Memoirs of a Foxhunting Man by Siegfried Sassoon

To those who are expecting to see me in the saddle again it may seem that I have delayed over-long in acquiring my first hunter. But I take this opportunity of reminding my invisible audience that there was no imperative reason why I should ever have bought a horse at all; in fact, candour compels me to confess that if I had been left to my own devices I should probably have spent the forty-five guineas on something else. For though I was living so quietly and paying Aunt Evelyn nothing for my keep, I never seemed to have much of a balance at the bank. And Mr. Pennett, who appeared to consider me utterly irresponsible in matters of money, had so far refused to disgorge more than £450 a year out of my estimated income of £600. So, what with buying books and a new bicycle, and various other apparently indispensable odds and ends, I found myself "going in for economy" when early in January Dixon began his campaign to revive my interest in the stable.

During the winter I had been taking a walk every afternoon. I usually went five or six miles, but they soon became apathetic ones, and I was conscious of having no genuine connection with the countryside. Other people owned estates, or rented farms, or did something countrified; but I only walked along the roads or took furtive shortcuts across the fields of persons who might easily have bawled at me if they had caught sight of me. And I felt shy and "out of it" among the local landowners -- most of whose conversation was about shooting. So I went mooning, more and more moodily, about the looming landscape, with its creaking-cowled hop-kilns and whirring flocks of starlings and hop-poles piled in pyramids like soldiers' tents. Often when I came home for five o'clock tea I felt a vague desire to be living somewhere else -- in 1850, for instance, when everything must have been so comfortable and old-fashioned, like the Cathedral Close in Trollope's novels. The weather was too bad for golf, and even "young" Squire Maundle was obliged to admit that the Amblehurst course was in far from first-rate condition. And there never seemed to be any reason for going to London, although, of course, there were interesting things to see there: (Aunt Evelyn was always intending to run up for the day and go to a matinee of Beerbohm Tree's new Shakespearean production).