Читать книгу What I Remember - Millicent Garrett Fawcett - Страница 4

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It was my good fortune to be born a member of a large family, and, moreover, in the younger half of it. I was either the seventh or the eighth child of my parents. I could never quite settle in my own mind which, for my eldest brother, born in November 1837, died in the following May, so his brief existence had come to an end nearly nine years before I was born in 1847; my only knowledge of him came from occasional references by my mother, who told us sometimes how, when her first little boy died, she had kneeled down and prayed God to take her too. I could, therefore, never really claim the special good fortune which is said to attend a seventh child; but my sister Agnes and I were content to share this, and many other things, between us. Another piece of good fortune is that I have never known either poverty or riches, so that in my case the prayer of Agur was answered without my asking.

The year of my birth was the year of the Irish Famine and the repeal of the Corn Laws, and the following year saw the downfall of half the old autocratic Governments in Europe. Naturally, I cannot remember anything of these tremendous events; but they may possibly have had an electrifying effect upon the whole atmosphere in which I found myself as a little child. At any rate, I began to hear about public events, and to think, in my childish way, about them at an early age; for instance, I remember walking along the crag path at Aldeburgh (we always resisted with vehemence any Cockney attempt to call it The Esplanade, The Parade, or any such name) when I was young enough to be holding my father’s hand and hearing him and listening with all my ears to his arguments, while he was persuading some of the leaders among the beachmen to volunteer for the Navy at the beginning of the Crimean War. I think this must have been in 1853; one man, I can recall perfectly, reiterating again and again that he was as ready as any man to sacrifice himself for his country, “But wolunteer, sir, I will not.” I also remember very distinctly the death of the Emperor Nicholas in March 1854, and thinking in my heart that, of course, now the war would cease. I could not picture war except as a struggle between individuals, and if the man we were fighting with was dead, there could be no reason to fight any more. It was one of the strange things about grown-ups, I thought, that they never seemed to see the things that were so obvious to a child. The next thing I remember about the Crimean War is my father coming in at breakfast-time with a newspaper in his hand, looking gay and handsome, and calling out to all his little brood, “Heads up and shoulders down; Sebastopol is taken.” This was in September 1855.

There was a very cordial and friendly feeling between my father and the seafaring men at Aldeburgh. He was a merchant and owned a small fleet of trading vessels which plied between our little town and London, and also Newcastle and the North. Later he built vessels for himself at his principal place of business, Snape, a few miles higher up the river than Aldeburgh. He had some official position which connected him with the beachmen. I remember on his business writing-paper the, to me, mysterious words, “Agent for Lloyds and Receiver of Droits of Admiralty.” The sound and look of the words Droits of Admiralty fascinated me. In the old days of sailing vessels the coast of Suffolk, and particularly the Aldeburgh bay, were very dangerous, and there was never a wreck without my father being present, and if there were lives to be saved he took an active part in the dangerous and difficult work. The rocket apparatus for sending a cord or rope over a distressed ship had not then been perfected, and lives were often lost in the vain attempt to reach and save mariners in ships which had been storm-driven on one of the shoals off Aldeburgh. The gun, three times fired, which summoned the lifeboat crew for active service was a familiar and none the less an intensely thrilling sound in our ears. Whenever the lifeboat was launched, even were it only for a practice, every man, woman, and child who heard the gun hurried to the beach, some to lend a hand, and all to see and wish and hope that the departing men would return in safety and bring their rescued comrades with them. It was a deep, angry sea where a tall man would be out of his depth three yards from the shore, and the great breakers in a storm beat with deadly weight upon men and ships alike. I remember one awful day, 2nd November 1855, when there were seventeen ships driven ashore or broken up on the shoals off Aldeburgh in my father’s district. Everything that possibly could be done was done, but there was a terrible loss of life. My father received the official thanks of the Royal National Lifeboat Institution, engrossed on vellum, for his services on this occasion. This document, which now belongs to my nephew Philip Cowell, runs thus: That the special thanks of the Royal National Lifeboat Institution be presented to Newson Garrett, Esq., in testimony of his highly meritorious conduct in assisting to rescue through the surf nine out of the eleven of the crew of the Swedish brig “Vesta,” which in a gale of wind was wrecked near Orford Low Lighthouse on the 2nd November 1855.

