Country Fair. Max Hastings

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СКАЧАТЬ Indeed, I am doubtful whether in its heyday any mere foreigner would have got a table.

      About now, thoughtful readers may ask: if the Hastings family was skint, how did they manage to do such grand eating? The same way they do now, silly. Expenses. Since both my parents were employed by media organisations, I doubt if they ever paid for a restaurant meal out of their own pockets. We had nothing in banks save overdrafts, but the Lord (Beaverbrook or Rothermere) was always good for a glass of champagne and a lobster. My father’s epicurean masterclasses triumphantly succeeded in one respect. They induced in me an enthusiasm for expensive food which has never faded. Likewise, when I started working and living in a flat on my own, I simply summoned rations by telephone from Harrods. I had no idea how else food might be obtained. The consequence, as you might surmise, was an impressive series of financial smashes in my early twenties. One of them was retrieved only by a handsome legacy from dear old nanny, when she passed on to the great nursery in the sky after seventeen years’ hard labour with the Hastingses.

      I once observed at a dinner party in the 1990s that I wished I had discovered back in 1964 or thereabouts that a girl was just as likely to go to bed with you if you bought her a hot dog as if you took her to Wheeler’s. This caused a middle-aged woman to shout from the far end of the table: ‘Rubbish! If a bloke gave me a good dinner, I used to feel I owed him one.’ I said how much I wished that we had met thirty years earlier.

      Nowadays, my culinary life has changed out of recognition. In deepest west Berkshire, our family try to be living exemplars of The Good Life. Scarcely a restaurant features in the programme any more. At Hastings Towers we live off the land, though this is by no means a universally popular policy. About once a week, my wife stands by the back gate crying out towards open country: ‘Mr Fox! Mr Fox! Where are you? Come on in!’ This is a demo directed at me. It is designed to emphasise how tiresome Penny finds our chickens, and especially the bother of feeding and watering them. ‘When did you last hear of Marks & Spencer running out of eggs?’ she demands crossly. I find it soothing to see a few hens scratching about in a pen. They may not be very bright, nor very rewarding conversationalists, but if you put layer’s mash in at one end, something useful emerges at the other.

      In our rustic domain, the chicken controversy is only one manifestation of a wider debate: how much husbandry can we take? If we profess to be country-dwellers and sportsmen, how far does it behove us to live off the landscape, to bottle and dry and freeze the spoils of chase and garden as our ancestors did? We eat a lot of game. I would be happy to exist on a permanent diet of semi-raw grouse, if others about the house shared my enthusiasm, which they do not. Many women find grouse too gamey. There is also domestic resistance to my views about how long birds should be hung, and to my theory that a few maggots contribute added protein, a view rigorously contested by the European Union in its latest regulations on the marketing of game meat.

      I release a lot of the trout I hook, sometimes deliberately, simply because nobody in the house will eat it more than three or four times in a summer. It is a problem with fish that until one tastes them it is impossible to guess how they will turn out. Some are delicious pink things, rich with shrimp, while others prove to have grey flesh, and to taste only of pellets. The latter is bad enough if one is eating alone, sorely embarrassing if there is company. Even salmon cannot be relied upon, unless they are fresh-run. In ignorant youth I killed a lot of stale fish for smoking or fishcakes, before realising that a horrible old red thing will always taste that way, however one processes it. We try to eat every fish within a month or two of committing it to the freezer, before it dries out.

      We are fanatical consumers of garden produce, our big extravagance. Even the crudest calculation by most honest amateur gardeners reveals that one could have fruit and vegetables delivered weekly from Fortnum & Mason more cheaply than growing one’s own. I speak as one who has just put in a new fruit cage. Only around 2035 might the strawberries and raspberries grown therein pay back the price of the frame. But that is not the point, as we peasants tell each other. The issues are quality and self-sufficiency.

      The quality bit starts looking shaky when we contemplate our asparagus. It is thin stuff compared with the fat, rich stalks from the pick-your-own place down the road. We struggle on, however, pouring onto the soil ever more dung at £65 a load, together with chemical fertilisers in industrial quantities. Cabbages, beetroot, onions, leeks and the rest flourish mightily on our acres and are eaten in bulk. The gardener cheats, however, by leaving every week at the back door baskets groaning with produce from his own allotment, rather in the spirit that Nigella Lawson might display a cake before the camera, saying smugly: ‘And here’s one I prepared earlier.’ He is especially eager to produce earlier samples of species which I have planted with my own hands. This twists the knife, or rather the trowel, about my horticultural limitations. In a cynical moment, my wife suggested that we could simply get the gardener to maintain regular deliveries from his own patch, saving the expense of doing our own tillage as well. Shame on her.

      My favourite technical innovation, purchased four years ago, is an apple press. Every season now, we squeeze and freeze about forty litres of apple juice, lovingly stored in plastic milk containers. As I point out, this also saves the gardener from having to clear up thousands of windfalls. As Penny points out, however, using an apple press requires physical effort matching that of child labour in a coal mine circa 1840. I am bathed in sweat after an hour of turning the great screw, manhandling the truckloads of fruit needed to produce a litre or two of juice. I find the process therapeutic, pleasingly Hardyesque. Others, however, gaze wistfully down the road that leads to the supermarket as they mop their brows in the autumn sunshine.

      We are self-sufficient in firewood, thanks partly to fallen branches, and partly to the fact that we don’t use a lot when we cuddle the Aga all winter. Like most men, I thoroughly enjoy an outing with a chainsaw and a chunk of fallen timber, though at least once a season I give myself a fright, using the saw up a tree. There was a delicate moment when I severed a big ash limb. As it plunged to the ground, the lightened butt sprang upwards, trapping my arm between itself and a rung of the ladder on which I stood, twenty feet above the ground. It took a lonely ten minutes to disengage myself, during which I contemplated my immortal soul, and reflected that these experiences are not quite so bracing at fifty-something as they seemed at twenty-something. I got no sympathy indoors, either.

      Most of us get lazier with the passage of years. I no longer make my own sloe gin, nor point chimneys, hang wallpaper or demolish pigeons in the garden with a .22. The more expensive tools I install in the workshop, the less likely I am to use them for ambitious woodworking of the kind I enjoyed thirty years ago. Yet it still gives pleasure to see things around house and garden which one has built or repaired with one’s own hands. The consequence of a childhood during the rationing era is that I never feel entirely comfortable about the state of the household, unless it is provisioned for a siege. In my complacent bed at night, I go to sleep counting not sheep but game in the three freezers, poised in the epicurean waiting room en route to my plate. I do not despair of learning to pot my own shrimps. We would have to call our Hastings Towers version The Quite Good Life rather than the whole package, but we do our rustic best.

       7 Duffers’ Days

      NOT LONG AGO, I watched a young girl cast a fly on a Scottish salmon river. Her line fell in a bundle amid the stream, and straightened only five, ten seconds after landing – which of course meant that it was unlikely to impress a fish for half the time it was crossing potentially active water. My heart bled for her. Yet I need not have worried. She caught a fish. This turned my mind to a general question. We know that a good dry fly trout fisherman will always catch more than a bad one. Unless one is plying a river in the mayfly season, or addressing oneself to tame fish lately released, the fine caster prevails over the coarse one, because presentation is all.

      Yet different rules apply to salmon fishing. Again and again, we see novices СКАЧАТЬ