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

by Siegfried Sassoon

  Without wishing to ridicule him, for he was always kind and courteous, I may say that both his features and his tone of voice have something in common with the sheep who lift their mild munching faces to regard him while he plays an approach shot in his cautious, angular, and automatic style. He is one of those shrewdly timorous men who are usually made a butt of by their more confident associates. Falstaff would have borrowed fifty pounds off him, though he has the reputation of being close with his money. His vocabulary is as limited as his habit of mind, and he speaks with an old-fashioned word-clipping conciseness. His lips are pursed up as if in a perpetual whistle. The links – on which he knows every tussock and ant-hill intimately – are always ‘in awful good condition’; and ‘That’s a hot ’un!’ he exclaims when I make a long drive, or ‘That’s for Sussex!’ (a reference to the remote possibility that my ball may have gone over the river). But the best instance I can give of his characteristic mode of expressing himself is one which occurred when I once questioned him about a group of little grey stones among the laurel bushes outside his stable-yard. After whistling to his retriever he replied, ‘House-dogs bury in the shrubbery: shooting-dogs bury in the park’….

  Aunt Evelyn always enjoyed a game of croquet with him at a garden party.

  But in my spontaneous memories of Amblehurst I am always playing by myself. The sun is in my eyes as I drive off at the ‘long hole’ down to the river, and I usually slice my ball into a clump of may trees. I am ‘trying to do a good score’ – a purpose which seldom survives the first nine holes – but only half my attention is concentrated on the game. I am wondering, perhaps, whether that parcel from the second-hand bookshop at Reading will have arrived by the afternoon post; or I am vaguely musing about my money affairs; or thinking what a relief it is to have escaped from the tyranny of my Tripos at Cambridge. Outside the park the village children are making a shrill hubbub as they come out of school. But the sun is reddening beyond the straight-rising smoke of the village chimneys, and I must sling my clubs across my shoulder and mount my bicycle to pedal my way along the narrow autumn-smelling lanes. And when I get home Aunt Evelyn will be there to pour out my tea and tell me all about the Jumble Sale this afternoon; it was such a success, they made more than six pounds for the Mission to Deep-Sea Fishermen.

  The days were drawing in, though it was only the second week in October.

  ‘There’s a nice fire up in the schoolroom, Mr George; and a parcel of books come by the carrier’s van,’ said Miriam, when she was taking away the tea things.

  Miriam (and I might well have mentioned her before, since she had already been with Aunt Evelyn for nearly seven years) was a gaunt woman who had looked more than middle-aged ever since I first saw her. Miriam’s hair had perhaps begun by being golden, but it was now a faded yellow remnant, drawn tightly back from her broad forehead and crowned by a skimpy lace cap. Her wide-set eyes had a strained and patient expression, as though expecting to be rather sharply ordered to lug a heavy scuttle of coals up four flights of steep stairs. She was unobtrusively humpbacked and round shouldered, which suggested that when not carrying scuttles upstairs she had been burdened with heavy trays or had been stooping over a scullery sink to wash and wipe a lifetime of crockery. Her voice, too, had a long-suffering note in it – most noticeable when she was doing her best to be gay. These outward characteristics were the only legacy which she had received from her late mistress who had for a long period of years exploited Miriam’s abnormal willingness for work. In such drudgery she had used up her youth and maturity, thereby acquiring an habitual capacity for taking on her own shoulders a load of domestic duties which never seemed to have struck her as being excessive. She was what is known as ‘a treasure’. The difficulty, as Aunt Evelyn often said, was to persuade her to sit down and shut her eyes for a few minutes and allow the other maids to do their fair share of the housework. But Aunt Evelyn’s kindness only stimulated Miriam to renewed activity, and her response to ordinary civility and consideration reflected no credit at all on her former employer. In those days I used to look upon her as a bit of a joke, and I took for granted the innumerable little jobs she did for me. She was no more than an odd-looking factotum, whose homely methods and manners occasionally incurred my disapproval, for I had a well-developed bump of snobbishness as regards flunkeydom and carriage-and-pair ostentation as a whole. Now and again, however, I was remotely affected by the smile which used to light up her sallow humble face when I said something which pleased her. It is the memory of that smile which has helped me to describe her. For there was a loveliness of spirit in her which I did not recognize until it was too late for her to know it.

