AS PRESENTS GO, IT WAS A pretty good one. I’d just turned 17 and I very clearly remember the battered leather box being laid out on the kitchen table. My godfather, a devout fisherman and moderately keen shot, had decided to rationalise the contents of his gun cabinet and reckoned that his old English side-by-side, a gun some long-dead relative of his had bought as a workhorse, would suit me well.
Beneath the initials
