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England Have My Bones
White's journal of life in the English countryside captures the constant surprises, joys, and natural wonders of the rural lifestyle
320 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1936
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About the author
T.H. White
103 books1,487 followersBorn in Bombay to English parents, Terence Hanbury White was educated at Cambridge and taught for some time at Stowe before deciding to write full-time. White moved to Ireland in 1939 as a conscientious objector to WWII, and lived out his years there. White is best known for his sequence of Arthurian novels, The Once and Future King, first published together in 1958.
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Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews
January 27, 2015
This book is written in the form of a diary running from 3rd March 1934 to the 3rd March 1935. White writes from and of an English agricultural county; though due to the later building of a motorway, this Shire is nowadays more often driven through at great speed instead of being savoured and admired for its rich history and productive landscapes. There’s an additional pleasure for the taking in picking out and solving the clues to the name of the shire, and the various locations described by White.
Hunting, shooting, fishing, AND flying makes this book an essential read for the keen or just curious country sportsman/woman. The first three compete against wildlife, whilst the fourth, given pre-WW2 technology, risks the lives of pilot, tutor, and the unsuspecting public going about their daily business far away down on the ground. Those readers who do not engage in such sports, are, in my opinion, best advised to forget about justification (or not) of blood sports; and instead simply to read and critically ‘listen’ to what the author has to say.
My initial interest was whetted when browsing this find in a second-hand book-shop. I purchased it without quite realising just how much I would learn about fly fishing; the techniques of which I knew precisely and absolutely nothing prior to reading. As I read, I apprehensively began to fear that the entire book might be about fishing. Thankfully, before I was dragged down to the watery depths, something clicked, and I realised that imperceptibly my mind had shifted into really enjoying my discovery of the sport: its successes, frustrations, and rewards. Imagining myself there and then, I almost expected to see the arrival of Montague Cork or Macdonald Hastings, [Cork on Water! https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1....]
Once I’d accepted that revelation, hunting, flying and shooting proceeded to interest me in equal measure.
And so it was that I found myself delighting in White’s forceful manner; even if his behaviour often struck me as downright personally reckless. Death, or a dare? Was White trying to prove something to himself, and publically to his readers, or were his choices in his writing merely calculated to draw his reader closer to him? His see-saw love-hate relationship with flying portrays him as being far from the most accomplished of pilots, and hating himself for that. Plagued by vicious circles of doubt, he craves the surge of adrenalin; yet skill is not always able to furnish the fix that he appears to desires so deeply and ardently.
White caught and held me. He greatly amused me with his success in lighting a fire in a cartridge box in a tent pitched in a very wet Lapland forest (pg.225). On the other hand, it was with a relief born from experience that I read of the considerably more humane present-day method (radio location) of digging out a ferret earthed up with a dead rabbit, rather than firing a gun down the hole (pg.249)!
Given the extensive national commemorations planned next year, marking the beginning of the First World War; it’s worth mentioning a ‘curiosity’ that White mentions in a lengthy footnote on (pg.261); where he describes the ridiculous magnitude of Archduke Franz Ferdinand’s unsporting bloodlust, using seven guns and four loaders. To kill over 4,000 birds in a day must be reckoned excessive by any sane person. He got his come-uppance – assassination in 1914, in Sarajevo.
White really nails it when describing the key to understanding a true sporting hunter; that “tiny edge of satisfaction”. He illustrates this by referring to a conversation with a Major Van der Byl of Wappenham, whom he describes as saying: “A woman wrote to me asking how I should like to be the quarry. I replied that I had been, in the Boer War, and that though the sensation was highly unpleasant I would not have missed it for the world.” (p.278) .
It is just that very edge of a sporting chance of a sporting escape, always exercised in conjunction with quick and humane methods of dispatch, which makes ALL the difference. This is why White condemns guns, such as the Archduke, who, like a spoilt child of stunted intellect, sought only to blast everything out of the sky; instead of pitting wits and engaging in the skill of the duel.
A very engaging and enjoyable read.
