‘He knew the cry of hounds as they streamed out of covert’
catherine.austen@futurenet.com
“HUNTING became part of my life, and I saw many things on those days: bright winter sunlight on clipped horses and scarlet coats; on bare trees; stacks; on farmhouse gables; the riding out after a slight frost; the riding home with a frost beginning and a young moon in the sky; puddles already crisping over as I said goodnight to friends. Such were needed to freshen my mind and vision.”
When Sir Alfred Munnings, doyen of British horse painters, penned his memoirs in the 1950s, some aspects of the sporting life of rural East Anglia which he described so vividly already seemed the stuff of an impossibly distant past. The cavalry regiments stationed in Norwich at the turn of the century kept their own hounds to hunt carted stag, and the young Munnings would follow the staghounds on winter mornings, nattily dressed in top boots, cord breeches, dark grey Melton coat and velvet
