Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man

by Siegfried Sassoon

  My sense of unfamiliarity with what was going on was renewed when Colonel Hesmon’s wizened face and bushy grey eyebrows appeared above the shiny brass eagle to read the First Lesson. This was not quite the same Colonel who had been in such a frenzy of excitement over the point-to-point race eight months ago, when he had exclaimed, over and over again, ‘I’ve told the boy that if he wins I’ll give him the horse!’

  The Colonel’s voice was on church parade now, and he was every inch a churchwarden as well. He went through the lesson with dispassionate distinctness and extreme rapidity. Since it was a long passage from Isaiah, he went, as he would have said, ‘a rattling good gallop’. But the words, I thought, were incongruous ones when uttered by the Colonel. ‘And he will lift up an ensign to the nations from afar, and will hiss unto them from the end of the earth: and, behold, they shall come with speed swiftly: none shall be weary nor stumble among them; none shall slumber nor sleep; neither shall the girdle of their loins be loosed, nor the latchet of their shoes be broken: whose arrows are sharp, and all their bows bent, their horses’ hoofs shall be counted like flint, and their wheels like a whirlwind: their roaring shall be like a lion, they shall roar like young lions: yea, they shall roar, and lay hold of the prey, and shall carry it away safe, and none shall deliver it. And in that day they shall war against them like the roaring of the sea: and if one look unto the land, behold darkness and sorrow, and the light is darkened in the heavens thereof. Here endeth the First Lesson.’ And the brisk little man turned over the leaves to a passage from Peter, arranged the gold-embroidered marker, and returned to his pew with erect and decorous demeanour.

  Twenty minutes later Mr Colwood climbed the pulpit steps to the strains of ‘O God our help in ages past’. My own vocal contribution was inconspicuous, but I had a stealthy look at my watch, which caused Stephen, who was giving a creditable performance of the hymn, to nudge me with his elbow. The sermon lasted a laborious twelve minutes. The Rector had a nervous mannerism which consisted in his continually gathering up his surplice with his left hand, as if he were testing the quality of the linen with his fingers. The offertory was for a missionary society, and he took as his text: ‘He that hath two coats, let him impart to him that hath none; and he that hath meat, let him do likewise.’ The results of the collection were handed to him on a wooden plate by the Colonel, who remarked afterwards at lunch that he ‘didn’t mind saying that with the best will in the world he’d have preferred to give his half-sovereign to someone nearer home’ – Stephen having already made his rather obvious joke—‘Whatever the Guv’nor may say in his sermon about ‘imparting’, if I ever get a new hunting-coat I’m going to ruddy well keep my old one for wet days!’

  The sun was shining when we emerged from the musty smelling interior. The Colonel, with his nattily rolled umbrella, perfectly brushed bowler hat, and nervously blinking eyes, paid his respects to Mr Colwood with punctilious affability; then he shepherded Stephen and myself away to have a look round his stables before lunch. We were there in less than five minutes, the Colonel chatting so gaily all the way that I could scarcely have got a word in edgeways even if I had felt sufficient confidence in myself to try.

  The Colonel had been a widower for many years, and like most lonely living people he easily became talkative. Everything in his establishment was arranged and conducted with elaborate nicety and routine, and he took intense pride in his stable, which contained half a dozen hunters who stood in well-aired and roomy loose-boxes, surrounded by every luxury which the Colonel’s care could contrive: the name of each horse was on a tablet suspended above the manger. Elegant green stable-buckets (with the Colonel’s numerous initials painted on them in white) were arranged at regular intervals along the walls, and the harness-room was hung with enough bits and bridles to stock a saddler’s shop. It was, as Stephen pointed out to me afterwards, ‘a regular museum of mouth-gear’. For the Colonel was one of those fussy riders with indifferent hands who are always trying their horses with a new bit.

  ‘I haven’t found the key to this mare’s mouth yet,’ he would say, as the irritated animal shook its head and showered everyone within range with flecks of froth. And when he got home from hunting he would say to his confidential old head-groom: ‘I think this mare’s still a bit under-bitted, Dumbrell,’ and they would debate over half the bits in the harness-room before he rode the mare again.