  On my way up to the schoolroom, which had formerly been known as ‘the day-nursery’, I decided that the name needed further promotion. ‘Study’ was inappropriate and sounded elderly. ‘Smoking-room’ wouldn’t do either, because I hadn’t begun smoking yet, although puffing my pipe by the fireside on winter evenings was a comfortable idea. ‘Library’, I thought (pausing in the dark passage with a hand on the brass door-knob) was too big a jump from ‘schoolroom’. Besides, there wasn’t any library. ‘Library’ meant glass-fronted bookcases with yellow busts of Julius Caesar and Cicero on the top. Entering the fire-lit room, I pounced on the bulky package which Miriam had deposited on the table. ‘Book-room’, I thought, as I tugged impetuously at the thick string. And ‘book-room’ it rather tentatively became.

  There was no doubt that I had a fondness for books – especially old ones. But my reading was desultory and unassimilative. Words made a muddled effect on my mind while I was busy among them, and they seldom caused any afterthoughts. I esteemed my books mostly for their outsides. I admired old leather bindings, and my fancy was tickled by the thought of firelight flickering on dim gilt, autumn-coloured backs – rows and rows of them, and myself in an armchair musing on the pleasant names of Addison and Steele, Gibbon and Goldsmith. And what wonderful bargains were to be discovered in the catalogues of second-hand booksellers at Birmingham! Only last week I had acquired (for seven and sixpence) Dr Burnet’s Rights of Princes in the Disposing of Ecclesiastical Benefices, 1685. FIRST EDITION. Original sheep, scarce. And there were Tillotson’s Sermons, ten imposing volumes in sage green morocco. I had bought them along with a twelve-volume edition of Doctor Johnson’s Works (in contemporary sprinkled calf), and had even read a few of the shorter Lives of the Poets (such as Garth, Broome, Mallet, and Sprat). I had also made a short-winded effort to read Rasselas….

  And now (disentangling the cord and rending the brown paper wrappings) Pope’s Homer had actually arrived. Six folio volumes, first edition, and they had only cost fifteen bob plus the postage. When I wrote for them (to a philanthropist named Cowler, at Reading) I made sure that someone else would have snapped them up. But no; here they were; in quite good condition, too. And how splendid, to be able to read both Pope and Homer at once! Homer had been impossible to enjoy in the fifth form at Ballboro’, but he would seem ever so much easier now. I resolved to read exactly a hundred lines every day until I waded through the whole six volumes. And when I’d marshalled them on the top shelf – for they were too tall to fit into any other – between the quarto sets of Smollett’s History of England and Tickell’s Addison, I solemnly abstracted the first volume of the Iliad and made a start.

  The wrath of Peleus’ son and that dire spring

  Of woes unnumbered, heavenly goddess, sing.…

  4

  To those who are expecting to see me in the saddle again it may seem that I have delayed over-long in acquiring my first hunter. But I take this opportunity of reminding my invisible audience that there was no imperative reason why I should ever have bought a horse at all; in fact candour compels me to confess that if I had been left to my own devices I should probably have spent the forty-five guineas on something else. For though I was living so quietly and paying Aunt Evelyn nothing for my keep, I never seemed to have much of a balance at the bank. And Mr Pennett, who appear
ed to consider me utterly irresponsible in matters of money, had so far refused to disgorge more than £450 a year out of my estimated income of £600. So, what with buying books and a new bicycle, and various other apparently indispensable odds and ends, I found myself ‘going in for economy’ when early in January Dixon began his campaign to revive my interest in the stable.

