Sue Smith first went shooting 20 years ago, when she was seven. Her father, a gun-smith, took her on a duck shoot. At 10, she was giver her first gun, ‘a 28-bore, the next size up from a 410’. She went pigeon shooting.

Then she started deer-stalking. ‘I got my first roebuck at 12,’ she says. ‘I’ve got a picture of it.’ In the following years she shot fallow deer, then red stags. Now she shoots pheasant and rabbits, too.

Smith, who works for a gunsmith as a professional gun finisher, is a crack shot. She is also anti those who are anti-blood sports, although she finds their views acceptable if they are vegetarians.

‘Most of them are just rent-a-gang, student recruits paid Pounds 15 a day to disrupt things.’

To those genuinely concerned about creatures’ suffering, she says: ‘An animal in an abattoir suffers far more because it knows it is going to be killed. When you stalk a deer, for instance, it doesn’t even know you are there.’ Occasionally, she concedes, a bird gets wounded. ‘But it is picked up instantly.’

She never feels upset about killing. ‘What? With the things I have to do as part of my work? Gutting rabits, skinning them, gralloching (gutting) deer and butchering them?’ Her father has started up an oven-ready enterprise.

She derives immense pleasure fom her sports. ‘I love being in the open air and getting exercise.’ Duck shooting is her favourite.

‘It’s the atmosphere out there on the marshes, when there are just three of you shooting in the dark. It’s freezing, and then you come back to a lovely fire.’ As far as pheasant shooting is concerned, she says: ‘It’s a bit naughty, but I suppose it is the thrill of seeing them drop from the sky.’

And rabbits? ‘You sit in clumps of grass or little hollows to get out of the wind and it’s fun because of the element of surprise.

Rosemary Cleverdon, the 49-year-old Joint master of the West Street Hunt, also enjoys the element of surprise. ‘We only get about one in every 25 foxes; they’re terribly crafty.

A former secretary in South Africa, she has been hunting for 15 years. ‘It’s exciting to see a pack work their way through a wood on the line of the fox. When they find a fox, the adrenalin gets going and the chase is rather fun.’ She says it gives her something to look forward to when everyone else is dreading winter.

The haunt takes out approximately 15 1/2 couples of hounds – ‘you talk about hounds in ‘couples’ and always take out an odd number’ – twice weekly from November to mid-March. In season, she probably dedicates about 25 hours a week to hunting.

With the other two Masters, she has to ‘draw covers’ (put the hounds into woods to try to find the fox) and decide where the hunt should go. She also has to obtain permission from the farmers, build a jump occasionally, organize fundraising events, visit the kennels, exercise her horses Mish and Dudley, and go to ‘masses of meetings.’

As Joint Master of the hunt, she maintains charge of the ‘field’ when they ‘move off’ (tells them where to go), and talks their way out of sticky situations if, for example, the hounds chase sheep or go into a garden.

She is not paid for her work; she pays a subscription to the hunt and contributes towards drinks at the meet. She estimates that a season’s hunting in her area costs at least Pounds 1,000.

‘A good coat costs about Pounds 800 and you pay aroung Pounds 250 for handmade leather boots,’ she adds.

The hunt expects to kill ’10 brace of foxes’ in a season. It is, she feels, the fairest and cleanest way to keep the animals down.

‘It’s a way of conservation – it is a service for the farmers – and the fox has an equal chance. Unlike shooting, you cannot just wound the animal.

‘Fortunately,’ she says, ‘we haven’t had too much trouble for the antis.’

Betty McKeever, an 86-year-old great grandmother and Master of the Blean beagles, says she had a ‘helluva’ time with them last season.

One of them – ‘some darned chap called Hey Ho or something’ – apparently gave them an awful ‘pasting’. In the subsequent chase, a policeman broke his ankle and had to be ‘carried off the field of battle.’ One day she was arrested.

As a matter of policy, she says she won’t allow ‘fisticuffs’. One of her fellow beaglers, she explains, disguises himself as a tree and watches out for people who squirt the hounds with acid.

