Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man

by Siegfried Sassoon

  I bought a race-card and went in the direction of ‘the paddock’, which was a hurdled enclosure outside some farm buildings. Several people nodded to me in a friendly manner, which made me feel more confident, although it puzzled me, for I couldn’t remember that I had seen any of them before. The first race was almost due to start, and the bookmakers were creating a background of excitement with their crescendo shoutings of ‘Even money the Field’ and ‘Two to one bar one’.

  ‘I’ll lay five to one Monkey Tricks; five to one Monkey Tricks,’ announced a villainous-looking man under a vast red umbrella – his hoarse and strident voice taking advantage of a momentary lull in the lung-bursting efforts of the ornaments of his profession on either side of him. ‘Don’t forget the Old Firm!’ he added.

  Looking down from above the heads and shoulders of their indecisive clients, the Old Firm appeared to be urging the public to witness some spectacle which was hidden by the boards on which their names were gaudily displayed. The public, however, seemed vaguely mistrustful and the amount of business being done was not equivalent to the hullaballoo which was inciting them to bet their money.

  There was a press of people outside the paddock; a bell jangled, and already the upper halves of two or three red- or black-coated riders could be seen settling themselves in their saddles; soon there was a cleavage in the crowd and the eight or ten competitors filed out; their faces, as they swayed past me, varied in expression, from lofty and elaborate unconcern to acute and unconcealed anxiety. But even the least impressive among the cavalcade had an Olympian significance for my gaze, and my heart beat faster in concurrence with their mettlesome emergency, as they disappeared through a gate in the wake of the starter, a burly, jovial-faced man on a stumpy grey cob.

  ‘Having a ride to-day, sir?’ asked a cadaverous blue-chinned individual, who might have been either a groom or a horse-dealer. Rather taken aback by this complimentary inquiry, I replied with a modest negation.

  ‘I see your brother’s riding Colonel Hesmon’s old ’oss in the ’Eavy Weights. He might run well in this deep going,’ he continued.

  I did not disclaim the enigmatic relationship, and he lowered his voice secretively. ‘I’m putting a bit on Captain Reynard’s roan for this race! I’ve heard that he’s very hot stuff.’ And with a cunning and confidential nod he elbowed his way toward the line of bookmakers, who were now doing a last brisk little turn of business before the destination of the Light Weight Cup was decided over ‘Three and a half miles of fair hunting country’.

  The card informed me that Lieut-Col C. M. F. Hesmon’s Jerry was to be ridden by Mr S. Colwood. ‘It can’t be Stephen Colwood, can it?’ I thought, visualizing a quiet, slender boy with very large hands and feet, who had come to my House at Ballboro’ about two years after I went there. Now I came to think of it his father had been a parson somewhere in Sussex, but this did not seem to make it any likelier that he should be riding in a race.

  At any rate, I wanted to see this Colwood, for whose brother I had been mistaken, and after the next race I walked boldly into the paddock to see the horses being saddled for the Heavy Weights. There were only five of them, and none of the five looked like going very fast, though all were obviously capable of carrying fourteen stone on their backs. But since one of them had got to come in first, their appearance was creating an amount of interest quite disproportionate to their credentials as racehorses, and their grooms and owners were fussing around them as if they were running in the Grand National.

  ‘I’ve told the boy that if he wins I’ll give him the horse,’ exclaimed an active little old gentleman with a straggling grey moustache and a fawn-coloured covert coat with large pearl buttons: his hands were full of flat lead weights, which he kept doling out to an elderly groom, who was inserting them in the leather pouches of a cloth which was to go under the saddle.

  ‘Yes, the old fellow’s looking well, isn’t he?’ he went on, dropping another lump of lead into the groom’s outstretched hand. ‘I don’t think I’ve ever seen him look fitter than he does today.’ He gazed affectionately at the horse, a dark bay with unclipped legs and a short, untidily trimmed tail.

  People kept on coming up and greeting the affable and excited owner with cordial civility and he made the same remarks to each of them in turn. ‘Yes, I’ve told the boy that if he wins I’ll give him the horse – are you quite sure those girths are all right, Dumbrell?’ (to the groom, who was continuing his preparations with stoical deliberation) ‘and ’pon my word I’m not at all sure he won’t win – the old fellow’s fit to run for his life – never saw him look better – and I know the boy’ll ride him nicely – most promising boy – capital eye for a country already – one of the keenest young chaps I’ve ever known.’

