England Have My Bones

T. H. White

• Publisher: Rare Treasure Editions
• Year: 2021
• Topic: Social Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9781774643242
• Subtopic: Social Science Biographies
• Index: Social Sciences

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.

Part 1

The English are serious. . . . They are good sailors and better pirates, cunning, treacherous and thievish; above three hundred are said to be hanged annually at London. . . . Hawking is the general sport of the gentry; they are more polite in eating than the French, devouring less bread, but more meat, which they roast to perfection. . . . They are powerful in the field, successful against their enemies, impatient of anything like slavery; vastly fond of great noises that fill the ear, such as the firing of cannon, drums, and the ringing of bells, so that it is common for a number of them, that have got a glass in their heads, to go up into some belfry, and ring the bells for hours together for the sake of exercise. If they see a foreigner very well made, or particularly handsome, they will say: ‘It is a pity he is not an Englishman!’

A GERMAN VISITOR

(in 1598).

3. iii. xxxiv.

An essential of a man’s life, if he wishes to rediscover a contact with the world outside him, is not mobility, but position. It is helpful, in a world whose values change 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 then my school, and the town it was near, and the county it was in: followed in due order by “England, Great Britain, Europe, the Northern Hemisphere, the World, Space.” I never got so far as writing “Time,” though I should dearly have liked an additional category. I did this for remote and curious reasons: everybody else did. But I wonder whether in a way I was not trying to identify myself. Red Indians, I believe, are unsure of the distinction between themselves and the outside world. They find difficulty in being certain whether it is raining or they are spitting. I understand that most races were like this, in the youth of the world, and I am sure that children are like it still. When Weg falls down I expect she resents the world for falling up, and I can perfectly remember wanting to break a golf club because I was unable to hit a ball with it.

The small boy who scrabbled all that rigmarole in Kennedy’s Eating Brimer was sorting himself out. He was saying, “I am I, and I live here.” It seems to be a common tendency of human nature.

Nowadays we don’t know where we live, or who we are. Intelligence seems to be merging again into the Red Indian void from which it sprang. The intellectual is physically helpless in a material world, and has to be looked after by servants, like those people in Swift. Even the non-intellectual tends to become totally vague about reality. He knows about the inside of his motor-car, and the relations of time tables, and sometimes the various co-ordinations of a tennis racquet; but all these things are artificial. He is fading into them, losing his identity in an abstract world where water is an idea that comes out of a tap, and light a conception in a switch. If all the main services failed, he “would not know where he was.” The old phrase is appropriate.

This is why, in a shifting world, I want to know where I am. I want to find the things which won’t fail with the services, to identify myself over again on a secure anchorage. I like staying in one place, so that I can learn it and let it grow about me as it is, instead of gadding from pillar to post in motor-cars and aeroplanes and trains. Moreover, when I stay in the country I am farther from the abstract tap-water: closer to the components which are most likely to endure in the world about my planted feet.

Therefore, as firmly as I ever was in Kennedy, I am an Englishman, and I live in the shire.

4. iii. xxxiv.

The Shire is a pasture country, about two-thirds sand, the rest clay and other components. It is well wooded, noticeable for its power of growing strong vegetation, so that it is sometimes referred to as “lush.” There is scarcely any industry in it, and its people are gentle without being sleepy. Our nature is pitched about half-way between the doze of Norfolk and the fierce friendliness of Gloucestershire. We are not particularly associated with Oliver Cromwell, or Owen Glendower, or even William the Conqueror. The overbearing historical personages don’t seem to have made us 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 durable and less spectacular of them, have found a safe harbour here without having to make a fuss about it. We were always 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 they just fall short of the Osbaldeston-Sutton tradition. Our church architecture is respectable without being arresting. We are not obviously old-fashioned and not peculiarly new-fangled. We don’t have much in the way of hills, and therefore very little in the way of valleys, nor are we entirely a question of vale. In fact, we live along.

Our county is a place. We don’t stay in it all the time, but we do stay in it most of the time, and so we know it. When anything exciting happens in it, and we are so far from extremes that occasionally something does happen, we remember the occurrence for four or five hundred years. My small rough shoot is poached by the inhabitants of a village who do so because they have not forgotten that one of their villagers was hanged for poaching, a little less than two hundred years ago. Tom Bourne, who allows me to shoot over his farm, still calls an unfenced area in a grass field “the Nunnery,” though there is not a brick or a stone left to mark the spot where the holy chapel once stood.

To put it shortly, we are residential. The locality has its roots so deep in a peaceful kind of time that it is enduring; it conveys a sort of stability to its residents; it is home.

6. iii. xxxiv.

