Jumping for joy
Jane Ridley
THE Fox IN THE CUPBOARD by Jane Shilling Viking £16.99, pp. 339, ISBN 0670912913
ane Shilling is a Times journalist and
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single parent who lives in Greenwich with her 12-year-old son. One day, for no particular reason, she decides to take up riding lessons. She turns up at a livery stables at Rooting Street in Kent, an establishment run by a formidable lady named Mrs Rogers. Jane Shilling had never swung her leg over a saddle before. 'I kept thinking of poor, mad Zelda Fitzgerald and her loopy attempts to train as a ballet dancer years after it was too late to begin.' She was too old, 'well into middle age' (she never lets on exactly how old, but she must be 40-something), her legs flail helplessly, and she wobbles off at a trot.
But soon she is hooked. Kent is only 50 miles' drive from Shilling's home, but it is another country, and she embarks on a voyage of discovery — a love affair with her new, secret life at the Rooting Street yard. Mrs Rogers, brisk and breezy, barks orders at her round the riding school. (The acknowledgments show that Mrs Rogers is in fact a real person — like it or not, she has now been immortalised as one of the great comic characters of equine literature.) Shilling travels to Ireland with Mrs Rogers and buys herself a horse, a grey
mare whom she names Molly. She discovers that horses are like babies, but worse — surrounded, as her baby son had been ten years before, with enormous and expensive paraphernalia, fenced around with dos and don'ts which have the direst consequences if ignored.
Under the ever-watchful eye of Mrs Rogers — Shilling calls her the Seeing Finger — Shilling the townie journalist learns to hunt, Never hunt south of the Thames, say the snobs, but Shilling's hunting experiences with the Kentish Ashford Vale are thrilling. Not that hunting is relaxing. On the contrary, she leaves home at 5 a.m., is often physically sick with fear, and swallows nothing all day except sweet tea and whisky. After spending hours laboriously plaiting her horse's mane she arrives at the meet in a state of gleaming, dizzying neatness, only to be splattered with mud within five minutes. She is run away with, she falls off, her horse refuses to jump, she is humiliated and physically shattered. What makes it all worthwhile? Well, the exhilaration of jumping a fence and getting it right, the sense of connectedness hunting brings, not only with her Ashford Valley friends ('Sit down and kick like fuck,' says one), but with a part of herself she didn't know existed.
Shilling is intensely aware of the ambiguity that is at once hunting's strength and its weakness. The hunter preserves and respects the fox he kills. 'Ambiguity is one of those bad-fairy gifts, like free will or contraception. It makes the world at once more interesting and more difficult.' Where there is ambiguity there is disagreement. The case for hunting needs to be made, and the real issue, as Shilling perceives, is one of style, not objective truth. The Burns Report ruled that hunting wasn't cruel back in 2000, but hunting has failed to put its case across. Shilling is rightly critical of the Countryside Alliance, whose blustering press releases resemble '0-level civics essays written by estate agents'.
This is a jewel of a book — funny, wellobserved and beautifully written. Like a good novel, it is shot through with shafts of recognition. What old girl of St Hugh's College, Oxford does not remember the Mary Gray Allen Block, 'a forbidding rectangular box of dark wood, dingy white Artex, toffee-coloured linoleum reeking aseptically of floor polish'. Ronnie Wallace, known as 'God' in the hunting world, is sketched, presiding at a puppy show, looking like a portrait of one of Queen Elizabeth's advisers with 'immobile features and bright, knowing eyes'.
I defy anyone — pro hunting or not — to read this book and not be moved. Like Molly Keane or Siegfried Sassoon, Shilling writes about hunting in a way that makes it intensely human and immediate. I closed this book feeling that the political move to ban hunting is the most wanton cruelty of all.
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