Hunting special
Jeremy Clarke
Foul weather and worse to come. Puddles in the farmyard. An 18th-century farmhouse with a cast-iron fox’s mask for a doorknocker. The door is ajar. Inside, men in hunting waistcoats are gathered around a silver drinks tray.
The warmth and enthusiasm of my host’s greeting takes me aback. He welcomes me literally with open arms and introduces me to the company. One of them, a raffish-looking bloke, is an Earl. Another, with a cruel, outdoor face, is introduced as ‘the Master’. Friendly hands are extended. ‘He looks the part, anyway,’ says the Master.
‘Now, then,’ says my host to me in a business-like manner, carefully tipping first whisky then cherry brandy into a glass and presenting it to me, ‘would you care for a “Sid special”?’ A scrubbed wooden table, a monumental oak cupboard, a coatrack fit for a school, a fireplace spacious enough to take a spitted pig and somebody to turn the handle, a centuries’-old soot-blackened clock stopped at ten to four, the assembled company in tall boots and hunting waistcoats: stepping into that parlour is like stepping back a couple of centuries. I remark on it. Not the most original remark they’ve ever heard, but it gets me off the mark and they are very sporting about it. Someone generously extinguishes the two bare light bulbs hanging over the table to increase the truth of it. ‘Cheers!’ says my host, arching his spine and crashing back his Sid special in one.
I met him at a Spectator party. He invited me to come hunting with him because he reads and sometimes enjoys this column. I accepted because I’ve yet to meet a professional huntsman I haven’t liked — though I’m more a ferret and terrier man myself. Professional foxhunters seem to me to be as modest and unassuming about their own particular set of verities as Anglican clergymen are about theirs — and just as troubled by occasional ‘doubts’. Also, I’m interested to see what difference, if any, the absurd Hunting Act 2004 has made to venery.
Twenty minutes and three Sid specials later, we step outside and go and mingle with the assembling field. I’m flying. I’m given a tray of Christmas pudding slices and told to hand them around. An elderly chap politely inquires whether I’m a hunt saboteur. I’m welcome anyhow, he says. Many people are pleased to note that the atrocious weather doesn’t seem to have put many people off. A man with a pet terrier says the only difference the Hunting Act has made to foxhunting is to make it more popular than ever.
A tap on the shoulder. Leaning down from the saddle, my host is keen to help me join the dots. ‘That Frenchman you’ve just shaken hands with? Queen of Spain’s nephew. The beautiful sapling of a French girl in the cricket jumper? Direct descendant of Napoleon Bonaparte.’ Above all, though, he’s anxious to make me feel welcome. I must make his home my home and stay as long as I want, he says. For a moment I think he’s going to cry. And as far as the hunting today goes, he says, pulling himself together, would I mind following the field in the Land Rover with his wife and Napoleon’s lovely relative?
After the field has moved off to plaintive blasts on the huntsman’s horn, we three climb into the Land Rover. His wife drives serenely and with a smile. Unfortunately we fail to notice which way the hounds and riders go, and make three circuits of the farmyard before admitting defeat and stopping to ask. A foot follower thinks they went east.
We drive a little way down a muddy lane, halt beside a five-bar gate, and wind down the windows. No sight nor sound of the hunt. ‘Look! A hare!’ I say, pointing towards a brown creature lolloping down the rainswept hill. ‘It’s a deer, surely,’ says my host’s wife, smiling. And so it is. It’s a roe deer — a biggish female. The Sid specials have ruined not only my sense of visual perspective, but also my credibility as a countryman.
We drive on. Napoleon’s descendant tells us how a fortnight ago, in Berlin, she met and fell in love with a young German artist. She doesn’t expect it to last, but she’s determined to enjoy it while she can. Berlin is an artists’ paradise at the moment, she says. Rents are affordable and the city’s creative energy has yet to be diverted by commercialism. She shows us the lapel badge he’s given her — a stylised portrait of Lenin framed by olive branches.
The weather is so foul, and our threecornered conversation about love, Berlin and Lenin is so much more interesting than scanning the soggy landscape for riders, that we abandon the search and drive to the pub. And because the scenting conditions are next to impossible, the riders aren’t very far behind us.
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