February 25, 2024
Loved the bits not about fishing or flying a plane (the book is about fishing and flying a plane)
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June 12, 2021Eclipsed now by the great Arthurian sequence beginning with The Sword In The Stone, but I believe this was White's first big hit. Which is hard to credit, reading it now. The format is one that still does perfectly good business – the author's diary of a year in the country, getting in touch with rural ways. Hell, another White book was part of the scaffolding for a recent hit in that line, H Is For Hawk. But where Helen Macdonald is careful to bring the reader along with her, explaining falconry from first principles, this feels a lot more like White has genuinely just published his diary, and he knows what everything means, and if you don't then it sucks to be you. The terminology of huntin', shootin' and fishin' is used without explanation, and when he learns to fly, that goes double. Even Googling, obviously a resource unavailable to the book's first six decades of readers, doesn't always help; I've flown a plane not much ahead of the ones White is in here, I still didn't know what a 'cheese-cutter' was, and it took a fair bit of thinking around SEO before it would stop trying to flog me aviation-themed items for cutting cheese and provide some approximation of an answer. Set against which obstacles, the bits one can follow really are very good on little details of flying, like the experience of not really knowing what you're doing as a plane stalls, and how there never seems to be an intermediate stage between 'high up' and 'really very close to the ground'.
As well as the terminology not being as welcoming as the modern reader might expect, there are also the sentiments. Even the early fishing sections are a long way from the bucolic idyll of Mortimer & Whitehouse; here it's all slitting of throats and discoloured gills in foul Scottish weather. And when White attends the birth of a foal, the instruction to take rope and an iron bar feels almost parodically grim, Cold Comfort Farm stuff. But while White never quite comes out and says it in the way a writer of a later generation might, it becomes clear fairly quickly that part of what he's doing here is working out how he feels about it all, and by extension who he is. Early on, I was tempted to abandon the whole project over the 'won't feel the benefit' logic of this passage: "The true voluptuary wears sackcloth nearly all the time, so that when he does put on his sheer silk pants he can get the full satisfaction out of rolling in the hay. It is the same with baths. If I am continually washing myself, quite apart from the dangerous and insanitary nature of the practice, I shall cease to appreciate it." Insanitary, that is, being a bath more than once a fortnight! And the notion of "the poor pansy, eroded almost out of recognition by excessive water twice a day" seemed all too easy to hear in Alex Jones' voice. But despite how easily triggered they all seem to be, I'm not sure one would ever catch a modern alt-righter with the self-awareness to muse "Does everybody claim to be unusually sensitive, just as everybody claims to have more to suffer than the next man, and to possess a sense of humour?" Or admitting "Perhaps it is true that the best method of defence is attack. Because I am afraid of things, of being hurt and death, I have to attempt them. This journal is about fear."
Not that these are the only times when White is willing to come across badly. One can to some extent discount as comic exaggeration his plans to become a cruel laird and be beastly to the commoners – "It will make very little difference to them in any case: their life is already insupportable. I shall be ninety years old, my nose will meet my chin, and I shall hunt my hounds out of a bath-chair drawn by Shetland ponies." But it's harder to raise a smile at his undisguised, ghoulish curiosity when he hears that someone has seen a pilot crash into telegraph wires and fry - "I said, and felt, that I might have liked to see this. He said: 'No, you wouldn't, because he screamed as he fried."' With animals, he tends to demonstrate much more compassion. Not in a way that stops him hunting (something I find a lot less confusing than many urban vegetarians seem to), but certainly in a way that complicates it. It's not that the bounds of his animal empathy are narrowly drawn; he has quite the menagerie, and it's here most of all that his gift for getting a character across in a line is on show: "Unlike the frog (who has the mentality of a chicken or a maiden aunt), the toad takes life as it comes. He sits in the middle of the carpet and reflects upon it". The home menagerie also includes snakes, of whom he's insistent he does not want to make pets: "They live loose in the room, except that I lock them up at nights so that the maids can clean in the mornings without being frightened." But he can still be endeared when they burrow inside the sofa, or institute excursions: "He was a confiding snake, and I once took him to church in my pocket, to make him a Christian and to comfort me during the sermon." He's outraged at animal deaths he considers not the done thing, and even unsure of the ones for which he's personally responsible, and it's easy to find his attempts to square the circle dishonest on some level, while being keenly aware that plenty of long-standing religions and philosophies have done no better: "One is a concrete assassination of beauty, the other is a creation of beauty – the beautiful aim. [...] A mere dead hare: horrible. But a hare cut over so that he somersaults with his head on the ground: beauty." For the sport to count as sport, he concludes, it needs to matter, and it can't be too easy. To which one might object, well, could a serial killer not say the same of hunting humans? Though I suspect that White would be a lot more OK with that than most. This is after all a man who can with every appearance of sincerity drop the sentence "I felt happy and interested, as if I had been condemned to death."
