England Have My Bones

T. H. White

Description

England Have My Bones was a well-received memoir about a year spent in England, staying in a workman's cottage and writing this book, while engaging in falconry, hunting & fishing. The book is written in the form of a diary running from 3rd March 1934 to the 3rd March 1935. The author fishes, hunts, shoots ducks, learns to fly a small aeroplane, and keeps a snake as a pet. He does these things one at a time and obsessively, being the sort of person who needs to be the best at everything he tries.
The author of "The Once and Future King" began keeping this diary to record the delights and constant surprises that a city dweller happens upon when he leaves the urban world behind and lives in the countryside. The poetry of fire, the mystery of trees, the marvels of trout fishing, the joy of the hunt and the delicious comfort of a cozy blazing fire are all described, and much more. An essential read for the keen or just curious country sportsman/woman.

Sujets

• Sport
• Autres sports
• Sports de plein air
• Recreation
• Fishing
• Sports

Informations

• Publié par: Rare Treasure Editions
• Date de parution: 06 novembre 2021
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781774643242
• Langue: English

Extrait

England Have My Bones
by T. H. White

First published in 1936
This edition published by Rare Treasures
Victoria, BC Canada with branch offices in the Czech Republic and Germany
[e-mail]
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system, except in the case of excerpts by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.

ENGLAND
HAVE MY BONES


by T. H. White

“God keep my soul
And England have my bones.”

PREFACE
Few people are interested in things, except the mechanicswho like engines. They are more interested in themselves,and humanity, and theories, and emotions. Isuppose quite a large percentage of people would notbe able to name a grain of wheat from a grain of oats,or perhaps even a blackbird from a rook. Our ancestorsof the nineteenth century grew up with things, so thatthey were real to them and had a sort of comfortablecompanionship now lost. That is why their things areso often more individual than ours. An old hobby-horse,turned up in an attic, will sometimes be so real thatit is a piece of art, and clamours to be put on show inthe hall downstairs. Not so the mass-produced Dobbinof to-day.
This book cannot pretend to be written by a naturalist,and it is not for naturalists. It is a book about things,for people who have lost them; because it has givenme pleasure to rediscover my things, and I should liketo shew them to other people who might be pleasedas well.
It has turned into a book about the tangible sideof country life. People, I felt, ought to pay more attentionto the temperature of their baths, and the waythey fill their pipes, and the birds who are squanderingtheir song for a chance audience, and the spectaclesof nature that give food for the pleasures of rumination,and the construction of fires, and the time to drinksherry, and the season at which a hot water bottleimproves upon the comfort of warming one’s ownbed. In fact, it is an empirical book, an effort toreturn to the various world. Sport is a good way ofdoing that.
At the same time, I am sorry to feel that it must bea book which requires apology, or at least explanation.Fishermen will be maddened by the flying, aviators bythe snakes, zoologists by the instructions for playingdarts. It may seem a fair criticism to say that too manythings are done, and none of them expertly. I find itdifficult to imagine the kind of person who will bearwith every digression. If there is such a person, he will bean amateur like myself: a reader with a forgiving mind,not a critical one: somebody not fascinated by sherryparties, who can see the point of an England defined bynegatives. My England is not that of the Saturday Review ,nor is it authoritative, like that of the Field . It is notstately enough for Country Life , nor experienced enoughto bear comparison with the works of A. G. Street orAdrian Bell. I hope it is not the kind of country that isinhabited by Mr. Beverley Nichols.
It is, unfortunately, the country of a leisured class,and for that reason it tends to be unreal. This sense ofunreality, which affects every sporting writer in the post-warworld, lies at the back of all efforts to return toharmony with the genuine countryman. It is what makesmy book digressional, kills it as a purely sportin’ compilationwithout assuring it of any permanent reality.It made me learn to milk and plough: but always as anenthusiastic dilettante, always a little patheticallyclamouring outside the gates of farming England.
I pretend to myself that the disability has broughta compensating joy. It is the book of a learner, at anyrate. And I have a passion for learning. I have enjoyedlearning to milk, and I enjoy to do it. My hands smellof milk as I write this; and my pen, now that the subjecthas been raised, rushes forward irresistibly to describe themilkman’s ardours.
Cows, my inadequacy as a farmer urges me to explain,give better if sung to. The cow-house is warm and smelly,the milk hypnotic. It sizzles and rings in the pail. Downat the other end, friendly, simple, and English, the boyis roughly teaching a very young calf to drink from thepail (by using his finger in a bucket of milk like a tit)and old Matthew, so trustfully drunk at Shireham fairlast Saturday, is singing a four-year-old fox-trot to thestrawberry roan, as if we were in Bethlehem.
Part 1

