The muddy hunting coat

There is little hope of being spared your tumblers’ club bill when your hunting coat is thick with mud, says Catherine Austen

JANE is regretting not paying the “compound” sum of £25 to the Dunthrop Vale Tumblers’ Club at the beginning of the hunting season. Four falls in, her tumblers’ club bill is £40 so far with just a few weeks of the season to go. Slightly embarrassingly, she is racing up the league table towards being “top tumbler”, only two falls behind the Wednesday field master, who is notorious for attempting vast hedges on green five-year-olds from Ireland. Still, if she wins, the first prize of a coat brush will come in useful. The countryside is desperately wet, and she has been avoiding looking at her hunting coat for two days now. It is filthy — splashes of mud, lumps of mud, horse slobber on the sleeves — and she just can’t face the hours of arm-exhausting brushing and then sponging to clean it before Saturday. Someone helpfully advises her to stick it under the outside tap and scrub it, but it would never dry in time — she doesn’t have an AGA.

Friday evening is spent scratching the lumps off with her fingernails, then brushing it with a dandy brush and sponging the worst stains. A clever friend has it sorted — she drops it off at the kennels every night after hunting and pays the second whipper-in £20 to clean it. At least she says she pays him, but Jane wonders whether another sort of quid pro quo is in place. She’d better start wearing more mascara and fluttering her eyelashes at him at the meet. H&H