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

by Siegfried Sassoon

  After that really remarkable recovery of mine, life became lyrical, beatified, ecstatic, or anything else you care to call it. To put it tersely, I just galloped past Brownrigg, sailed over the last two fences, and won by ten lengths. Stephen came in a bad third. I also remember seeing Roger Pomfret ride up to Jaggett in the paddock and inform him in a most aggressive voice that he’d got to ‘something well pay up and look pleasant’.

  Needless to say that Dixon’s was the first face I was aware of; his eager look and the way he said, ‘Well done’, were beyond all doubt the quintessence of what my victory meant to me. All else was irrelevant at that moment, even Stephen’s unselfish exultation and Mr Gaffikin’s loquacious enthusiasm. As for Cockbird, no words could ever express what we felt about him. He had become the equine equivalent of Divinity.

  Excited as I was, an inward voice cautioned me to control my volubility. So when I had weighed in and returned with my saddle to find a cluster of knowing ones casting an eye over the winner, I just waited soberly until Dixon had rubbed him down, mounted, and ridden serenely out of sight. The Colonel was on the spot to congratulate me on my ‘nailing good performance’ and, better still, to give Dixon his due for having got Cockbird so fit. Those few lofty minutes when he was making much of his horse were Dixon’s reward for all the trouble he had taken since Cockbird had been in his charge. He had needed no such incentive, but he asked for nothing more. While he was on his way back to Downfield he may also have thought to himself how he had made me into a good enough rider to have got round the course without a catastrophe. (He had yet to hear full details of the race – including my peculiar acrobatics toward the end, which had been witnessed by no one except the rider of Mikado, who had been kind enough to tell Croplady that he never saw such a thing in his life, which was, I hoped, intended as a compliment.)

  When I had watched Dixon’s departure I found that public interest was being focused on the Yeomanry Team Race. I was glad to slip away by myself: a few fields out in the country I relaxed my legs on a five-barred gate and contemplated my achievement with as much mental detachment as I could muster. Even in those days I had an instinct for getting the full flavour of an experience. Perhaps I was fortunate in not yet having become aware that the winner of the last race is forgotten as soon as the next one starts.

  Forty minutes later I had claimed my cup. (There was no ceremony of presentation.) Having crammed the ebony pedestal into my kit-bag I came out into the paddock with the cup in my other hand. It was convenient to carry, for it had handles to it.

  Good-natured Arthur Brandwick came up and offered me a lift back to Downfield. While he was patting me on the back I caught sight of a figure which seemed somehow familiar. A loose-built ruddy-faced young sportsman was talking to a couple of jovial whiskered farmers; he sat on a shooting-stick with his thin neatly gaitered legs straightened; a brown felt hat was tipped well over his blunt nose, for the five o’clock sun was glaring full in his eyes. I wondered who it was he reminded me of. Brandwick answered my unspoken question.

  ‘D’you twig who that is?’ I shook my head. ‘Well, take another good look at him. It’s our new Master, and a hell of a good lad he is, from all I’ve heard. Up till a month ago everyone thought the country’d have to be hunted by a Committee next season. There was something fishy about every one of the coves who’d applied for the Mastership. And then this chap wrote and offered to hunt the hounds himself and put up fifteen hundred a year if we guaranteed him another two thousand. Hardly a soul knew about it till today. We’re lucky to get him. He’s been hunting a good rough country in Ireland the last two seasons and showing rare sport. He’s run across for a couple of days to look at us.’ As we walked away the new Master turned his head and favoured us with a slow and rather blank stare.

  ‘What did you say his name was?’ I asked, when we were out of earshot. Brandwick informed me that his name was Milden – Denis Milden – and I knew that I’d known it all the time, though I hadn’t set eyes on him since I was eleven years old.

  Aquamarine and celestial were the shoals of sunset as I hacked pensively home from Dumbridge. The Colonel’s Cup clinked and joggled against my saddle. Time was irrelevant. But I was back at Butley by eight o’clock, and Cockbird, who had returned by an earlier train, was safe and sound; a little uneasily he wandered around his loose-box, rustling the deep straw, but always going back to the manger for another mouthful of clover-hay. Dixon serenely digested triumph with his tea; presently he would go out to the ‘Rose and Crown’ to hand Homeward his multiplied half-crown and overawe the gossips with his glory.