But then, like any writer trying to evoke the life of the rural working class of which he can't altogether be part, White is inevitably an outsider in all directions, and he knows it, openly if reluctantly admitting that this is a dilettante's book: "My intellectual friends consider my fishing a pose, and my fishing friends have an anxious expression, in case I should say something perverse." Like most English anti-urbanists he loves his Cobbett, with London of course referred to as the Wen, and underground commuters compared to maggots burrowing through a corpse – an image that feels considerably truer in the 2020s, with the once-great city now so hollowed out. "When London Bridge has tumbled down, and the sewers of the hive have ceased to pollute the waters, there will be salmon opposite the Imperial Chemicals building, but no Imperial Chemicals building opposite the salmon." Given I couldn't tell you where the Imperial Chemicals building was, then in a sense this has already come to pass – though equally, we've really scaled up our destruction in the past 85 years, so I'm not as sure as White of the salmon doing much better in the medium to long term. And yet, this same would-be bluff son of soil is reading dos Passos, one of the laureates of the 20th century city, without feeling any need to attribute it to knowing one's enemy or suchlike! Among the many times when I wondered how his Luddite tendencies and flirtations with anti-intellectualism would fare in the modern day was when he was delighting in birdsong not being susceptible to musical notation – now, of course, there's an app for that, and a pretty good one too, even if I am sceptical of its occasional insistence on buzzards around me, when every time I briefly think I see a raptor it turns out to be a pigeon at a flatteringly dramatic angle.
White's own area, incidentally, he refers to as the Shire. "There is no need even to be enthusiastic about the county, and no compulsion to remain. I don't myself consider it beautiful. The land prefers to make no demands upon its inhabitants, but to exist as a position on the map of England, for those who want it. A non-committal earth, secretly exuberant in its private way". He makes some efforts to disguise it, but inexpert ones, and long before mention was made of Waltheof having been its earl, I'd fingered Middlehampton as Northampton. Not an area I know at all well, despite it being home to the greatest living Englishman, but one for which this book, despite all its faults, has given me a deeper theoretical fondness. Much like the Frank Turner album which almost shares its title, it's painfully gauche in some places, outright concerning in others. But both of them also have a profound love and yearning at their core, for which I can forgive much. One could even argue that White has the edge because to my knowledge he never re-released this in five colourways to rinse the hardcore fans. Plus, he finds room for at least one absolutely true sentence: "It has been an almost perfect day, and suffers from the disease common to such days: that it was not quite perfect and eternal."
As well as the terminology not being as welcoming as the modern reader might expect, there are also the sentiments. Even the early fishing sections are a long way from the bucolic idyll of Mortimer & Whitehouse; here it's all slitting of throats and discoloured gills in foul Scottish weather. And when White attends the birth of a foal, the instruction to take rope and an iron bar feels almost parodically grim, Cold Comfort Farm stuff. But while White never quite comes out and says it in the way a writer of a later generation might, it becomes clear fairly quickly that part of what he's doing here is working out how he feels about it all, and by extension who he is. Early on, I was tempted to abandon the whole project over the 'won't feel the benefit' logic of this passage: "The true voluptuary wears sackcloth nearly all the time, so that when he does put on his sheer silk pants he can get the full satisfaction out of rolling in the hay. It is the same with baths. If I am continually washing myself, quite apart from the dangerous and insanitary nature of the practice, I shall cease to appreciate it." Insanitary, that is, being a bath more than once a fortnight! And the notion of "the poor pansy, eroded almost out of recognition by excessive water twice a day" seemed all too easy to hear in Alex Jones' voice. But despite how easily triggered they all seem to be, I'm not sure one would ever catch a modern alt-righter with the self-awareness to muse "Does everybody claim to be unusually sensitive, just as everybody claims to have more to suffer than the next man, and to possess a sense of humour?" Or admitting "Perhaps it is true that the best method of defence is attack. Because I am afraid of things, of being hurt and death, I have to attempt them. This journal is about fear."
