Memoirs of a Foxhunting Man quotes

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.

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.

As a special treat Dixon used to take me down there. Sitting on Rob Roy at the side of the road I would count them over and over again, and Dixon would agree that it was a wonderful sight.

I felt that almost anything might happen in a world which could show me twenty hop-kilns neatly arranged in one field.

It is no use pretending that I was anything else than a dreaming and unpractical boy. Perhaps my environment made me sensitive, but there was an “unmanly” element in my nature which betrayed me into many blunders and secret humiliations.

But I was aware of the mild inquiry in his glance. If only I’d been carrying my green butterfly-net instead of the rather clumsy old hunting-crop of which I was usually so proud!

I have never been a clever dissembler, so I have no doubt that my whole demeanour expressed the concealment of delinquency.

Mr. Star removed his black, wideawake hat, wiped his forehead with a red handkerchief, and genially ejaculated, “Well, well; what a gloriously fine afternoon we are having!”

Macdoggart was immediately in front of me. My attitude was an acquiescent one.

I have always been inclined to accept life in the form in which it has imposed itself upon me, and on that particular occasion, no doubt, I just felt that I was “in for it.”

It did not so much as occur to me that in following Mr. Macdoggart I was setting myself rather a high standard, and when he disappeared over a hedge I took it for granted that I must do the same.

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.

For it was my own countryside, and I loved it with an intimate feeling, though all its associations were crude and incoherent.

I cannot think of it now without a sense of heartache, as if it contained something which I have never quite been able to discover.

Thus we jogged and jingled along in the rumbling two-horse brake with the Butley team talking their parish talk, and every house and hamlet animating William Dodd to some local-flavored anecdote.

The phrase “afterlife” was also vaguely confused with going to church and not wanting to be dead—a perplexity which can be omitted from a narrative in which I am doing my best to confine myself to actual happenings.

At the age of twenty-two I believed myself to be unextinguishable.

It was a wet and windy afternoon toward the end of September. We were on our way home from a seaside place in Devonshire, where we had been staying for a change of air.

If I ever thought of myself as a man of thirty-five it was a visualization of dreary decrepitude. The word maturity had no meaning for me.

I did not anticipate that I should become different; I should only become older.

I cannot pretend that I aspired to growing wiser. I merely lived. And in that condition I drifted from day to day.

By the time we were home I knew quite clearly that my attitude toward the tea-making had been odious; and the more I realized it the more impossible it seemed for me to make amends by behaving gently to her.

It was one of those outwardly trivial episodes which one does not forget.

It was now an accepted fact that I had quitted Cambridge University. During the autumn I was limply incorporating myself with Aunt Evelyn’s localized existence.

Now and again, however, I was remotely affected by the smile which used to light up her sallow humble face when I said something which pleased her. It is the memory of that smile which has helped me to describe her.

For there was a loveliness of spirit in her which I did not recognize until it was too late for her to know it.

On my way up to the schoolroom, which had formerly been known as “the day-nursery,” I decided that the name needed further promotion. “Study” was inappropriate and sounded elderly.

It was his mundane duty as my ex-guardian and acting trustee. Nor can it be denied that Dixon’s loyalty to his profession required him to involve me as inextricably as possible in all that concerned the equine race.

Dixon had emerged victorious. A raw youth who refuses to read for the Bar is persuaded by the family groom to buy a horse.

How tame it sounds! But there was a lot more in it than that—a statement which can be applied to many outwardly trivial events in life when one takes the trouble to investigate them.

But it wasn’t until I had surreptitiously compared them with other boots that I realized their shortcomings (one of the worst of which was their lack of length in the leg).

A boot can look just as silly as a human being.

However, I had other anxieties as I rode to the meet, for I was no less shy and apprehensive than I had been on my way to the same place ten years earlier. At the meet I knew no one except Mr.

there is a light burning in the farmhouse window, and the evening star glitters above a broken drift of half-luminous cloud. “Only three miles more, old man,” I say, slipping to the ground to walk alongside of him for a while.

It is with a sigh that I remember simple moments such as those, when I understood so little of the deepening sadness of life, and only the strangeness of the spring was knocking at my heart.

I was now eager to find out all I could about riding and hunting, and it was with this object in view that I made up my mind to go to the Ringwell Hunt Point-to-Point Races.

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.

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 goodbye 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.

Warder took off his cap and mopped his brow. Then he looked with grudging good humour at the remnant of his field and their heaving horses.

“Now let the bastards say I don’t go well enough!”

he remarked, as he slipped his horn back in its case on his saddle.

and that, for all I had known, there might have been no hounds at all, since they were always a couple of fields ahead of us, and we were, most of us, merely following the Master, who already knew exactly which way they would go.

