LETTERS

BY OUR SIDE

Vintage Times (It’s a baptism by fire, 13 January) by John Humphreys brought back memories. His story about the young gamekeeper mirrored my own introduction to shooting in the early 1960s as a boy of eight to 10 years old by my cousin Kenneth Smyth. It gave me the love of the countryside and a foundation in shooting that I still have.

Kenneth was a sergeant in the Ulster Defence Regiment and a former B Special, and was murdered by the IRA on 10 December 1971. I often think that he and I would have gone shooting