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

by Siegfried Sassoon

  3

  My successful scramble across the Potford Vale obliterated all the dreariness and disappointment of my days with the Dumborough. My faith in fox-hunting had been reinforced in the nick of time, and I joggled home feeling a hero. Highly strung old Harkaway seemed to share my elation. His constitution was equal to a fast hunt, but he needed to be taken home early in the afternoon. The long dragging days in the Dumborough woodlands wore him out. Even now he had a dozen miles to go to his stable, but they seemed short ones to me for I was thinking all the way how pleased Dixon would be. For the first time in my career as an independent sportsman I had a big story to tell him.

  In the light of my mature experience I should say that I had very little to tell Dixon, unless I had told him the truth. The truth (which I couldn’t have admitted, even to my inmost self) was that my performance had consisted not so much in riding to hounds as in acting as a hindrance to Harkaway’s freedom of movement while he followed Mr Gaffikin’s mare over several miles of closely-fenced country – almost pulling my arms out of their sockets in the process. Had I told the truth I’d have said that during that gallop I was flustered, uncomfortable, and out of breath; that at every fence we jumped I was all over the saddle; and that, for all I had known, there might have been no hounds at all, since they were always a couple of fields ahead of us, and we were, most of us, merely following the Master, who already knew exactly which way they would go.

  I lay stress on these facts because it is my firm belief that the majority of fox-hunting riders never enjoy a really ‘quick thing’ while it is in progress. Their enjoyment, therefore, mainly consists in talking about it afterwards and congratulating themselves on their rashness or their discretion, according to their temperaments. One man remembers how he followed the first whip over an awkward stile, while another thinks how cleverly he made use of a lucky lane or a line of gates. Neither of them was able to watch the hounds while they were running. And so it was with me. Had I been alone I should have lost the hounds within three fields of the covert where they started.

  But my complacency had been unperturbed by any such self-scrutinies when I clattered into the stable-yard in the twilight, just as Dixon emerged from the barn with a sieve of oats and a stable-lantern. His quick eyes were all over the horse before I was out of the saddle.

  ‘Going a bit short in front, isn’t he?’ was his first remark.

  I agreed that he was going a bit queer. Dixon had seen in a moment what I had failed to notice in twelve miles. My feeling of importance diminished. I followed the two of them into the loose-box. Dixon’s lantern at once discovered an over-reach on the heel of one of Harkaway’s front feet. No reference was made to my having failed to notice it; and as we said, it was a clean cut, which was much better than a bruise. When asked whether it had been a good day, I replied ‘Topping’, but Dixon seemed in no hurry to hear about it, and he went out to get the gruel. I stood silent while the old horse drank it eagerly – Dixon remarking with satisfaction that he’d ‘suck the bottom out of the bucket if he wasn’t careful’.

  Unable to restrain myself any longer, I blurted out my news: ‘They ran slap across the vale for about twenty-five minutes; a five-mile point without a check. It must have been seven or eight miles as they ran!’

  Dixon, who was already busy brushing the dried mud off Harkaway’s legs, straightened himself with a whistle. ‘Did you see it all right?’

  ‘The whole way; there were only ten up at the finish.’

  ‘Did they kill him?’

  ‘No, he got into a rabbit-hole just outside Cranfield Park. The Master said it was no good trying to get him out as it was such a big place.’ Dixon looked puzzled.

  ‘That’s funny,’ he remarked. ‘They told me at the “Bull” last night that he’s a great one for terriers and digging out foxes. A lot of the subscribers complain about it. They say he’s never happy unless he’s got his head down a rabbit-hole!’

  With a knowing air I told him that Mr Gaffikin had said it was a drag.

  ‘By Jingo! If it was a drag they must have gone like blazes!’ I asserted that they did go like blazes.

  ‘You must have jumped some big places.’

  There was a note of surprise in his voice which made me feel that I had been doing more than was expected of me. Could it be possible, I wondered, that Dixon was actually proud of his pupil? And, indeed, there must have been a note of jubilation in his voice when, as he bent down to brush the mud off Harkaway’s hocks, he asked: ‘Did Mr Gaffikin see him jumping?’