  Absolved and acquiescent was the twilight as I went quietly across the lawn and in at the garden door to the drawing-room. Aunt Evelyn’s armchair scrooped on the beeswaxed floor as she pushed it back and stood up with her bottle of smelling-salts in her hand. For the first time since my success I really felt like a hero. And Miriam served the dinner with the tired face of a saint that seemed lit with foreknowledge of her ultimate reward. But at that time I didn’t know what her goodness meant.

  At the end of our evening, when they had gone upstairs with my highly coloured history of the day in their heads, I strolled out into the garden; for quite a long time I stared at the friendly lights that twinkled from the railway station and along the dark Weald. I had brought something home with me as well as the Cup. There was this new idea of Denis Milden as Master. For I hadn’t forgotten him, and my persistent studying of Horse and Hound and The Hunting Directory had kept me acquainted with his career as an amateur huntsman since he had left Oxford. A dog barked and a train went along the Weald…the last train to London, I thought….

  Going back to the drawing-room, I lit a pair of candles which made their miniature gold reflections on the shining surface of the massive Cup. I couldn’t keep my eyes away from it. I looked round the shadowed room on which all my childhood and adolescence had converged, but everything led back to the talisman; while I gazed and gazed on its lustre I said to myself, aloud, ‘It can’t be true that it’s really there on the table!’ The photograph of Watts’s ‘Love and Death’ was there on the wall; but it meant no more to me than the strangeness of the stars which I had seen without question, out in the quiet spring night. I was secure in a cosy little universe of my own, and it had rewarded me with the Colonel’s Cup. My last thought before I fell asleep was, ‘Next season I’ll come out in a pink coat.’

  PART SEVEN

  DENIS MILDEN AS MASTER

  1

  All through an extra fine summer I often wondered how the new Master was getting on in the Ringwell country. But I was almost entirely ignorant of what a Master of Hounds does with himself between April and September. I saw next to nothing of Stephen, who was at Aldershot, learning how to be a Special Reserve officer in the Royal Field Artillery.

  My own energies were mainly expended on club cricket matches. I managed to play in three or four matches every week; I was intent on keeping my batting average up to twenty runs per innings, which I found far from easy, though I had one great afternoon when I compiled a century for Butley against some very mediocre village bowling. Those long days of dry weather and white figures moving to and fro on green grounds now seem like an epitome of all that was peaceful in my past. Walking home across the fields from Butley, or driving back in the cool of the evening after a high-scoring game on the county ground at Dumbridge, I deplored my own failure or gloated over one of my small successes; but I never looked ahead, except when I thought about next winter’s hunting. The horses were out at grass; and so, in a sense, was I.

  Now and again I accompanied Aunt Evelyn to a garden-party where, as a rule, I competed in a putting tournament, which was a favourite mode of entertainment at the time. Solemnly round someone’s garden I putted, partnered, perhaps, by a major’s wife or a clergyman’s daughter. At Squire Maundle’s I won a magnifying glass, and on another occasion I carried off a carriage clock. Aunt Evelyn, who preferred croquet, was extremely pleased, and my l
eisurely conquests among herbaceous borders and yew hedges accentuated the unique pride I had in my racing Cup. In an exciting match play final on Captain Huxtable’s mossy and evergreen-shaded lawn I just failed to capture an ivory paper knife.

  One week-end in July Stephen came to stay with us. Artillery life had caused no apparent change in him. We indulged in cheerful nostalgia for the chase. After sniffing the trussed hay in the stable-barn we contemplated Cockbird and Harkaway in the paddock. We sighed for a nice moist winter morning. Stephen was hoping to get ‘attached’ to some Gunners who were conveniently stationed in the Ringwell country. He could tell me nothing about the new Master, except that he was already reputed to be a tireless worker and very well liked by the farmers. For his benefit I unearthed my early impressions of Denis Milden as I had seen him when he was staying at Dumborough Castle as a boy. Already Milden was a very great man in our minds.

