Читать книгу What I Remember - Millicent Garrett Fawcett - Страница 6

Table of Contents

The Barhams were in my parents’ service long before I was born. He was groom and gardener: he drove the carriage when my father didn’t; he looked after the pigs, killed them when the fatal moment came, turned them into bacon, and was the gentlest, kindest, dearest, and most modest man in the world. Whatever in the nature of outdoor things we wanted, our first idea was to go and ask Barham; he would look down on us with his rosy apple-cheeked face and smiling eyes, and say, as he put down his spade, “You are more trouble to me than all my money,” and then proceed to do what we wanted. Years later, when most of us were grown up, my father had the idea, a suitable artist being handy, of having portraits painted of all the men who had been more than twenty years in his service. Barham, who was the senior and the most well-beloved, objected very much, and when the artist proposed to depict him with a pot of azaleas in his hand, downright refused to permit it. “If it had been a rake or a hoo,” he said, he wouldn’t have minded so much; so a rake it had to be. Barham was a devotedly religious man, and belonged to a small dissenting community which had no chapel in Aldeburgh; they had, however, a meeting-place on Aldringham Common, about three miles away. Some expressed surprise at this, and especially that Barham chose this distant place of worship, involving a six-mile walk on Sundays after all his hard physical work on weekdays. But he was out-and-out an outdoor man, and I believe that the walk, the main part of which was over a lovely common covered with gorse and heather, with the sea shining in the near distance, was to Barham a real sanctuary of his soul.

Mrs. Barham was no less remarkable; a tall handsome woman with waving hair growing low on her forehead like the Clytie in the British Museum. She had charge of my mother’s dairy as long as her health permitted. She was a most interesting conversationalist. We never went to see her without bringing away with us something worth remembering. She had two sons and a daughter. The elder son took service in London with Mr. T. Valentine Smith, with whom my father had business relations. This Barham became a first-rate wheelwright, and afterwards was placed in a responsible position on Mr. T. V. Smith’s estate in Scotland. One of Mrs. Barham’s epigrams related to the positions of trust occupied by her husband and elder son, the one in Aldeburgh and the other at Thames Bank, London. She said: “The sailors, they tell me that the last thing they hear when they leave Aldeburgh is someone hollering for Barham, and the first thing they hear when they reach Thames Bank is someone hollering for Barham.”

The younger son, John, was an apprentice in a general shop in Aldeburgh. This did not suit Mrs. Barham’s ambitions for him, and he was sent to London. Mrs. Barham’s account of it was this: “John is a good lad, but I know my John wants polish; so I am sending him to a situation in the Whitechapel Road.” This poor John, whether polished or unpolished, was certainly vaccinated, but he died of smallpox in London in one of the epidemics which swept through it in the early ’sixties. About her daughter, Mrs. Barham was reticent—but obviously very sad. She was thought to have married well: her husband was a tradesman with a good business, but he was a drunkard and often and often the poor daughter felt she must have left him if it had not been for the two children. However, for the sake of her boy and girl, she endured to the end, which came while the man was still young. The next time I called on Mrs. Barham after this, she said, “You hev heard, no doubt, m’m, that my daughter hev lost her dear husband.” A slight pause, in which I intimated assent, and Mrs. Barham continued: “You wonder, I expect, at my calling of him ‘dear'; but he was dear, he cost her a many tears and sighs.” And then she went on: “There was a great change come over William Marker before he died; sometimes he would ask my dear daughter to read a chapter or to sing him a hymn, and when I think of the pore dying thief I hev my strong hopes of William Marker. But you know, m’m, you should see how them millers come buzzing about round my dear daughter. ‘Mrs. Marker,’ says one of ’em, ‘I am desirous of becoming the purchaser of your business.’ ‘And so you will, sir,’ she say, ‘if you’re the highest bidder.’ Another come and say, ‘Mrs. Marker, you must remember you hev lost your pore husband.’ ‘I hev, sir,’ she say, 'but I hev not lost myself.’ ”

