Leslie Stephen was sardonic about nature writing in the Cornhill Magazine of 1880: ‘Our guide may save us the trouble of stumbling through farmyards and across ploughed fields, but he must have gone through it himself until his very voice has a twang of true country accent.’ He was discussing writers such as William Cobbett, Izaak Walton, Gilbert White and George Borrow, but the point applies just as well to later exponents of rural life. Books like these are the armchair experience of the country – precursors of travel writing. And while such literature was indeed produced by countrymen, it was written with an urban readership in mind: vicarious enjoyment, Arcadia without the inconvenience of mud and rain.
But the rural literature cult of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is only a part of it. Earlier, the Romantic poets had set the tone. And before that still the eighteenth-century invention of the picturesque had literally turned landscape into art. If the prospect was not sufficiently pleasing, you tweaked and groomed until it was. Significantly, conspicuous evidence of agricultural activity became undesirable, save for a handful of aesthetically acceptable cattle or a strategically placed cottage. The eighteenth-century landowner under the thrall of Lancelot Brown or Humphrey Repton, arbiters of taste, would sweep away an entire hamlet in the interests of scenic perfection. Those who tilled the fields were to be kept out of sight, and indeed the very fields themselves – the ideal world was a natural one, apparently uncontaminated by human intervention. This preference persists today: most people's model landscape would be a sweep of the Lake District, Exmoor, the Cornish coast or the Scottish Highlands, rather than the farming acreage of East Anglia. Painting of the Constable school may have launched a thousand calendars, but the rustic figures there are adjuncts to a pastoral ideal, a necessary complement to the stream, the tree, the sky. They are points of reference, figures in a landscape like the sylvan intruders of Claude Lorrain.
The pastoral idealism of art and literature reaches back into the distant past, back to Virgil. There is a sense in which the vision has scarcely changed, which is why the Eclogues and Georgics fall easily on the modern ear. The idea of the country as paradise is centuries deep, a conditioning that has simply been reinforced over time, its assumptions shifting a little here and there, but resolute in its vision of that desirable world which is a convenient mental reconstruction of the real thing.
When children write poetry, they write about nature: rain, snow, fire, ice, my hamster. The invisible directing hand of the teacher is often evident here, as I realized when serving as one of the judges for a national children's writing competition – a slew of poems about pikes, crackling with the influence of Ted Hughes, batches that celebrated rainbows or feathers or the new moon. But there was frequently a verve and a veracity about the writing that was clearly quite independent of any adult's dictation. The physical world is astonishing and unexpected, for every child; it serves up some new surprise each day. As children, we see afresh, we look with an intensity that we will never recover and we look most intensely at nature, at growth and regeneration, at the turning of the world. No wonder, then, that when children find the power of words it is the world around them that prompts the language.
That world is most likely to be an urban one. But it is still infused with potent symbols. I remember a clutch of primary schoolchildren on the pavement alongside the panting traffic of City Road, in London, huddled intently over something at the base of a sickly tree. What were they looking at? A caterpillar. And everyone visits the country, nowadays, or sees it roll past through the windows of a train or car. It is impossible to recover that profound divide, that mutual ignorance before the railway system fingered its way out across the map, and especially before the car achieved absolute authority. The huge expansion in car ownership between the wars – 2 million cars by 1939 – brought the countryside within reach of suburbia, but further down the economic scale it was cycling and hiking that sent unprecedented numbers of people out into the landscape. You put yourself on the train – or yourself and your bike – and there you were, lord of the universe for a day, or a weekend. It is an exodus that has seen exponential growth over the century, but the bikes are mostly gone, and many of the hikers with them; now it is just the cars that glitter from coast to coast – 8 million by 1960, 26 million today, 70 per cent of households on wheels.
This is no place for the pro- and anti-car debate. The point here is simply that transport, over the last hundred years, has brought town and country face to face. There was mutual ignorance still in the first half of the century, which was exposed by the evacuation exercise of the 1940s; since then, the two nations have looked each other in the eye, a process which may have served to distance rather than to unite.
