IN MY YOUTH, hunt balls were held in vast country houses and were very, very wild. By midnight, the barrage of bread rolls was only exceeded by the squadrons of moths thundering out of the brocade as ancient four-posters heaved with occupants.
It was with excitement but some trepidation therefore that we accepted an invitation to the Cotswold Hunt Ball. Needing a dress, I borrowed my daughter’s black strapless. A mild fit of sulks, because my husband said I looked like a badly wrapped Christmas cracker, gave me the excuse to sit in the back. The dress would never have got under a seat belt anyway; when my brother took his wife and daughters to a hunt ball in Shropshire, he had to borrow a horse box to accommodate the crinolines.
We kicked off with champagne at the house of the Joint Master, Tim Unwin. Those making feeble attempts to pace themselves drank Buck’s Fizz. A hunting blade with a red Pentel was marking the list of forty people in the Unwin’s party: ‘Putting asterisks beside all the worst gropers,’ he said. He had to guard his wife, he explained, pointing to an exquisite blonde. ‘She’s Polish, I’m Welsh. It makes for a wonderfully volatile marriage. We throw telephones at one another.’
Another beautiful blonde, Princess Michael’s lady-in-waiting, floated across the room.
‘I’m official lech-in-waiting tonight,’ said my husband, pursuing her briskly.
The men looked even more glamorous than the women, gaudy peacocks in their different tailcoats, red with green collars for the Cotswold, red with maroon for the VWH (Vale of the White Horse), dark blue with buff for the Beaufort. Permission to wear the hunt coat – or one’s button, as it is called – is given by the Master, like getting one’s colours.
Soon they were capping each other’s tales of earlier hunt balls: erotic scufflings in the dungeons at Berkeley Castle, Masters riding their horses round the ballroom followed by hounds. Our host remembered dancing most of one evening with a lampstand. ‘Suddenly I noticed the then Master was solemnly chewing up a glass. My immediate unaltruistic thought was “Oh hell, he won’t be able to take hounds out tomorrow.” But he didn’t come to any harm. If the glass is good, one doesn’t.’
It was a bitterly cold night as we set out in convoys to the ball. Cars with silver foxes on the bonnets skidded over the roads, rattling cattle grids and lighting up the grey curls of traveller’s joy and the last red beech leaves. Flakes of snow drifted down as we arrived at Cheltenham Town Hall. ‘It’s already fetlock deep in Stow-on-the-Wold,’ bellowed a woman who had just arrived with a white windscreen.
In the Ladies, pale-shouldered women with weathered complexions fought for the mirror.
‘I got bucked off into a cow-pat today,’ wailed a pretty girl. ‘I’ll never get my breeches clean.’
‘Soak them in Nappisan,’ advised a large lady.
Soon four hundred people were tucking into a splendid dinner at £18.50 a head. On my left a late arrival seemed very familiar. Tall, raffish, handsome, like an unfrocked cherub making a guest appearance in Minder, he said he’d just left a crucial meeting in Maidenhead. He hunted with the Cotswold when business and racing allowed.
Suddenly I twigged: he was Michael Arnold, the Receiver who’d so audaciously hijacked the miners’ five million pounds from a foreign bank last week.
‘For what we are about to receiver,’ I said, attacking my smoked mackerel.
What was extraordinary, he went on, was that he had suddenly bumped into one of the foreign bankers he’d been writing to for weeks trying to recoup the cash, out hunting. Neither of them had had any idea that they were members of the same hunt.
‘Gosh,’ I said, having visions of wads of tenners being handed over as they whizzed over hedges.
Mr Arnold, forty-nine, started hunting only three seasons ago, but has, he said, no difficulty keeping up. ‘I’m as competitive about hunting as I am about business. Nanny hunts with the Cotswold too – she picks me up if I fall off,’ he added.
‘My cleaner used to hunt with the Beaufort,’ I said, to keep my end up.
On my right, the Master, Tim Unwin, said that one of the keenest hunts in the country was the South Wales Banwen Miners: ‘We keep drafting hounds to them. They always want a hound who’s a pack leader.’
Perhaps they should call it Arthur.
Discussing obsessions with hunting, Tim cited a former Master who’d left a clause in his will saying he wanted his body fed to hounds so he could enjoy one last run.
‘We got round it by scattering his ashes on the hounds’ porridge.’
A diversion was caused by the late arrival of three young men from the Cambridge Harriers, all with ironed hair and smooth faces, who’d gone to Gloucester Town Hall by mistake. ‘Fast man across country,’ said Tim approvingly as one of them sat down opposite us. He was certainly the fastest eater, and raced through three courses in as many minutes.