  During the winter I had been taking a walk every afternoon. I usually went five or six miles, but they soon became apathetic ones, and I was conscious of having no genuine connection with the countryside. Other people owned estates, or rented farms, or did something countrified; but I only walked along the roads or took furtive short cuts across the fields of persons who might easily have bawled at me if they had caught sight of me. And I felt shy and ‘out of it’ among the local landowners – most of whose conversation was about shooting. So I went mooning, more and more moodily, about the looming landscape, with its creaking-cowled hop-kilns and whirring flocks of starlings and hop-poles piled in pyramids like soldiers’ tents. Often when I came home for five o’clock tea I felt a vague desire to be living somewhere else – in 1850, for instance, when everything must have been so comfortable and old-fashioned, like the Cathedral Close in Trollope’s novels. The weather was too bad for golf, and even ‘young’ Squire Maundle was obliged to admit that the Amblehurst course was in far from first-rate condition. And there never seemed to be any reason for going to London, although, of course, there were interesting things to see there. (Aunt Evelyn was always intending to run up for the day and go to a matinee of Beerbohm Tree’s new Shakespearean production.)

  I seldom spoke to anyone while I was out for my walks, but now and again I would meet John Homeward, the carrier, on his way back from the county town where he went three days a week. Homeward was a friendly man: I always ‘passed the time of day’ with him. He was a keen cricketer and one of Dixon’s chief cronies. The weather and next year’s cricket were the staple topics of our conversation. Homeward had been making his foot-pace journeys with his hooded van and nodding horse ever since I could remember, and he seemed an essential feature of the ten miles across the Weald to Ashbridge (a somnolent town which I associated with the smell of a brewery and the grim fact of people being hung in the gaol there). All the year round, whether there was snow on the ground or blossom on the fruit trees, the carrier’s van crawled across the valley with its cargo of utilities, but Homeward was always alone with his horse, for he never took passengers. In my mind’s eye he is invariably walking beside his van, for he always got out at the steep hill which winds down to the Weald. His burly figure and kindly bearded face must have gone up and down that hill about five thousand times before he retired to prosper with a small public-house. I used to wonder what he thought about while on the road, for he had the look of a man who was cogitant rather than vegetative. Dixon told me that he spent his whole time weighing the pros and cons of the half-crown bets which he made on races. In matters connected with the Turf he was a compendium of exact knowledge, and his profession allowed him ample leisure to make up his mind about likely outsiders and nicely handicapped horses at short odds.

  Another feature of the local landscape was Joey, who worked on the roads, mostly at flint-breaking. I never knew his real name, though I’d known him by sight ever since I could remember. He was a lizard-faced man and the skin of his throat hung loose and shrivelled. I had named him Joey – in my mind – after a tortoise which I had owned when I was a child. Sitting on a heap of stones on the main road, alone with the humming telegraph poles and the clack of his hammer, he always saluted me as I passed, but I never conversed with him and he never seemed to get any older. He might have been any age between forty and seventy….

  But I must hurry along a bit, for it is high time that I was on the back of my new hunter.

  On New Year’s Day I was half-pedestrian and half-bicyclist, with no idea of being anything else. Within a week I found myself a full-blown horse-owner, and was watching Dixon exerting himself with a hammer and chisel as he opened the neat wooden case which contained a new saddle from that old-established West End firm, Campion & Webble. The responsibility for these stimulating occurrences rested with Dixon.

  One morning after breakfast Miriam announced that Dixon had something he particularly wished to speak to me about and was waiting in the servants’ hall. Wondering what on earth it could be, I asked her to send him up to the book-room. I was there before him; a minute or two later the sound of his deliberate tread was audible in the passage; he knocked portentously and entered respectfully, introducing a faint odour of the stables. He had an air of discreetly subdued excitement and there was a slight flush about the cheekbones of his keen face. Without delay he produced a copy of Horse and Hound from his pocket, unfolded it carefully, and handed it to me, merely saying, ‘I want you to have a look at that, sir.’ That, as indicated by his thumb, was the following item in Tattersall’s weekly sale list.