  My memory of that summer returns like a bee that comes buzzing into a quiet room where the curtains are drawn on a blazing hot afternoon.

  By the middle of September Dixon had got the horses up from grass. Cricket matches were out of season, but there hadn’t been a spot of rain since the end of June. Robins warbled plaintively in our apple orchard, and time hung rather heavy on my hands. The Weald and the wooded slopes were blue misted on sultry afternoons when I was out for a ruminative ride on one of my indolent hunters. Hop-picking was over early that year and the merry pickers had returned to the slums of London to the strains of the concertina or accordian. I was contemplating an expedition to the West End to order a short-skirted scarlet coat and two pairs of white breeches from Kipward & Son; Craxwell was to make me a pair of boots with mahogany coloured tops. I intended to blossom out at the opening meet as a full-fledged fox-hunter.

  The autumn was a period of impatience. I longed for falling leaves and the first of November. The luminous melancholy of the fine September weather was a prelude rather than an elegy. I was only half in love with mists and mellow fruitfulness. I did not dread the dark winter as people do when they have lost their youth and live alone in some great city. Not wholly unconscious of the wistful splendour, but blind to its significance, I waited for cub-hunting to end. Europe was nothing but a name to me. I couldn’t even bring myself to read about it in the daily paper. I could, however, read about cubbing in the Midlands; it was described at some length every week in the columns of Horse and Hound. Any other interests I had are irrelevant to these memoirs, and were in any case subsidiary to my ambition as a sportsman.

  Disapproving Mr Pennett had left me severely alone since the previous winter, and for the time being my income seemed adequate.

  Toward the end of the month Stephen had asked me to stay at the Rectory. He had escaped from Aldershot and was about to join his new brigade, which was quartered in the Ringwell country. Both his brothers were still serving their country in foreign parts.

  The first morning I was there we got up at four o’clock, fortified ourselves with boiled eggs and cocoa, and set off on bicycles to a cubbing meet about eight miles away. The ground was still as hard as a brick, and we had decided to save the horses’ legs for later on and see what we could ‘from our flat feet’. Cock-crowing dimness became daylight; the road was white and dry, but the air smelt of autumn. I saw Milden again, in the glinting rays of a quiet scarlet-orbed sunrise; he was on a compact little roan horse; among his hounds outside some gryphoned lodge-gates he leant forward in diplomatic conference with a communicative keeper. The ‘field’ consisted of a young lady with a cockaded groom and a farmer on an unclipped and excited four-year-old. A few more riders turned up later on when the hounds were chivvying an inexperienced cub up and down a wide belt of woodland. After the first invigorating chorus in the early morning air had evoked our enthusiasm the day soon became sultry: pestered by gnats and flies we panted to and fro, and then followed the hunt to another big covert.

  By ten o’clock we had both of us lost our early ardour; they had killed a cub and now a brace had gone to ground in a warren. Stephen told me that the Master was mad keen on digging out foxes, which in that and many other parts of the country were too plentiful for good sport later in the season. While cheering his hounds up and down the woods he had several times passed us; but he was engrossed in his job and scarcely gave us a glance.

  When we arrived at the rabbit-warren I could at first see nothing of him but the back of his old mulberry coat; his head and shoulders were half underground; he had just put a terrier in and was listening intently for muffled subterranean barkings. Stephen got into conversation with Will, the first whip, who was an old friend of his, since he’d been second whip under the previous huntsman (the ineffectual Ben Trotter). I didn’t dare to hope that Milden would remember me, but when he straightened himself and swivelled a jolly red face in my direction I gazed at him with humble expectancy.

  I drew his face blank; for his eyes travelled on toward the first whip and he exclaimed, with the temporary Irish brogue which he had acquired while he was hunting the Kilcurran Hounds, ‘They’re a tarrible long time bringing those spades, Will!’

  Whereupon he picked up his heavy-thonged crop and whistled some baying and inquisitive bitches away from the rabbit-hole, addressing them in the unwriteable huntsman’s lingo which they appeared to understand, judging by the way they looked up at him. ‘Trinket…good ole gal…here; Relic; Woeful; Bonnybell; get along bike, Gamesome…good little Gamesome’ – with affectionate interpolations, and an aside to Will that that Windgall was entering first rate and had been right up in front all the morning… ‘throwing your tongue a treat, weren’t ye, little Windgall?’ Windgall jumped up at him and flourished her stern.

