Jeremy leaves gun in kitchen having shot rabbits without the sights on. For a start, especially with the twins in the house, Nevill would never have left it there. Secondly, what would JB have been doing shooting rabbits without the sight? (Bit convenient this rifle just lying around)
There were guns all over WHF, Vic. Guns in the gun cupboard, two on the stairs (used as a makeshift cupboard for the kitchen), a bandolier of bullets hanging on the door, a loaded shotgun under Nevill's bed at one stage. A gun on the settle would hardly have been out of place.
My family lived in Tolleshunt D'Arcy and surrounding villages for centuries. I'm a local historian, researching for a book about the district, so I know this part of the world quite well.
This was a tiny village in deepest Essex in the midst of gun and wildfowling country: the sort of village where many a house and tiny cottage had a gun on the settle.
Just 50 years previously, this was a wild, lawless place on Tiptree Heath: smuggler country within the district of a rotten borough, where locals were no lovers of authority or of snooping revenue men. It was then the sort of place where old families and money ruled with rough justice - or no justice at all. A place where the local lord of manor and GP, among others, bought elections by locking the other side's supporters in the pub with copious free beer and by hiring gangs of villains to help them personally beat up those who wore the other side's colours or who attempted to vote against their man.
Have things changed? Of course, yet old ways die hard. A few years ago I stood on the public highway, my back to a small farm, taking photographs of views across the fields to the coast. Out came the farmer: what did I think I was doing photographing his land! What was I up to? He stood behind his hedge, so I couldn't see whether he'd a shotgun or not, but I felt the menace of it in his tone.
Remember too that this was the 1980s, a time before the EU and its legions of bureaucrats and Health and Safety edicts had taken over our lives. It was a different world to ours.