Once in our young days my sister Agnes and I went to a ball^[1] at Saxmundham, Barham driving us in our old-fashioned carriage. On our return journey, about 2 a.m., there had been a slight fall of snow, and on the place in the Aldeburgh road where it crosses the common there were no hedges to mark its course. The horses wandered from the road and went up a fairly steep bank, with the result that the carriage was overturned; my sister and I, in our satin slippers, found ourselves about two miles from home with no choice but to walk the rest of the way. Barham, of course, was on his feet even before we were on ours, seeing to the horses, who stood perfectly still. He remained guarding the carriage and its contents until he obtained help, while we walked home. The tragedy came next day. My father was furiously angry with Barham—said he must have been drunk, which was to us absurd. Everyone but Barham admitted that he might have been a bit sleepy. But Barham wouldn’t even admit this, and my father dismissed him. Barham went home very quietly; he maintained that he was not drunk and was not asleep, but that it was impossible in that place under a slight fall of snow to see the road. When Barham reappeared he was in his Sunday clothes; he did not take himself off in a temper, he merely said that he wasn’t going to leave; he knew when he had got a good master, and master ought to know when he had got a good servant. Then my father fumed and raged, and stuck to it that Barham should leave. Our one hope was Mrs. Barham, and she did not fail us. Her own account of it was that on the second morning after the dismissal it was cold and wet, and she persuaded Barham to have a cup of tea in bed. “Then I went down and made him a nice cup of tea and a slice of hot buttered toast, like I know he liked, and I set down by his side till he had finished, and then I said to him, gentle like, ‘Now, Barham, you was asleep, wasn’t you?’ and Barham said he might ha’ been.” And thus ended our domestic tragedy. Some months after, James Smith, our eldest sister’s husband, being in Aldeburgh, Barham came in to his wife with a smile on his face, and she asked him what he was smiling at. Mrs. Barham must tell the rest. “ ‘Mr. Smith,’ he say, ‘hev been a joking o’ me about upsetting my young ladies.’ ‘Barham,’ I say, ‘I wonder at you, jokin’ on that solemn occasion.’ ”

I could really go on almost indefinitely reporting Mrs. Barham’s conversation. She was not only a very good talker, but was clever all round in many kinds of work. She made most elaborate patchwork quilts of geometrical design, of her own devising; and for us, her own young ladies, as she called us, she aimed at making them entirely of silk. When she was working at one of these quilts, made up by small octagons fitted together with minute nicety, my sister Alice (Mrs. Cowell) came in to see her and found that Mrs. Barham was running short of a pale cream-coloured silk, which was needed to finish one of the four corners of the design in a quilt to be presented either to Agnes or myself. “She see in a minute how I was sitivated and how short I was of that light; well, she went home and sent me two bodies of frocks dirackly—soo like a sister.” Each of the little octagons was tacked on to a paper of the exact shape required, and when the sewing together was accomplished the great work began of taking out all the paper framework on which the quilt had been built up. “I tell Barham,” she would say, “that he mustn’t expect no hot victuals when I am taking out the papers.”

When quilts had been made for all the six daughters of my father’s house, the daughters-in-law began to think (one of them, at any rate) that their turn was coming. But Mrs. Barham quickly nipped this expectation in the bud. “Noo, Mrs. Edmund,” she replied to a rather pointed inquiry, “I shall niver make another; my husband say I am not to, and,” turning to me for confirmation, “we must always do what our husbands say, mustn’t we, ma'am?” I rejoined, “I wonder at you, Mrs. Barham, talking like that, when everybody knows that Barham does what you say a great deal more than you do what he says.” A smile and a knowing look came into her face, and she rejoined, slyly, “Well, m’m, I du say that if our oon way is a good way there’s nothing like hevin’ it.” (The “oth” in nothing should be pronounced like the “oth” in bother.) This became quite a familiar saying in our family.

