I chose to read this as a prelude to ‘Memoirs Of An Infantry Officer’, which is part of my WW1&2 reading list. This is the first part of a trilogy, of which ‘Memoirs Of An Infantry Officer’ is the second installment and ‘Sherston’s Progress’ the third. It’s indicative of the kind of reticent emotional life upper class Englishmen were living around the time of the wars that Sassoon choses to write his first volume of memoir with a specific focus on fox hunting. Having safely assured his audience that no ghastly subjects like feelings, emotions or sexual desires will rear their ugly heads, Sassoon waxes lyrical about the joys of village cricket and fox hunting. In some ways, it struck me as a bit absurd. However, in its best parts, it also had a meditative, golden quality of people and places warmly remembered.
As far as friends or companions go, he only really mentions his groom, Dean, and a friend Stephen. He seems to be on friendly terms with the people he meets from school at point to point races and hunting but, for the most part, he’s a very solitary figure living a sleepy village existence with his old aunt. He travels quite large distances by train or bicycle in order to go hunting as a young boy. He pines to live in a neighbourhood where hunting is more active and when he does manage to leave, seems to enjoy life more. His aunt is in agreement about this, and is said to have bemoaned the situation of such an active boy in such a decidedly quiet milieu.
For a book purporting to be a memoir, it’s strange that there’s scarcely a mention of his immediate family in the entire book except to say his parents separated when he was 4. Wikipedia relates that his father later died when he was around 9, which doesn’t get a mention. His mother lived until 1947 (when Sassoon was 60ish) but is never mentioned, nor are his two brothers. This all gives the impression that family life was not happy and, therefore, should not be discussed. It’s terribly bad form to bring up topics that aren’t jolly, don’t you know old bean? It's rather strange to have such silence on subjects like family but Sassoon bashes on undaunted by the fact that the only relationships where he seems willing to discuss his feelings are those with servants or horses! “Aunt Evelyn”, the woman he lives with while not at school, does feature on occasion but always in a kind of Bertie Wooster and Aunt Agatha “aged relative” sort of way. Sassoon does an admirable job of portraying her as a warm, kind woman. However, he describes their relationship in such a distant way it really is almost like a “Jeeves and Wooster” character, only not as amusing.
When he’s not at school, another topic that goes almost completely untouched, Sassoon lives with his aunt and subsists on an independent income that allows him to do some hunting and play village cricket. In many passages he seems to indicate that he’s not that rich, but the reality seems quite the contrary. He goes to Cambridge for a couple of years, which also goes unremarked upon, and leaves without a degree to take up hunting in earnest. This kind of indifference to his career struck me as a privilege only a rich person could afford. His neglect of his career rather endeared him to me, with the exception of the fact that I don't like hunting.
A subject that does receive major attention is the horses he buys and sells. I found it telling that there is more information about the first hunting horse he buys than there is about any human being. His relationship with his groom, who also acts as his mentor in hunting matters, also receives voluminous coverage. The groom seems to be one of his major companions in early teenage life and tells a lot of stories from the various hunts, cricket matches and point-to-point races he’s involved with. The image I was left with from his recollections of early life was of a sad, lonely boy estranged from his family with plenty of money but only a servant as a friend.
As he becomes more proficient in hunting, he graduates to riding with his old school friend, Stephen, who lives nearby in an area where they hunt more intensively. This is one of two relationships that seem especially close in the book, although obviously Sassoon would never mention this himself. There are clues, like describing people he especially likes in glowing terms as sportsmen and making more frequent reference to them, but, on the whole, he seems more comfortable reserving feelings of affection for horses or servants. One inkling of a closer relationship comes when the war starts and Sassoon shows one of his fellow soldiers a photo of Stephen he carries with him, which struck me as an odd thing to do if Stephen really were just a hunting friend. The other ‘special friend’ Sassoon seems to make is Denis, who is master of the hunt for a couple of years near where Stephen lives and employs Sassoon as some kind of assistant. When he moves to a bigger hunt, he takes Sassoon with him and the two spend lots of time together working, living and hunting but never revealing anything deeper about their relationship. In both of these cases, I felt there may have been more to the relationship but Sassoon seems determined to only write about coverts, hounds, ‘chicken hearted skirters’ and ‘hard bitten sportsmen’ and never writes an emotional line in the entire book.
On the whole, I found this book quite boring and remarkably unforthcoming for a memoir. In this sense, I suppose it’s a good example of the buttoned-up, repressed style of operation that was in fashion for men of this time and social class. He wants to present himself as ‘a hard riding swell’ and a gentleman, but is totally disinterested in opening up in any meaningful way. The book gives a fair representation of the author’s love of hunting, although it seems a very class conscious and stuffy world. It was at its best recalling idyllic pastoral scenes with a faintly mournful tone, which is probably given more context in the second book of the trilogy, ‘Memoirs of An Infantry Officer’. My favourite quote was,
“It is with a sigh that I remember simple moments such as those, when I understood so little of the deepening sadness of life, and only the strangeness of spring was knocking at my heart.” (p101)
Maybe he writes such an idyllic, nothing-could-be-jollier type of nostalgia because he wants to draw a stark contrast with the war later on. Maybe he does it because that’s the way ‘officer and a gentleman’ type WW1 British public schoolboys go about talking about their lives. Namely, by fastidiously avoiding the main events of their lives and focussing predominately on fox hunting, jolly hockey sticks and depicting himself as the freshest of all country bumpkins.
Taken on its own, I found it a rather strange little book of nostalgia. It’s well drawn in places but suffers for simultaneously attempting to be personal while staunchly refusing to broach any feelings more intimate than, ‘I loved hunting and found it immensely good fun’, which, in the final analysis, is not frightfully illuminating stuff!
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