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Red Letter Days

In the blood

Rory Knight Bruce
Quiller Publishing, 176pp, £20,

Melissa Kite

Wednesday, 21st May 2008

Melissa Kite on Rory Knight Bruce's new book

Anyone who has been stuffed down a foxhole at a young age to pull out a hound, and has come back out attached to a hound attached to a fox attached to a badger, deserves to be read.

Is it any wonder townies do not understand country folk you ask yourself as you read this wonderfully rich romp of a life story. Rory Knight Bruce bills his book as a hunting diary, but it feels much more than that. It is a vivid tribute to the personalities of the countryside and a love song to the land. It is also very funny. You know you are in for a good ride when chapter one concludes:

Quite why my mother decided to leave home when I was less than two years old, leaving me in the custody of Jackson the tractor man in a hedgerow down the back lane, I cannot say and have never asked.

Whether or not these experiences were painful at the time he does not say either, but they have left Knight Bruce ridiculously well furnished with anecdotes.

His idiosyncratic family rampage through life in a riot of upper-crust eccentricity that makes for a modern day Tristram Shandy. ‘I was conceived, so far as it is known, between the morning tea and breakfast at the Berkeley Hunt kennels on Boxing Day, 1955’, he begins. After his mother takes off, there are a string of temporary carers, including his father’s kennel huntsman, and a series of stepfathers, including a Russian count. I think. I decided after a few chapters not to worry about the precise details, but to let them wash over me.

Surprisingly, given this background, Knight Bruce does not get on a horse until the age of 30, but turns out to be one of those infuriating latecomers who master the art in a week. Within days he manages a full day’s hunting and within months is surveying the wanted adds for ‘joint master’ jobs.

I wish I could profess to such bravery, but after 30 years of riding I am still a nervous hunter who sneaks off with the children when the master calls out ‘anyone who doesn’t want to jump go with Mrs Worsley!’

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