  ‘Well, Colonel, and how’s the old horse?’ ejaculated an exuberant person in a staring check suit and a protuberant canary-coloured waistcoat, extending an immense red hand toward the little man – who dropped the lead weights in a fluster with ‘Ah, my dear chap, how are you – how are you – delighted to see you’ – followed by a reiteration of his repertoire about ‘the boy’ and ‘the old horse’.

  The fact that this was Lieut-Col C. M. F. Hesmon was conveyed to me by the arrival of my former schoolfellow, Stephen Colwood. ‘Ah, there you are, my boy – that’s capital,’ said the Colonel, moderating his agitation in order to adopt the important demeanour of an owner giving his final admonitions to a gallant young gentleman rider.

  Stephen, who was wearing a pink silk cap and a long-skirted black hunting-coat, silently received from the groom the saddle and weight-cloth and disappeared into the weighing tent, accompanied by the Colonel, who was carrying a cargo of surplus lead. When they reappeared Stephen looked even more pale and serious than before. At the best of times he had a somewhat meditative countenance, but his face usually had a touch of whimsicality about it, and this had been banished by the tremendous events in which he was at present involved.

  The combined efforts of Colonel and groom were now solemnly adjusting the saddle and weight-cloth (though it is possible that the assistance of the Colonel might have been dispensed with). Meanwhile the old hunter was standing as quiet as a carriage horse.

  Stephen was holding the bridle, and in the picture which my memory retains of him at that moment he is looking downward at the horse’s lowered head with that sensitive and gentle expression which was characteristic of him. It was nearly three years since I had last set eyes on him, but I had known him fairly well at school. As I watched him now I felt almost as nervous as if I were about to ride the Colonel’s horse myself. I assumed that it was the first race he had ever ridden in, and knew that he was feeling that if anything went wrong it would be entirely his own fault and that he would never be able to look the Colonel in the face again if he were to make a fool of himself. And he had probably been suffering from such apprehensions for several days beforehand. It was not surprising that he patted Jerry’s philosophic profile with a visibly shaking hand. Then he looked up, and encountering my sympathetic gaze his face lit up with recognition. It was a time when he badly needed some such distraction, and he at once made me feel that I was an opportune intruder.

  ‘Why, it’s old Sherston!’ he exclaimed. ‘Fancy you turning up like this!’ And he gave me a wry grin which privately conveyed his qualms.

  He told me afterwards that there were two things which he wished at that moment: either that the race was all over, or that something would happen to prevent it taking place at all. It is sometimes forgotten that without such feelings heroism could not exist.

  He then made me known to the Colonel, who greeted me with a mixture of formality and heartiness and insisted that I must come round to his brake and have a glass of port and a sandwich after the race.

  It seemed as though my diffident arrival on the scene had somehow relieved their anxieties, but a moment later the stentorian voice of the starter was heard saying, ‘Now, gentlemen, I’m going down to the post,’ and I st
ood back while Stephen was given a leg up by the groom. Then he bent his head to hear the Colonel’s final injunctions about ‘not making too much of the running’ and ‘letting him go at his own pace at the fences’, ending with a heartfelt valediction. Stephen was then turned adrift with all his troubles in front of him. No one could help him any more.

  Colonel Hesmon looked almost forlorn when the horse and his long-legged rider had vanished through the crowd. He had the appearance of a man who has been left behind. And as I see it now, in the light of my knowledge of after-events, there was a premonition in his momentarily forsaken air. Elderly people used to look like that during the War, when they had said good-bye to someone and the train had left them alone on the station platform. But the Colonel at once regained his spryness: he turned to me to say what a pity it was that the course was such a bad one for the spectators. Then he got out his field-glasses and lost consciousness of everything but the race.

  The horses appeared to be galloping very slowly when they came in sight for the last time. I was standing up on the hill and couldn’t see them distinctly. They had undoubtedly taken a long time to get round the course. Three of them jumped the last fence in a bunch, and Jerry was one of the three. For years afterwards that last fence was a recurrent subject of conversation in the Colwood family, but there was always a good deal of uncertainty about what actually happened. Stephen admitted that it was ‘a bit of a mix-up’. Anyhow, one of them fell, another one pecked badly, and Jerry disengaged himself from the group to scuttle up the short strip of meadow to win by a length.

