Another Part of the Forest

The Rustication of a Field-Marshal

By STRIX

I WAS among the first of those who offered, some months ago, to give a home to the equestrian statue of Field-Marshal Lord Strathnairn of Strath- nairn and Jhansi, whose owners, de facto if not de jure, are the West- minster City Council; at the time of writing the

Field-Marshal's fate is still uncertain, but I gather unofficially that I was beaten into second place by a gentleman in Hampshire. 1 am not sure, on reflection, that I am unduly disappointed.

It is true that I have long wished to acquire a large unwanted statue to re-erect in a vista about 600 or 700 yards from my house, and it i3 true that Lord Strathnairn's vital statistics filled the bill to perfection.' Standing (until 1931 at the junction of Knightsbridge and Brompton Road) some thirty feet high and weighing over fifty tons, the bronze statue and its plinth would have been unlikely, even in the middle distance, to be mistaken by one's guests for a broken- down tractor or a king-sized concrete gnome; with lesser monuments there would always be this risk. One would have been proud and delighted (and not all that much poorer, for the Council undertook to pay the costs of removal) when those luxuriant bronze whiskers .under teh plumed sunhelmet first caught the setting sun.

But what of the future? The statue's new owner is required to allow the public, who with Straithnairn's friends helped to pay for it, access to the site; in theory this right is only to be exercised by appointment, or at certain specified times, but in practice, where I live, there would be nothing to stop this line though demode monument (which I suspect few Londoners wasted many glances on during the thirty-six years it stood in their •midst) from becoming a popular rural rendezvous for their motorised descendants.

And what a target this larger-than-lifesize horseman and his lavishly accoutred mount would make for vandals! To daring young fel- lows who have won their spurs wrecking rail- way carriages, damaging bus-shelters and slash- ing hassocks in churches, Lord Strathnairn would represent a supreme challenge, a sort of Everest of the hooligan world. In private woodlands there is no street lighting, no policeman on the beat; and however low one, assesses the risk of the statue being defaced or damaged or dis- membered, it would be foolish to pretend that the risk does not exist, and over-sanguine to hope that it will diminish with' the passage of time.

During the Indian Mutiny, when he made his name as a commander, Sir Hugh Rose (as he then was) was five times prostrated by sun- stroke; in ,Prle action he had a spur shot off. I hope that, resurrected from semi-oblivion and translated tb the English countryside, no worse Vicissitudes will'befall him; but if on the centen- ary of his death in 1985 he and his charger are still in one piece I must admit, reluctantly, that I shall be surprised.

Eccentric Foxes It lasted only half an hour, and you couldn't really have called it a blizzard; but it was a phenomenon which none of us could recall having jeopardised a partridge-drive in late October. Nature, we tritely agreed as we moved through gelid sunlight to the last stand of the day, was unpredictable and inconsistent.

But inconsistent is not always the right word. Two of the guns were brothers whose family has farmed this land for several generations, and on the way back to the Land-Rovers one of them pointed to a spot near the top of the steep slope at the foot of which we had been standing.

'Odd place for a fox's earth, wouldn't you say? Right out in the middle of an open field.'

I agreed that it was very odd; two small rough woods, only a bowshot away, seemed much riper for development.

`I'll tell you a funny thing,' said the farmer. 'There was always a fox's earth there when we were boys; Walter and I used to creep along the hedge on moonlit nights and watch the cubs playing. Then the war came, the field was ploughed up for corn and of course the foxes moved out. It was corn or roots for—how long, Walter?'

Walter reckoned at least ten years.

'Then it went back to permanent pasture, and in no time at all the foxes dug a fresh earth in exactly the same crazy spot they'd used before. Rum, wasn't it?'

It seemed to me very rum indeed. I wonder if any albpecophil reader can suggest an ex- planation?