There is something distinctly bizarre about the way in which fox-hunting seems to have become the central issue in the town and country divide, over recent years. Only a very small proportion of the rural population is directly involved in hunting, whether by way of employment or as participants. Many city dwellers would only vaguely be aware of the activity, were they not briskly reminded by the media. But it has become a political matter, an eccentric symbol of difference and dissent.
In the past, the image of hunting was that of archetypal Englishness: picturesque, time-honoured, the expression of an ancient tradition. It was never that, except in the sense that the pursuit of animals is one of the most atavistic practices still around, first recorded in the caves of Lascaux and Altamira, subject matter for art and literature the world over ever since. But fox-hunting is a parvenu where man's engagement with animals is concerned. The primeval incentive for hunting was simply hunger, but there must always have been that element of exhilaration, the rush of adrenalin, the satisfaction at testing skills and experience. Eventually the entertainment aspect of hurtling in pursuit of dinner overtakes the practical to such an extent that the prey must be reserved for the privileged. Medieval hunting was the preserve of the aristocracy. Peasants were strung up for poaching deer. By the nineteenth century errant farmers could be hauled before the magistrates for the crime of vulpicide, the killing of a fox other than by hunting it with hounds. But by then the quarry was inedible, and few countrymen would have stepped out of line anyway: hunting was now subsumed into the structured hierarchy of rural life, shoring up the authority of the landed proprietor, its conventions serving as social reinforcers.
At Golsoncott, the front door opened into the vestibule, a small circular hallway. Its walls were hung with hunting trophies: brushes, deer slots, fox masks – all of them desperately moth-eaten, each with a little plaque recording the date and extent of the run. Down in the stables, the harness room was another shrine to the horse-and-hound culture of the area, decked out with faded rosettes – red, blue, white – recalling past successes at Dunster Show. Firsts and Seconds and Reserves in hunter classes; Commended in the Open Jumping. The achievement of Gaiety Girl, Gay Dream, Roland, Juno and the rest. My aunt kept two horses always, three when the current brood mare had an offspring that would later be sold off. Hunters, all of them – professionals, as it were – whose daily regime dictated the pattern of the day. Exercise, every morning – long leisurely rides in summer, when the horses were out at grass, punishing workouts in the autumn when they were being got into condition for the coming season. I was taken along, on a borrowed pony that couldn't or wouldn't keep up, frantically digging my heels into its sides as Rachel pounded away out of sight. I can smell the harness room to this day: hay and saddle soap and leather and horse. Winter mornings with ice-cold water in a bucket, doing all that post-exercise washing-up of the tack; the elaborate grooming operation of hunting days. But I was a disappointing disciple. Eventually it was tacitly agreed that I was not cut out for serious horse business. By the time I was seventeen, I was allowed to potter around the landscape by myself on an elderly mare equally disinclined for anything at all taxing.
Rachel's combination of interests was esoteric. As a young woman in the 1920s and 1930s sh
e must have been unique – an avant-garde artist who was also a fervent horsewoman, hunting regularly. Her artistic talent was exceptional and her range covered wood engraving, sculpture, painting, the creation of inn signs, and metalwork. She studied art at Iain Macnab's Grosvenor School of Modern Art: wood engraving with Macnab himself, linocutting with Claude Flight and Cyril Power. Her work puts her in the first rank of twentieth-century wood engravers. Her output was considerable – some fine, large wood sculptures during the early period, along with works in stone, often grey and pink alabaster from the coast at Watchet, as well as the more formal limestone, many watercolour and oil paintings – the style and technique changing radically over the years. She was influenced by Cubism and flirted with Surrealism, constantly experimenting, though she always retained the excitement and engagement of those contemporary with the Modern Movement. In her youth, she made the sequence of inn signs that still enliven the area – the Valiant Soldier in Roadwater, the White Horse at Washford, the Butchers Arms at Carhampton and others – several of them early experiments in metalwork. In her last decades, this became her favoured form. She learned how to weld when in her seventies (previously she had been using rivets), branched out with some adventurous compositions and became a revered member of the Artists-Blacksmiths Association (one of the only women at international gatherings amid brawny male practitioners of this highly physical art form). Her metal sculptures are now widely dispersed, but several grace local churches in west Somerset – notably Leighland, Rodhuish and Old Cleeve.