Not that these are the only times when White is willing to come across badly. One can to some extent discount as comic exaggeration his plans to become a cruel laird and be beastly to the commoners – "It will make very little difference to them in any case: their life is already insupportable. I shall be ninety years old, my nose will meet my chin, and I shall hunt my hounds out of a bath-chair drawn by Shetland ponies." But it's harder to raise a smile at his undisguised, ghoulish curiosity when he hears that someone has seen a pilot crash into telegraph wires and fry - "I said, and felt, that I might have liked to see this. He said: 'No, you wouldn't, because he screamed as he fried."' With animals, he tends to demonstrate much more compassion. Not in a way that stops him hunting (something I find a lot less confusing than many urban vegetarians seem to), but certainly in a way that complicates it. It's not that the bounds of his animal empathy are narrowly drawn; he has quite the menagerie, and it's here most of all that his gift for getting a character across in a line is on show: "Unlike the frog (who has the mentality of a chicken or a maiden aunt), the toad takes life as it comes. He sits in the middle of the carpet and reflects upon it". The home menagerie also includes snakes, of whom he's insistent he does not want to make pets: "They live loose in the room, except that I lock them up at nights so that the maids can clean in the mornings without being frightened." But he can still be endeared when they burrow inside the sofa, or institute excursions: "He was a confiding snake, and I once took him to church in my pocket, to make him a Christian and to comfort me during the sermon." He's outraged at animal deaths he considers not the done thing, and even unsure of the ones for which he's personally responsible, and it's easy to find his attempts to square the circle dishonest on some level, while being keenly aware that plenty of long-standing religions and philosophies have done no better: "One is a concrete assassination of beauty, the other is a creation of beauty – the beautiful aim. [...] A mere dead hare: horrible. But a hare cut over so that he somersaults with his head on the ground: beauty." For the sport to count as sport, he concludes, it needs to matter, and it can't be too easy. To which one might object, well, could a serial killer not say the same of hunting humans? Though I suspect that White would be a lot more OK with that than most. This is after all a man who can with every appearance of sincerity drop the sentence "I felt happy and interested, as if I had been condemned to death."
But then, like any writer trying to evoke the life of the rural working class of which he can't altogether be part, White is inevitably an outsider in all directions, and he knows it, openly if reluctantly admitting that this is a dilettante's book: "My intellectual friends consider my fishing a pose, and my fishing friends have an anxious expression, in case I should say something perverse." Like most English anti-urbanists he loves his Cobbett, with London of course referred to as the Wen, and underground commuters compared to maggots burrowing through a corpse – an image that feels considerably truer in the 2020s, with the once-great city now so hollowed out. "When London Bridge has tumbled down, and the sewers of the hive have ceased to pollute the waters, there will be salmon opposite the Imperial Chemicals building, but no Imperial Chemicals building opposite the salmon." Given I couldn't tell you where the Imperial Chemicals building was, then in a sense this has already come to pass – though equally, we've really scaled up our destruction in the past 85 years, so I'm not as sure as White of the salmon doing much better in the medium to long term. And yet, this same would-be bluff son of soil is reading dos Passos, one of the laureates of the 20th century city, without feeling any need to attribute it to knowing one's enemy or suchlike! Among the many times when I wondered how his Luddite tendencies and flirtations with anti-intellectualism would fare in the modern day was when he was delighting in birdsong not being susceptible to musical notation – now, of course, there's an app for that, and a pretty good one too, even if I am sceptical of its occasional insistence on buzzards around me, when every time I briefly think I see a raptor it turns out to be a pigeon at a flatteringly dramatic angle.
