Charles Moore’s column in tomorrow’s issue of the magazine contains a wickedly funny literary item. Here it is, a day early, for readers of this blog:
The Duchess of Cornwall also strikes a blow for cultural subversion this month. For Give A Book, the excellent charity set up in memory of the playwright Simon Gray, she has chosen the pre-war children’s classic Moorland Mousie by ‘Golden Gorse’, about a wild Exmoor pony. The tale is told in Mousie’s voice. The Duchess says the book ‘brings back happy memories of the many hours that my sister and I spent galloping over the moors with Moorland Mousie and his friends’. Thanks to her patronage, WHSmith will be stocking the book from next month. What the Duchess does not elucidate is that the book is a paean of praise to stag-hunting: ‘Hounds came into view on the far hill, running hard. Most of the riders were a mile behind. Two people only were close to the hounds. One was the huntsman, the other was Farmer. He was shouting out news of the stag, and thoroughly happy, and well he deserved to be.’ Mousie’s cousin Tinkerbell is deeply moved: ‘When I grow up,’ he said, ‘I shall be a hunter.’ Mousie forms the same ambition. Obviously any normal child reading his story would follow this role model, as the young Camilla Parker-Bowles did.
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