But on hunting days she became someone else. She frequently rode side-saddle and dressed the part, setting aside her usual impatiently dismissive attitude towards clothes and tendency to turn out in anything that came to hand. Hunting was another matter: black habit and hunting coat, spanking-white stock, polished boots, bowler and veil. It was the veil that did it, I seem to remember – she became vaguely mysterious, a Henry James woman, intrepid, handsome and a touch unapproachable. Especially so if mounted on Roland, a half-Arab black stallion of famously capricious behaviour; you kept well clear of Roland, a creature so charged with well-being that he seemed like a coiled spring, barely controllable. He and Rachel were a renowned partnership, crashing a hectic and unstoppable course through the jumps at Dunster Show each summer, to yells of encouragement from the appreciative local crowd.
Those impelled to hunt do so for a diversity of reasons, and ever have. Rachel would have felt at home in the climate of eighteenth-century fox-hunting, when the squirearchy was principally interested in the intricacies of hound work, rather than in the headlong dash across the countryside favoured by feckless young bloods and providing the emphasis of the mid nineteenth-century sport. She hunted for the riding opportunities offered, for the experience of exploring and enjoying the landscape, and for the technical interest of hound skills. Had she come across it, she probably would have seized on Trollope's defence of the sport, which homed in on the point that, unlike such activities as bear- and bull-baiting, cock-fighting or the persecution of animals as an arena spectacle in Roman times, the death of the fox is in a sense a side issue for the hunter. The infliction of cruelty is not the central purpose of hunting; the participant is not therefore degraded in the same way as the spectator at a baiting or a cock-fight. The argument is a dodgy one, but the novelist – an ardent hunting man – had been provoked into a response by the attack upon hunting delivered in the Fortnightly Review in 1869 by E. A. Freeman, later Regius Professor of History at Oxford. There had been criticism of hunting over time, but this was the most serious, prominent and carefully thought-out attack yet, arguing that while it is acceptable to kill animals out of need – to eat, or by way of pest control – to inflict cruelty in the service of sport is indefensible. Bull- and bear-baiting and cock-fighting had by then been outlawed, but the debate was still fresh in people's minds, as was the knowledge that some had defended these sports partly because they tacitly recognized that banning traditional recreations of the poor was hardly equitable while hunting, the entertainment of the wealthy, remained immune.
Where the fox was concerned back then, the conservation argument could be put forward – that without the preservation factor of hunting, the species would be exterminated because of its depredations on poultry. Freeman had admitted the validity of this point. But in the early nineteenth century the surging popularity of hunting had resulted in a serious shortage of foxes. The measures taken to remedy this are significant. The most visible and lasting was the effect on the landscape of the wholesale planting by landowners of coverts – small stands of woodland in agricultural country – intended to serve as places for foxes to breed and go to ground. But at some points in the early part of the century fox numbers had fallen so low that it was necessary to resort to desperate devices: the purchase of foxes from areas where they were more prolific, ‘bagging’ foxes – bringing them in bags and releasing them for the occasion of a hunt – and even – most desperate remedy of all – importing foxes from France. This trade is peculiarly interesting in the xenophobic response that it provoked: French foxes were denounced as effete creatures, the introduction of which would contaminate the bloodline of the stout British fox, a view which meshed with the Francophobia of the age.