There was a family of seamen for which we ever after felt a deep bond of gratitude and affection—the Cables. My father and George Cable were taking a leading part in making a human chain along a rope to reach a shipwrecked crew in urgent distress and fetching them off one by one. My father went first, Cable second, and a good number following; after doing this and bringing in his man several times, my father showed signs of exhaustion, and Cable said to him, “Look here, governor, you have done this often enough,” and he took the leading place on the rope from my father and assumed it himself; he never came ashore again; the rope snapped between my father and Cable, as if it had been pack thread, and Cable was washed away and perished in sight of the gallant men who had undertaken the work of rescue. My father was again, and by his own choice, in the place of the greatest risk, which had just ended fatally before his eyes. We were always taught by my mother to remember that Cable had saved my father’s life.

James Cable, the son of George just referred to, was only a boy when all this happened, but as he grew in years he developed into a very fine seaman, much respected and well-known all along the coast and in the Lifeboat Society for combined courage and caution; for many years, indeed until old age compelled him to withdraw, he was coxswain of the Aldeburgh lifeboat. On one occasion this boat, under James Cable’s command, had more than usually distinguished itself, so that newspaper men from London came down to learn and retail all the particulars of the brave work. They found Cable the very reverse of communicative; their only chance seemed to be to pump his narrative out of him in fragments, question by question. One of these, and Cable’s reply to it, form a sort of epitome of his character.

Newspaper Reporter: “Now, Mr. Cable, you can tell me, I expect, how many lives you have saved at sea.”

James Cable: “I don’t know, I’m sure, sir; I don’t keep no count on ’em.”

This was the sort of thing that made everyone in Aldeburgh just love Cable, but he was not a bit spoiled—he was always the same simple, modest, upright man that his father had been before him.

Another incident of my childhood in connection with the lifeboat was an intense joy to me. The lifeboat gun had been fired, but only for a practice. The crew received three shillings a head for practice on a smooth day and five shillings on a rough day; this was a five-shilling day. We all ran off to the beach as usual, I, again, holding my father’s hand. While the boat was still on the rollers one of her crew said to my father, “Come along with us, governor”; he replied, “I should like it, my lad, but you see I can’t, I’ve got the child with me.” Looking down on me, the sailor rejoined, “Little missie would like to come too, sir.” There was no need for me to say anything. I was too enchanted at this unexpected adventure. The smallest cork jacket in the collection was found and slipped over my head, and we embarked. The seas broke over the boat as we crossed the shoal, and drenched my hair and shoulders; one of the kind sailors produced a pink cotton handkerchief from his pocket and said, “Here, missie, wrop this round your neck.” Of course, I did so, and, of course, the pink handkerchief was soon as wet as the rest of my clothing. I was intensely happy, and never dreamed of being sea-sick.

My father was a very good sailor himself, and he never quite succeeded in ridding himself of the notion that to be sea-sick was affectation. One day, however, a little party of us, headed by my father and completed by a dog, embarked in a small boat for a sail. Before long the dog was sea-sick. My father was immensely astonished; he said several times, “God bless my soul, look at that poor thing; then it is not affectation, after all.”

The Aldeburgh of my earliest recollections was very different from the Aldeburgh of to-day. It is true that its two ancient buildings, the church and the Moot Hall, still remain unchanged in essentials, but its ancient corporation has been re-formed. The two Bailiffs have been converted into one Mayor; and the Council is elected by the vote of the ratepayers; the dignified robes of office are retained, and so are the old silver maces dating from the reign of Queen Elizabeth, decorated by a large “E” with a crown.

Crabbe’s house has entirely vanished, but in lieu of it a bust of our one poet has been put up in the church. He is still our one poet; but a poet of to-day, Mr. John Freeman, has found our river, which runs parallel with the sea for about twelve miles before it is finally merged into it, a fitting subject for a parable in verse. A Turner engraving of Aldeburgh still exists, and is full of interest to those who wish to see how the old town looked to one who had the poet’s vision.

