England to Me: A Memoir

by Emily Hahn

  The Major and I were just beginning to feel justified in accepting invitations to cocktail parties, if they were not too far away, if the Major considered the hosts were really good old friends whose acquaintance compensated for absence from his library, and if the Coopers were invited, too, because then we went in their car. (One of the Major’s spasmodic infrequent economies is saving on taxi bills.) We had had the painters in, up to the limits of our Government permit to paint. The floors were scraped and polished. In the cellar we had a bottle of gin, two bottles of sherry, and several of Algerian wine. Best of all, the Army had signified that it might possibly pay a part of our claim, given a reasonable amount of time to, think it over. All this security, this pride of position, put the Major into a good humor, and so we went to a big cocktail party in Dorchester.

  I can’t claim to have had either a very good time or a very bad one: I didn’t know many people to begin with, and, as usually happens, I got into a huddle with one or two other guests, couldn’t get out of it, and began to feel I knew them far too well long before the end. They were feeling exactly the same way about me. What happened to the Major, though, sticks in my memory. Instead of being cravenly content, like me, to discuss the iniquities of the Government with a few such stranger cronies, he looked around the room and resolved to sulk. It was a lovely room, he decided, but full of frumps. There wasn’t a decent-looking woman in the place except his hostess and his wife. The Major was prejudiced in his hostess’s favor because she was an old friend, and in mine because I was wearing an American dress. Textile-starved England is nearly all shabby just now because so many dresses have been made over. The Major refused to apply this excuse: he clings to his convictions no matter how long ago he may have formed them, and he is convinced that his countrywomen dress the way they do on purpose. Suddenly he saw another decent-looking woman. At any rate, he told himself, she would have been quite passable if she’d left her hat at home. He was introduced to her—her name was Lady Jones, or something like it—and as he drank his gin, without mentioning hats, he found himself being courteous to Lady Jones and rather enjoying the party after all.

  They talked about Ireland. Many people who live on unearned income were then moving to Ireland to escape the high income tax, close rationing, and rude remarks of the Labour Government. Lady Jones, it seemed, had been to Ireland with her husband and selected a place which they were going to buy. “There’s only one drawback,” she added. “The shooting rights. They’re only ours for life.”

  The Major, in the middle of his next cocktail, was puzzled. “Surely that’s enough for anyone?” he asked. “You won’t want shooting rights after you’re dead, will you?”

  Lady Jones was scornful of his stupidity. “But the children! Of course I want all those things in perpetuity!”

  Telling about it later, the Major never seemed to understand what came over him. Me, I think it was a strong sense of general cocktail-party futility. Besides, Dorchester always reminds him of Hardy. He fixed Lady Jones with a burning blue eye and recited,

  “Ah, no: they sit and think, ‘What use?

  What good will planting Rowers produce?’ ”

  Lady Jones made an alarmed gesture, but the Major continued inexorably:

  “No tendance of her mound can loose

  Her spirit from Death’s gin.”

  The last word made him look at his glass, which was empty. By the time he had got it filled, Lady Jones was gone. He was conscious of her later in the evening, glancing at him from a corner of the room and then glancing away again, hastily. She seemed badly frightened of him, though he didn’t know why.

  “In any case,” he told me on the way home, “it was a terrible hat.”

  “I shouldn’t think hunting would have survived,” said the Major in surprise. “You’d think this Labour Government would have put it down.”

  It has survived, all right. What surprises me more than its survival is that even the same old arguments for and against it are written in letters to the Times. There are the people opposed to “blood sports” and the people who retort that the fox likes it; the ones who say it wastes money and crops and the ones who answer that it improves the breed of horses, and saves poultry because foxes are pests; there are the champions of the workingman, often titled gents, who call it a shameful symbol of the decadent aristocracy, and the indignant people who write straight back listing their own hunts, which are evidently made up exclusively of farmers, blacksmiths, and other representatives of the working classes. In .the meantime the hunt goes on most months of the year around here —the Cattistock used to kill a May fox every year before they called it off for the summer; I don’t know if they still do. The hunt went on with a skeleton pack, through the war, they tell me proudly. There is a story, possibly not apocryphal, that a German parachutist dropped into a field near here, spang into the middle of the meet, and the Master tied him to his saddle and led him off to the nearest constabulary while everyone else went on with the really important business of the day.

  Sometimes one sees posters stuck up in Dorchester, calling on the enlightened public to stamp out hunting because it is a wicked, wasteful, cruel, upper-class pastime. Maybe someday the enlightened public will, but it will have to be much more enlightened than it is now. The thing seems to be that people like hunting, just as they like shooting and coursing and the trials of murderers. I can’t quite go along with them. I don’t like killing things; I don’t like bullfights; I don’t like—or do I like murder trials? Yes, I do. And as for hunting I like that, too, except for the killing part. I love jumping horses and being afraid I won’t make it, and then making it. When I am on foot I love even more the horn, and the looks of the hunt streaming out across the field, though when one doesn’t ride, as I don’t now, it hurts too much, not being part of it, to watch very long. But since I do not have any bloodlust, I realize I don’t really understand the full, true passion of the hunt, which grips whole crowds of people to such an extent that they become absolute bores to outsiders like me.