The band was playing ‘Red Red Wine’. The brilliantly lit ballroom beckoned. Tim swept me off to dance. A wonderful dancer, his only problem was that, being Master, he knew everyone . . . and every time he raised his hand, which was firmly clasping mine, to hail some chum, I shot right out of my dress – a chintzless wonder.
As the vast floor filled with couples, red coats with flying tails clashing gloriously with the stinging fuchsia pinks and electric blues of the girls’ dresses, the ballroom looked like a shaken kaleidoscope. I couldn’t help feeling that as well as class hatred, an element of sexual jealousy must motivate the hunt saboteurs: people in hunting kit look so good.
‘If we went out in rags on rough ponies we wouldn’t get half the flak,’ said Tim Unwin. ‘People get completely the wrong idea. Hunting isn’t a rich elitist sport – people of all ages and classes come out with us. We’ve got millers, doctors and farmers as well as knights. I always think of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales.’
To prove the point, at that moment our fishmonger bopped past with his comely wife, and I was able to order some cod for the weekend.
It was also nice to see the huge number of young people who’d paid £11.50 for an after-dinner ticket. Sartorially there is a complete divide between the young girls, who all wear mid-calf dresses and look as though they are going to a drinks party, and the wrinklies, whose dresses go down to the ground.
‘Ever since a short-sighted brigadier mistook my varicose veins for patterned stockings I’ve stuck to long,’ sighed one woman.
With the richness of royalty in the area, each hunt is proud of its royal patrons. Princess Anne and Captain Phillips hunt with the Beaufort, Princess Michael also. But Prince Michael remains loyal to the Cotswold. Maybe it is the secret of a happy marriage for each to hunt with different packs.
Prince Charles goes out with the VWH. ‘HRH has got a triffic sense of humour,’ said a VWH stalwart. ‘The other day a bobbed-tail fox went past, and he turned to me and said, “Looks more like a bloody corgi.” Bloody funny, what?’ he brayed with laughter.
Everyone was having a great time. The Receiver turned out to be a wonderful dancer, too, what with twinkling black suede feet and long muscular arms (presumably as a result of humping all that money around).
No one poured champagne over anyone else – at £15 a bottle they couldn’t afford to. And with so many starving birds outside, people were far too conservation-conscious to hurl bread rolls.
12.30 a.m.: There was a rumpus in the hall. ‘No, you can’t come in,’ a bossy official was saying to a group of people with snow in their hair. ‘The doors shut at midnight.’
The next minute a pint-sized individual in a red coat, furious as a hunt terrier, was yelling into the official’s navel.
‘You don’t understand, you must let us in. They’re hunting over me le-and tomorrow.’
Three thousand acres near Winchcombe tipped the scales, and the doors were opened.
Hungry as hunters, we fell on breakfast. Back on the floor, the fastest eater, obviously still hungry, was nibbling his partner’s bare shoulder. One local Casanova, with patent leather hair and an overdeveloped little finger from winding women round it, had the unenviable problem of having both his wife and current mistress as well as his discarded mistress present. The former two smirked slightly as the ex-mistress flounced up to him, breathing fire.
To shut her up, he bore her off to dance, and all round the floor one could see them rowing in that rigid-jawed upper class way, as though they’d had too many injections at the dentist.
Why do hunting people have such a reputation for adultery? Perhaps it is because they’re so fit – at three o’clock in the morning no one was flagging – or because if you like chasing foxes, you enjoy chasing other things, or because, as one man explained to me, ‘Only time one can really sleep with one’s wife is two weeks in November. Then she can have the baby in August, and be back in time for cubbing.’
3.45 a.m.: Sadly mindful of icy roads, we called it a day. Outside there were already three inches of snow. As the long dresses trailed over the white pavements, flurrying flakes blurred the Regency houses, and young blades engaged in a snowball fight, we seemed to have gone back a hundred years.
Not unamiably, the attendant manning the Gents sleepily imitated them: ‘Going to Georgie’s drinks party? Ya. Is Rose going? Ya. Hunting tomorrow? Ya. Think they’ll cancel? Ya.’
Suddenly the horn called and they all swarmed back, view-hallooing, to join the stampede of the ‘Posthorn Gallop’. A passionately embracing couple, nearly knocked sideways in the rush, reluctantly disengaged themselves and joined in.
The anti-fox hunting brigade don’t seem to realise that by trying to abolish hunting, they are taking a pair of scissors to the whole social tapestry of country life, which has lasted for generations. For, as R S Surtees commented, over a hundred years ago, the real business of a hunt ball ‘is either to look out for a wife or look after a wife, or to look after somebody’s else’s wife’.
It has very little to do with foxes.