The English are serious. . . . They are goodsailors and better pirates, cunning, treacherous andthievish; above three hundred are said to be hangedannually at London. . . . Hawking is the generalsport of the gentry; they are more polite in eatingthan the French, devouring less bread, but moremeat, which they roast to perfection. . . . Theyare powerful in the field, successful against theirenemies, impatient of anything like slavery; vastlyfond of great noises that fill the ear, such as thefiring of cannon, drums, and the ringing of bells,so that it is common for a number of them, that havegot a glass in their heads, to go up into some belfry,and ring the bells for hours together for the sakeof exercise. If they see a foreigner very well made,or particularly handsome, they will say: ‘It is apity he is not an Englishman!’
A GERMAN VISITOR
( in 1598 ).
3. iii. xxxiv.
An essential of a man’s life, if he wishes to rediscovera contact with the world outside him, is not mobility,but position. It is helpful, in a world whose valueschange so quickly, to be able to say, “I am an Englishman.”I only mean this as a kind of identification,not for jingoism. When I was a small boy at school,I used to write my name in my school books, and thenmy school, and the town it was near, and the countyit was in: followed in due order by “England, GreatBritain, Europe, the Northern Hemisphere, the World,Space.” I never got so far as writing “Time,” thoughI should dearly have liked an additional category. Idid this for remote and curious reasons: everybodyelse did. But I wonder whether in a way I was nottrying to identify myself. Red Indians, I believe, areunsure of the distinction between themselves and theoutside world. They find difficulty in being certainwhether it is raining or they are spitting. I understandthat most races were like this, in the youth of the world,and I am sure that children are like it still. When Wegfalls down I expect she resents the world for fallingup, and I can perfectly remember wanting to break agolf club because I was unable to hit a ball with it.
The small boy who scrabbled all that rigmarolein Kennedy’s Eating Brimer was sorting himself out.He was saying, “I am I, and I live here.” It seems to bea common tendency of human nature.
Nowadays we don’t know where we live, or whowe are. Intelligence seems to be merging again intothe Red Indian void from which it sprang. The intellectualis physically helpless in a material world,and has to be looked after by servants, like those peoplein Swift. Even the non-intellectual tends to becometotally vague about reality. He knows about the insideof his motor-car, and the relations of time tables, andsometimes the various co-ordinations of a tennisracquet; but all these things are artificial. He is fadinginto them, losing his identity in an abstract worldwhere water is an idea that comes out of a tap, andlight a conception in a switch. If all the main servicesfailed, he “would not know where he was.” The oldphrase is appropriate.
This is why, in a shifting world, I want to knowwhere I am. I want to find the things which won’tfail with the services, to identify myself over againon a secure anchorage. I like staying in one place, sothat I can learn it and let it grow about me as it is,instead of gadding from pillar to post in motor-carsand aeroplanes and trains. Moreover, when I stay inthe country I am farther from the abstract tap-water:closer to the components which are most likely toendure in the world about my planted feet.
Therefore, as firmly as I ever was in Kennedy, I aman Englishman , and I live in the shire .
4. iii. xxxiv.
The Shire is a pasture country, about two-thirdssand, the rest clay and other components. It is wellwooded, noticeable for its power of growing strongvegetation, so that it is sometimes referred to as “lush.”There is scarcely any industry in it, and its people aregentle without being sleepy. Our nature is pitchedabout half-way between the doze of Norfolk and thefierce friendliness of Gloucestershire. We are not particularlyassociated with Oliver Cromwell, or OwenGlendower, or even William the Conqueror. The overbearinghistorical personages don’t seem to have madeus their playground very much; or if they did come,it was only in a hurry to get somewhere else. Poets,on the other hand, and particularly the more durableand less spectacular of them, have found a safe harbourhere without having to make a fuss about it. We werealways more the country for monasteries than castles,and, since the monks were generally good landlords,we enjoy a peaceful agricultural tradition.
There is nothing remarkable about this country.We are hunted over by good packs of hounds, but theyjust fall short of the Osbaldeston-Sutton tradition.Our church architecture is respectable without beingarresting. We are not obviously old-fashioned andnot peculiarly new-fangled. We don’t have much inthe way of hills, and therefore very little in the wayof valleys, nor are we entirely a question of vale. Infact, we live along.
Our county is a place. We don’t stay in it all thetime, but we do stay in it most of the time, and sowe know it. When anything exciting happens in it,and we are so far from extremes that occasionallysomething does happen, we remember the occurrencefor four or five hundred years. My small rough shootis poached by the inhabitants of a village who do sobecause they have not forgotten that one of theirvillagers was hanged for poac