Ann's Letters

It was a rainy, ungenerous day and now I like to attribute a symbolism to that bitter windswept setting that was so appropriate to all that followed, namely the three deaths, the politics and dramas of well over a half century ago, and my part in a conspiracy that found me fighting for my life near Martinhoe Church. And all this again at the end of a journey that had taken me from an obscure Exmoor village like Brendon to Geneva, Paris, and most importantly to Marseille, to the politics of the French far right, and a certain political figure of extreme persuasion. 

That however is for later.   The discussions on the hill above Dulverton were incomparably different from the sinister and violent exchanges and events that were to come.   Nevertheless they followed a thread from that first unplanned meeting with the hunt supporters to the violence which was the main feature of a climax which followed inexorably, but that I could have hardly imagined.

This is to run on again however.  If anything that morning meeting left me puzzled, though also slightly reverent; reverential, and less clear in my judgement of those who hunt and the passion which they appeared to possess. I simply could not understand what it was all about, or at least the extremes of the passion involved.

And that was where Astra came in.  For those who are predicting at this early stage the first introduction to a romantic attachment, you are wrong.   The truth was far more compelling, and she was one of a number of individuals that I took early steps to distance from the events that followed, especially when it was apparent that these individuals were likely to be threatened by what was to unfold.  

She wrote to me.  Apparently she was the secretary of the hunt supporters club, and ever anxious to promote the sport.   I also presumed that she had been told by my earlier contacts above Dulverton that I was intending to write an article in support, for one of the London newspapers.  This was the article that subsequently appeared and, unknown to me at the time, played a major role in the events that were to follow.

I took up her invitation to meet and hear the views of the supporters club, and I duly arrived at the White Horse in Exford later that September.   We drank at the bar and I listened, making notes and looking for a hook that could give a more unusual perspective to my intended article.

At one point in our discussions I nodded in the direction of one of the hunting prints on the wall of the bar, and suggested that it was a somewhat striking depiction of all that she had been telling me.  She contradicted me however, and told me that the print was a poor specimen in fact, and that if I wished to understand the power of such art I should see her own collection of such items. This was followed by an invitation to her house in Brendon to see the collection in question.

Touched by the invitation I accepted, and a few days later the gravel on her drive fell silent as my tyres ceased to roll, and the silence was only broken by the handbrake going on in my land rover.

Once inside her tiny cottage I was smitten by the little figures like toy soldiers but that were in fact huntsmen, in the colour of their respective hunts with their assistant hunt staff, cantering, jumping, walking or waiting, which she had apparently been collecting for a decade or more.   And then the hounds, and the occasional tiny fox, crouching and listening.  Then there were the more functional objects, like flasks, horns, whips, spurs and bridles.

These interested me particularly, largely because of a previous association with a similar object which I have owned since a child.   This was a hunting whip the provenance of which was both personal and tragic, since it had been given to an ancestor of mine while working as a groom at Moreton Morrell in Warwickshire prior to the First World War.  The whip had been given to him by his employer, as a leaving present on the day he left to join the Warwickshire Regiment.  He was killed at the first successful battle to halt the German advance, at the Marne in 1915.  Somehow I came by the whip as a boy, associated it with the leafy certainties of Edwardian Warwickshire, and which I have had as a talisman ever since.

To return however to what I found on that visit to Astra’s cottage, I was again intrigued by the paintings and prints of the hunting field, and once again childhood memories of the other locations in my early years spoke to me in that late autumn evening, and I recalled being taken to see the hunt in Lincolnshire when five, six or seven.   I still remember being shocked by the deference shown to the Master and his staff.   This reverence, with the same accompanying hush, I experienced again as my host pointed out the huntsmen and women in various prints by Lionel Edwards, Snaffles, Cecil Aldin, Tom Carr and the rest; and Mr that of the Pycherly, Colonel this of the Ludlow, Lord that of the Fitzwilliam, and Judge the other of the Heythrop.  Even the ladies were called Mrs with a reverence for their married titles.   Somehow this seemed to indicate a time when being the wife and bearing the name of a particular hunting husband, brought a reverence and respect to the individuals and the institution of marriage somewhat at odds with contemporary times.   When the name of certain better-known Exmoor personalities, like Lord Fortescue, Mordant Fenwick Bisset, and Captain Ronnie Wallace were mentioned, I seemed to be invited to stand straighter, better and taller.

My chief feeling however was one of surprise.