  What gives hunting such a tremendous appeal, I think, is that it combines those two strong urges, to ride fast and to kill. Riding itself can be an obsession, as I know, and so can the tactics of warfare or any sort of chase on foot, though I have never experienced that one. Together— Well, the only thing that might damp a hunt-bitten man’s ardor, one would think, is the necessity of taking care of his stable himself. Even then, even with the shortage of stable hands and of money to pay stable hands, people go on hunting.

  “When you do all the work yourself, it’s not quite the same thing,” explained Jim Coleman, grumbling as usual, for Jim is a dairy farmer and farmers are never satisfied. “Exercising the silly brutes, dressing them, taking care of them when you come in—I often tell myself it’s a mug’s game, especially with this sciatica of mine. But still …”

  Jim’s family, his wife and five children, live for hunting. Those of school age have to go away in the autumn, but they cheer themselves with the knowledge that they’ll have the Christmas holidays at any rate. Jim’s wife Elaine never misses out very much, even when she has babies. Sometimes she has the whole house to take care of by herself—a seventeenth-century farmhouse, with uneven stone floors and cranky doors, and all the cooking, and no modern appliances, and strictly limited petrol with which to go marketing in town five miles away. She does it all, including scrubbing the stone floors, but not until she has come home from the day’s meet. If, by chance, the hunt stays out until dark, well, the house waits. Nobody would expect Elaine’s house to come first—the very idea!

  In the summer months Elaine takes it more or less easy. There’s just the house, after all, and a few of the more delicate cows to coddle, and a couple of hounds she is walking for the hunt, and the children, and the new terrier they are training to work with the pack. Summer is easy, but of course it isn’t what one calls life.

  “Aren’t you going to hunt again?” she asked the Major, who is an old friend of the
Colemans.

  “Lord, no. I can’t afford it,” he said, and the Colemans both looked badly shocked. They can’t afford it either, but they’d give up anything else first.

  “Maybe next year,” I put in tactfully.

  “No, unless I come out just once in a while on a hired horse,” said the Major.

  Elaine looked worried, as if she had sniffed heresy right in her own drawing room. Later she sounded me out. “What do you really think of Charley?” she demanded.

  Naturally I was surprised. “What do I think of him? Well, really, Elaine—”

  “I mean, is he really keen?”

  I looked at her in heightened puzzlement.

  “I’ve often wondered about him before,” she continued. “I never did quite understand Charley, even in the old days. He’d come in from a day with hounds and I’d say, ‘How was it, Charley?’ Now you know if a man’s keen he’ll tell you all about the run: where they found, and where they went, and all about it, but Charley would just say, ‘Oh, we had a damn fine day; galloped like hell.’ Well, I mean to say!”

  I became accustomed to it in time, but for a while it was a strange feeling to be introduced as “Mrs. Boxer—wife of the man who used to ride that little black horse we had later, in ’36, remember?”

  Carola came home from school one day in tremendous excitement, because the hunt had ridden slowly past the schoolhouse while the children were at “break”—recess, we used to call it in St. Louis. She had seen the red coats and the hounds, but what she liked best was the terrier.

  “Do they kill the fox when they catch him, Mummy?”

  “Yes, they do.”

  “Do they always catch him?”

  “No, they don’t.”

  “Good.”

  One day at a sherry party at one of the big houses, which was a considerable event for these days, Elaine suddenly appeared at my elbow. I was glad to see her, because she is not deaf. Everybody else at the party was, or perhaps I got the wrong idea from having been introduced to two or three very old men, one after the other. I had been shouting so long that I roared into Elaine’s ear, and she recoiled.

  “Goodness,” she said. “There is a din here, isn’t there? Come here and meet Mrs. Dornford. Her husband’s Master, you know, and we were wondering if you wouldn’t like to walk some of the hound pups. They’re absolutely sweet.”

  “Why, I—”

  “It’s no trouble at all,” said Elaine, firmly piloting me through the shouting crowd of guests. “I always take some myself; we’ve got a couple right now. It’s the only way the Hunt can manage, you know, what with all these rations—farming the pups out. You have such wonderful kennels. The place was made for hounds. That’s what I’ve just told— Oh, here you are, Mrs. Dornford; Mrs. Boxer would love to take a couple.”

  Mrs. Dornford was enthusiastic. “It is good of you.”

  I realized that somehow I must have said I would. It was too late now to back out. “There’s only one condition,” I said. “Don’t tell my husband about it until the animals are delivered at the house, when it’s too late for him to do anything about it.”

  “Oh, I do think you’re so wise,” said Mrs. Dornford.

  Fatima and Faber, for Fatima and Faber were their names, were dumped at our door by the huntsman soon afterward. They were, of course, very appealing little brutes at seven weeks old, and the Major was not too angry, only a bit apprehensive.

  “Who’s going to walk them? I’m not,” he said, while Carola and Clifton raved over them in the background, out of doors.

  “I will. But it’s not really walking them out on leads, Charles; you’ve got the wrong idea.”

