The Complete Memoirs of George Sherston 1 - Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man

by Siegfried Sassoon

  As I was unable to say anything at all in reply, he continued, with gentle jocularity (running his eyes over the brown corduroy riding-suit which I was just beginning to grow out of), ‘And what have you done with your pony? You look almost as if you’d lost him.’

  At this appallingly intuitive comment I gazed guiltily down at my gaiters and muttered abruptly, ‘Oh, I’m going to take him out after tea; I was just out for a walk.’

  My voice died unhappily away into the dusty sunshine…. After tea! For all I knew, darling Rob Roy might be dead by then…. For two pins I could have burst into tears at that moment, but I managed to control my feelings: Mr Star tactfully informed me that he must be getting on his way, and our constrained interview ended. Half an hour afterwards I slunk into the stable-yard with a sinking heart. Dixon’s black retriever was dozing with his head out of his kennel under the walnut tree. No one seemed to be about. I could hear the usual intermittent snorts and stampings from inside the stable. There were two stalls and a loose-box. My pony occupied the stall in the middle. My heart thumped as I peeped over the door, the upper half of which was open. Rob Roy was facing me; he was attached to the ‘pillar-reins’, still saddled and bridled. I am certain that his face wore a look of amusement. A sense of profound relief stole over me…. A moment later the stable-boy came whistling out of the barn with a bucket. On seeing me he grinned derisively and I retreated toward the house in dignified silence. As I passed the kitchen window Mrs Sosburn, the fat, red-faced cook, dropped the cucumber which she was peeling and greeted me with a startled squeal.

  ‘Lawks, Master Georgie, whatever ’ave you bin up to? The mistress ’as been in an awful state about you, and Dixon’s gone down to the village to look for you. We thought you must ’ave broke your neck when the pony came trotting back without you.’

  And the well-meaning woman bustled officiously out to make sure I hadn’t any bones broken, followed by the gaping kitchen-maid; a moment later the parlour-maid came helter-skelter out of the pantry, and I was inundated by exasperating female curiosity and concern.

  ‘Gracious goodness! To think of him going off by himself like that, and no wonder he got thrown off, and the wonder was he wasn’t killed, and the pony too,’ they chorused; whereupon my aunt’s head popped out of an upper window, and they clucked like hens as they reassured her about my undamaged return.

  Infuriated by all this feminine fussiness I pushed past them and scurried up the back stairs to the schoolroom, whither Aunt Evelyn immediately followed me with additional exclamations and expostulations. I was now not only humiliated but sulky, and had I been a few years younger my rudeness would have ended in my being smacked and sent to bed. As it was I was merely informed that unless I learnt to behave better I should never grow up into a nice man, and was left alone with my tragic thoughts….

  Next morning I paid my customary visit to the stable with a few lumps of sugar in my pocket. Dixon was polishing up a stirrup-iron at the door of the little harness room; he stopped in the middle of a jaunty snatch of song to give me his usual greeting. All my embarrassment faded out of me. His impassive face made not the slightest reference to yesterday’s calamity and this tactful silence more than ever assured me of his infinite superiority to those chattering females in the kitchen.

  4

  Since the continuity of these memoirs is to depend solely on my experiences as a sportsman, I need not waste many words on the winter, spring, summer and autumn that chronologically followed the last episode which I narrated. Outwardly monotonous, my life was made up of that series of small inward happenings which belong to the development of any intelligent little boy who spends a fair amount of time with no companion but himself. In this way I continued to fabricate for myself an intensely local and limited world. How faintly the vibrations of the outer world reached us on that rural atmosphere it is not easy to imagine in this later and louder age. When I was twelve years old I hadn’t been to London half a dozen times in my life, and the ten sleepy miles to the county town, whither the village carrier’s van went three times a week, were a road to romance. Ten miles was a long way when I was a child. Over the hills and far away, I used to think to myself, as I stared across the orchards and meadows of the Weald, along which ran the proverbially slow railway line to London.

  There were a few events which created in my mind an impression out of proportion to the architecture of my earthly ideas. Among them was Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee (though I cannot pretend to remember exactly how it struck me at the time, except that I counted fifty bonfires from the hill near our house). This was balanced by Canterbury Cricket Week. (I went there by train with Dixon and spent a long hot day watching Prince Ranjitsinhjii make about 175 not out. My aunt’s black Persian cat was called Ranjii, which made the celebrated Indian cricketer quite a comfortable idea for me to digest.)

