earlier had all gone quiet. There didn’t seem to be a bird anywhere except for the hen harrier, still circling above the beating line. Then there was a shot from further down the line, then a ragged fusillade and then, before I had a chance to do anything about it, a pack of small brown birds was rocketing past the butt on every side, swarming in every direction. The birds were moving at an incredible speed. They were gone before I had even thought to raise my gun to my shoulder.

I swung on it and fired and everything slowed down: the grouse, which had already closed the gap to less than forty yards, seemed to tumble in the air in front of me, and then something whizzed past my head at great speed, and I turned and saw it bounce as it hit the ground ten yards behind me, in a cloud of white and brown feathers. After that I fired shot after shot, and by the end of the drive six more birds had fallen. Bob had made me wear ear protectors, but even so, by the time the beaters arrived at the butts and the drive was over, my head ached, my shoulder felt bruised from when I had fired before nesting the gun properly into my shoulder, and my throat was dry with the pollen from the heather.

Suddenly she bent and picked something from the ground. When she straightened up, she was holding a sprig of white heather. She gave it to me and said, ‘Wear this in your cap, Wilberforce. It brings good luck.’

‘It is always a special moment when you shoot your first grouse. Of course, we have none at home in Austria. I still remember my first grouse. It was here, many years ago, just after the war, almost the first year they started shooting the moors again. I was sixteen years old, and Ed’s grandfather and Francis’s father were still alive. I still remember that little bird coming down, just as if it was yesterday. You arrived here with Francis. He is a friend of yours?’

‘He used to shoot so well, before he gave it up. It is a great shame that he does not shoot any more. His obsession with wine, I fear, has cost him his fortune. I feel a little bit responsible, for it was I who started his interest in wine.’

Heinrich stopped walking, and so I stopped as well. ‘I must catch my breath. I am not so young. Walking over this heather is hard work for an old man. Yes, Francis came to me for some months when his parents wanted him out of the way of some trouble. He never told me what it was, but I expect a girl. Francis was so good-looking in those days. I looked after him for his father’s sake. His father had been in the army and had stopped Russian troops from burning down my family’s house at the end of the war, so I felt that I owed the Black family some favours. I took Francis to see my new winery in California that I had just bought. In those days it was very brave for Europeans to try to make wine in California, but it has been my best investment. Then I took him to my little property in Bordeaux. You have heard of Château Trébuchet?’

Heinrich Carinthia said, ‘He is so rude about it. Francis knows a lot about wine, but I still ask myself whether he truly understands it. You must try the Château Trébuchet. I will find your address from Francis and send you a case.’

‘You will drink it to celebrate your first grouse, and then you will tell Francis that, after all, my Trébuchet is a very good wine. If you are a friend of Francis, you must also be an amateur of wine.’

Heinrich Carinthia shook his head. ‘Be careful. It is good to like wine; it is acceptable to love it, as I do; but what Francis feels for wine is beyond love. You must be careful to stop at liking. Even loving is a little dangerous. Ah, here we are, and we have kept them all waiting.’

When we arrived back at the Lodge, Ed told everyone to do whatever they liked with the rest of the afternoon, but to be ready for drinks and dinner by eight. There was a race for the three bathrooms as soon as he had finished speaking. I decided I could wait my turn, and I went into the rough garden and looked about the Lodge. I came around the side of the house and found the keepers still tying up the grouse into braces with lengths of red twine, and hanging them in the game larder. There were dozens of birds still in there from the previous day’s shooting.

I went on with my tour and finally sat down on a bench looking over the dale, beneath an open upstairs window. I sat there for a minute or two. Then, to my surprise, I heard voices just above my head. I realised after a second that I must be sitting beneath the open window of Ed’s bedroom.

Catherine’s voice said sharply, ‘Looks at me like what, Ed? He can look at me if he likes. You don’t own me. You’re just in a bad mood because you didn’t shoot well today.’

‘Please don’t talk to me like that in my own house,’ said Ed. There was some muttering from further away that I could not hear, and then the loud slam of a door. It sounded as if there had been a row.

I sat there until the silence from above persuaded me that there was no longer anyone close to the window. At any rate, I could not sit there for ever. I stood up. Tears were smarting at the corners of my eyes. I could not believe what Ed had just said. Every time I had ever met him he had been so kind to me, so friendly, so full of charm and thoughtfulness. What was it I had just heard him call me: ‘Mr Nobody’?

I walked down to the bottom of the garden where the shaggy lawn ran into a spinney of Scots pine. I thought there might be tears running down my cheeks and I did not want to meet anyone just then. I felt humiliated and disappointed at the same time, but within me a reasonable voice said, ‘Mr Nobody: that sums it up very well.’ After all, I didn’t even know who my real father and mother were, or had been. All I knew of life had been learned by sitting in front of a computer for the last ten or fifteen years. No wonder Ed got bored with me. Everyone was bored by me, after a while. I bored myself. Everyone who ought to love me abandoned me.

I stood amongst the trees for quarter of an hour feeling sorry for myself, until at last a sense of calm returned. After all, what did it matter? I would get through the evening and drive back the next morning with Francis, and then I need never see any of them again. I practised a smile and found I could stretch my lips into some semblance of a grin. I could at least look normal, even if I did not feel it.

He stopped me by gripping my arm and giving me his most charming smile. ‘Wilberforce, I’m so pleased you shot your first grouse today. We’ll definitely get you out again. You shot so well today. Bob told me. You’ll be shooting as straight as the best of us before long - I know you will.’

‘Oh, we’ll get you out again,’ he promised. ‘Huge fun, to see someone get their first bird. It’s always a special moment.’ He gave me two quick pats on the shoulder and went on to his bedroom.