  Soon afterwards the second whip rode through the undergrowth encumbered with spades, and they took their coats off in the dappling sunshine for a real good dig. The crunch of delving spades and the smell of sandy soil now mingled with the redolence of the perspiring pack, the crushed bracken that the horses were munching, and the pungent unmistakeable odour of foxes. However inhumane its purpose, it was a kindly country scene.

  Well enough I remember that September morning, and how, when I offered to take a turn with one of the spades, Denis Milden looked at me and said, ‘Haven’t I seen ye somewhere before?’ I answered shyly that perhaps he’d seen me at the point-to-points. It seemed providential when Will reminded him that I’d won the Hunt Heavy Weights. Milden casually remarked, ‘That must be a good horse of yours.’

  Emboldened by this, I asked whether by any chance he remembered meeting me out with the Dumborough nearly fourteen years before. But for the life of him he couldn’t recollect that. ‘Ye see I’ve seen such a tarrible lot of new people since then!’ he remarked cheerily, pushing his blue velvet cap up from a heated brow. Nevertheless, I toiled back to the Rectory well satisfied with the way I’d managed to remind him of my undistinguished identity, and Stephen exulted with me that the new Master was such an absolutely top-hole chap. ‘Not an atom of swank about him.’ It is quite possible that we may both of us have talked with a slight Irish accent when we were telling the attentive Rector all about it during luncheon.

  2

  October arrived; the drought broke with forty-eight hours’ quiet rain; and Dixon had a field day with the new clipping machine, of which it is enough to say that the stable-boy turned a handle and Dixon did the rest. He had decided to clip the horses’ legs this season; the Ringwell was a bad country for thorns, and these were naturally less likely to be overlooked on clipped legs, which also were more sightly and dried quicker than hairy ones.

  ‘Only bad grooms let their horses get cracked heels’, was one of his maxims. ‘Only lazy grooms wash the mud off with water’ went without saying.

  We often spoke about the new Master, who was already the sum and substance of my happy hunting-ground thirty miles away. Dixon remembered him distinctly; he had always considered him the pattern of what a young gentleman ought to be. Frequently I wished Aunt Evelyn’s se
date establishment could be transplanted into that well-foxed and unstagnant county. For one thing it was pretty poor fun for Dixon if I were to be continually boxing Cockbird and Harkaway to Downfield or staying at the Rectory; but Dixon seemed satisfied by the bare fact of my being a hunting man.

  Resplendent in my new red coat, and almost too much admired by Aunt Evelyn and Miriam, I went off to the opening meet by the early train from Dumbridge to Downfield. Half an hour’s ride took me to the kennels, where I joined an impressive concourse, mounted, in vehicles, and on foot. The sun shone after a white frost, and everyone was anxious to have a look at the new Master. My new coat was only a single spot of colour among many, but I felt a tremendous swell all the same. Familiar faces greeted me, and when we trotted away to draw Pacey’s Plantation, old Mr Dearborn bumped along beside me in his faded red coat and blue and white spotted bird’s-eye cravat. ‘This horse ought to have one of you young chaps on his back!’ he exclaimed. ‘Jumps too big for an old buffer like me; never known him put a foot wrong, clever as a cat – (hold up, will you!)’…his clever hunter having tripped badly on some stones.

  He presented me to an affable person on the other side of him – Mr Bellerby, of Cowslake Manor. Mr Bellerby was mounted on a fidgety, ewe-necked, weak-middled, dun-coloured mare. He had a straggling sandy beard and was untidily dressed in new clothes which looked all wrong. He seemed to have put them on in a hurry – baggy black coat half-unbuttoned – spurs falling back from loose-fitting, patent-leather boots, starched stock with a horseshoe pin insecurely inserted – badly cut white corduroy breeches; and an absurdly long cane hunting-crop without a thong. He had a mackintosh coat rolled up and strapped on the back of his saddle. He wore moss-green worsted gloves, and his mare’s bridle had a brow-band of yellow and black striped patent leather.