  Almost my favourite books were The Palace in the Garden and Four Winds Farm, both by Mrs Molesworth. Naturally there were other more impressive phenomena which cropped up in my mental existence, such as Scott’s Ivanhoe and Longfellow’s poem Excelsior, and Beethoven’s piano sonatas. But all these things clothed themselves in local associations. Sir Walter Scott had no existence outside of my aunt’s voice as she read him aloud in the evening, Longfellow was associated with Mr Star in the schoolroom, Beethoven lived somewhere behind the faded silk on the back of the upright piano, and I never imagined any of them as in any other edition than those in which I knew them by sight. The large photograph of Watt’s picture, ‘Love and Death’, which hung in the drawing-room, gave me the same feeling as the ‘Moonlight’ sonata (my aunt could only play the first two movements).

  In this brightly visualized world of simplicities and misapprehensions and mispronounced names everything was accepted without question. I find it difficult to believe that young people see the world in that way nowadays, though it is probable that a good many of them do. Looking back across the years I listen to the summer afternoon cooing of my aunt’s white pigeons, and the soft clatter of their wings as they flutter upward from the lawn at the approach of one of the well-nourished cats. I remember, too, the smell of strawberry jam being made; and Aunt Evelyn with a green bee-veil over her head…. The large rambling garden, with its Irish yews and sloping paths and wind-buffeted rose arches, remains to haunt my sleep. The quince tree which grew beside the little pond was the only quince tree in the world. With a sense of abiding strangeness I see myself looking down from an upper window on a confusion of green branches shaken by the summer breeze. In an endless variety of dream-distorted versions the garden persists as the background of my unconscious existence.

  I had always been given to understand that I had a delicate constitution. This was one of the reasons which my aunt urged against my being sent to school when Mr Pennett, the pink-faced solicitor who had charge of our affairs, paid us one of his periodic visits and the problem of my education was referred to in my presence. The solicitor used to come down from London for the day. In acknowledgement of his masculinity my aunt always conceded him the head of the table at lunch. I can remember him carving a duck with evident relish, and saying in somewhat unctuous tones, ‘Have you reconsidered, my dear Miss Evelyn, the well-worn subject of a school for our young friend on my left?’

  And I can hear my aunt replying in a fluttering voice that she had always been nervous about me since I had pneumonia (though she knew quite well that it was only slight inflammation of the lungs, and more than two years ago at that). Fixing my gaze on his fat pearl tie-pin, I wondered whether I really should ever go to school, and what it would feel like when I got there. Nothing was said about Mr Star, but Mr Pennett usually had a private conversation with him on the subject of my progress.

  ‘Your guardian seems an extremely well-informed gentleman,’ Mr Star would say to me after one of these interviews. For Mr Pennett had been to Harrow, and when Mr Star spoke of him I was vaguely aware that he had made the modest old man feel more humble than usual. My aun
t was perfectly satisfied with Mr Star, and so was I. But the solicitor knew that I was growing out of my tutor; and so, perhaps, did Mr Star himself…. Indeed, I was getting to be quite a big boy for my age. People in the village were saying that I was ‘filling out a fair treat’, and ‘shooting up no end’….

  To one little incident I can give an exact date – not always an easy thing to do when one is looking back such a long way. It was in 1896, on the last Wednesday in May, and I had just returned from my afternoon ride. My aunt was out in the garden, wearing her leather gauntlets to cut some lilac, when I dashed excitedly across the lawn shouting, ‘Isn’t it splendid, Auntie – the Prince of Wales has won the Derby!’

  ‘Oh, how splendid – has he really?’ she exclaimed, dropping the branch of white lilac which she had just snipped off the bush with her huge pair of scissors.

  ‘Yes,’ I continued, bursting with the important news, ‘we stopped at the station on our way home, and the station-master showed Dixon the telegram.’

  ‘What was it called?’ she queried.

  ‘Persimmon, of course; I should have thought you’d have known that!’

