Madame Eulalie’s Rare PlumsThe Daily Mail, May 20, 1929
Whit Monday, which to so many means merely one more opportunity of strewing Beauty Spots with paper bags, has a deeper significance for the hunting man. For, if you look in your diary, you will find the following entry:—
May 20 (Whit Monday). — Fly Swatting Begins.
Simple words, but how much they imply. What magic memories of past delights they conjure up, what roseate visions of happy days to come.
English poetry is rich in allusions to this king of sports. Every schoolboy is familiar with those lines of Coleridge:
It is the Ancient Mariner,
He swatteth one in three.
These have been taken by some to suggest a slur on the efficiency of the British Merchant Service, but I do not think that Coleridge had any such interpretation in mind.
Mark the word “ancient.” “It is the ancient Mariner.” That is to say, he was past his prime, possibly even of an age when he might have been expected to abandon the sport altogether. Yet, such was the accuracy of eye and suppleness of limb resulting from the clean, fresh life of the open sea that he was still bagging one out of every three—a record which many a younger man would be glad to achieve.
It is Chaucer who is responsible for the old saw:
When noone is highe,
Then swatte ye flye,
which has led some to hold that the proper time for a meet is after lunch. Others, of whom I am one, prefer the after-breakfast theory. It seems to me that a fly which has just risen from its bed and taken a cold plunge in the milk-jug is in far better fettle for a sporting run than one which has spent the morning gorging jam and bacon and wants nothing more than a quiet nap on the ceiling.
The Swattesmore, the hunt to which I belong, always meets directly after breakfast. And a jovial gathering it is. Tough old Admiral Bludyer has his rolled-up copy of Country Life, while young Reggie Bootle carries the lighter and more easily wielded Daily Mail.
There is a good deal of genial chaff and laughter because some youngster who is new to the game has armed himself with a patent steel-wire swatter, for it is contrary to all the etiquette of the chase to use these things. Your true sportsman would as soon shoot a sitting bird.
Meanwhile Sigsbee, our host’s butler—specially engaged for his round and shiny head, which no fly has ever been known to resist—has opened the window. There is a hush of anticipation, and the talk and laughter are stilled. Presently you hear a little gasp of excitement from some newly joined member, who has not been at the sport long enough to acquire the iron self-control on which we of the Swattesmore pride ourselves. A fine fly is peering in.
This is the crucial moment. Will he be lured in by Sigsbee’s bald head, or will he pursue his original intention of going down to the potting-shed to breakfast on the dead rat? Another moment, and he has made his decision. He hurries in and seats himself on the butler’s glistening cupola. Instantaneously, Francis, the footman, slams the window. The fly rockets to the ceiling. “Gone away, sir, thank you, sir,” says Sigsbee respectfully, and with a crashing “Yoicks!” and “Tally-ho!” the hunt is up.
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Ah me! How many wonderful runs that old library has seen. I remember once a tough old dog fly leading us without a check from ten in the morning till five minutes before lunch.
We found him on Sigsbee’s head, and a moment later he had made a line across country for the south window. From there he worked round to the bookshelves. Bertie Whistler took a fearful toss over a whatnot, and poor old General Griggs, who is not so keen-sighted as he used to be, came to grief on a sunken art nouveau footstool.
By the end of a couple of hours only “Binks” Bodger and myself were on the active list. All the rest were nursing bruised shins in the background. At a quarter to one the fly doubled back from the portrait of our host’s grandmother, and in trying to intercept him poor “Binks” fell foul of the head of a bearskin rug and had to retire.
A few minutes later I had the good luck to come up with the brute as he rested on a magnificent Corot near the fireplace. I was using a bedroom slipper that day, and it unfortunately damaged the Corot beyond recognition. But I have my consolation in the superb brush which hangs over my mantelpiece, and the memory of one of the finest runs a swatter ever had.
There are some who claim that fly-swatting is inferior as a sport to the wasping of the English countryside. As one who has had a wide experience of both, I most emphatically deny this. Wasping is all very well in its way, but to try to compare the two is foolish.
Waspers point to the element of danger in their favourite pursuit, some going so far as to say that it really ought to come under the head of big game hunting.
But I have always maintained that this danger is more imaginary than real. Wasps are not swift thinkers. They do not connect cause and effect. A wasp rarely has the intelligence to discover that the man in the room is responsible for his troubles, and almost never attacks him. And, even admitting that a wasp has a sting, which gives the novice a thrill, who has ever heard of anyone barking his shin on a chair during a wasp hunt?
Wasping is too sedentary for me. You wait till the creature is sitting waist-high in the jam and then shove him under with a teaspoon. Is this sport in the sense that fly-swatting is sport? I do not think so. The excitement of the chase is simply non-existent. Give me a cracking two-hours run with a fly, with plenty of jumps to take, including a grand piano and a few stiff gate-leg tables. That is the life.