My love of shooting started on a holiday back to South Africa with Bruce’s brother John’s pellet gun. But it really kicked off when I was nine, the day I was given Niels’s old BSA Meteor for my birthday. I’ve already told that story in The Mallorca Days, but what matters is that from that point on, I was out in the garden most afternoons, seeing what I could hit.
At first, it was just cans and makeshift targets—whatever I could prop up on a wall or stick in a tree. But I eventually set my sights on Minah birds. They were loud, invasive, and aggressive toward other birds, so I convinced myself I was helping the local ecosystem. Whether that was true or not is debatable, but at the time it felt like reason enough.
But until then, I’d never fired a proper firearm. That changed one afternoon after the following happened:
I was standing in the driveway of 44 First Avenue with my pellet gun loaded when Niels arrived home from work in his Range Rover. He pulled in, got out, and greeted me. Just as he did, a dove came tearing up the driveway—fast and low. Instinct took over. I swung from the hip, fired, and there was a dull thud. The bird folded mid-flight, already dead, and came to rest on the tiles outside the kitchen door.
Niels stared at me like I’d just levitated.
“That’s it,” he said. “You’re coming shooting this weekend.”
I could hardly believe it. The weekend was already in the diary—one of Niels’s regular winter trips with his mates down to the Orange Free State that, up until this point, I’d never been invited to. We stayed in an old farmhouse, and the shoot was run by a grizzled ex–big game hunter from Kenya. His name escapes me, but he took me under his wing immediately.
That Friday night was quiet. Dinner, some friendly ribbing from the grown-ups, and then early to bed. The plan was to be out on the dams before sunrise, waiting for the spur-wing geese—either coming in from feeding or heading out to the fields, I forget which.
The next morning, I crouched beside the old hunter in the reeds, shotgun ready. “Make sure you give it a good lead,” he whispered. “At least six feet.”
A goose came sweeping in low. I swung through, fired, and dropped it clean into the water. First spur-wing goose of the season, apparently—a minor celebrity moment. I was buzzing. I hadn’t slept a wink the night before, thanks to adrenaline and sharing a room with Niels and his industrial-grade snoring, but none of that mattered.
Not long after, I begged my mother to buy me a shotgun. We settled on a 20-bore SKB—lighter than a 12-gauge, since I was still a scrawny fourteen-year-old who hadn’t quite hit his growth spurt. But I was ambitious: I convinced her to let me get the 3-inch Magnum version.
Now, a standard 12-gauge shell carries an ounce and a quarter of shot. A 3-inch 20-bore Magnum carries the same—just in a longer, narrower case. But because the gun itself is so much lighter, the recoil is monstrous. It kicks like a mule.
I remember the anticipation vividly. After the six-week licence wait, we finally picked up the shotgun from the shop—Laxton’s, in Bree Street. Over the following weeks, I went to Niels’s Wood Creations factory and, with the help of a lovely Zimbabwean guy named Sinet, I built a custom wooden case for the SKB, lined with felt. It was beautiful. I was in love.
Of course, you couldn’t exactly let loose with a shotgun in suburban Johannesburg. But I did find a spot behind the servant’s quarters where I could get away with firing the odd shell. Just once or twice a month, just for the thrill of it.
By that point, though, my old BSA Meteor was starting to feel underpowered. I knew Niels had a .303 Lee-Enfield from his South African army days, tucked away in his room—never returned, obviously—but I wasn’t all that interested in that.
What I wanted was the .22 FN Browning pump-action. A wicked little rifle.
Eventually, I wore him down. One weekend we took it to Three Falls. Technically unlicensed at the time—my mum got it registered later—but Niels had managed to source some .22 long rifle ammo. We were staying in Pine Cottage, not our usual Willow, and I still remember that moment so clearly.
At one point, my mum surveyed the cliffs on the other side of the river and said, “Why don’t you put up some targets over there?”
Niels laughed. “Mum, it’s a .22, not a bloody howitzer.”
We stuck some beer cans on the rocks behind the cottage and spent the afternoon pinging them, then moved on to longer shots into the dam. Watching those sharp, distant plumes of water as the rounds hit—well, it made my pellet gun feel like a toy.
When we got back to Joburg, I convinced Niels to let me clean the rifle. Eventually, it migrated into my room. At the local gun shop, I discovered these odd little things called .22 caps—short copper rimfire rounds with no powder, just the primer. They still made a noise, but nothing like a full .22 LR round, and they were infinitely more powerful than a pellet gun.
Later, I convinced Mum to let me get a silencer fitted to the .22. After that, I never looked back. There wasn’t a Minah bird safe in Illovo.
And then came the coin story.
One day at school, Richard Bridgman told one of the jocks—David Heimann—that I could hit a coin, or even a bit of broken bottle, out of the air with my .22. David scoffed and called bullshit. So I invited him over.
One afternoon he came over, and I showed him.
Just a couple of days ago, in our St. John’s 1984 WhatsApp group, I mentioned something offhand about how I’d been good at shooting back in the day, though maybe not in time to do much with it.
David replied:
“Peter, you weren’t great. You weren’t good. You were freaking amazing. I’ll never forget watching you take a coin out of the air with a .22. I’ve still got no idea where those bullets ended up.”
He’s not wrong. If you can take something out of the air with a .22, then shooting with a shotgun is... well, insultingly easy.