I lay stress on these facts because it is my firm belief that the majority of foxhunting riders never enjoy a really “quick thing” while it is in progress.

Their enjoyment therefore, mainly consists in talking about it afterwards and congratulating themselves on their rashness or their discretion, according to their temperaments.

My Harkaway, on the other hand, was more a subject for solicitude, and I reluctantly confessed that he didn’t seem up to my weight.

It was a thousand pities, said Stephen, that I couldn’t have bought that six-year-old of young Lewison’s.

“Given him for his twenty-first birthday by his uncle, who’d forked out £170 for him. But young Lewison couldn’t ride a hair of the horse, though he was a nailing fine ‘lepper’ and a rare good sort to look at.

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.

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.

I could have sworn that I knew what he was going to say before a single word was out of his mouth. And when, without a second’s hesitation, I replied, “I’ll give you fifty pounds for him,”

I was merely overhearing a remark which I had already made.

Young Lewison looked incredulous; but Stephen intervened, with no sign of surprise, “Damn it, George, you might do worse than buy him, at that price. Hop off your hireling and see what he feels like.”

And those words from my diary do seem worth commenting on—symbolic as they are of the equestrian equilibrium on which my unseasoned character was trying to pattern itself.

I wrote myself down that evening as I wanted myself to be⁠—a hard-bitten hunting man, self-possessed in his localized knowingness and stag-hunting jargon.

The words might well have been penned by a middle-aged sheep-farmer, or even by Mr. “Gus” Gimling himself. “Took a toss over a stile” is the only human touch. But taking tosses was incidental to the glory of being a hard rider.

I wrote myself down that evening as I wanted myself to be—a hard-bitten hunting man, self-possessed in his localized knowingness and stag-hunting jargon. The words might well have been penned by a middle-aged sheep-farmer, or even by Mr. “Gus” Gimling himself.

“Took a toss over a stile” is the only human touch.

But taking tosses was incidental to the glory of being a hard rider.

But there is a risk in such ridicule. As I remember and write, I grin, but not unkindly, at my distant and callow self and the absurdities which constitute his chronicle. To my mind the only thing that matters is the resolve to do something.

Middle-aged retrospection may decide that it wasn’t worth doing; but the perceptions of maturity are often sapless and restrictive; and “the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts,” even though they are only about buying a racing-cap.

A week before the Races I went to London and bought a cap with a jutting peak; it was made of black silk, with strings that hung down on each side until they had been tied in front.

No day was too long and no fence too hairy for George and the guv’nor’s ’osses. At the most remote meets he would trot up—his fine-featured open face subdued to the decorum of servitude and a jolly twinkle forever lurking in his keen eyes. (

He was a man who could condense more meaning into a single wink than most political speakers can put into a peroration.

) Always he had his free and easy hail for the hunt-servants (to whom he could generally give some useful information during the day); for the gentry he reserved a respectful rap of his hat-brim and a sonorous “Mornin’, sir.”

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.

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.

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.

A stone statue stares at me, and I wonder who lived there when the house was first built.

“I am riding past the past,” I think, never dreaming that I shall one day write that moment down on paper

; never dreaming that I shall be clarifying and condensing that chronicle of simple things through which I blundered so diffidently.

“When did you last give a ball at Folesford, Sir Jocelyn?” I politely asked him, gazing bashfully at one of his dangling top-boots.

“We have no record (sniff) of any ball at Folesford (sniff),” was his rejoinder.

Why there had never been any balls at Folesford I am still at a loss to understand. But the fact remained. It was (sniff) so. … And Sir Jocelyn, as I have taken trouble to indicate, was the king of the Saturday country.

The horse went on alone and the jockey scrambled to his feet, and as he walked past us on the other side of the rails Charlie Peppermore laughed. It was the most insulting, contemptuous laugh I’d ever heard. Then he turned to me and drawled,

“How I hate that man! I’ve been waiting years to see him break his neck.”

Of the two, Denis liked Jack the best, and one Saturday in the middle of November Jack was invited to dinner, with two other young sportsmen who lived not many miles away. This was an uncommon event at the Kennels, and Mrs.

Fantasias of polite society swept through me in wave on wave of secret snobbishness; life in London when Hyde Park would be bright with flowers assumed the enchanting aspect of a chapter in an elegantly written novel about people with large incomes and aristocratic connections.

Sighing for such splendours, I knew that I was only flattening my nose against the plate-glass window of an expensive florist’s shop.