At the time of my first visit to London, January 1858, the nearest railway station was at Ipswich, twenty-six miles away. I remember having felt in 1851, I being four years old, that the right thing had not been done by me in not taking me to see the famous exhibition of that year, but that I had been somewhat consoled for this slight by lovely bonnets of “drawn” blue velvet with pink baby ribbon and lace in the “caps” brought back from London for my sister Agnes and myself.

In 1858 the journey to London, the first I had ever taken, was one prolonged delight—first the drive of twenty-six miles in my father’s carriage, himself, I think, driving, and then the railway train and all its wonders. I remember an old gentleman who travelled in our carriage and took a great deal of notice of us children, but whom we suspected of not being quite right in his mind, as he vehemently protested against the guard locking the carriage door, shouting out that he was a free-born Englishman and would not submit to being locked up.

The wonder of the London streets, especially at night, when the shop windows were not shuttered as they are now, but were brilliantly illuminated, made London seem to me a sort of fairyland. Our eldest sister, Louie, had married in the previous autumn; we were her guests and were petted and made much of, to our hearts’ content. One of our evenings was spent at Albert Smith’s entertainment; he was describing the journey of a party up the Rhine; there were the sentimental sister and the practical sister who lisped. The sentimental sister was reciting solemnly “Round about the prow she wrote ‘The Lady of Shallot,’ ” and the practical sister comments, “I wonder what she wrote it with. Did she scratch it with a hair-pin?” At this point, when everyone was laughing, a sort of managerial person came on the platform with a very solemn face and announced the attempt of Orsini to blow up the Emperor and Empress of the French on their way to the opera that very evening. This was my first experience of anything approaching contact with the tragedy of revolutionary politics. This is also one of the points in my story to which I can affix an exact date: it was 14th January 1858.

But to return to Aldeburgh, as we did very soon after the unprecedented journey just recorded. Aldeburgh was a place very much without an aristocratic element in its population. It is true that there were three families, the Thellussons, the Rowleys, and the Wentworths, who belonged to the aristocracy; but they lived quite aloof from the people of the town, and did not make the smallest impression on our lives. Mr. Wentworth, the Lord of the Manor, and Lady Harriet were hardly ever resident, except for a week or two in the partridge-shooting season. Mr. Rowley, with a large family, was, so to speak, hibernating in Aldeburgh, waiting to succeed to an estate and title then held by his unmarried elder brother in West Suffolk; and the Thellussons were likewise lying low under the shadow of the great Thellusson lawsuit. I remember hearing Mrs. Thellusson tell my mother in an awed voice, “If we lose this lawsuit, dear Mrs. Garrett, we shall be beggars, absolutely beggars, on £600 a year.” To me at ten years old £600 a year meant wealth beyond the dreams of avarice, and again I wondered at the strangeness of grown-up people. Old Peter Thellusson’s extraordinary will and the portentous lawsuit to which it gave rise may have suggested to Dickens the great suit “Jarndyce v. Jarndyce,” which forms the main theme of Bleak House.

Though not an aristocrat, there was a gentlewoman then living at Aldeburgh who had to the full the aristocratic instinct of service, of helping those less well off than herself to a fuller and better life. I think she belonged to what in the slang of the present day we should call the “New Poor.” Mrs. James was the widow of a West Indian planter, one of those who had suffered financially from the emancipation of the slaves. She lived with great simplicity in a large house, and for all the years of my childhood she set apart a portion of this house to be used as a public elementary school. It seems now almost incredible that so late as the ’fifties and well into the ’sixties of the last century no public provision was made for the housing of a school for the poorer classes in Aldeburgh, nor, as I suppose, in the greater number of small towns and villages throughout the country. Mrs. James had several sons; one a clergyman, the Rev. Herbert James, became the father of distinguished sons; one, Dr. Montagu James, is now Provost of Eton, and well-known in the world of scholarship; another son, Captain James, was in the Indian Navy; and we keep up very friendly relations with his surviving daughter, often talking over our recollections of old Aldeburgh. She remembers quite well returning from India in the days when there was no Suez Canal, and passengers were taken across the isthmus on camels or in palanquins.

The main interest to us in our Aldeburgh neighbours did not centre in the small group of those I have called the aristocrats, but in the Barhams, Mary Reeder, Mr. Metcalf, Mr. Dowler, the Vicar, and Bob Wilson, the old sailor at the Look-out Station at the top of the steps.