The case made for fox-hunting as a means of controlling fox numbers was never very plausible. Before the switch from deer- to fox-hunting in the eighteenth century the fox had been regarded simply as vermin, killed by all countrymen to protect their poultry and to some extent for the use of fox skins. Villages would organize a fox extermination day along the same lines as a rat-hunt. But the early nineteenth-century shortage made it clear that in fact conservation measures were now necessary, along with some way of ensuring that all surviving foxes were reserved for the purposes of hunting – hence the invocation of vulpicide. The fox was still vermin, but vermin with a special status.
The fox has had a bad image. In practical terms, it was the ravager of farmyard poultry, but alongside that was its literary persona – cunning, ruthless and unreliable, a stock character of folklore and fairy tale, its role as a villain wrapped up conclusively by Beatrix Potter with Mr Todd. Deer, on the other hand, were seen as noble creatures, the stag as the last word in majesty and courage. Think of Monarch of the Glen. The chroniclers of Exmoor stag-hunting write with rapture and respect of the lifestyle of the red deer, while the fox is only of circumstantial interest to fox-hunting experts on account of its strategies for outwitting a pack of hounds. Perhaps all this is coloured by the question of edibility, and there have always been those whose perception of deer was rather different – notably medieval peasants who had to put up with their crops being eaten by the sacred quarry of the nobility.
Deer have been the favoured prey all over Europe since antiquity: reasonably abundant, excellent eating. The forerunners of Monarch of the Glen are those murky shapes on the walls of Lascaux. But with the erosion of forests and woodland through the Middle Ages deer numbers fell dramatically – hence the draconian game laws of the period. Hunting was limited strictly to the upper classes – the sport of kings in France, and indeed in this country too, though by the seventeenth century in England deer parks owned by country gentlemen were widespread, the source not only of sport but also of fresh meat. Private packs of hounds had long been around, the creatures ancestral to the hound of today. Hound-breeding became a central concern; the aesthetics of hunting required a choice cry as well as good pace, hounds being selected for bass, tenor and counter-tenor, with beagles supplying the treble. Hares were also seen as acceptable quarry, but the hare does not run in a straight line – at some point in the eighteenth century hunting squires began to discover the virtues of the fox when it came to a stimulating run across country. Deer were becoming even more scarce, but foxes, at that point, were abundant. The apparently traditional sport of fox-hunting was born, something over a couple of hundred years ago, launching a blizzard of sporting prints and creating an imperishable image of rural life.
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The eighteenth-century fox-hunting squire had been a connoisseur of hounds and their skills, above all. By the mid nineteenth century there had been a radical change in both the style and significance of fox-hunting. As its popularity grew, not only for the participants but as a spectator sport for country people who turned out to see the nobs go by, so its status changed from a private to a public activity. The subscription pack took the place of the local squire's privately owned pack. This was the age of the country house, the apex of the rural social hierarchy; hunting as an activity was now integrated into the social system and the hunting field became an arena for advancement in society.
The nineteenth-century hunting gentleman liked to charge his way across the countryside as fast as possible and for as long as possible. The more jumps available, the better. It was during this period that a hierarchy of packs developed, with the Midlands emerging as the prime hunting country on account of its enclosure landscape with plenty of hedges to provide excitement and abundant grassland for the good hard gallop. Another factor was the railway system. The city-based enthusiast could now hunt from London, travelling in a first-class carriage with his horses and groom in a rail horsebox. Trollope used to do this – a day's hunting in Leicestershire and back to town by evening. His vision of the rural landscape, indeed, seems to have been as a convenient backdrop for fox-hunting, given that ‘the owner of the land, with all the law to back him, with his right to the soil as perfect and as exclusive as that of a lady to her drawing-room, cannot in effect save himself from an invasion of a hundred or a hundred and fifty horsemen, let him struggle to save himself as he may.’ But few would be inclined to struggle: ‘It may be said that in a real hunting county active antagonism to hunting is out of the question. A man who cannot endure to see a crowd of horsemen on his land, must give up his land and go elsewhere to live.’