Читать книгу Period Piece - Gwendolyn Raverat - Страница 17

From the day nursery window we looked across the road to the grass bank and the lime trees opposite; and over Queens' Green to the great elms of the Backs. The level of the Green was then lower than the road, and the horses grazed on the smooth ancient turf, which can only be made by hundreds of years of pasturing animals. It seemed to me the original place about which had been written the poem, which I then thought so lovely:

Buttercups and daisies— O the pretty flowers! Coming ere the spring-time, To tell of sunny hours.

Then the Town Council decided that the level of the Green must be raised; and for a long time—two or three years—it was in a most repulsive mess, while cart after cart dumped refuse there. The horses used to flounder about and often fell on the slippery mud; and then they would lie there as helpless in their harness as fallen knights in armour. I used to watch them with horrified and exaggerated pity. I should not have minded nearly so much if they had been men; but I identified myself with the horses. At last the grass grew on the Green again; but the old, old turf was gone and most of the daisies, too; and it has never been so beautiful since the level was raised.

Once I was taken out of bed and carried down to the front door in my nightgown to see the water covering the road and the Green, when a flood had risen suddenly one night. My parents had gone out to dinner on foot, but the frightened maids sent a four-wheeler to fetch them back in a hurry. The water came up to the hubs of the wheels, but was not very deep on the pavement. The cellars were awash, and my father had to wade out into the garden to rescue a cat which was marooned on top of a wall. We had several very delightful floods in my youth, but unfortunately the water never quite came into the house; nor did it in the Great Flood of 1947.

Gunning records, in his Reminiscences of Cambridge, that there was a very high flood in February 1795. 'There was a ball given by the Freemasons on that evening, and a carriage was waiting to take Mrs Beales and her party to it. The coachman (in order to save his own life and that of his horses) was obliged to drive away, leaving the company behind. Monsieur Corneille, a celebrated hair-dresser, whose presence was anxiously awaited by several parties in the town, could not leave Mr Beales's house, but was obliged to take up his residence there for the night.' It is clear that this refers to the Grange; and also it is pretty plain, from the context, that, apart from the cellars, the house itself was not flooded even then; though from the height the water reached in the Queens' Cloister Court, it must have been higher than any flood we ever saw.

If you looked to the left out of the day-nursery window you could see Springfield, and the beginning of Sidgwick Avenue; it was still being made then, and we called it The New Road. Here, at the crossroads of the Backs, the lame crossing-sweeper plied his trade, limping, all crooked, across the road with his broom.

And if you looked to the right there was a small builder's yard and two little houses, before you got to the tall trees and Silver Street Bridge, and Queens' Essex Building. But you could not see the little Tudor cottage which stood among the trees. Another early memory is of a fire at night in the builders' yard opposite, and of my father in agitation about the sparks, which were flying across the road to the Granary.

There were railings along the road leading to the bridge, lovely Georgian railings, now improved away; and often people were glad to dodge behind them to escape from the terrified and terrifying herds of cattle, which were driven with bangs and shouts, through the streets to the Monday cattle-market. There had always been some sort of bridge, where the bridge is now, and Desiderius Erasmus himself must often have walked down our road when he went out from Queens' to take the air.

In the summer the thick white dust came powdering in at all the windows; rising in clouds from the horses' hooves, and whitening the grass and the trees across the road. And in the winter the oozy, jammy mud sloshed about, and the street-cleaners scraped it up in delicious soupy spoonfuls, and threw it into their carts. And everywhere and all the time there was the smell of horses; it came in at the windows with the dust; not very nice, but not nearly so nasty as the petrol and exhaust smells are now. And often we heard the clattering of the feet of the hansom-cab horses and the jingling of their bells, as they cantered by; for they were mostly retired Newmarket race-horses, and so they always had to pretend to gallop, to satisfy the undergraduates, however slowly they might really be going. My cousin Nora said she knew the faces of every one of those horses.

Then there was the rush and rattle of the butchers' traps and their furious little ponies, whom we believed to be fed on meat to make them fierce; and the yellow milk-carts, like Roman chariots, with their big brass-bound churns of milk and their little dippers hooked on at the side; and the hairy-footed shire horses, who drew the great corn-wagons in from the country. And on Saturdays, market days, the farmers came trotting by in their traps; and the carriers' carts plodded in with their slow horses from villages as much as fifteen miles away. Sometimes they were hooded carts, sometimes they were just open carts, with planks for seats, on which sat twelve cloaked and bonneted women, six a side, squeezed together, for the interminable journey. As late as 1914 I knew the carrier of Croydon-cum-Clopton, twelve miles from Cambridge; his cart started at 6.30 in the morning and got back about ten at night. Though he was not old, he could neither read nor write; but he took commissions all along the road—a packet of needles for Mrs. This, and a new teapot for Mrs. That—and delivered them all correctly on the way back.

All day long the slow four-wheelers used to go clip-clopping along to the station. And sometimes, even slower, even heavier, yet more dismal, there was the Plop, Plop, Plop, of the feet of the oldest horses in the world, as they plugged along, pulling the funereal Girton cabs out to Girton with four melancholy students in each; while the drab Newnham girls skurried to and fro to their lectures on foot. And all the time there were dons going 'to lecture, with the wind in their gowns'; and undergraduates in their Norfolk jackets, setting out in pairs to do the 'Grantchester Grind' for exercise.

Nearly every day we could watch the Master of St. Catharine's riding by on his small black pony. He was a little old man, and made an antique and lonely figure in his clerical clothes. Even we children knew that he had been cut by all the university, ever since the rumours about his election to the Mastership in 1861, thirty years before; and it was said that he had been passed over when his turn came to be Vice-Chancellor. It was believed that, at the college election, he and another Fellow had each promised to vote for the other. The voting was equal between these two, but when it came to the point, Dr. Robinson voted for himself, thus becoming Master by two votes; the affair, however, has never been very clear. My parents used to greet him, if they met outside, for the sake of poor Mrs. Robinson, but he was never invited to parties. Often his daughter Mary rode out with him, on a taller horse, yet even this only seemed to enhance his solitude.

There were still occasional old workmen riding by, with their plaited straw bags of tools, on their high penny-farthing bicycles. Sometimes there were lovely organ-grinders; or a stray Italian boy, with a little shivering monkey, or even a dancing-bear. Every night the lamp-lighter came with his long pole to turn on the gas-lights. Sometimes, of a summer night, there were the beautiful scarlet Volunteers, marching by in all their glory; beautiful, but vaguely frightening, casting a kind of shadow image of what war might be, into my childish mind. And the sound of their brass band, and of their marching feet going over the bridge, made my heart turn right over in my stomach.

There was plenty to see; nearly all the life of Cambridge flowed backwards and forwards over our bridge, and before our house.