  ‘Really, Georgie dear, you shouldn’t speak so rudely to your aunt.’

  I was silent for a moment, feeling crestfallen. Then I remarked, in a subdued voice: ‘Earwig was third.’

  ‘Earwig! What an odd name for a horse!’ And then, as I bent down to pick up a spray of lilac, she added, ‘Good gracious, darling, how you’ve grown out of your riding-breeks! I really must get you another corduroy suit’….

  But my increasing size had another and far more important effect. I was growing out of Rob Roy. My aunt showed her inevitable lack of initiative in the matter: she said that a small pony was safer for me. During the summer, however, Dixon persistently drew her attention to the obvious fact that my legs were getting nearer and nearer to the ground, although he had the highest respect for gallant little Rob Roy, who was beloved by all who knew him. The end of it was that a ‘perfect home’ was found for him, and he trotted out of my life as gaily as he had trotted into it. After his departure I had a good cry by myself in the kitchen garden.

  ‘I shall never be so fond of anyone again as I was of Rob Roy,’ I thought, mopping my eyes with a grubby handkerchief. Subsequent events proved my prophecy incorrect. And anyhow it was a fine day, early in September; a few minutes afterwards I was clambering up into a plum tree. The plums were particularly good that year.

  As might be expected, Dixon lost no time in discovering an adequate substitute for my vanished favourite. For several weeks he remained reticent on the subject, except that once or twice he mentioned mysteriously that he thought he had heard of something. Conscientious enquiries among coachmen, innkeepers, and the local vet, and the insertion of an advertisement in the county paper, culminated in the arrival of a fourteen-hand, mouse-coloured Welsh cob called Sheila. The sight of Sheila struck awe into my heart. She looked as much too big for me as Rob Roy had looked too small. I also divined that she was enormously expensive.

  ‘Do you really think Master George’ll be able to manage her, Dixon?’ asked my aunt, regarding Sheila with deprecatory approbation. Dixon reiterated his belief that the mare was thoroughly handy and as quiet as an old sheep: he added that we’d never get such a bargain again for thirty pounds.

  ‘Jump on her back, Master George, and see if she doesn’t give you a good feel,’ suggested that inexorably encouraging voice which was to make a sportsman of me. Whereupon he quickly circumvented the obvious fact that this was no jumping matter by giving me a leg-up into the saddle (a nearly full-sized one). There was no doubt at all that I was a long way from the ground. Rather timidly I surveyed the stable-yard from my new altitude. Then Dixon led the cob carefully through the gate into the paddock and she broke into a springy trot.

  5

  November, with its darkening afternoons and smell of burning weeds, found me gradually becoming acclimatized to ‘the new mare’, as I importantly called her (using Dixonian phraseology). The groom was able to give me all his attention, since my aunt never rode in the winter. We now went longer distances; sometimes he would tell me that we were ‘on the edge of the Dumborough country’, and he would pull up and point out to me, a few miles away, some looming covert where they often went to draw.

  The Dumborough, as I afterwards discovered, was a scrambling sort of country to hunt in – heavily wooded and hilly. But as we turned away from its evening-lighted landscape I would listen eagerly to Dixon’s anecdotes of the sport he had seen there. He spoke often of Mr Macdoggart, Lord Dumborough’s hard-riding agent, and how one year he had seen him win the Hunt Steeplechase by a short head from a famous ‘gentleman rider’: and how, another year, Mr Macdoggart had got concussion of the brain while riding in the same race.

  Our afternoon expeditions usually took us in the Dumborough direction, and I suspect that Dixon always had a faint hope that we might ‘chip in with the hounds’, though he knew too well that the foxes rarely ran our way. He also showed an increasing antipathy to the high road, and was continually taking short cuts across the country.

  ‘It’ll do them good to have a pipe-opener,’ he would say, turning in at a gate and setting his horse going up a long stretch of meadow, and my confidence in Sheila increased as I scuttled after him.

  Sometimes we would pretend to be ‘riding a finish’, and I would say, ‘Tom, show me how Mr Macdoggart won the Hunt Cup on Nobleman.’

  I had never seen a race in my life; nor had I ever been to a meet of the hounds. But I assiduously studied the novels of Surtees, of which my aunt had a complete set. She dipped into them herself now and again, and we often used to talk about Mr Jorrocks.