When my husband became Postmaster-General in 1880 no one was more interested in his new official position than Mrs. Barham; it appeared that she had a great-nephew in the Post Office whose abilities she thought were worthy of a better kind of work than that entrusted to him. She did not fail to raise the subject when I was next in her company. She had had her great-niece with her not long before, a sister of the young man in the G.P.O. “Yes, m’m, Jennie was here, and I thought I would talk to her about her brother. I didn’t like to say to her straight out, ‘What is your brother Willie’s character?’ but I worked up to it kind of gradual; soo, when we was settin’ at our teas I say to her, ‘Jennie, dear girl, do your brother Willie drink?’ ” This gradual approach to the subject had very satisfactory immediate results, for Jennie was able to give her brother a clean bill of character, but unfortunately for her there were so many young fellows in the G.P.O. with similar qualifications that it did not lead to his immediate promotion.

Of a somewhat important funeral in Aldeburgh, Mrs. Barham was pleased to express her approval of the arrangements made. “The family all following, husbands and wives walking together. Now some people make the eldest son walk first, along with the eldest daughter, and the second son along with the second daughter, right down to the ind—and then the pore 'laws’ all alone by themselves.” It was the first time any of us had heard sons-and daughters-in-law called “the pore laws,” and the expression took root. One of my nephews-in-law to this day always signs himself when writing to me “Your affectionate pore law.” One more story of Mrs. Barham shall be my last. It has a pathetic note. Her dear daughter, Mrs. Marker, had died not long after the death of her husband, and the two children, a boy and a girl, the former about four years junior to the latter, were left without either father or mother. The girl in this position developed a motherly and protective feeling towards the boy. When they both had holidays at their respective schools she would seek him out and take him for some little excursion. On one of these excursions she took him to Beccles, where there is an attractive river and a nice woman who let out boats to hire by the hour; the two children presented themselves at her house and said they wanted a boat. And now Mrs. Barham must finish the story: “The woman, she looked ’em up and down, and then she say, ‘What could your father and mother be thinking of to let you two dear children come here all alone by y'rselves to goo out in a boat?’ And then the two pore children bursted out crying, and said their father and mother was both dead: and the woman, oh! she was so sorry you can’t think: she couldn’t do enough for ’em. She let ’em hev a boat without charging them nothin’ for it, and when they came back she say to them, 'Now, you two dear children, you go down into my garden and gather anything you like that grows there.' But what was the good o’ that? They didn’t want nothin' out of the woman’s garden.”

There was a remarkable old lady who had lived in Aldeburgh all her life, and remembered in minute detail the chief events of the Napoleonic Wars. Her name was Mary Reeder; she was often given brevet rank and called Mrs. Reeder. In middle life she had been a nurse in the Rowley family, and had specially devoted herself to a delicate child. She lived to be nearly one hundred, and directed in her will that the church bells should ring a merry peal at her funeral in lieu of the usual solemn tolling. She lived in her own cottage, bequeathed to her by her father. It had a pleasant little garden in front and at the back. Mary objected to chance acquaintance and indiscriminate greetings, and would say, “If I goes out in my front, one and another passing says, ‘Good day, Mrs. Reeder,’ or ‘Hope you are well, Mrs. Reeder.’ I don’t want none of that, so when I wants the air, I goes out in my back.” Her father had been in the Navy, and he and four other Aldeburgh men had been taken prisoners by the French about 1798. “When none of the five came back, and nothing was heard of them by their wives, four on ’em thought their husbands was dead and put on black and widders’ caps: but my mother, she say, ‘Noo, I will niver put on black for Joo Reeder not till I know he’s dead, not if I can afford it iver soo.’ Soo she put me out to nurse and went into service again herself. Well, when five years after that they all came back,^[2] alive and well, you should ha’ seen how silly them other women looked as had made certain their husbands was dead. But my father, he bought this house, and my mother came back to live with him in it. Oh! it was a wretched place then, the roof all to pieces, earth floor in the kitchen, and no comfort anywhere: and my mother, she say, ‘Joo Reeder, Joo Reeder, this is a place to bring a woman to!’ But my father he was as merry as could be. Sailor-like, as soon as he had lighted a fire and put a kittle on to boil, he thought he’d got a home: and he worked away at it and got it all to rights in noo time.” She used also to tell how on another occasion her father, having just been released on furlough from his ship and put ashore at Portsmouth, was proceeding to walk to Aldeburgh, a distance, I suppose, of some 150 miles, when he was taken by the Press Gang and sent back into active service again. When I contrast this with the treatment of our men in the late war, I cannot help feeling that, whatever may be its faults, a democratic Government is more humane and more intelligent than the old autocracies.

