In my boyhood we played a game that allowed full expression of the imagination: when, ideally, would you like to have been born? And we decided that the 1880s, the decade of Shooting Times’ founding, was about perfect.
The game was usually played in an Edwardian octagonal tree-house perched in a cedar tree where we often spent the summer nights before rising at dawn and marauding with airgun, catty and butterfly net. It was a hunting base, in other words, and so the criteria for the perfect birth-year were based mostly on sporting opportunity with one other, very selfish, consideration: we didn’t want to have been nobbled in one of the world wars.
Never repeated
World Wars I and II weren’t vague notions in the