  As Christmas approached Dixon drew her attention to my rapid improvement as a rider. Finally he took the bull by the horns and intimated that it would do me no harm to go and have a look at the hounds. She seemed taken aback by this, but he assured her that he would only take me as far as the meet. When she suggested that he could drive me there in the dogcart Dixon’s face assumed such an air of disapproval that she gave way at once, and it became only a matter of waiting for the next ‘near meet’.

  ‘I think, ’m, you can rely on me to take proper care of Master George,’ he remarked rather stiffly; the next moment he looked at me with a grin of delight followed by a solemn wink with the eye furthest away from my aunt.

  A few days later I found him studying the local paper in the leather-smelling little harness room. ‘They’re meeting at Finchurst Green on Saturday,’ he announced with appropriate seriousness. It was an important moment in my life. Finchurst Green was not quite nine miles away.

  It was a grey and chilly world that I went out into when I started for my first day’s fox-hunting. The winter-smelling air met me as though with a hint that serious events were afoot. Silently I stood in the stable-yard while Dixon led Sheila out of her stall. His demeanour was business-like and reticent. The horses and their accoutrements were polished up to perfection, and he himself, in his dark-grey clothes and hard black hat, looked a model of discretion and neatness. The only one who lacked confidence was myself.

  Stuffing a packet of sandwiches into my pocket and pulling on my uncomfortably new gloves, I felt half aware of certain shortcomings in my outward appearance. Ought one really to go out hunting in a brown corduroy suit with a corduroy jockey-cap made to match the suit? Did other boys wear that sort of thing?… I was conscious, too, that Dixon was regarding me with an unusually critical eye. Mute and flustered, I mounted. Sheila seemed very fresh, and the saddle felt cold and slippery. As we trotted briskly through the village everything had an austerely unfamiliar look about it, and my replies to Dixon were clumsy and constrained.

  Yet the village was its ordinary village self. The geese were going single file across the green, and Sibson, the lame shoeing-smith, was clinking his hammer on the forge as usual. He peered out at us as we passed, and I saluted him with a slightly forlorn wave of the hand. He
grinned and ducked his head. Sheila had had her shoes looked to the day before, so he knew all about where we were going.

  As we jogged out of the village, Dixon gazed sagaciously at the sky and said with a grim smile, ‘I’ll bet they run like blazes today; there’s just the right nip in the air,’ and he made the horses cock their ears by imitating the sound of a hunting-horn – a favourite little trick of his. Secretly I wondered what I should do if they ‘ran like blazes’. It was all very well for him – he’s been out hunting dozens of times!

  As we neared the meet I became more and more nervous. Not many of the hunting people came from our side of the country, and we saw no other horsemen to distract my attention until we rounded a bend of the road, and there at last was Finchurst Green, with the hounds clustering in a corner and men in red coats and black coats moving to and fro to keep their horses from getting chilled. But this is not the last meet that I shall describe, so I will not invent details which I cannot remember, since I was too awed and excited and self-conscious to be capable of observing anything clearly.

  Once we had arrived, Dixon seemed to become a different Dixon, so dignified and aloof that I scarcely dared to speak to him. Of course I knew what it meant: I was now his ‘young gentleman’ and he was only the groom who had brought me to ‘have a look at the hounds’. But there was no one at the meet who knew me, so I sat there, shy and silent – aware of being a newcomer in a strange world which I did not understand. Also I was quite sure that I should make a fool of myself. Other people have felt the same, but this fact would have been no consolation to me at the time, even if I could have realized it.

  My first period of suspense ended when with much bobbing up and down of hats the cavalcade moved off along the road. I looked round for Dixon, but he allowed me to be carried on with the procession; he kept close behind me, however. He had been sensible enough to refrain from confusing me with advice before we started, and I can see now that his demeanour continued to be full of intuitive tactfulness. But he was talking to another groom, and I felt that I was being scrutinized and discussed. I was riding alongside of a large, lolloping lady in a blue habit; she did not speak to me; she confined herself to a series of expostulatory remarks to her horse which seemed too lively and went bouncing along sideways with its ears back, several times bumping into Sheila, whose behaviour was sedately alert.