  The Colonel, of course, was the proudest man in Sussex, and I myself could scarcely believe that Stephen had really won. The only regrettable element was provided by the dismal face of the man who was second. This was a Mr Green, a lean and lanky gentleman farmer in a swallow-tailed scarlet coat – not a cheerful-looking man at the best of times. He made no secret of the fact that, in his opinion, Stephen had crossed him at the last fence, but as he never got beyond looking aggrieved about it no one really minded whether Mr Green had been interfered with or not, and Jerry’s victory appeared to be an extremely popular one. The Colonel was bombarded with cordialities from all and sundry, and kept on exclaiming, ‘I said I’d give the boy the horse if he won and I’m dashed glad to do it!’

  Stephen, who now emerged after weighing in, wore an expression of dreamy enthusiasm and restricted himself to a repetition of one remark, which was, ‘By Gosh, the old horse jumped like a stag’; now and again he supplemented this with an assertion that he’d never had such a ride in his life. He gazed at the old horse as if he never wanted to look at anything else again, but the Colonel very soon piloted him away to the port and sandwiches. As they were going Stephen pulled me by the arm with, ‘Come on, you queer old cuss; you aren’t looking half as bright as you ought to be.’ As a matter of fact I was thinking what a stagnant locality I lived in compared with this sporting Elysium where everything seemed a heyday of happiness and good fortune.

  When we had regaled ourselves with the Colonel’s provisions, Stephen led me off into the fields to watch the Farmers’ Race, which was usually a very amusing show, he said. As we strolled along by ourselves I told him how I’d been mistaken for one of his brothers, and I asked what had happened to his family that day. He told me that both his brothers were abroad. Jack, the elder one, had gone to India with his regiment a month ago. The younger one was in the navy, and was with the Mediterranean Fleet.

  ‘They’re both of them as keen as mustard on the chase. It’ll be pretty mouldy at the Rectory without them when hunting starts again,’ he remarked.

  I asked why his father wasn’t there to see him ride. His face clouded. ‘The Guv’nor’ll be as sick as muck at missing it. Poor old devil, he had to take a ruddy funeral. Fancy choosing the day of the point-to-points to be buried on!’…

  It was after eight o’clock when I got home and Aunt Evelyn was beginning to wonder what had happened to me. I had enjoyed my day far more than I could possibly have anticipated, but my gentle and single-minded relative came in for nothing but my moody and reticent afterthoughts and I was rather ungracious to poor Miriam when she urged me to have a second helping of asparagus. Her face expressed mild consternation.

  ‘What, no more asparagus, sir? Why it’s the first we’ve had this year!’ she exclaimed.

  But I scowled at the asparagus as if it had done me an injury. What was asparagus to me when my head was full of the Colonel and his Cup, and the exhilarating atmosphere of the Ringwell Hunt? Why on earth had Aunt Evelyn chosen such a rotten hole as Butley to live in? Anyhow, Stephen had asked me to go and stay at Hoadley Rectory for the Polesham Races next week, so there was that to look forward to. And Aunt Evelyn, who had relapsed into a tactful silence (after trying me with the latest news from her bee-hives), was probably fully aware that I was suffering from the effects of an over-successful outing.

  PART FOUR

  A DAY WITH THE POTFORD

  1

  The summer was over and the green months were discarded like garments for which I had no further use. Twiddling a pink second-class return ticket to London in my yellow-gloved fingers (old Miriam certainly had washed them jolly well) I stared through the carriage window at the early October landscape and ruminated on the opening meet in November. My excursions to London were infrequent, but I had an important reason for this one. I was going to try on my new hunting clothes and my new hunting boots. I had also got a seat for Kreisler’s concert in the afternoon, but classical violin music was at present crowded out of my mind by the more urgent business of the day.