White's own area, incidentally, he refers to as the Shire. "There is no need even to be enthusiastic about the county, and no compulsion to remain. I don't myself consider it beautiful. The land prefers to make no demands upon its inhabitants, but to exist as a position on the map of England, for those who want it. A non-committal earth, secretly exuberant in its private way". He makes some efforts to disguise it, but inexpert ones, and long before mention was made of Waltheof having been its earl, I'd fingered Middlehampton as Northampton. Not an area I know at all well, despite it being home to the greatest living Englishman, but one for which this book, despite all its faults, has given me a deeper theoretical fondness. Much like the Frank Turner album which almost shares its title, it's painfully gauche in some places, outright concerning in others. But both of them also have a profound love and yearning at their core, for which I can forgive much. One could even argue that White has the edge because to my knowledge he never re-released this in five colourways to rinse the hardcore fans. Plus, he finds room for at least one absolutely true sentence: "It has been an almost perfect day, and suffers from the disease common to such days: that it was not quite perfect and eternal."
September 10, 2017
This book is calming and meditative. It offers some great insight into T.H. White's interests and activities in 1934 and 1935. I thought the first part of the book, especially the one-off entries and passages on fishing, to be far superior to the latter airplane and hunting chapters. Overall, it's a great window into the life of a great writer.
April 2, 2023
I was rather disappointed in this book. The language was pedestrian and there was a lot of killing of small, defenseless animals. Yes, I knew it was about fishing, flying, shooting and hunting, but his constant totting up of the number he had succeeded in “offing” grated. I think I expected something more insightful and poetic.
August 17, 2011
Although I am no lover of shooting & fishing, and have an aversion to snakes - which takes in abot least half the content of this book, I have a great love of it. Have read it complete 4 times and often dip into it. Usually content is much of the attraction, but White has such a style and enjoyment of what he does, along with a very personal kind of reflection on what he does, that it's irresistible. He's something of a pre-Green Roger Deakin.
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March 23, 2017I think this book was kicking around the house when we were growing up, and I grabbed it but had never read it until now. A year (1934) in the life, focusing on fishing, hunting and flying in and over the English countryside. Good for dipping into. This copy is quite wonderful: the cover (no dust jacket) is designed with White's drawings of trees, buildings, farm implements, tankards, dogs, horses, pheasants, etc., totally charming. Inside, the University League Book Club has pasted in two pages, one a list of dates and who is to receive the book when, the other with the rules for passing it along until the end of the year (1937), when members can purchase the books "for one-quarter of their price." There is no mention of any kind of book discussion. At the back of the book is the list of 42 titles for the year, including Gone with the Wind, Moscow Skies, Eyeless in Gaza, Live Alone and Like it, School Days with Kipling, Drums along the Mohawk and Man from the Morlands. The ULBC appears to have been associated with Princeton. I'd love to know more about it.
January 2, 2022
“Dogs, like very small children, are quite mad.”
Is this a five star book? Yes. Am I recommending it to anyone? No. Because I’m extra special and can appreciate it.
I’m all sincerity I wouldn’t expect this book to be widely enjoyed. Even written in the 1930’s it is slightly archaic, and it focuses almost exclusively on five topics; fishing, shooting, flying, “country living” and hunting (meaning riding ponies after foxes). But White writes beautifully. He is witty, profound and disarmingly honest.
“One consolation: it was an absolutely perfect tragedy”
Is this a five star book? Yes. Am I recommending it to anyone? No. Because I’m extra special and can appreciate it.
I’m all sincerity I wouldn’t expect this book to be widely enjoyed. Even written in the 1930’s it is slightly archaic, and it focuses almost exclusively on five topics; fishing, shooting, flying, “country living” and hunting (meaning riding ponies after foxes). But White writes beautifully. He is witty, profound and disarmingly honest.