  ‘Yes. I foll—I was close to him all the way.’

  Perhaps it was just as well that Harkaway, munching away at his feed, was unable to lift his long-suffering face and say what he thought about my horsemanship! Looking back at that half-lit stable from the detachment of today, I can almost believe that, after I had gone indoors to my boiled eggs, Dixon and the old horse had a confidential chat, like the old friends that they were. Anyhow, the horse and his groom understood one another quite as well as the groom understood his master.

  Aunt Evelyn did her best to come up to the scratch while I was talking big at the dinner-table. But the wonderful performances of Harkaway and myself during our exciting half-hour in the Potford Vale were beyond her powers of response, and her well-meant but inadequate interjections caused my narrative to lose a lot of its sporting significance. Anxiety for my safety overshadowed her enthusiasm, and when I was telling her how we jumped a brook (it was only a flooded ditch, really) she uttered an ill-timed warning against getting wet when I was hot, which nearly caused my narrative to dry up altogether.

  Faithful Miriam made things no better by exclaiming, as she handed me a plate with two banana fritters on it, ‘You’ll break your neck, sir, if you go out with them hounds much oftener!’

  What was the good of trying to make them understand about a hunt like that, I thought, as I blundered up the dark stairs to the schoolroom to dash off a highly coloured account of my day for Stephen Colwood. He, at any rate, was an audience after my own heart, and the only one I had, except Dixon, whose appreciation of my exploits was less fanciful and high-flown. Writing to Stephen I was at once away in a world of make-believe; and the letter, no doubt, was a good example of what he used to call my ‘well-known sprightly insouciance’.

  Poor Stephen was living in lodgings in London, and could only get home for a hunt on Saturdays. A wealthy neighbour had promised Parson Colwood an opening for his son if he could qualify as a chartered accountant, and this nauseating task occupied him five days a week. So my visualization of Stephen, exiled in a foggy street in Pimlico, made it doubly easy for me to scribble my lively account of a day which now seemed so delightfully adventurous.

  Stephen’s reply was a telegram asking me to stay at the Rectory for as long as I liked, and this was followed by a letter in which he announced that he’d got a month’s holiday. ‘If your old nag’s still lame I can get you some top-hole hirelings from Downfield for thirty-five bob a day, and I’ve ordered the Guv’nor to offer up prayers next Sunday forbidding the Almighty to send any frost to Sussex.’

  Aunt Evelyn considered this almost blasphemous; but she thought my visit to Hoadley Rectory an excellent idea, for Stephen was quite one of her favourites, and of the Rev. Colwood (whom she had met at a diocesan garden-party) she had the highest possible opinion. ‘Such a fine face! And Mrs Colwood seemed a real fellow creature – quite one of one’s own sort,’ she exclaimed, adding, ‘D’ you mind holding his hind-legs, dear?’ for she was preoccupied at the moment in combing the matted hair out of one of her Persian cats.

  PART FIVE

  AT THE RECTORY

  1

  Stopping at every station, a local train conveyed me sedately into Sussex. Local and sedate, likewise, were the workings of my brain, as I sat in an empty compartment with the Southern Daily News on my knees. I had bought that unpretentious paper in order to read about the Ringwell Hounds, whose doings were regularly reported therein. And s
ure enough the previous day’s sport was described in detail, and ‘Among the large field out’ was the name, with many others, of ‘Mr Colwood, junr.’ Although I had yet to become acquainted with the parishes through which Reynard had made his way, I read with serious attention how he had ‘crossed the Downfield and Boffham road, borne right-handed into Hooksworth Wood, turned sharply back, and worked his way over the country to Icklesfield’, etc. etc., until ‘hounds ran into him after a woodland hunt of nearly three hours’. The account ended with the following words: ‘If ever hounds deserved blood they did this time, as they had to work out nearly every yard of their fox’s line.’

