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WITH ALL THESE HAPPENINGS taking place at more or less the high-water mark of the so-called Jazz Age, also known as the Era of Easy Money (at least for those who had some), it must have seemed almost natural, or at least not too unusual, that the young, and let’s admit it by no means unspoiled newlyweds, had been gifted by the groom’s rich father with a yearlong honeymoon: to be spent in England mainly riding horses, refining equestrian skills on the tough venues of the top English foxhunts, trying to learn what they could from the people who thought they had invented the sport. From a date three days after the wedding, there remains a newspaper photo showing the bride and groom at the deck rail of the great, four-funnel steamship Aquitania, Alicia in a trim new traveling suit and fashionable cloche hat, her head not quite at a level with her much taller husband’s shoulders, both of them chic, abstracted, and a bit blurry, though that might be a result of the obligatory sailing photo. Five days later they were in Liverpool, then London, and soon after back up into the English Midlands, in Leicestershire: then the heartland of English foxhunting country, where they began installing themselves in the town of Melton Mowbray.

Should anyone be interested: In the phrase “painting the town red,” there actually was such a town; and the town was Melton Mowbray, where in 1832, or maybe 1833, the contents of three wooden buckets of red paint were splashed and flung about by the dashing, fun-loving, and mostly sodden young Earl of Somerset and his fellow huntsmen of the then-famous Quorn Hunt. Not quite one hundred years later, “the Quorn” (as it was known) was perhaps even more celebrated and esteemed, as possibly the best of the 120 or so foxhunting “packs” in England, with its meets bringing together many of the most skilled and audacious riders in the nation, a clubby gathering of mainly aristocratic riders of both sexes, in which the Simpsons had arranged to be included. Nor was this a casual, picturesque, weekend type of activity; indeed, “riding with the Quorn” was in some ways—in its physical demands and possible dangers—at least an equivalent to a long winter’s skiing in the high Alps: day after day going out on difficult runs, often in bad weather, in the company of the strongest and most competitive athletes. A season with the Quorn commonly ran from autumn well into winter, with as many as five or six meets in a week, each one a hard day’s outing, with sometimes sixty or seventy riders running their thoroughbreds at speed over uneven, gorse-covered fields (good protection for the fox, though with hidden hazards for horse and rider), across streams and brooks, taking high fences and stone walls at a jump, or not. Thanks to Papa Simpson’s largesse, the young Simpsons’ well-smoothed introduction to the British hunting scene extended to their living quarters, a suite of rooms at Bishop’s Inn, where the Prince of Wales, also a member of the Quorn, kept his own of course much grander suite. Out on the field Jim Simpson was easily the better rider of the couple, a world-class equestrian who in December wrote his father “how gratifying it is to be referred to here as Mr. Simpson, American sportsman and rider, and not always merely as the son of the president of Marshall Field.” For her part Alicia was good enough at least to hold her own in a tough crowd of women riders; what she lacked in precision and training she made up for in gumption and daring, galloping headlong when she could, and accepting the bangs and bruises that came with sometimes being thrown. For much of the season she went out three or four times a week, in the saddle for most of the day, with time-outs for a change of mounts. Even with the falls, however, the days were often easier than the nights, when she chafed under the British custom, all too easily adopted by her husband, whereby the women were left behind while the men went out to dine and drink together.

The Quorn field assembles, early morning; AP is the lone woman in the middle.

And then she had one mishap too many; as it happens not from being thrown by a horse but from a sudden, unexplained bleeding, an internal hemorrhage, while cantering across a farmer’s field. Back at the inn, after a doctor’s visit, the problem was revealed as a miscarriage from a pregnancy she hadn’t known existed. Worse still, it was from a rare, ectopic (or tubular) pregnancy, which in the short term brought with it considerable pain, and in the long term made it impossible for her to have children (a consequence only disclosed much later). It’s doubtful she told her husband about the miscarriage or that he’d have known how to respond had she done so; as things were, with his new wife pale, “under the weather,” and confined to bed, Simpson apparently saw no reason to alter his own schedule of hunting and dining out. But then, as Alicia recuperated at the inn, still hurting and feeling woebegone, she received a happily distracting letter from her father in New York. Whether vaguely guilty toward his daughter or just momentarily bored himself, for the time being he seemed to have abandoned the role of stern and disapproving father (of both feckless cub reporter and runaway bride) and now reappeared as good-natured, boyish Poppa. “I just read your letter about the English hunts,” he wrote, “and much like what you said and how you said it. I kid you not, you have a faculty for vivid, straightforward writing, and my guess is if you want to cultivate this you can get somewhere…What I’m proposing is, you write me an article of 3 or 4 thousand words for Liberty about the English hunts and Melton Mowbray in particular. Tell about all the different kinds of people you’re around, both the nobs & ladies & the grooms etc. who do the work….Not too much horsy stuff but good horsy stuff. Customs of the hunt. The Prince of Wales on horseback. Anything of interest to the American mass reader—actually much like what you wrote in your letter. We’d pay a fair price for it, though not sight unseen, and if you do a good job it could help you make a start in the magazine business.”

This was what Alicia needed to hear, and she quickly began to regain both strength and spirits, finding a typewriter to rent at a local law firm and soon setting to work in her room. She approached the piece as if she were writing another letter to her father: At once personal and informal, she spun out a narrative from the perspective of a clueless though spunky American girl rider in the heart of the British hunting establishment, struggling to get things right; with gossipy anecdotes, such as the time when the Prince of Wales got thrown at Dugald’s Gate just like everyone else; how she herself seemed to hit the dirt at least once a day, though Lady Somebody, in her sixties, had just managed five hours in the rain without a tumble. Unlike many of Alicia’s previous efforts, both at school and at the Daily News, this time she worked hard and methodically, taking pains, checking facts, doggedly rewriting, and making sure to have her copy “clean” before mailing it off. Two weeks later she heard from her father by cable: STORY ACCEPTABLE NEEDS ANOTHER THOUSAND WORDS. She quickly wrote another thousand words, put them in the mail, and cabled her father back: WORDS ENROUTE USE MAIDEN NAME ON BYLINE.