  ‘Sunday morning stables’ being one of his favourite ceremonies, the Colonel now led us from one loose-box to another, commenting affectionately on each inmate, and stimulated by the fact that one of his audience was a stranger. Each of them, apparently, was a compendium of unique equine qualities, on which I gazed with unaffected admiration, while Stephen chimed in with ‘Never seen the old chestnut look so fit, Colonel’, or ‘Looking an absolute picture’, while Dumbrell was deferentially at hand all the time to share the encomiums offered to his charges. The Colonel, of course, had a stock repertory of remarks about each one of them, including how they had won a certain point-to-point or (more frequently) why they hadn’t. The last one we looked at was a big well-bred brown horse who stood very much ‘over at the knees’. The Colonel had hunted him twelve seasons and he had an equivalently long rigmarole to recite about him, beginning with ‘I remember Sam Hames saying to me (I bought him off old Hames of Leicester, you know) – that horse is the most natural jumper I’ve ever had in my stable. And he was right, for the old horse has only given me one bad toss in twelve years, and that was no fault of his own, for he landed on the stump of a willow tree; it was at that rough fence just outside Clout’s Wood – nasty place, too – you remember I showed it you the other day, Steve’; all of which Stephen had probably heard fifty times before, and had been shown the ‘nasty place’ half a dozen times into the bargain. It was only when he heard the distant booming of the luncheon-gong that the Colonel was able to tear himself away from the brown horse’s loose-box.

  While going into the house we passed through what he called ‘the cleaning room’, which was a sort of wide corridor with a skylight to it. Along the wall stood an astonishing array of hunting boots. These struck me as being so numerous that I had the presence of mind to count them. There were twenty-seven pairs. Now a good pair of top-boots, if properly looked after and repaired, will last the owner a good many years; and a new pair once in three years might be considered a liberal allowance for a man who has started with two or three pairs. But the Colonel was nothing if not regular in his habits; every autumn he visited, with the utmost solemnity, an illustrious bootmaker in Oxford Street; and each impeccable little pair of boots had signalized the advent of yet another opening meet. And, since they had been impeccably cared for and the Colonel seldom hunted more than three days a week, they had consequently accumulated. As we walked past them it was as though Lord Roberts were inspecting the local Territorials, and the Colonel would have been gratified by the comparison to the gallant Field-Marshal.

  It did not strike me at the time that there was something dumbly pathetic about those chronological boots with their mahogany, nut-brown, and salmon-coloured tops. But I can see now that they symbolized much that was automatic and sterile in the Colonel’s career. He had retired from the Army twenty years before, and was now sixty-six, though active and well preserved. And each of those twenty years had been as stereotyped as his ideas. The notions on which he had patterned himself were part regimental and part sporting. As a military man he was saturated with the Balaclava spirit, and one could also imagine him saying, ‘Women and children first’ on a foundering troopship (was it the Warren Hastings which went down in the early nineties?). But the Boer War had arrived seven years too late for him, and the gist of the matter was that he’d never seen any active service. And somehow, when one came to know him well, one couldn’t quite imagine him in the Charge of the Light Brigade: but this may have been because, in spite of the dashing light-cavalry tone of his talk, he had served in a line regiment, and not at all a smart one either. (His affl
uence dated from the day when he had married where money was.)

  As a sportsman he had modelled himself on what I may call the Whyte-Melville standard. His conversational behaviour echoed the sentiments and skylarking vivacities of mid-Victorian sporting novels and the coloured prints of a slightly earlier period. And yet one could no more imagine him participating in a moonlight steeplechase than one could visualize him being shot through the Bible in his breast pocket in a death or glory attack. Like many chivalrous spirits, he could never quite live up to the ideal he aimed at. He was always talking about ‘Brooksby’, a hard-riding journalist who, in the Colonel’s heyday, had written regularly for The Field. He had several volumes of these lively scribblings and he had read and re-read them in his solitary evenings until he knew the name of every gorse-covert and woodland in the Shires.