  Having read this through twice I allowed my thoughts to dally with the delightful prospect of my being a participator in similar proceedings next day. Occasionally I glanced affectionately at the bulging kit-bag containing those masterpieces by Craxwell and Kipward which had cost me more than one anxious journey to London. Would Stephen approve of my boots, I wondered, staring out of the window at the reflective monochrome of flooded meadows and the brown gloom of woodlands in the lowering dusk of a heavily clouded December afternoon.

  Whatever he might think of my boots, there was no doubt that he approved of my arrival when the fussy little train stopped for the last time and I found him waiting for me on the platform. I allowed him to lug my bag out of the station, and soon he had got it stowed away in the old yellow-wheeled buggy, had flicked his father’s favourite hunter into a trot (‘a nailing good jumper, but as slow as a hearse’), and was telling me all about the clinking hunt they’s had the day before, and how he’d enjoyed my account of the Potford gallop. ‘You’ve got a regular gift for writing, you funny old cock! You might make a mint of money if you wrote for Horse and Hound or The Field!’ he exclaimed, and we agreed that I couldn’t write worse than the man in the Southern Daily, whose ‘Reynard then worked his way across the country’ etc. afterwards became one of our stock jokes.

  In describing my friendship with Stephen I am faced by a difficulty which usually arises when one attempts to reproduce the conversational oddities of people who are on easy terms. We adopted and matured a specialized jargon drawn almost exclusively from the characters in the novels of Surtees; since we knew these almost by heart, they provided us with something like a dialect of our own, and in our care-free moments we exchanged remarks in the mid-Victorian language of such character-parts as Mr Romford, Major Yammerton, and Sir Moses Mainchance, while Mr Jorrocks was an all-pervading influence. In our Surtees obsession we went so far that we almost identified ourselves with certain characters on appropriate occasions. One favourite role which Stephen facetiously imposed on me was that of a young gentleman named Billy Pringle who, in the novel which he adorns, is reputed to be very rich. My £600 a year was thus magnified to an imaginary £10,000, and he never wearied of referring to me as ‘the richest commoner in England’. The stress was laid on my great wealth and we never troubled to remember that the Mr Pringle of the novel was a dandified muff and ‘only half a gentleman’. I cannot remember that I ever succeded in finding a consistent role for Stephen, but I took the Surtees game for granted from the beginning, and our adaptation of the Ringwell Hunt to the world created by that observant novelist was simplified by the fact that a large proportion of the Ringwell subscribers might have stepped straight out of his pages. To their idiosyncrasies I shall return in due course: in the meantime I am still on my way to Hoadley Rectory, and Stephen is pointing out such fox-hunting features of the landscape as are observable from the high road while we sway companionably along in the old-fashioned vehicle.

  ‘That’s Basset Wood – one of our werry best Wednesday coverts,’ he remarked, indicating with the carriage-whip a dark belt of trees a couple of miles away under the level cloud-bars of a sallow sunset. He eyed the dimly undulating pastures which intervened, riding over them in his mind’s eye as he had so often ridden over them in reality.

  ‘We’ll be there on Monday,’ he went on, his long, serious face lighting up as his gaze returned to the road before him. ‘Yes, we’ll be drawing there on Monday,’ he chuckled, ‘and if we can but find a straight-necked old dog-fox, then I’ll be the death of a fi’-pun’-note – dash my wig if I won’t!’

  I said that it looked quite a nice bit of country and asked whether they often ran this way. Stephen became less cheerful as he informed me that there was precious little reason for them to run this way.

  ‘There’s not a strand of wire till you get to the road,’ he exclaimed, ‘but over there’ – (pointing to the left) ‘there’s a double-distilled blighter who’s wired up all his fences. And what’s more, his keeper shoots every fox who shows his nose in the coverts. And will you believe me when I tell you, George my lad, that the man who owns those coverts is the same ugly-mugged old sweep who persuaded the Guv’nor to get me trained as a chartered accountant! And how much longer I’m going to stick it I don’t know! Seven months I’ve been worriting my guts out in London, and all on the offchance of getting a seat in the office of that sanctimonious old vulpicide.’

