Lives in Cricket No 26 - HV Hesketh-Prichard

78 for Hex for the social contacts than for the cricket. In August Hex and Kate set off for Newfoundland, and they went shooting – or rather Hex and Jack Wells shot while Kate relaxed in the tent – before Hex met up with Alfred Gathorne-Hardy to go hunting. They left on 4 September and were out for about a month, after which Hex set off again into Canada, looking for moose. He did not succeed with moose. (This was when he first heard of using a birchbark trumpet to call them, and was taught how to do it by his guide, Ed Atkins,though he did not write it up until 1910, in an article for Wide World. ) He did though have caribou from Newfoundland. He was thinking at this time of writing a book on the ethics of hunting, but this was something that never materialised. In November he got back home. Kate talks here about Hex’s love of pictures, and in particular Millais’ Vale of Rest , a picture of a peculiarly Victorian sensibility which shows a nun watching a woman digging a grave. The Tate’s caption says: Stirred by the spirituality and yearning in Mendelssohn’s song ‘Ruhetal’, here Millais’s theme is death, signified by the presence of the grave, skull and funerary wreaths, and in the intense and solemn colours of a graveyard touched with the last rays of a setting sun. Viewers are invited to contemplate their own mortality through the preparation of the new grave in the foreground and the nun who gazes out towards them. Despite the pain and sadness in death, the title offers hope that it will bring repose from life’s cares and an infinite contentment. This seems again to emphasise a sentimentality, almost a delight in melancholy, that was part of Hex’s character. It was not necessarily a religious sentiment: nothing he did or said as an adult suggests a strong attachment to religion. Travel with Ball or Gun ‘Vale of Rest’ by Sir John Millais, the father of one of Hex’s closest friends. Hex’s admiration of this painting points to a sentimental, melancholic aspect of his character.