  But, as Stephen might have said (if he’d been capable of relaxing his admirable loyalty to his god-father) ‘The dear old Colonel’s always bucking about Leicestershire, but I don’t suppose he’s had half a dozen days there since he was foaled!’ And when the Colonel asked one to dine at ‘the Club’ (‘You’ll always find me in town in Ascot week, my dear boy’) ‘the Club’ (he had two) wasn’t quite up to the standard he set himself, since instead of being that full-blown fogeydom ‘The Naval and Military’, it had to face things out as merely (‘Capital Club! Lot of nice young chaps there!’) ‘the Junior’.

  On this special Sunday, however, I could still estimate the Colonel’s importance as being equivalent to twenty-seven pairs of top-boots. In fact, I thought him a terrific swell, and it wouldn’t have surprised me to hear that he’d won the Grand National when he was a gallant young subaltern. At luncheon (roast beef and apple tart) he was the most attentive of hosts, and by the time we had finished our port – (‘I think you’ll find this a nice light-bodied wine. I get it through the Club’) – he had given most of his favourite anecdotes an airing. While the decanter was on its way round Stephen tackled him about the miseries of learning to be a chartered accountant. The lament was well received, and when he said, ‘I’ve been wondering, Colonel, whether I couldn’t possibly get into the Gunners through the Special Reserve,’ the idea was considered a capital one.

  The Colonel’s face lit up: ‘I tell you what, my boy, I’ll write at once to an old friend of mine at the War Office. Excellent officer – used to be in the “Twenty-Third”. Very useful man on a horse, too.’

  Warmed up by the thought of Stephen getting a commission, he asked me whether I was in the Yeomanry. Reluctantly confessing that I wasn’t, I added that I’d been thinking about it; which was true, and the thought had filled me with unutterable alarm. When we rose from our chairs the Colonel drew my attention to the oil-paintings which adorned the walls. These were portraits of his past and present hunters – none of whom, apparently, ‘knew what it was to put a foot wrong’. Among many other relics and associative objects which he showed us was a large green parrot which he ‘had bought from a sailor five-and-twenty years ago’. He had taught the bird to ejaculate ‘Tear ’im and eat ’im’, and other hunting noises. Finally, with a certain access of grand seigneur dignity, he waved to us from his front doorstep and vanished into the house, probably to write a letter to his old friend at the War Office.

  3

  At nine o’clock next morning my cold fingers were making their usual bungling efforts to tie a white stock neatly; but as I had never been shown how to do it, my repeated failures didn’t surprise me, though I was naturally anxious not to disgrace the Rectory on my first appearance at a meet of the Ringwell Hounds. The breakfast bell was supplemented by Stephen’s incitements to me to hurry up; these consisted in cries of ‘Get-along-forrid’ and similar hunt-servant noises, which accentuated my general feeling that I was in for a big day. While I was putting the final touches to my toilet I could hear him shouting to the two Scotch terriers who were scuttling about the lawn (he was out there having a look at that important thing, the weather).

  Fully dressed and a bit flurried, I stumped downstairs and made for the low buzz of conversation in the dining-room. Purposing to make the moderately boisterous entry appropriate to a hunting morning, I opened the door. After a moment of stupefaction I recoiled into the passage, having beheld the entire household on its knees, with backs of varying sizes turned toward me: I had entered in the middle of the Lord’s Prayer. After a temporizing stroll on the lawn I re-entered the room unobtrusively; Stephen handed me a plate of porridge with a grin and no other reference was made to my breach of decorum.

  After breakfast he told me that I’d no more idea of tying a stock than an ironmonger; when he had re-tied it, he surveyed the result with satisfaction and announced that I now ‘looked ready to compete against all the cutting and thrusting soldier-officers in creation’.

