Hunting horn sounds for death of Old Britain

IT IS four years since my mother died; as I stood at her grave on Thursday, it struck me that were she to come back now, while the little churchyard folded into Lancashire’s Trough of Bowland may look the same, the country we live in has changed entirely.

My mother died on 13 February 2001, just before news of the foot and mouth outbreak was made public and Britain was filled with the stench of burning carcasses. A couple of hounds, as well as her family, witnessed her coffin lowered into the vault as one of the joint masters of the hunt blew Gone Away across the valley.

My mother lived in a pre-9/11 world. When she died, Big Brother was still a novelty, war with Iraq unthinkable, immigration well down the list of political priorities and the idea of Prince Charles marrying Camilla Parker Bowles something whispered only behind palace curtains. My mother had never heard of Osama bin Laden or used the word "tsunami". If she came back now, a great deal would need explaining.

But it would not only be events or new words. She would notice at once how different the country feels. Some of this difference is the inevitable result of the increased risk of terrorism perpetrated by suicide bombers. However, the new emphasis on security does not fully account for the changed atmosphere. There is something deeper going on in Britain, and, difficult though it is to put a finger on it, the easiest way to describe it is to say that during the second term of the Blair project, something else, apart from my mother, has died.

Few people may have noticed its demise; some may have noticed and cheered; others noticed but not cared. Nevertheless, this other death struck me hard as I followed my local hunt in England for the final time last Tuesday.

Hounds met in front of a house in which the same family has lived for more than 600 years. There were many supporters present: old men with craggy faces leaning on sticks; women on cobs and plenty of cheerful, red-faced school-aged children on hairy ponies. I was on foot, and followed with, among others, the retired district commissioner of the Pony Club, a redoubtable woman whose knowledge of the countryside in all its facets makes her a living Observer’s book of plants, animals, weather conditions, flowers and hound behaviour.

But although there was certainly fighting talk on the subject of the imminent hunting ban as we climbed the hills, there was less an air of defiance among these doughty people as of weary and desolate resignation. We spoke, in practical terms, of what will happen next, but in our hearts something else was going on: we were already mourning not just the end of proper hunting, but for what the end of proper hunting signifies, which is the end, too, of what we might call Old Britain.

Old Britain was the kind of country that complained about its institutions and disliked some traditions, but cared for them nonetheless, as they connected each citizen/subject to a common past. To those who chose to settle here from other places, our esoteric ways were often part of the attraction. It was the kind of place in which responsibilities came far above rights, and ancient liberties above town hall bureaucracy; the kind of place to which people returned with a sense of relief, desperate for a good cup of tea.

Old Britain produced Winston Churchill and Evelyn Waugh, Margaret Thatcher and Denis Healey. It also produced many of the people with whom I was walking.

For Old Britons who hunt, a day out with the local pack is not about the proverbial mad gallop and what fences you can jump, it is about watching how the hounds work, about scenting conditions and reading the country, in the hunting sense of that word, right.

One of the great pleasures of hunting for Old Britons has always come in the way it challenges rural skills born of generations of experience and observation, and provides an opportunity to pass these on to future generations.

As traditional hunting dies, so, too, dies this valuing of experience and observation, and a mortal blow is dealt to the natural British sense that tradition and history are not just for theme parks. The hunting ban is the final act in a flurry of destruction by the gleeful institution wreckers, constitutional vandals, tradition-haters and petty, jeering class-warriors who constitute the cutting edge of Blairism.

Killing hunting marks an important victory for them, not because it will save any foxes (it won’t) but because it signals to Old Britons that they are finally finished.

Recent elegies about the end of hunting are not "panegyrics preached over an empty coffin", as Waugh famously described Brideshead Revisited, his own elegy to a certain British way of life. This time the coffin is full.

WHAT is more, with regard to hunting, a snare has been set in the graveyard. The snare consists of the weasel-phrase "new" hunting, a phrase that makes my heart sink even as the hearts of all who hate Old Britain must rise. There is no such thing as "new" hunting, because the new form - trail hunting in which a scent is deliberately laid, or foxes are shot as they break cover - is not hunting. Indeed, to call it hunting is to give Blairites the final victory. It implies acceptance, where no acceptance should be possible, that hunting does not have, at its core and heart, the age-old, unpredictable and sporting relationship between man, hound and quarry, but that it can happily become a jolly day of fox shooting or simply be dedicated to pleasing the sort of mounted followers we used to call "thrusters", who care nothing for hound, fox or land, but just want the opportunity to charge about other people’s fields.

This is certainly a new form of hunting - Blairite hunting, we might call it. Old Britons will find it distressing, to say the least.

That the Countryside Alliance has embraced "new" hunting, albeit for the best of pragmatic reasons, worries me. Such "hunting", because, like much Blairite rhetoric, its meaning is questionable and its integrity compromised, will produce no poetry, no art and no understanding of how the countryside works.

Worse, it may prove popular enough among those whose interest in real hunting has always been minimal to let the Tories, some of whom have been less vociferous in defending Old Britain than they should have been, off the hook.

If enough hunt supporters are happy with "new" hunting, the whole idea of rescinding the ban can be quietly dropped, thus banging the final nail into Old Britain’s coffin.

Maybe most people will not mind. Maybe most people feel it is time Old Britain made way for Cool Britannia. But I mind because I happened to love the feel of Old Britain, solid as old turf beneath my feet. Old Britain, just like traditional hunting, was not perfect, but it had a certain stubborn and glorious quality, a certain earthy sense of itself.

Now Blair has finally killed that off, and, standing over my mother’s grave, I found myself grateful that she was spared seeing Old Britain die as the Gone Away faded and the hounds hunted into the dark.