Memoirs of a Foxhunting Man

My childhood was a queer and not altogether happy one. Circumstances conspired to make me shy and solitary. My father and mother died before I was capable of remembering them. I was an only child, entrusted to the care of an unmarried aunt who lived quietly in the country. My aunt was no longer young when I began to live in her comfortable, old-fashioned house with its large, untidy garden. She had settled down to her local interests, seldom had anyone to stay with her, and rarely left home. She was fond of her two Persian cats, busied herself sensibly with her garden, and was charitably interested in the old and rheumatic inhabitants of the village. Beyond this, the radius of her activities extended no further than the eight or ten miles which she could cover in a four-wheeled dogcart driven by Tom Dixon, the groom. The rest of the world was what she described as “beyond calling distance.”

Dixon was a smart young man who would have preferred a livelier situation. It was he who persuaded my aunt to buy me my first pony. I was then nine years old.

My aunt had an unexplained prejudice against sending me to school. So I remained at home until I was twelve⁠—inefficiently tutored by a retired elementary schoolmaster, a gentle, semi-clerical old person who arrived every morning, taught me a limited supply of Latin, and bowled lobs to me on the lawn.

At this moment I can only recall a single instance, which happened about eighteen months after the arrival of Rob Roy. By that time I was going for rides of six or seven miles with Dixon, and the “leading-rein” was a thing of the past. I was also having jumping lessons, over a small brush-fence which he had put up in the paddock. One day, inflated with pride, I petitioned, rather shyly, to be allowed to go for a ride by myself. Without consulting my aunt Dixon gave his permission; he seemed pleased, and entrusted me with the supreme responsibility of saddling and bridling the pony without his help. I managed to do this, in my bungling way, and I have no doubt that I felt extremely important when I tit-tupped down to the village in that sleepy afternoon sunshine of thirty years ago. Rob Roy probably shared my feeling of independence as he shook his little black head and whisked his long tail at the flies. I was far too big a man to look back as we turned out of my aunt’s white gate into the dusty high road; but I can imagine now the keen sensitive face of Dixon, and his reticent air of amusement as he watched us go out into the world by ourselves. My legs were then long enough to give me a pleasant feeling of security and mastery over my mount.

“Here we are, Rob,” I remarked aloud, “off for a jolly good day with the Dumborough.”

The Tea Tent was overcrowded and I found Aunt Evelyn sitting a little way outside it in comparative seclusion. She was in earnest communication with Miss Clara Maskall, a remarkable old lady who had been born in the year of the Battle of Waterloo and had been stone-deaf for more than sixty years.

My aunt was one of the few people in the neighbourhood who enjoyed meeting Miss Maskall. For the old lady had a way of forgetting that the rest of the world could hear better than she could, and her quavering comments on some of the local gentlefolk, made in their presence, were often too caustic to be easily forgotten. She was reputed to have been kissed by King George the Fourth. She was wearing a bunched-up black silk dress, and her delicately withered face was framed in a black poke-bonnet, tied under the chin with a white lace scarf. With her piercingly alert eyes and beaky nose she looked like some ancient and intelligent bird. Altogether she was an old person of great distinction, and I approached her with an awful timidity. She had old-fashioned ideas about education, and she usually inquired of me, in creaking tones, whether I had recently been flogged by my schoolmaster.

But the menace of Roman Catholicism was her most substantial and engrossing theme; and up to the age of ninety she continued to

At any rate, it was a relief to settle down in a corner of the dark blue cushioned compartment after my aunt’s unnecessary fussification about the luggage. Raindrops trickled down the windows as we steamed out of the station, and I was glad to avert my gaze from the dingy and dilapidated tenements and warehouses which we were passing. Poverty was a thing I hated to look in the face; it was like the thought of illness and bad smells, and I resented the notion of all those squalid slums spreading out into the uninfected green country. While I perused a magazine called Golf Illustrated I stole an occasional glance at the two very first-class looking passengers who occupied the other corners of the compartment. One of them was a grey-haired lady with a crocodile-skin dressing-case and a fur cloak. She was reading a book with an air of refined hauteur. The other was a middle-aged man with a neatly trimmed grey beard and a glossy top-hat which he had ceremoniously arranged on the rack above him. He was glancing at Blackwood’s Magazine, and he had a bunch of violets in the buttonhole of his opulent dark blue overcoat. From the tone of voice in which he inquired whether she would prefer the window down a little I inferred that the lady was a stranger to him. Compared with these influential-looking people, Aunt Evelyn in her countrified tweed coat and skirt and her dowdy little hat seemed only just presentable. I had yet to make the significant discovery that the most distinguished personages are sometimes the most untidy.

Mr. Gaffikin then tied the strings of my cap in a very tight bow; a bell jangled and a stentorian voice shouted, “Now then, gentlemen, I’m going down to the post.” The blue sky suddenly went white; my heart bumped; I felt dazed and breathless. Then Mr. Gaffikin’s remote voice said, “Let me give you a leg-up, old chap”; I grabbed hold of the reins, lifted an awkward foot, and was lifted airily on the slippery saddle: Cockbird gave one prance and then stood still; Dixon was holding him firmly by the head. Pressing my knees into the saddle I overheard Mr. Gaffikin’s ultimate advice. “Don’t go in front unless you can help it; but keep well with ’em.” They both wished me luck and released me to my destiny.

I felt as if I’d never been on Cockbird’s back before; everything around me appeared unreal and disconnected from all my previous experience. As I followed Stephen out of the Paddock in a sort of equestrian trance, I caught sight of his father’s face, pale and fixed in its most strenuous expression; his eyes followed his son, on whose departure he was too intent to be able to take in anyone else. We filed through a gate under some trees: “Gentleman George” was standing by the gate; he stared up at me as I passed.