  I consoled him with a reminder that he’d spent most of August and September shooting and fishing in Scotland. (His father rented a place in Skye every summer.) And during the remainder of the drive we debated the deeply desirable and not impossible eventuality of Stephen’s escape from chartered accountancy. His one idea was ‘to get into the Army by the back door’. If only he could get into the Gunners he’d be happy. His elder brother Jack was in the Gunners, and was expecting to be moved from India to Ireland. And Ireland, apparently, was a fox-hunting Elysium.

  ‘I really must have a chat with Colonel Hesmon about it. By the way, the dear old boy’s asked us both to lunch tomorrow.’

  This led to a rhapsody about that absolutely top-hole performer Jerry, who had been given him by the Colonel after he’d won the Heavy Weight Race. My Harkaway, on the other hand, was more a subject for solicitude, and I reluctantly confessed that he didn’t seem up to my weight. It was a thousand pities, said Stephen, that I couldn’t have bought that six-year-old of young Lewison’s. ‘Given him for his twenty-first birthday by his uncle, who’d forked out £170 for him. But young Lewison couldn’t ride a hair of the horse, though he was a nailing fine “lepper” and a rare good sort at that. They sent him up to Tatts last week, and he went for £90, according to the paper. Gosh, what a bit of luck for the cove who got him so cheap!’

  My appetite for horseflesh was stimulated by this anecdote, but I wondered what Mr Pennett would say if I wrote and told him that I’d bought another ninety pounds’ worth! For Mr Pennett still refused to allow me more than £450 of my £600. The balance, he said, must be ‘invested for a rainy day’.

  Stephen’s visionary contemplations of ‘being stationed at the Curragh and riding at Punchestown Races’ were interrupted by our arrival at the Rectory. I had stayed there more than once in the summer, so I received a surly but not unfriendly salute from Abel, the grim little old groom with iron-grey whiskers who led our conveyance soberly away to the stable-yard. This groom was an old-fashioned coachman, and he had never been heard to utter a sentence of more than six words. His usual reply, when asked about the health of one of the horses, was either, ‘Well enough’ or ‘Not over-bright’. Stephen now reminded him (quite unnecessarily, and probably not for the first time) that two of the horses would be going out hunting on Monday. Abel grunted, ‘Got ’em both shod this afternoon,’ and disappeared round the corner of the shrubbery with the buggy.

  There was only one thing against him, said Stephen, and that was that he hadn’t a ghost of an idea how to trim their tails, which were always an absolute disgrace. ‘I’ve told him again and again to pull the hair out,’ he remarked, ‘but he goes on just the same, cutting them with scissors, and the result is that they come out at the opening meet with tails like chrysanthemums!’

  From this it may be inferred that there were many things in the Rectory stable which fell short of Stephen’s ideal. He and his brothe
rs were always trying to bring ‘the old guv’nor’ into line with what they believed to be the Melton Mowbray standard of smartness. There was also the question of persuading him to buy a motor car. But Parson Colwood was a Sussex man by birth and he valued his native provincialism more than the distant splendours of the Shires toward which his offspring turned their unsophisticated eyes. The Rectory, as I knew it then, had the charm of something untouched by modernity.

  The Rev. Harry Colwood, as I remember him, was a composite portrait of Charles Kingsley and Matthew Arnold. This fanciful resemblance has no connection with literature, toward which Mr Colwood’s disposition was respectful but tepid. My mental semi-association of him with Arnold is probably due to the fact that he had been in the Rugby eleven somewhere in the sixties. And I have, indeed, heard him speak of Arnold’s poem, Rugby Chapel. But the Kingsley affinity was more clearly recognizable. Like Kingsley, Mr Colwood loved riding, shooting and fishing, and believed that such sports were congruous with the Christian creed which he unobtrusively accepted and lived up to. It is questionable, however, whether he would have agreed with Kingsley’s Christian Socialism. One of his maxims was ‘Don’t marry for money but marry where money is’, and he had carried this into effect by marrying, when he was over forty, a sensible Scotch lady with a fortune of £1,500 a year, thereby enabling his three sons to be brought up as keen fox-hunters, game-shooters, and salmon-fishers. And however strongly the Author of his religion might have condemned these sports, no one could deny him the Christian adjectives gentle, patient, and just.