Building a Billion by Charlie Berridge

Author:Charlie Berridge
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harriman House

14. Straight Shooting

There’s a hunter-gatherer streak in all of us but not all of us pander to it. I did and have gone further than most in scratching that particular itch. A day out shooting is also a great way of meeting like-minded business types and the occasional scallywag.

My first shotgun was a Spanish side-by-side twelve-bore which I bought for £12 from a guy in North New Milton via an ad in the local rag. You didn’t need a shotgun licence in those days. The barrels had a dent in them and the stock rattled like a loose tooth. I was twenty-four. Tim Ham had a gun and permission to shoot pigeons on eight hundred acres in Whiteparish. I hadn’t got a clue and without any guidance didn’t really understand the golden rules about gun safety. I blew a smoky hole in the ground once when the thing went off because I was walking with it loaded and unbroken. In hindsight I was bloody lucky I didn’t blow my foot off or worse. I learnt my lesson and from then on safety became paramount.

After my marriage to my first wife, when we lived in our two-up-two-down with an outside loo, there was little money. Bill Stone and I were trying to build at Buckland Park and live on £8 a week. That first Christmas of married life, Tim Ham and I were on the banks of the Lymington River with our guns early one evening. There were two pheasants roosting in a tree and I shot them and one of them fell into the water below. I waded in up to my chest to retrieve the dead bird and proudly carried it home for our Christmas dinner.

I guess the wading episode persuaded me to get a dog. I’d grown up with dogs but nothing that would retrieve a dead bird without eating it. I had my first dog, Sandy, whilst still at school but he was run over. I ran home to find that my father had buried him. This was a great loss as he was only a puppy and my first real friend. I was distraught.

I recall that we had a mad female vet in Lymington. I was convinced she was a witch. She dressed in black and had a large protruding nose. I took our dog to see her for an injection against distemper and when I returned for the animal she said that the dog had broken a window and escaped. I found him and took him home. A few months later the dog contracted distemper and was in a sorry state. He hadn’t been touched by the vet at all. One evening he became very ill and was not going to last the night so I decided that the best thing I could do was to put it out of its misery. I took him to Tim Ham’s home where he was building a septic tank.

I wanted to shoot the dog and bury him in the hole.

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