  I felt as though I had an awful lot to do before lunch. Which had I better go to first, I wondered (jerking the window up as the train screeched into a tunnel), Craxwell or Kipward? To tell the truth I was a bit nervous about both of them; for when I had made my inaugural visits the individuals who patrolled the interiors of those eminent establishments had received me with such lofty condescension that I had begun by feeling an intruder. My clothes, I feared, had not quite the cut and style that was expected of them by firms which had the names of reigning sovereigns on their books, and I was abashed by my ignorance of the specialized articles which I was ordering. Equilibrium of behaviour had perhaps been more difficult at the bootmaker’s; so I decided to go to Kipward’s first.

  Emerging from Charing Cross I felt my personality somehow diluted. At Baldock Wood Station there had been no doubt that I was going up to town in my best dark blue suit, and London had been respectfully arranged at the other end of the line. But in Trafalgar Square my gentlemanly uniqueness had diminished to something almost nonentitive.

  Had I been able to analyse my psychological condition I could have traced this sensation to the fact that my only obvious connections with the metropolis were as follows: Mr Pennett in Lincoln’s Inn Fields (he was beginning to give me up as a bad job) and the few shops where I owed money for books and clothes. No one else in London was aware of my existence. I felt half-inclined to go into the National Gallery, but there wasn’t enough time for that. I had been to the British Museum once and the mere thought of it now made me feel bored and exhausted. Yet I vaguely knew that I ought to go to such places, in the same way that I knew I ought to read Paradise Lost and The Pilgrim’s Progress. But there never seemed to be time for such edifications, and the Kreisler concert was quite enough for one day.

  So I asserted my independence by taking a hansom to the tailor’s which was some distance along Oxford Street. I wasn’t very keen on taxicabs, though the streets were full of them now.

  The lower half of Kipward & Son’s shop window was fitted with a fine wire screening, on which the crows and vultures of several still undethroned European Majesties were painted. In spite of this hauteur the exterior now seemed quite companionable, and I felt less of a nobody as I entered. A person who might well have been Mr Kipward himself advanced to receive me; in his eyes there was the bland half-disdainful interrogation of a ducal butler; for t
he moment he still seemed uncertain as to my credentials. On the walls were some antlered heads and the whole place seemed to know much more about sport than I did. His suavely enunciated ‘what name?’ made the butler resemblance more apparent, but with his, ‘Ah, yes, Mr Sherston of course; your coat and breeches are quite ready for you to try, sir’, and the way he wafted me up a spacious flight of stairs, he became an old-fashioned innkeeper who had been in first-rate service, and there seemed nothing in the world with which he was not prepared to accommodate me. To have asked the price of so much as a waistcoat would have been an indecency. But I couldn’t help wondering, as I was being ushered into one of the fitting compartments, just how many guineas my black hunting-coat was going to cost.

  A few minutes later I was sitting on a hard, shiny saddle and being ciphered all over with a lump of chalk. The sallow little man who fitted my breeches remarked that the buff Bedford cord which I had selected was ‘a very popular one’. As he put the finishing touch with his chalk he asked me to stand up in the stirrups. Whereupon he gazed upon his handiwork and found it good. ‘Yes, that’s a beautiful seat,’ he remarked serenely. I wondered whether he would say the same if he could see me landing over a post-and-rails on Harkaway. The artist responsible for my coat was a taciturn and deferential Scotchman, stout, bald, and blond. He, too, seemed satisfied that the garment would do him credit. My sole regret was that I hadn’t yet been asked to wear the Hunt button. Downstairs in the dignified and reposeful reception room the presiding presence was warming himself in front of a bright fire. As he conducted me to the door I observed with secret awe some racing colours in a glass case on the wall. In after years I recognized them as being Lord Rosebery’s.

  Craxwell & Co. was a less leisurely interior. As might have been expected, there was an all-pervading odour of leather, and one was made to feel that only by a miracle could they finish up to time the innumerable pairs of top-boots for which they had received orders. The shop bristled and shone with spurs; and whips and crops of all varieties were stacked and slung and suspended about the walls. Pace was indicated everywhere and no one but a hard-bitten thruster could have entered without humility. A prejudiced mind might have imagined that all Craxwell’s customers belonged to some ultra-insolent, socially snobbish, and libertine breed of military Mohocks. But the percentage, I am sure, was quite a small one, and my boots, though awkward to get into at first, were close-fitting and high in the leg and altogether calculated to make me feel that there were very few fences I would not cram my horse at. In outward appearance, at least, I was now a very presentable fox-hunter.