Hunting Upland Game and Waterfowl Book

Hard to believe it's been ten years since Britain banned traditional fox hunting. I was working for the BBC when the ban came in, and I remember going up to spend a day with one hunt in the midlands, filming them as they defiantly flouted the act, and then following them down to London for yet another huge tweed-clad protest outside Parliament. It was widely bruited about that animal welfare was just a smokescreen for a more sinister attack on country life by the urban classes.

The ban marked the formal end to an era that was, I suppose, in practice already long gone - the time of local hunts that brought small country communities together, ruddy-faced farmers doffing their caps as the squire rode past in hunting pink, everyone knowing everyone else and everyone knowing their place. Nowadays these same picturesque little villages are more likely to hold bankers on weekend retreats, adulterous retirees, and women pulling in six figures selling gold lamé tea-towels on Etsy.

Anyway, it's that lost world of rural Britain that is evoked in this affecting memoir - fictionalised memoir, I should say, because Sassoon also wrote some 'straight' non-fiction versions of his childhood, which most critics seem to think were less interesting than this putative novel. It is full of very beautiful Hardyesque descriptions of the English countryside:

To watch the day breaking from purple to dazzling gold while we trotted up a deep-rutted lane; to inhale the early freshness when we were on the sheep-cropped uplands; to stare back at the low country with its cock-crowing farms and mist-coiled waterways; thus to be riding out with a sense of spacious discovery - was it not something stolen from the lie-a-bed world and the luckless city workers - even though it ended in nothing more than the killing of a leash of fox-cubs? (for whom, to tell the truth, I felt an unconfessed sympathy).

Many of these descriptions are shot through with a generalised melancholy ('It is with a sigh that I remember simple moments such as those, when I understood so little of the deepening sadness of life…'), whose source looms up through the text although it is rarely mentioned. Instead we just have an uneasy sense that everything we read about has somehow been lost, and this gave the detailed explanations of fox hunting an interest that they wouldn't otherwise have had for me.

I knew Sassoon as a war poet, of course, but this book showed me a completely new side to him - dry, witty, full of a kind of naïve and faux-pompous enthusiasm that allows for some admirable characterisations - of hens ('the providers of that universally respected object, the egg'), for instance, or a local churchwarden ('his impressive demeanour led us to suppose that, if he was not yet on hat-raising terms with the Almighty, he at any moment expected to be'). Supporting characters have cartoonish names like Nigel Croplady, Fred Buzzaway, Joe Barless, and Sir Jocelyn Porteus-Porteous ('note the majestic variation in spelling').

All of this Edwardian badinage only makes it the more painful when he sees his cosy world come crashing down with the outbreak of the First World War, a narrative intrusion that is carefully held off until near the end of the book. It's consequently quite horrific to head off to the trenches with such a jovial narrator after endless chapters of cheerful rural pranks - like seeing Bertie Wooster given a rifle and thrown in a dug-out.

Our narrator's natural Conservatism and patriotism evaporate on exposure to the realities of trench warfare. And the measured judgements of this cheerful innocent are much more powerful than any number of angry denunciations from other quarters.

To him, as to me, the War was inevitable and justifiable. Courage remained a virtue. And that exploitation of courage, if I may be allowed to say a thing so obvious, was the essential tragedy of the War, which, as everyone now agrees, was a crime against humanity.

This is the first of three volumes, the second and third of which focus more closely on Sassoon's wartime experiences. But he clearly wants to root their power in this long, dreamy remembrance of pre-war country life, so that we all understand what was lost. For me it worked well. (And if you're one of those 'humanitarian cranks' who worry about animal cruelty, I'm pretty sure they barely catch a single fox in the whole book.)