Affectionate evocations of early 20th Century rural life and beautifully observed character sketches were of little interest to me. I was about to say that it was a different poem to the one that I thought I remembered so vividly – but of course, it wasn’t the poem that had changed. The Squire and his three daughters – two happy and flirty and the other, Jane: In my fickle youth, I’d blanked Masefield’s beautiful character sketches of the people who were meeting for the hunt. Till his back bent up and his tongue hung flagging,Īnd his belly and brush were filthed from dragging … They were nearer now and they meant to kill.Ĭlogged on his heart as his brush with mud, He could run for an hour and then be cunning,
The fox was strong, he was full of running,
My memories were all of the hunt – of heart-rending passages like: What actually struck me most forcibly was the extent to which I’d remembered the second part of the poem and almost totally forgotten the first part – apart from the opening lines. It’s probably the single most vivid memory of my schooldays (next to bunking off from PE on Thursday afternoons and going for a walk along the Thames instead) and I was curious what my reaction to Masefield’s most famous narrative poem would be now, forty years later, having never once revisited it in those intervening decades. I don’t want to get to the end of the poem because of what I’m afraid it will hold but at the same time I have to know what happens … I’m appalled and fascinated all at the same time. We run with him we hide with him we listen with him we even hold our collective breath with him. Masefield’s ability to put himself in the place of the hunted animal – to put US in his place, is almost uncanny. When we started the poem everyone took turns, but eventually there were about six of us who were happy to do it without coercion. Not all of us – not by then it’s just a few – the ones who enjoy reading aloud and do it quite well.
And we’re reading Reynard the Fox out loud. We’re all sitting in rows at our desks – the wooden kind with lids and inkwells and the initials of past students scratched into the surface with compasses. I remember always admiring the white fur trim. The English Lit teacher is sitting at his desk, at the front of the classroom wearing his university gown – as all teachers did then. The sort you write on with white chalk and erase with a felt duster on a wooden block.
I’m sitting in an old-fashioned schoolroom in the south of England – the Victorian kind, with high ceilings and long tall windows that have to be opened with those specially designed hooks on long poles. Having said that, there are one or two moments that stand out from the general background haze like lighthouses on a darkened shoreline. I’ve never been one of those people who can recall their childhoods – or even their early teens – with pinpoint clarity. Reynard the Fox – or the Ghost Heath Run ~ by John Masefield