Animals and Sport
Shooting Days. By Eric Parker. (Philip Allan. 12s. 6d.) A Highland Gathering. By H. Frank Wallace. (Eyre and Spottiswoode. 15s.) At the Tail of the Weir. By Patrick R. Chalmers. (Philip Allan.
12s. 6d.) Scotty. By Frances Pitt. (Longmans. 10s. &I.) The Animals Came to Drink. By Cherry Kearton. (Longmans.
6s.) A Hunting We Will Go. By Brigadier Geoffrey Brooke. (Seeley Service. 10s. 6d.) Cross-saddle and Side-saddle. By E. V. •A.•Christy. (Seeley Service. 12s. 6d.) Jorrocks's England. By Anthony Steel. (Methuen. is. 6d.)
THE first three books are tales of performance, labours of love, love of the sport, of animals, of all that has to do to the countryside. At the Tail of the Weir has, of course, to do with fishing, but with Thames fishing alone. It is full of pleasure and of information, and is not, and is not intended to be, a book for the beginner. Mr. Chalmers, who is also, as is well known, a poet is. discursive and anecdotal, and if he is not always to the point, he is always an agreeable gossip. I believe all his fishing stories, every one, but frankly I do not believe the story .of the gourmet's who plricidly accepted port for burgundy and burgundy for port, although l am the most gullible' of mortals. Everything else about tiout; chub, tench, roach or any other fish I accept. Mr. Wallace write' chiefly about stalking, and his first few chapters are very good. The rest -are rather makeshift, except •the final chapter on John Guille Millais, a worthy and delightful tribute. All the books here noticed.are illustrated, bill this one is adorned with very pleasing water-colours and pencil sketches by the author.' Of Shooting Days it will not be permitted to me to say much, as it is a third edition since 1928, now revised and enlarged. Mr. Parker writes about all sorts of shooting, and all sorts of animals, and besides !knowing-his subject inti- mately, he is a writer both born and made. Though the other wilters• are all practised, -Mine of them,--with the -exception of" Mr. Steel, gives us the extra sense of reality, of intensity over And beyond our mental .image of the scene described, which the word and the phrase properly wielded can give. Mr. Parker's book is literature as well as sport or natural history. He should be omitted from no anthology of English prose, not merely from no anthology of sport.
• The next two books are natural history rather than sport. Miss Pitt, already well known as an interpreter:of the animal mind, tells us the story of a Highland fox," which, brought south, eventually finds his way back to his birthplace. It is also a hunting story, and, as the wrapper justly tells us, Miss Pitt understands the feelings of hunter and hunted alike. I may say that I do not believe the story, but that does not matter a whit, as it is a delightful story, and the details are obviously all of them right. The Animals Came to Drink is a most fascinating book about African animals, and though written in the form of a story about an impalla, is intended to correct many works, and even films, which distort our view of how the wild animals of those manless regionS behave. Croco- diles (there is a superb crocodile fight described), elephants, deer of various kinds, baboons, lions, all figure in this tale, which is well woven and illustrated with beautiful photo- graphs. It will hold you from beginning to end.
A Hunting We Will Go is the story of a short-sighted Anglo-Indian, who, his hunting wife having come into a fortune, takes to hunting, wins a point-to-point, thanks to being able to spend unlimited sums of money on his horses, and ends up as an M.F.H. It cannot be said that Brigadier Brooke is a born novelist, but it is an agreeable tale, written with sentiment and humour, and may well occupy a frost- hound day. We wish, however, that Brigadier Brooke, who is author of Horsemanship in the Lonsdale Library, would write us a more didactic novel. We wish his ignorant hero Ilad had to struggle rather more with his riding and horseman- ship, for Brigadier Brooke really knows, and could tell us most agreeably in fiction form. Mr. Christy, also already
known for books on -this- subject, ispurel3"r-didacticl-his hook is for beginner and past-master alike : there is nothing he does not tell us about saddles, bits, bridles, whips and so on, and he has admirable chapters on riding. Here there will be some who disagree. Mr. Christy seems to advocate the grip with the calf rather than with the thigh (which, apart from anything else, tends to put too much weight on the stirrup), and in his instructions on the jumping seat. does not seem to take into :ponSideration the need to take the weight off the horse's loins, whereupon Brigadier Brooke might have something tc say. This is the hardest of all the books to read, as it demands attention.
Mr. Steel's book is not really a sporting book at all ; it is an essay, and a very timely one, in social history ; timely, because too. many people are inclined to regard Surtees as a writer who confined himself to hunting. Mr. Steel, in an excellently written book, proves by means of extensive quota. tion that Surtees after all wrote about a good many other things, things which help us to reconstruct the England of his day. Travel, the land, the domestic scene, middle-class society, professional life, are, as well as sport, the headings of some of his chapters. Those of us who were inclined to regard Surtees merely as a hunting cove will be astonished at the number of subjects with which he deals ; and this apart from him as a creator of character, upon which Mr. Steel touches lightly, besides being a writer of comedy which rises very high.
What strikes one in reading these books together, apart from the two writers already set aside, is the high standard of writing among the amateurs. I do not mean that the authors are not practised writers ; they all are, but they are not first and foremost concerned with writing, but With animals or fish. They have, indeed; a tendency to mistrust the interest of what they have to say, which leads them to divert the reader with humour which is not always very successful ; this is, with rare exceptions, a mistake. With some of them we live in a somewhat irritating atmosphere of wealth which we shall never attain ; it is almost a different world wheli begins in these days to look a little fantastic. But all of them, except Mr. Steel's, which could not do so without incon- gruity, are permeated with a love of animals and their ways, and of nature, with the feel of the air on cold crisp mornings, with the sense of contact with the earth, with the love of life as it is. With none of them is the love of killing at all to the fore ; many of the authors abstain from killing whenever they can ; few but feel a twinge of remorse at depriving a noble animal of life. To love the things of the earth, to understand them, it is necessary to share the passions of those who live upon it, and among these passions is that of the hunter. It is safe to say that only a very small proportion of those who kilOw much about the way animals live, and love them and their life, do not at the same time go out on occasion with
Previous page
