Gone Away!

Can you recall the novel that took you away from the nursery bookshelves and into the realms of Grown-Up Books – a gateway book, if you like? I happened upon mine after months of resisting efforts both at home and at school to get me to read something more challenging. Until then, as a pony-mad child without a pony, I’d sought refuge in my tattered copies of thrilling stories like Show-Jumping Secret and We Hunted Hounds by the Pullein-Thompson sisters. Then one day, entirely of my own volition, when I was perhaps 12 or 13, I reached for the blue, cloth-bound copy of Siegfried Sassoon’s Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man.

Most readers encounter Sassoon as the brave soldier-poet with the Military Cross, the mentor of Wilfred Owen, who has shaped our thinking on the First World War perhaps more than anyone else. It was Sassoon who first exposed the horrors of the trenches in his poetry. His depiction of the calamitous Western Front and the gulf between blundering, incompetent generals and innocent young soldiers betrayed is the overriding impression we have of that conflict, despite efforts of revisionist historians in the decades since his death. But that afternoon, as I devoured the first of Sassoon’s three volumes of lightly fictionalized autobiography, I met him as a boy in the person of his alter-ego George Sherston, clip-clopping to a distant meet alongside Dixon the groom, his fingers numb and a melting hoarfrost on the hedgerows. Sassoon began Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man (1928) as the spoof reminiscences of a retired sporting colonel living in Cheltenham. But in the autumn of 1926 he destroyed these and, using his hunting memories to escape an unhappy present (he had burnt much of his recent poetry and was in an unsatisfactory relationship with a young actor), he began to write about a boy growing up in Kent. George Sherston (a surname taken from a village in the famous Beaufort Hunt country) is a shy, sensitive, rather lonely boy, raised by a maiden aunt in a Wealden village. Like Sherston when the book opens, I had never ‘seen hounds’, as hunting people say, and hunting terminology was a mystery to me. I’d no idea that a ‘ratcatcher’ was a tweed coat worn before the opening meet, that ‘covert’ has a silent ‘t’, or that ‘holloa’ – the shriek emitted when the quarry is spotted leaving the covert – is pronounced ‘holler’. Under the guidance of Dixon, who is keen to make a proper little fox-hunting man of his young charge, I thrilled with Sherston to the excitement of the chase, the anticipation aroused by a nip in the air which means that hounds will ‘run like the blazes . . . fairly scream along’ (scent, Dixon explains, is most pungent on cold, damp ground). I was there with him at his very first meet, riding pillion on his little cob, Sheila:

And then, for the first time, I heard a sound which has thrilled generations of foxhunters to their marrow. From the far side of the wood came the long shrill screech (for which it is impossible to find an adequate word) which signifies that one of the whips has viewed the fox quitting the covert. ‘Gone Away’ it meant. But before I had formulated the haziest notion about it, Lord Dumborough was galloping up the ride and the rest of them were pelting after him as though nothing could stop them . . .

Despite Sherston’s obsession with the chase, for the reader who does not share his passion he is never boring. Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man is a lyrical evocation of a vanished, unspoilt rural England, a eulogy for the Elysian Weald of Sassoon’s youth. Here, during those gorgeously golden Edwardian summers before the First World War, we meet Aunt Evelyn, with smelling salts in hand and a bee veil over her head, her world limited by ‘the distance she could cover in a fourwheeled dog cart’ and divided into people whom one could ‘call on’ and people who were ‘socially impossible’. There are sleek-haired little boys in Eton jackets, a stationmaster in a top hat and a baggy black frockcoat, and at home a ‘fire-lit parlour’ and ‘the smell of strawberry jam’. From this Utopia Sassoon excised unhappy elements of his own boyhood: the scandal of his father leaving his mother and her mental instability. In his 2005 biography Max Egremont writes of Sassoon becoming ‘more English’ in Fox-Hunting Man, of ‘purging’ that which had set him apart from his contemporaries – his homosexuality and his Jewishness. The adult Sherston acknowledges that memory is imperfect, that it reflects like the tarnished mirror in the sunless passage that led to his schoolroom. He admits to the reader that he is ‘reconstructing’ his life as he loiters among his memories, recasting and reimagining. Recalling the cricket match at the annual village flower show, he confesses: ‘The umpires are in their place. But it is in the sunshine of my own clarified retrospection that they are wearing their white coats.’ But Sassoon’s own ‘clarified retrospection’ is far more radical than Sherston’s, with his homosexuality expunged entirely. While writing the book, he became enmeshed in a torrid, protracted affair with the aesthete Stephen Tennant. Later he would embark on marriage to a young woman called Hester Gatty, who was twenty years his junior. He saw her as the chance to ‘redeem my life’; the marriage was, inevitably, disastrous. The reader might sense Sassoon’s true feelings in Sherston’s intense friendship with the fictional Stephen Colwood – in reality Stephen Gordon Harbord, the son of a sporting parson whose vicarage became Sassoon’s second home – and with Denis Milden, the name he gave to Norman Loder, an expert Old Etonian huntsman and his boyhood hero. The companionable scenes when Sherston goes to stay at the kennels with Denis – ‘the most significant occasion my little world could offer me’ – have the easy familiarity of a contented married couple:

