John Berger - G.

The general public welcomed the apotheosis. Like most audiences they felt that, to some degree, they owned the performing players. Their one-time rulers appeared to have become their romancers. Meanwhile during the diversion the upper class — at its class centre — habituated itself to its new and necessarily more disguised exercise of power. Like a phoenix it was to rise again from its own ashes, for the ashes were only those of its regalia, finally used as theatrical costume.

Jocelyn is an impoverished and peripheral member of this class. The Hunts and the Point-to-Point Races he goes to are comparatively undistinguished ones. But this increases his need to believe that the play is life and that the rest of life is a suspended empty interval. This is why he is elusive and why, when he is off-stage with no lines to speak or actions to perform, he becomes unusually passive. But let us be clear: it is not because he wants limelight or applause (on the contrary, he would consider them vulgarities), but because he believes that the play is reality.

His costume for the part: top boots with mahogany-coloured tops, spurs, cord breeches, a faded swallow-tailed pink coat, a white stock, a low-crowned top hat, a short leather crop with a long lash.

From November to April he hunts four days a week.

I must emphasize that I have used the word ‘play’ as a metaphor so that we can appreciate the essentially artificial, symbolic, exemplary and spectacular nature of the occasion. But the scene and the props are real. The winter weather, the hounds, the coverts to be drawn, the fences to be jumped, the country that is there to be ridden over, the drag of the fox, the fatigue of the man who has thrust all day — these are real: and the physical experience of these is all the intenser because of their symbolism which every hard-bitten hunting man feels.

To be mounted is already to be a master, a knight. To represent the noble (in the ethical as well as the social sense). To vanquish. To feature, however modestly, in the annals of battle. Honour begins with a man and a horse.

To get well away with the hounds is to be intrepid. To be ingenious. To be the respecter of nothing but the pace.

To hunt is the opposite of to own. It is to ride over. To dart in the open. To be as men as free as the straight-necked dog-fox is as fox.

To meet is to ride with others, who whatever their character know something of these values and help to preserve them. All that is opposed to these values appears to be represented by the invention of barbed wire. (The wire that, later, millions of infantrymen will die against on the orders of their mounted generals.)

Jocelyn is riding home early one December evening. The horse is caked with mud. He slips from the saddle and, although at first he is so stiff that he cannot stand upright but is bent like a man with a stick, he walks beside the horse’s head. Its ears are cocked well forward. Just two more miles old fellow, he says. The two proceed side by side. The man runs over in his mind the main incidents of the day. What happened to him and what his friends had recounted of their day. In the marrow of his tiredness is a sense of well-being, even of modest virtue. He is convinced that just as the consequences of a crime — an act of treachery, for example, or a theft — often spread outwards to involve more people and further actions, so, too, within a medium of cause and effect which he cannot name or quite visualize, the consequences of an act of honourable horsemanship must emanate outwards with tiny but endless effect. He looks up at the sky. A few stars. And in that vast space he feels the absence of gigantic horses that once darted through it.

The boy listens on the stairs to their talking in the bedroom. Later he will realize that the cadence of their two voices is like that of a couple talking in bed: not amorously but calmly, reflectively, with pauses and ease. (Some evenings his uncle goes to bed early, and on these evenings his aunt takes a hot drink up to his rooms. She calls it — with a laugh — a nightcap.) Their words are not decipherable to the boy on the stairs. But the manner in which the male voice and the feminine voice overlap, provoke and receive each other, the two complementary substances of their voices, as distinct from one another as metal and stone, or as wood and leather, yet combining by rubbing together or chipping or scraping to make the noise of their dialogue — this is more eloquent than precise overheard words could ever be, eloquent of the power of the decisions being taken. Against these decisions no third person, no listener, can appeal.

In the summer of 1893 there was a drought for three months. When at last it rains in a great storm, he runs out and the earth smells of meat.

On his hands is the smell of horse and harness. Its components derive from leather, saddle soap, sweat, hooves, horsehair, horse breath, grass, oats, mud, blankets, saliva, dung and the smell of various metals when moisture has condensed upon them.

He brings one of his hands to his face to savour the smell. He has noticed that sometimes a trace of it lingers until the evening — even when he hasn’t ridden since early morning.

The horse and harness smell is the antithesis of the cowshed smell. Each can only be properly defined by reference to the other. The shed smell means milk, cloth, figures of women squatting hunched up and small against the cow flank, liquid shit, mulch, warmth, pink hands and udders almost the same colour, the absolute absence of secrecy and the names of the cows: Fancy, Pretty, Lofty, Cloud, Pie, Little-eyes.

The horse and harness smell is associated for him with the eminent nature of his own body (like suddenly being aware of his own warmth), with pride — for he rides well and his uncle praises him, with the hair of his pony’s mane and with his anticipation of a man’s world.

He knows some of the terms of this world but he believes that all of them refer to something which nobody ever mentions. He assumes that the men around him have, for their own reasons, a need for secrecy comparable to his own. When he enters their world — and follows Captain Elwes’ hounds — he will learn their secrets.

MISS HELEN

Between the ages of two and five the boy has three governesses. The last one is called Miss Helen.

In the schoolroom in the wing of the farm furthest from the kitchen and the yard, there are no men; there is only the boy. He is sitting at the high desk, his feet dangling in the air, reading out loud. She is in an armchair which she has turned round so that she can gaze out of the window.

When it seems that her attention is entirely taken up by what she can see through the window, he deliberately makes a mistake so as to re-attract her attention. Sometimes his mistakes are unintentional.

… all thrush summer the birds were singing.

Thrush?

Yes, the speckly bird.

Thrush summer?

She gets up from the chair, smooths the front of her dress where it is pleated round her tiny waist and comes behind him to look at the book.

All through summer. Thrush indeed! OUGH not RUSH.

She laughs. He laughs and in laughing throws his head back against her dress.

It was a good mistake, a thrush is a sort of bird.

But not a sort of preposition.

Falling in love at five or six, although rare, is the same as falling in love at fifty. One may interpret one’s feelings differently, the outcome may be different, but the state of feeling and of being is the same.

A pre-condition is necessary for a five-year-old boy to fall in love. He must have lost his parents or, at least, lost any close contact with them, and no foster-parents should have taken their place. Similarly, he must have no close friends or brothers or sisters. Then he is eligible.