  ‘The Property of Cosmo Gaffikin, Esq., Harkaway III. Chestnut gelding; aged; sixteen hands; a good hunter; an exceptionally brilliant performer; well known with the Dumborough Hounds, with whom he has been regularly hunted to date. Can be seen and ridden by appointment with Stud Groom, Mistley House, Wellbrook.’

  I read the advertisement in a stupefied way, but Dixon allowed me no time for hesitation or demur.

  ‘It struck me, sir, that you might do worse than go over and have a look at him,’ he remarked, adding, ‘I saw him run in the Hunt Cup two years ago; he’s a very fine stamp of hunter.’

  ‘Did he win?’ I asked.

  ‘No, sir. But he ran well, and I think Mr Gaffikin made too much of him in the first mile or two.’ For lack of anything to say, I re-read the advertisement.

  ‘Well, sir, if you’ll excuse me saying so, you don’t get a chance like that every day.’

  An hour later Dixon had got me into the dogcart and was driving me over to Wellbrook – a distance of ten miles. It was a mild, grey morning, and as I felt that I had lost control over what was happening, there was no need to feel nervous about the impending interview. In response to my tentative inquiries Dixon displayed a surprisingly intimate knowledge of everything connected with Harkaway and his present owner, and when I suggested that the price expected would be too high for me he went so far as to say that he had very good reason to believe that he could be bought for fifty pounds.

  When we arrived at Mistley House it soon became clear even to my unsuspicious mind that the stud groom had been expecting us. When Harkaway was led out of his stable my first impression was of a noticeably narrow animal with a white blaze on his well-bred and intelligent face. But I felt more impelled to admire than to criticize, and a few minutes later Mr Gaffikin himself came clattering into the stable-yard on a jaunty black mare with a plaited mane. The stud groom explained me as ‘Mr Sherston, sir; come over from Butley to have a look at Harkaway, sir.’ Mr Gaffikin was about thirty-five and had a rather puffy face and full-sized brown moustache. He was good-humoured and voluble and slangy and easy going, and very much the sportsman. He had nothing but praise for Harkaway, and seemed to feel the keenest regret at parting with him.

  ‘But the fact is,’ he explained confidentially, ‘the old horse isn’t quite up to my weight and I want to make room for a young ’chaser. But you’re a stone lighter than I am, and he’d carry you like a bird – like a bird, wouldn’t you, old chap?’ – and he pulled Harkaway’s neat little ears affectionately. ‘Yes,’ he went on, ‘I don’t mind telling you he’s the boldest performer I’ve ever been on. Nailing good hunter. I’ve never known him to turn his head. Absolute patent-safety; I can guarantee you that much, Mr Sherston.’

  Whereupon he urged me to jump on the old horse’s back and see how I liked the feel of him. (He used the adjective ‘old’ as if in the case of Harkaway age was an immensely valuable quality.) Conscious of the disparity between my untidy grey flannel trousers and Mr Gaffikin’s miraculously condensed white gaiters and perfectly cut brown breec
hes, I clambered uncouthly into the saddle. As I jogged out of the yard I felt myself unworthy of my illustrious conveyance. Conscious of the scrutiny of the experts whose eyes were upon me, I also felt that Mr Gaffikin was conferring a privilege on me in affording me this facility for making up my mind about ‘the old horse’. When I had been down to the gate and back again everyone agreed that Harkaway and myself were admirably suited to one another.

  ‘I’m asking fifty for him – and he’d probably make a bit more than that at Tatts. But I’m awful keen to find the old chap a really good home, and I’d be glad to let you have him for forty-five,’ Mr Gaffikin assured me, adding, ‘Forty-five guineas: it’s very little for a horse of his class, and he’s got many a hard season in him yet.’ I agreed that the price was extremely moderate. ‘Well, you must come in and have a bit of lunch, and then we can talk it over.’ But it was obvious that the transaction was as good as concluded, and Dixon had already made up his mind to put a bit more flesh on the old horse before he was much older.