It was after half-past six when he came in. He seemed to take me for granted already, but assured me again he was ‘terrible pleased to have someone to talk to’. . . As soon as he had swallowed a cup of tea he lit his pipe and sat down at his writing-table to open a pile of letters.

The war does not intrude on this idyll until late in the book, when Sherston’s innocence and naïvety, and the world he has evoked, are shattered. Sassoon would give a fuller account of his experiences in the trenches in Memoirs of an Infantry Officer (1930), completing the trilogy with Sherston’s Progress (1936), which begins with his arrival at Slateford War Hospital, based on Craiglockhart, a sanatorium in Edinburgh. Sassoon was sent there by an army medical board in July 1917, diagnosed with shell shock and a nervous breakdown after issuing an anti-war statement that was read out in the House of Commons. Wilfred Owen, a fellow in-patient, sought out his company; Sassoon would suggest changes to ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’ and help him get published. In the closing pages of Memoirs there is a clarion call, as great as anything Orwell wrote in response to the Second World War, for a certain kind of England, for the ‘pleasant and homely countrified life . . . I wanted the past to survive and to begin again’. Sassoon writes with the same lyricism on the hell of Flanders as he does on the Elysian fields of the Weald. Under bombardment, ‘the sky winked and flickered like a thunderstorm gone crazy’ with ‘a remote rumble . . . like heavy furniture being moved about in a room overhead’. Here in the trenches it is hunting that sustains Sherston, whether he is daydreaming or indulging in ‘sporting make-believe’:

Assuming a Denis Milden manner . . . I would go solemnly through a wood, cheering imaginary hounds. After an imaginary fox had been found, away we’d scuttle, looking in vain for a fence to jump, making imaginary casts after an imaginary check, and losing our fox when the horses had done enough galloping. An imaginary kill didn’t appeal to me, somehow.

Some names and details from Sassoon’s real hunting world are unchanged, or only altered very slightly. Sherston’s noble hunter Cockbird, on which he wins the Colonel’s Cup at a point-to-point, was a real horse, winning several races before the war for his proud owner. No doubt the amateur huntsman of the staghounds, Harry Buckman (Buckland in real life), did ‘tit-tup stylishly’ past Sassoon at a meet, ‘his velvet cap cocked slightly over one ear’. When I left BBC News for a staff job at Horse & Hound magazine – an unusual move that may owe something to my adolescent reading of Sassoon – one of the first people I met was Buckland’s great-great-granddaughter, Lucinda Sims. I had booked myself into one of her hunting clinics to try to fill in the gaps in my knowledge and learn how to ‘cross the country’ on a horse. As it turned out there was no need to prise me away from the nursery bookshelves; I was immediately captured by the story of Sassoon’s growing up, and by his characters both real and imagined. I have much to thank him for; writing on the first really cold day of the year, in the midst of an energy crisis, I remember Sherston’s observation, that no one who understands the significance of a nip in the air ever ‘dreads the dark winter’.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 79 © Flora Watkins 2023