Despite a recent hip replacement and failing eyesight, this season she has followed the hounds, walking for more than one and a half miles and has had a ‘rippling’ time.

McKeever’s mastership dates from 1909, when her father gave her some beagles. She has been in the parish almost all her life – she now lives in a part-13th century farmhouse with a pet bat.

As Master, she is responsible or the hounds’ upkeep. ‘I feed ’em on bibles (bullocks’ stomachs).’ They hunt from September – ‘as soon as we can get on the corn land’ – until March.

mcKeever has a huntsman and two or three amateur whips on a Saturday. On thursdays, a doctor, who is ‘supposed to be the best nuclear physicist in the world or something’, hunts the pack.

It is, says McKeever, an elderly or really young person’s sport. Three gentlemen in their seventies always go out with her.

She explains her enjoyment: ‘For a kick-off, you are in different country every time: Lovely woods, huge arable lands or marsh country.’ Beagling is very social, too, she says. On Boxing Day they meet at the Brewery, ‘all free drinks’.

If beagling is made illegal, she says firmly that she will move with her pack to Ireland. She doesn’t like killing anything unnecessarily but, she says, the hares damage fruit trees and are otherwise hunted by the fox, shot or snared.

‘I never feel guilty about killing them. I don’t think they think the way Beatrix Potter made out.’

If you have not heard of Una-Mary Parker yet, you soon will have. She is currently embroiled in scandals that involve sex, drugs, fraud and embezzlement, and last week she masterminded a hijack and broke down in tears after a friend took an overdose and died. ‘I have experienced some of these things,’ explains the charity queen-turned-novelist, ‘but 90 per cent come from my imagination. ‘ They occur, in fact, in her still unfinished second novel, Scandals (her first, Riches, is due out this summer).

Una-Mary Parker, 55, is named after her aunts Una and Mary. ‘My mother thought she was being clever – but neither of them left me a bean,’ she says in her baritone voice, laughing throatily.

Until this year, Parker was the ‘unrivalled’ organizer of charity balls. She spurns the tabloid label of society queen – ‘that conjures up visions of ladies in pearls, flowered hats and print frocks’ – preferring to be called an events organizer; ‘much more professional,’ she explains. She had been Tatler’s social diarist, attending as many as five fucntions a night and acquiring a contracts book that one imagines needed to be carried on wheels. ‘After 10 years on Tatler, I thought I would have a breakdown if I had to go to another cocktail party. ‘ But film premieres, dances, fashion shows and gala exhibitions for charity were another ball game.

Parker decided to ‘major on decor’ (ballrooms transformed into jungles and deserts), and to become a stickler for detailed organization. By the time Parker hung up her ballgown, she was arranging 19 major events a year, ‘practically each one attended by a member of the Royal Family’.

Such a blue-blooded coterie was familiar to Parker. She was a debutante who did the deb scene’, and had a coming out ball. ‘I came out in 1949 in court – at a drawing-room tea party in Buckingham Palace with the then King and Queen Elizabeth. ‘ Then she married her late husband, society photographer Archie Parker – and had ‘the traditional 1,200-guest wedding reception’.

Archie Parker left Lloyds to become a protrait photographer at a time when, Parker says, it wasn’t the done thing to leave the City to become a snapper. ‘We did all the royals at Windsor and some came to our Knightsbridge studio. ‘ they also photographed showbusiness personalities and celebrities (‘we spent a weekend with Somerset Maugham’).

Parker has no regrets about leaving her charity career. ‘I had gone as far as I could in 15 years, and writing had become an obsession for me. ‘ She ‘felt a bit shy and inhibited’ – understandably since she dubs her first novel, Riches, as being the Dynasty between the sheets. Nevertheless, she sent the half-written Riches – about the different ways enormous wealth affects people – to a New York agent. ‘She said it was terrific. ‘ Parker will not reveal how much money she’ll make, saying only that ‘there are a comfortable number of noughts involved’. Small wonder that she now intends to write a novel every 15 months.