One can’t say that the Shire is a better place than anywhere else. Among other things, the place itself would scarcely appreciate the compliment. It would be against its nature to compete: it would lose what reality it possesses if it were made in any way to outstand. There are certain counties which once had outstanding qualities, and which have been overwhelmed for that reason. Sussex and Devonshire are cases in point. Downs, Devonshire cream, and damned bad literature, have provoked the invaders. No sensible man can go to either of those places now. Gloucestershire and Wiltshire are outstanding counties, and play more strongly and instantly on the emotions than does the Shire. But their loveliness makes them provocative, and their day will come. The invaders will top the skyline, marching under petrol pumps and curiosity shops and corrugated iron roofs. Gloucestershire, whose architecture grows out of the earth, because it builds with the stone it stands on, will blossom with red brick and blue slates. Wiltshire, whose downs enclose the fertile valleys, will bloom with loop-ways and mustard-yellow touring signs and gentlemen from the A.A.

The Shire has protected itself against these things by a non-committal policy. It makes no Banbury cakes or Yorkshire teas or Devonshire creams. It has concealed its individuality in order to preserve it. We have a few loop-ways, a few yellow signs, a few corrugated iron roofs, a few thatched ones, nothing very definite: so that the invaders pass through, as Oliver Cromwell did before them, looking for somewhere else.

10. iii. xxxiv.

There is no need even to be enthusiastic about the county, and no compulsion to remain. I don’t myself consider it beautiful. The land prefers to make no demands upon its inhabitants, but to exist as a position on the map of England, for those who want it. A non-committal earth, secretly exuberant in its private way, the Shire has no reproaches for me if I go to fish in Scotland or, in the summer, to look for another love. If I stay, the land is there for me, with its Southdown, Oxford Down and cross-bred Leicesters cropping the lush grass: if I go, I shall have gone with Oliver Cromwell; but the Shire is still a position.

20. iii. xxxiv.

So is the whole British Island an anchorage, if you avoid the towns. So are birds and beasts and the sporting seasons. It would be possible to throw out other grapples. All the things which will outlast London are important to the philosophic man. The incredible swarm of the Wen, whose money-makers not only scramble over the surface of the nest in buses and on their feet, but also dive into it like maggots and pop up again at the exits of other tube stations, ceaselessly bustling about their carrion errands: all this swarm is impermanent beside the salmon. When London Bridge has tumbled down, and the sewers of the hive have ceased to pollute the waters, there will be salmon opposite the Imperial Chemicals building, but no Imperial Chemicals building opposite the salmon.

26. iii. xxxiv.

At Southam brook, beyond Leckley, a stream that you can jump on a horse, I caught the first trout of this year: ½-lb., in good condition. He was taken on a worm and eaten for dinner, as a charm to increase virility during the coming season. I awarded myself the title of Primorarotructicaptor, or Hammer of the Salmonidæ.

People who don’t fish regard fishermen as crazy, or at least as if they belonged to another race: like monkeys or clergymen. “How you can have the patience!” they say. It doesn’t make me feel cross, but impotent, as if I were talking about logarithms to a Zulu. They have not experienced, and therefore need not believe in, other people’s joys. It is the same with ghosts. Such people can’t understand that the fisherman lives not patiently, but so far behindhand with what he wants to do, that the rush of fishing obliterates time, and the day is over before he has begun. They confuse him with the float-fisher, not realising that the skilful timing of a cast is as difficult as the timing of a cricket stroke. Perhaps they don’t even know that half the true fishermen in the world are so excited when they rise a fish that in striking him, if he is small, they jerk him out of the water. So shattering is the excitement of getting into a fish, so violently does the heart leap into the gullet, that I should put the “patient” fisherman’s blood-pressure at treble the height of the hunting man’s, and five times that, for the very smallest fish, of the man who kills a snipe.

Perhaps you do have to be patient in order to play the abstract game of cricket; but when you wed the timing of every stroke to the possibility of a kind of living “six,” that goes on fighting you for five minutes in still water, then it becomes a little difficult to talk about “patience” patiently.

6. iv. xxxiv.

The hunting season ends with a feeling of regret in the Shire, especially if the last day is a fair one. To-day was only moderate; but it suited a slow horse, and there was jumping to be had if wanted. It was nice to be among the dozen that didn’t get lost when we ran to ground by the Doric Bridge, having brought him from Weston Wild. It was nicer to smash an enemy’s lock at a gate: and to jump one’s own places: and so on. Two foxes were killed, but they were headed in every direction. I stayed to the bitter end, in sleet, and went home sadly to my bath. A bad season for me, but I have been happy. Next winter will be grand, but I shall be a year older. These thoughts were not cheered by the spectacle of a growing stomach. Three poached eggs restored confidence. The Rothmore on the 16th!