When Mary Reeder was about seventy, and very hard pressed to make ends meet, for she had very little besides her cottage, my father arranged to give her a pension of so many shillings a week as long as she lived on condition that the cottage was to be his when she died. Well, she lived and lived and lived: and we were very glad she did: it was she who was disturbed by it. She used quite to worry us by harping on the subject every time we saw her. She constantly wanted to give my mother a pretty little set of silver spoons which she possessed, my mother as constantly declining them, saying she enjoyed very much more seeing them on Mary’s table than she would if they were locked up in the plate chest at Alde House, but Mary had got the subject on her brain, and could not leave it alone. “I ha’ lived out of the course of nature,” she argued, “and I want to die an honest woman.” My mother was equally determined, but Mary left her the spoons in her will. An honest woman she certainly was: some question arose as to her exact age: was she really one hundred or only ninety-eight or so? “It is very easy to settle that,” said my mother, “ask the Vicar to give you a copy of the entry of your birth in the parish register.” Mary agreed, and my mother added, “The charge for that, you know, Mary, is 3s. 6d.” The reply came as quick as lightning, “And I have got it riddy for him, too.” When in 1870 the municipal franchise was given to women ratepayers, Mary became a voter, and my father being keen on the return of a certain candidate, asked the daughters who were at home to canvass the women electors. When they came to Mary Reeder’s house they found with her an old man named Taylor—Billy Taylor he was always called. My sisters did not canvass him, for he saved them the trouble by volunteering the following information: “When my pore dear sister lay a-dying, ‘Willam,’ she say to me, ‘when there’s any vooting’ goin’ forrard, du you always voot same as Mr. Newson Garrett, be that blew, yaller, or rad': and so I du.” The point of this lay in my father lately having changed over from the Conservative to the Liberal side in politics. My father didn’t like this story about Billy Taylor at all.

Other friends came to live in Aldeburgh in the ’sixties: Mr. and Mrs. Percy Metcalf. He came from the Tyne, and was a shipbuilder by profession: he built some ships at Snape for my father, and made great friends with Sawyer, the head carpenter, and Felgate, the shipwright, who were already in my father’s service. But what made all the difference to the rest of our lives was his passion for music. It was he who introduced us to the great world of music—Bach, Mozart, and Handel. He was less enthusiastic about Beethoven; and Wagner, I think, he had never heard of. Mozart was the god of his idolatry, and Spohr. I can hear now my sister Agnes singing Spohr’s “Who calls the Hunter to the Wood?” with the piano accompaniment in Mrs. Metcalf’s rather inadequate hands, Mr. Metcalf playing the horn obligato, taking the horn from his lips from time to time to say to his wife quite good-naturedly, “What a fool you are, my dear.” He opened a new world of music to us, and gave us a perennial spring of consolation, hope, and endurance which has never failed us. The local concerts at Aldeburgh became quite a different thing after the arrival of the Metcalfs: he would sing songs out of Figaro and Don Giovanni in a way that made the audience hardly know whether they were standing on their head or their heels: and even Mrs. James, usually so reserved, would say it reminded her “of her naughty days,” when she used to go to the opera. After one of his Don Giovanni songs there was a great roar of applause, and he flung himself back on his seat and exclaimed sotto voce, “I thought the fools would like it.”

In after-years my sister Agnes’s friendship with Sir Hubert and Lady Maud Parry gave us another great musical friend, of whom I shall have more to tell in a later chapter.

[1] At this ball, and at several others, we used to meet members of the Cavell family, before the birth of Edith Cavell, the heroic nurse who was shot by the Germans in Brussels about fifty years later, on 15th October 1915.

[2] I think this must have been during the Peace of Amiens, when prisoners on each side were released.