  By a quarter past ten the Rector was driving me to the meet in the buggy – the groom having ridden his horse on with Stephen, who was jogging sedately along on Jerry. The Rector, whose overcoat had an astrakhan collar, was rather reticent, and we did the five miles to the meet without exchanging many remarks. But it was a comfort, after my solitary sporting experiments, to feel that I had a couple of friendly chaperons, and Stephen had assured me that my hireling knew his way over every fence in the country and had never been known to turn his head. My only doubt was whether his rider would do him credit. We got to the meet in good time, and Mr Whatman, a very large man who kept a very large livery-stable and drove a coach in the summer, was loquacious about the merits of my hireling, while he supervised my settlement in the saddle, which felt a hard and slippery one.

  As I gathered up the thin and unflexible reins I felt that he was conferring a privilege on me by allowing me to ride the horse – a privilege for which the sum of thirty-five shillings seemed inadequate repayment. My mount was a wiry, nondescript-coloured animal, sober and unexcitable. It was evident from the first that he knew much more about the game than I did. He was what is known as a ‘safe conveyance’ or ‘patent safety’; this more than atoned for his dry-coated and ill-groomed exterior. By the time I had been on his back an hour I felt more at home than I had ever done when out with the Dumborough.

  The meet was at ‘The Five Bells’, a wayside inn close to Basset Wood, which was the chief stronghold of fox-preservation in that part of the Ringwell country. There was never any doubt about finding a fox at Basset. Almost a mile square, it was well-rided and easy to get about in, though none too easy to get a fox away from. It was also, as Stephen remarked when we entered it, an easy place to get left in unless one kept one’s eyes and ears skinned. And his face kindled at the delightful notion of getting well away with the hounds, leaving three parts of the field coffee-housing at the wrong end of the covert. It was a grey morning, with a nip in the air which made him hopeful that ‘hounds would fairly scream along’ if they got out in the open and, perhaps for the first time in my life, I felt a keen pleasure in the idea of sitting down and cramming my horse at every obstacle that might come in our way.

  In the meantime I had got no more than a rough idea of the seventy or eighty taciturn or chattering riders who were now making their way slowly along the main-ride while the huntsman could be heard cheering his hounds a little way off among the oaks and undergrowth. I had already noticed several sporting farmers in blue velvet caps and long-skirted black coats of country cut. And scarlet-coated Colonel Hesmon had proffered me a couple of brown-gloved fingers with the jaunty airified manner of a well-dressed absent-minded swell. He was on his corky little grey cob, and seemed to be having rather a rough ride. In fact the impetuous behaviour of the cob suggested that the Colonel had yet to find the key to his mouth.

  An open space toward the top end of the wood formed a junction of the numerous smaller paths which were tributaries of that main channel – the middle-ride. At this point of vantage a few of the more prominent characters from among the field had pulled up, and since the hounds had yet to find a fox I was able to take a few observations of
people who afterwards became increasingly familiar to me in my mental conspectus of the Ringwell Hunt. Among them was the Master, of whom there is little to be said except that he was a rich man whose resignation was already rumoured. His only qualification was his wealth, and he had had the bad luck (or bad judgment) to engage a bad huntsman. Needless to say the Master’s perplexities had been aggravated by the criticisms and cavillings of subscribers who had neither the wealth, knowledge, nor initiative necessary for the office which this gentleman had found so ungrateful. Much of this I had already learned at the Rectory, where he was given his due for having done his best to hunt the country in handsome style. Sitting there that morning on a too-good-looking, well-bred horse, he seemed glum and abstracted, as though he suspected that most of his field would poke fun at him when his back was turned. One of his troubles was that he’d never learnt how to blow his horn properly, and his inexpert tootlings afforded an adequate excuse for those who enjoyed ridiculing him.

  Chief among these was Nigel Croplady. When I first observed him he was sitting sideways on his compact short-tailed brown horse; a glossy top-hat was tilted over his nose. His supercilious, clean-shaven face was preoccupied with a loose-lipped inspection of his own left leg; his boot-tops were a delicate shell-pink, and his well-cleaned white ‘leathers’ certainly justified his self-satisfied scrutiny of them.