Orchids were altogether beyond my income. I never doubted the authenticity of those enjoyments. My immature mind, as was natural, conjectured something magical in such allurements of prosperity. It was the spectacle of vivid life, and I was young to it.

During the winter Aunt Evelyn had persuaded her to go to the seaside for a fortnight’s holiday, as her health had become noticeably bad. While at the seaside she unobtrusively died of heart failure.

To the last, therefore, she managed to avoid being a trouble to anyone.

This was a severe blow to Aunt Evelyn. She had been so much a part of the place that I had taken for granted everything she did.

I had already been offered a commission in my own Yeomanry, but how could I have accepted it when everybody was saying that the Germans might land at Dover any day? I was safe in the Army, and that was all I cared about.

I had slipped into the Downfield troop by enlisting two days before the declaration of war.

For me, so far, the War had been a mounted infantry picnic in perfect weather. The inaugural excitement had died down, and I was agreeably relieved of all sense of personal responsibility. Cockbird’s welfare was my main anxiety;

The bugle blew for twelve o’clock “stables,” and I went down to the horse-lines to take Cockbird to the watering trough. Everyone had been talking about the hundred thousand Russians who were supposed to have passed through England on their way to France.

Away across the hot midday miles the bells of Canterbury Cathedral refused to recognize the existence of a war.

It was just a dazzling early autumn day, and the gaitered farmer came riding in from his fields on a cob.

Everyone had been talking about the hundred thousand Russians who were supposed to have passed through England on their way to France. Away across the hot midday miles the bells of Canterbury Cathedral refused to recognize the existence of a war.

It was just a dazzling early autumn day, and the gaitered farmer came riding in from his fields on a cob.

As I was leading Cockbird back from watering I passed Nigel Croplady, who was one of the troop leaders. He stopped to speak to me for a moment, and asked whether I had heard from Denis Milden lately;

Many of us believed that the Russians would occupy Berlin (and, perhaps, capture the Kaiser) before Christmas.

The newspapers informed us that German soldiers crucified Belgian babies. Stories of that kind were taken for granted; to have disbelieved them would have been unpatriotic.

When Aunt Evelyn came over to see me one hot Sunday afternoon I assured her that we should soon be going to the Front. Her private feelings about “men who march away” had to be sacrificed to my reputability as a cavalryman.

The significance of those approaching feet was intensified by my sentrified nerves. Holding my rifle defensively (and a loaded rifle, too), I remarked in an unemphatic voice, “Halt, who goes there?” There was no reply.

Out of the mist and the weeds through which it was wading emerged the Kentish cow which I had challenged.

By the third week in September the nights were becoming chilly, and we weren’t sorry when we were moved into the Workhouse, which was quite near the farm where we had been camping. Sleeping in the Workhouse seemed luxurious;

The weather had been as depressing as the War news. Like everybody else I eagerly assimilated the optimistic reports in the papers about Russian victories in East Prussia, and so on.

“The Russian steamroller”; how remote that phrase seems now!

… Often I prayed that the War would be over before my arm got well. A few weeks later the doctor said the bone had united and I had another operation for the removal of the plate.

but he would have regarded it as a greater tragedy if he had seen me shirking my responsibility. To him, as to me, the War was inevitable and justifiable. Courage remained a virtue.

And that exploitation of courage, if I may be allowed to say a thing so obvious, was the essential tragedy of the War, which, as everyone now agrees, was a crime against humanity.

Luckily for my peace of mind, I had no such intuitions when I walked across the fields to Butley that afternoon, with four o’clock striking in mellow tones from the grey church tower, the village children straggling home from school, and the agricultural serenity of …

Considerably closer was a hissing and throbbing inferno, which incessantly concocted the form of high explosive known as T.N.T.; when the wind was in the east the Camp got the benefit of the fumes, which caused everyone to cough.

Adjoining the Camp, on the other side, was a large Roman Catholic cemetery. Frequent funeral processions cheered up the troops.

The surrounding country, with its stunted dwelling-houses, dingy trees, disconsolate canal, and flat rootfields, was correspondingly unlikable.

It was a sad story, but I make no apology for dragging it from its decent oblivion.

All squalid, abject, and inglorious elements in war should be remembered. The intimate mental history of any man who went to the War would make unheroic reading. I have half a mind to write my own.

In the meantime there is nothing more to be said about my first night in mess, and the next morning I began to acquire the alphabet of infantry training. Mansfield picked it up twice as quick as I did.

And his “word of command” had fire and ferocity; whereas mine was much as might have been expected (in spite of my having acquired a passable “view holloa” during my foxhunting life).