“One consolation: it was an absolutely perfect tragedy”
February 19, 2021
Enjoyable read. A constant theme was self-reflection on his courage and instinct when on the edge of serious injury or death while piloting a small airplane or hunting on horseback. This was done in part through assessment of courage, competency, and character of those around him in these stressful situations. Fishing was a complicated endeavor for T.H. White. I was better off growing up, all I had to do is put a worm on a hook and put it in the water.
March 5, 2019
I wanted very much to enjoy this book more than I did, White writes so well. Some sections just move along at a stubborn crawl, but the variety of his experiences in this year help keep the pace going.
Even in the slowest of passages (for me, the flying lessons and hunts), I was rewarded time and again with gems--lovely descriptive writing, bits of humor, thoughts to ponder.
Even in the slowest of passages (for me, the flying lessons and hunts), I was rewarded time and again with gems--lovely descriptive writing, bits of humor, thoughts to ponder.
June 24, 2023
As an American with no experience hunting/fishing/shooting/flying reading this in 2023, I thought it was a little over dense with “technical” jargon and older English colloquialisms. But it was interesting nonetheless and White’s charm always finds a way to break through.
June 26, 2019
Not enough nature, too much hunting of birds. I skimmed a lot of it. It had recommended in another book as a nature book.
December 2, 2016
When reading The Once and Future King, which I loved, I thought White was an unusual and fascinating person, and it would be great to spend more time with him. Well, that's what this book is: spending time with White, rambling around England at his side. And he does feel fascinating, very unconventional in the most conventional settings, always providing an unexpected insight, a lot of knowledgeable details, and some (not much) humour.
Here are some of the descriptions he gives to himself: proud, impecunious, imaginative, and "fortunately not a gentleman." I would add candid (not a synonym for honest), pessimistic, determined, and oh so alive. Even though the whole book is a kind of memento mori, always giving the present moment its full due, but also fighting the fear of death, ultimately with the unbeatable argument that while I am here, death is not, and when it is, I am not.
He also depicts the going-back-to-nature in an unusual way: not the stupid New Age idea of relaxing in a flowered paradise where everything is made exactly right for you, oh no; he thinks you should be one with nature and therefore fight for your life as all the living things do, or stop living.
I keep wanting to use some sweet, gushing, unappropriate expressions. The truth is, I feel as used to him as if I'd lived with him for years, and like him so much - I wish someone could have that sort of bond with me after I'm dead.
But of course I don't write books.
Here are some of the descriptions he gives to himself: proud, impecunious, imaginative, and "fortunately not a gentleman." I would add candid (not a synonym for honest), pessimistic, determined, and oh so alive. Even though the whole book is a kind of memento mori, always giving the present moment its full due, but also fighting the fear of death, ultimately with the unbeatable argument that while I am here, death is not, and when it is, I am not.
He also depicts the going-back-to-nature in an unusual way: not the stupid New Age idea of relaxing in a flowered paradise where everything is made exactly right for you, oh no; he thinks you should be one with nature and therefore fight for your life as all the living things do, or stop living.
I keep wanting to use some sweet, gushing, unappropriate expressions. The truth is, I feel as used to him as if I'd lived with him for years, and like him so much - I wish someone could have that sort of bond with me after I'm dead.
But of course I don't write books.
August 26, 2009
I was so disappointed in this book! I adored T.H. White's The Once and Future King, and I am such an Anglophile -- I thought I could fall into this book like coming to The Last Homely House. Instead, it was all about his experiences fishing and shooting. The fishing wasn't bad -- I'm an erstwhile fisherman myself. But the shooting bits were awful -- I don't understand English shooting, nor do I care to. No travel writing, no descriptions of any of lovely old England. Just fishing and shooting. Thumbs down!
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
October 22, 2012
http://www.goodreads.com/assets/layou...
I didn't finish it. His fiction is wondrous, but this one is a fishing memoir. At least it was as far as I got. BORING!!!!
I didn't finish it. His fiction is wondrous, but this one is a fishing memoir. At least it was as far as I got. BORING!!!!
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