  “Of course it is—miles and miles you’ll have to walk every day.”

  “No, you don’t. They just stay in the kennels and twice a day I let them out right here in the grounds, and they fool around for an hour, and then I put them back. It’s perfectly simple.”

  “And feeding them,” said the Major, beginning to work himself up. “You are an idiot. Whyever did you let yourself be let in for it? How are you going to get meat for great galumphing brutes like that? It isn’t allowed to feed them meat, surely.”

  “Oatmeal is what they get. Elaine told me how to cook it, and once in a while horse meat from the cat’s-meat man in Dorchester, and the rest of the time fish. That’s all they’d get at home. Do look at the little one, Charles, isn’t he marvelous? Look at the way his ears flop. He’s a perfect Jim Thurber.”

  “Um,” said the Major. “Well, so long as it’s understood they’re your responsibility.”

  The hounds lasted at Conygar just about three months. I still maintain I did my duty by them. I stood in a queue in Dorchester, outside a very smelly shop, for two hours in order to get six pounds of overripe horseflesh. Incidentally, I was impressed by the number of people as imbecilic as myself. “The things one does for one’s pets,” sighed an old lady standing just ahead of me. I tried again once or twice, but the cat’s-meat man didn’t even open his shop doors most days. There was a shortage of meat last summer—I mean table meat—and the ration claims couldn’t be honored all the time. Why this shortage should have been reflected in the horse-meat trade I’m sure I don’t know, but the answer is indicated, at least; so-called inedible stale horse meat must have gone into meat pies and sausages. Mind? No, I don’t mind, as long as I don’t know for certain. There couldn’t have been much in the sausages at any rate. Sausages get more bready every year, all over the world.

  In the meantime, the hound pups were growing large and rangy, looking more like hounds every day. They began to act like hounds too. At first they just fooled around outside the house on the lawn, but then they went farther afield. It was pure liveliness. I don’t think they were hungry, even though I failed them week after week with the cat’s-meat man, because I fed them on fish. I gave them plenty of fish, cooked up fresh twice a week, but they liked it better toward the bottom of the pot. I kept the pot in a disused apple room, but even then the smell permeated the house. It was a hot summer: lovely weather made up for the dreadful winter it supplanted. We were all sunburnt. It was really hot. Flies came from miles around to examine the hounds’ fish, and I bought new flypapers weekly.

  “Faber and Fatima smell just like cod-liver oil,” said Carola disapprovingly.

  “You’re not bringing them up right,” said the Major. “I’m sure you’re not. Eating fish all day. They’re foxhounds, not otter hounds. At this rate they’ll be swimming whenever they get the chance. And you shouldn’t let them chase rabbits; you don’t keep an eye on them as you ought.”

  “Elaine said it’s all right to let them chase rabbits. They’re good stock, and as soon as they start cubbing they’ll know the difference.”

  “What does she say about this fish diet?”

  “It’s what everybody feeds them. They’ve got to. There isn’t any meat. The knacker traveled fifty miles last week without—”

  “I’ll bet Elaine’s hounds don’t get into the house all the time, the way these do.”

  “They do too. She said they always do. They shouldn’t, of course, because it’s bad training, but they do.”

  Time passed. The hounds got so large they jumped the kennel fence. We put up wire around the top, but a week later they were big enough to jump that as well.

  “They’re wild,” said the Major wamingly. “I can’t handle them at all now. What are you going to do about it?”

  “I can handle them,” I said. “They come when I call.”

  Then Faber and Fatima began going next door and chasing Mr. Sanders’s cows. “Elaine’s go out hunting all day and she doesn’t mind,” I said. At last one day, while I was in Dorchester, the Major took a mean advantage of me. When I got back the hounds were gone; the kennel was empty.

  “Back to the huntsman,” said the Major with satisfaction. “I simply telephoned him, that’s all, and told him we couldn’t manage them any more, so he came and collected them, after a bit of
a tussle. He admitted they’re a full-time job for any stableboy at this age. It seems people usually turn them back about this time.”

  “Oh dear,” I said. “I wonder what Elaine—”

  “I don’t give a damn what Elaine’s doing about hers,” said the Major. “I sent ours back.”

  “Well,” I said doubtfully, wondering whether to make a scene. “Well …” I decided not to protest, after all. I was myself very tired of the smell of fish. “But you’ve got to make it clear to Elaine it was you who did it, not me, and that will settle you in Elaine’s estimation. Unkeen, that’s what you are.”

  The Major’s reply was unkind, ungentlemanly, and positively unBritish.

  Down in the country the most important social event of the season is the Hunt Ball. Rather, the Hunt Balls, because each hunt throws its own party and thus collects cash for the season ahead. We live in the South Dorset Hunt domain, but we’re not at all far from the Cattistock, and there are plenty of others which would be within easy driving distance, if we had a car and if cars were allowed enough petrol. At the moment private drivers aren’t being allowed any at all, because of the latest Dollar Crisis, but in the spring of ’47, toward the end of the hunting season, and toward the beginning of the Hunt Balls, people were still getting a “basic ration” which they saved up for the big blowout.