Country life
Hunt-balled out
Leanda de Lisle
Ilay in bed after I came back from the Quorn Tercentenary ball and wrote this column in my head. It was a good column, I think. Unfortunately, I can't remember a thing about it and now I feel all hunt-balled out. All that sticks in my mind is that sever- al people came up and commented on my penultimate hunt ball column, apparently under the impression that I'd been refer- ring to the Quorn hunt ball when I'd been writing about the Atherstone's. I'm morti- fied, as I talked about being the hostess and, at the Quom, that privilege fell to my in-laws.
Still, my American guests were the belles of the ball. My cousin's girlfriend, Kristina, looked particularly beautiful in a ball-gown from Bergdorf in New York. She hadn't been sure what to get and hearing some English accents in the store she went up to the two strangers and asked their advice. Remarkably, these two women were shop- ping for something to wear at the Ather- stone. Talk about a small world. Anyway, heaven knows what she made of it all when she got here on Friday. She arrived just as I was expanding our dining-room table. To my horror, a leg came away in my hand. `Woodworm,' I explained, shamefaced.
I prayed that the table wouldn't collapse beneath us while we were eating and it didn't. Instead, the electricity blew an hour before lunch the next day. Peter was out shooting and so when Raj from the corner shop dropped round with some supplies I fell on him, begging for help. Somehow, he got' the electricity working again and I pro- duced some game mid-afternoon. I was so fraught I didn't notice the house was cool- ing down until Peter (that wretch) finally came home at tea-time. Kristina had been advised by her relations to pack long johns, so she wasn't too concerned about the cold, but we had hoped to disprove the cliché about the discomfort of an English country house.
As it was, when Kristina and my aunt politely enquired about how they could wash their hair, I was confronted by the truth of our barbarism. They both had en suite bathrooms, but there weren't any showers. 'The sink?' I suggested hesitantly, .. or . ..' — and I knew this was going to make us sound like dirty beasts — 'the bath?' In the end I sent up some plastic jugs while Peter tracked down Mr Wolf the emergency-heating man. My housekeeper, who was staying to baby-sit the boys, thought it very funny. Mr Wolf is the name of a memorable character in Pulp Fiction, who would appear when the gangsters needed the evidence of their murders cleaned up.
Anyway, our Mr Wolf managed to get the heating going, but left a message saying he hadn't known how to set the system properly, which explained why the house was about 110 degrees and rising by Sun- day. Thankfully, nothing else went wrong. I vaguely remember that the ball itself had been spectacular, with the marquee lit by tiny lights that looked like stars. There were red coats everywhere, all with a story behind them. My favourite concerned a hunting coat bought cheap because its pre- vious owner had been killed in it. But despite the coats the most striking part of the evening was Lieutenant Colonel Sir John Miller's speech. It conjured up 40 years of hunting: the people, the places, the whole picture.
My aunt hunted in England with my mother and her sisters when she was a child, while my uncle had last hunted with the Quorn in 1953, when he was stationed with the American forces in Europe. They both still hunt in New Jersey and rather bravely chose to go out with the Quorn on the Monday. How did they find it com- pared with the hunting of 40 years ago? It's more friendly and less formal were their observations. It was a perfect day and my aunt jumped about 15 fences in the two short hours she was out. This morning they set off back to London via Frank Hall's, the famous tailor in Market Harborough, so their hunting coats in America will have an English cut to remind them of their stay. As for me, I may be hunt-balled out, but I find myself left with a rather worrying yearning to return to the hunting field myself.
Petronella Wyatt returns next week.
Previous page