Learning how to be a second lieutenant was a relief to my mind. It made the War seem further away.

I hadn’t time to think about it, and by the end of each day I was too healthily tired to worry about anything.

How does he manage to look like that? I thought; and for the moment I felt all my age, though the world had taught me little enough, as I knew then, and know even better now.

His was the bright countenance of truth; ignorant and undoubting; incapable of concealment but strong in reticence and modesty.

In fact, he was as good as gold, and everyone knew it as soon as they knew him.

Dick made all the difference to my life at Clitherland.

Apart from his cheerful companionship, which was like perpetual fine weather, his Sandhurst training enabled him to help me in mine.

Patiently he heard me while I went through my repetitions of the mechanism of the rifle. And in company drill, which I was slow in learning, he was equally helpful.

But it was probably an accident that he had succeeded. It was a lucky beginning, anyhow. What a railway-tasting mouth I’d got! A cup of coffee would be nice, though French coffee tasted rather nasty, I thought. … We got to Bethune by half-past ten.

We got to Bethune by half-past ten: I am well aware that the statement is, in itself, an arid though an accurate one.

And at this crisis in my career I should surely be ready with something spectacular and exciting. Nevertheless, I must admit that I have no such episode to exhibit. The events in my experience must take their natural course.

He was, in fact, a man of snug and domesticated habits and his mere presence (wearing pince-nez) in a front line trench made one feel that it ought, at any rate, to be cosy.

Such an inherently amicable man as Barton was a continual reminder of the incongruity of war with everyday humanity.

In the meantime he was making gallant efforts to behave professionally, and keep his end up as a company commander. But that stove had no business to be making the room uninhabitable with its suffocating fumes.

A heron sailed slowly away across the misty flats of ploughed land. Twilight deepened, and a flicker of star-shells wavered in the sky beyond Bethune.

The sky seemed to sag heavily over Flanders; it was an oppressive, soul-clogging country, I thought

, as I went back to our company mess in the squalid village street, to find Dick polishing his pipe against his nose, Ormand and Mansfield playing “nap,” and Durley soberly reading The Cloister and the Hearth in an Everyman edition.

“Our company have been for a bath today and had a clean shirt given us and socks. We had to march five miles each way, so we had a good walk for it didn’t we? My feet are minus all the top skin.

Everywhere we go seems such a long way.

” In those last words one infantry private speaks for them all.

We had to march five miles each way, so we had a good walk for it didn’t we? My feet are minus all the top skin. Everywhere we go seems such a long way.”

In those last words one infantry private speaks for them all.

Our big move to the back area began at six a.m. We had to be up by then, for our kits had to be packed and ready by half-past seven.

I sat on a milestone and watched the sun come out, and a thrush sang a little way off—the first I’d heard in France.

But solitude was scanty and precious in the Army, and at half-past ten I was on parade.

We marched two miles into Lillers and entrained. The train started at noon. Ten hours later we detrained at a station three miles from Amiens. We had averaged four miles an hour, and it was now after ten;

a dark, still night, with a little rain at times. Men, transport horses, officers’ chargers, limbers, and field-kitchens (known as “the cookers”) were unloaded. All this took two hours. We had some tea. …

If I could taste that tea out of the dixies now I should write it all very much as it was.

Living spontaneity would be revived by that tea, the taste of which cannot be recovered by any effort of memory.

After the second halt the road seemed to become more hilly. About once in an hour we passed through a dark sleeping village. There was a lamp hung on a limber in the rear of the column.

Twice I saw our shadows thrown on a white wall in a village. The first time it was a few colossal heads with lurching shoulders and slung rifles; and a second time, on a dead white wall, it was a line of legs; legs only; huge legs striding away from us as if jeering at our efforts to keep going.

Movement became mechanical, and I found myself falling asleep as I walked. The men had the weight of their packs and equipment to keep them awake!

And kind Aunt Evelyn talked bitterly about the Germans and called them “hellhounds.” I found myself defending them, although I couldn’t claim acquaintance with a single one of them (except Willie Regel, and I shouldn’t have known him by sight if I’d met him).

Looking round the room at the enlarged photographs of my hunters, I began to realize that my past was wearing a bit thin.

The War seemed to have made up its mind to obliterate all those early adventures of mine. Point-to-point cups shone, but without conviction. And Dixon was dead. …

Looking round the room at the enlarged photographs of my hunters, I began to realize that my past was wearing a bit thin. The War seemed to have made up its mind to obliterate all those early adventures of mine.

Point-to-point cups shone, but without conviction.

And Dixon was dead. …