10. iv. xxxiv.

I have lived long enough in the Shire to be able to afford to go away from it with pleasure. I suppose this is what homes are for. If one hadn’t got an anchorage it wouldn’t be exciting to sail away. For a month now I have been turning over fishing stocks, reading books, looking forward to the opportunity of the first salmon of my life. A set of brand new salmon lures, Bulldog and Kessler’s Fancy, have been sharpened all over again with a carborundum; thereby making them rather blunter than they were before. A dozen wet-fly casts for trout have been tied in advance: silver march brown, skinnum, butcher. No really decent-minded fisherman can avoid buying a few bright flies, useless except for sea-trout, if any use for them: and, once bought, he has to put up one or two of these for the ordinary trout, just in case, because they are so beautiful. Then every fly in the box has to be sharpened, and the eyes cleaned of gut in cases where they were bitten off in a crisis last season. The line has to be dried (it is bone dry already) and greased: the reel has to be taken to bits out of mere restlessness: and of course one has got to practise casts.

Part 2

No fisherman can be a good man.

BYRON.

end rend

16. iv. xxxiv.

I drove up from Tenmere to Aberdeen yesterday in 13¼ hours, including stops for breakfast, lunch and tea, and many other breaks of a few minutes at bridges to look at the fishy water: less than eleven hours’ driving, and a distance of 516 miles on the speedometer. I arrived in a hail storm, like Amundsen; bought the best room in the Caledonian Hotel; had two baths, and slept it off.

People ought to take more interest in baths and extravagance. Both must be indulged in sparingly, to be properly appreciated. If I live in a public-house for ten months, and shave in the kitchen, then Claridges becomes an excellent way of expressing myself for two days. The true voluptuary wears sackcloth nearly all the time, so that when he does put on his sheer silk pants he can get the full satisfaction out of rolling in the hay. It is the same with baths. If I am continually washing myself, quite apart from the dangerous and insanitary nature of the practice, I shall cease to appreciate it. The thoughtful bather, who has a bath once a fortnight, is the man who knows that a bath ought to be entered warm, and raised to hot after entry, in order to experience the ineffable warmness, wetness, nakedness, milkiness of the steamy relaxation, percolating between his hams, with the winter night outside. It is the horny-handed and the leather-legged who properly enjoys his rare ablutions. He is the man who uses five shillings’ worth of bath-salts at a time, and loves it; while the poor pansy, eroded almost out of recognition by excessive water twice a day, though in the baths of Cleopatra, can hardly with any delight raise up the ghost of a rose.

To-day I bought stock at Sharpes, Alexander Martin’s and another’s: drove to Grantly and settled at the Stratheven Commercial: drove to Craigenkillie Castle and found Macdonald out to his traps: fished right up the river and back again to discover its geography. But it was a hopeless spate. When I got back to the castle at 7.45 Macdonald was waiting. He says the water has been out of order since Thursday, but should improve soon. We are to fish two of the pools to-morrow with minnow for salmon. I could follow Charles’ map from the Linbane pool down to Upper Crombie, but after that it became confused. A roaring brown torrent all the way: a staircase of dun waves with back-drafts leaping uphill, a spectacle of Biscay.

17. iv. xxxiv.

It was a hellish day, but in some ways grand, because it was medieval. I shook off the dust of Grantly after breakfast and picked Macdonald up from Craigenkillie at 10.30. The water was improved. We drove to the Gordon Arms, a superb John Buchan sort of beer shop, and left a bag, after covenanting for £2 a week. We drove straight down the precipice to Linbane farm and started fishing the Mill Pool at noon. I pricked what was supposed to be a salmon and a 3-lb. trout almost at once, but Cheese’s rod seemed not heavy enough to drive home the multiple hooks of a Devon minnow. We went over the pool twice, and then up the river. In the Crooked Pot I took the first fish, a trout of 17 ounces. We fished up through the Ardgalleys fruitlessly, then back to Linbane for lunch. After lunch at 3.30 I tried the Mill Pool for trout, using Silver March Brown, Skinnum, and a blue-silver-teal sort of sea-trout fly, in that order from tail fly to top dropper, on a 4x cast. In one hour I had eight more fish, two ¾ lb. and the rest going down to ½ lb., and put them all back, except one of the ¾ lb. for breakfast. All three of the flies were taken; though the gaudy one only once, by a very small stupid fish. Then we went back to minnow, but in vain. At seven o’clock we tried to restart the car and found that it had blown up. At seven-thirty we decided to walk back to Craigenkillie, and did s...

Table of contents

• Part 1
• Part 2
• Part 3
• Part 4
• Part 5
• Part 6
• Part 7
• Part 8
• Part 9
• Part 10