Читать книгу What I Remember - Millicent Garrett Fawcett - Страница 8

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What I have written already may, I hope, give some indication of my father’s personality. I cannot pretend to write with any detachment either of him or of my mother. My father was a handsome man, of the straight-featured Scandinavian type. In appearance he was not unlike Garibaldi: but the portrait of Walt Whitman at the beginning of Specimen Days is so like him that it might have passed, even among his near relations, for a portrait of himself. I have tested this by showing it to nieces and nephews and, covering the name, have asked, “Who is this?” They have answered at once, “Uncle Newson.”

There is another portrait of Walt Whitman in his old age, now in the Metropolitan Museum of New York, and here reproduced, which is also extraordinarily like my father when he was old. It is so like him that I can never see it without a thrill. The eldest of my great-nieces, Lesley, now Mrs. More, daughter of Sir George and Lady Gibb, writes to me of what she remembers of her great-grandfather: “My memory of him is bound up with a vast expanse of white beard ... and somewhere just above glowed two sapphires with a fire behind them.”

We had been told by Mrs. Barham (an older contemporary of my father) that he was the most beautiful child she had ever seen; fair-haired, of a bright complexion, “ruddy and withal of a beautiful countenance and goodly to look upon,” like David. He was a great contrast in this respect to his sister and two brothers, who were dark even to the point of swarthiness. His temperament was sanguine, generous, daring, impulsive, and impatient, and I am afraid I must add, quarrelsome. There were very few in our little circle at Aldeburgh with whom from time to time he did not quarrel desperately. He quarrelled badly with his elder brother, Richard, of Leiston. Sometimes he quarrelled so fiercely with our clergyman, Mr. Dowler, that going to church on Sunday became a positive scandal; then we were all marched off to the little dissenting chapel in the High Street, and it entertained us very much to see with what deference we, even the little children of our party, were greeted by the usual habituées of the place. Once about the time of the birth of my dearest brother, Sam, the war between my father and the Vicarage waxed so hot that he swore that Mr. Dowler should not christen the new baby: Sam was therefore taken, suitably escorted, to be christened at Snape Church, a beautiful little fifteenth-century building with a font much more ancient.^[3]

My father had built up a considerable malting business at Snape: it was conveniently situated on the Alde, so that malt and other things could be shipped thence: and when railways became a practical proposition in our part of Suffolk my father exerted himself successfully to get a branch line, for goods only, extended to Snape. The junction is between Wickham Market and Saxmundham, and it is one of my joys to this day to look out of the railway carriage window at this point and see the masts of ships rising up apparently out of the trees and meadows of rural Suffolk.

Snape Bridge is of importance strategically, as we found out during the war, for it is the main place where heavy-wheeled traffic can cross the Alde. One of my Leiston cousins saw it marked very prominently in a German map circulated among German officers in the late war.

For many years, from the ’fifties and ’sixties of the last century, our family migrated from Aldeburgh to Snape during the winter months. My father’s main business was then at Snape. This was constantly growing, while his business in Aldeburgh, since the arrival of the railway, was as constantly diminishing. My father adapted himself with characteristic energy to the new situation. There was no house at Snape where we could live, so he at once built one, in the bungalow style: a one-storied house which could be extended at discretion. Its advantage from the business point of view was obvious, and, as its position shortened my father’s driving journeys to nearly all the markets at which he bought barley, it considerably lessened the fatigue and wear and tear of his life. Malting can only be carried on in the cool months of the year: it generally stops in May and is resumed in October or November. For many years, therefore, Snape was our winter, and Aldeburgh our summer, home. Often and often I remember my father returning from his more distant markets, having driven himself in an open dog-cart, his hair and beard fringed with icicles. He was fond of horses, and rode himself almost daily until nearly the end of his life. He taught us all to ride, and mounted us on Shetland ponies as soon as we were old enough to sit on a saddle. It was a great pride to him to take out a cavalcade. He was a fearless driver, and it was quite an interesting adventure driving with him. “Would you like to see the new house that So-and-so is building over there?” he would say, pointing with his whip across the common. Of course we did like, and then we drove straight over the common where there was no road and where the vehicle was often very much out of the perpendicular. He met, naturally, with many accidents, but none of a serious kind: his horse would arrive home sometimes without the trap, and then a search party would set out, usually meeting my father before long, laughing at his misadventure.

It was one of our family jokes that he kept up this habit of upsetting himself even when age and infirmity had reduced him to a bathchair: it was a bathchair with a pony to draw it, and he even managed to upset himself in this, and was found laughing to himself, the pony standing close by perfectly quiet, my father still encased in his wrappings, chair and all, like a hermit crab in its shell.

My father, until he was past middle life, believed himself to be a Conservative, but he was not in the least a Conservative in temperament. Everything new appealed to him, rather as it did to the Athenians of old. He welcomed railways with both hands, though they destroyed his carrying trade at Aldeburgh. If he had lived in the twentieth century I am certain he would have welcomed motor-cars, aeroplanes, and wireless. About the early ’sixties it occurred to him that he was not a Conservative, and he wrote to Sir Fitzroy Kelly, then M.P. for East Suffolk, for whom he had hitherto voted, that he had changed his politics and should thenceforth support the Liberal Party. His delight in novelties showed itself in various ways. I forget the exact date when Turkish baths were introduced in London. I think it was just after the Crimean War. Having tried them, and after making some inquiries about their construction, he proceeded to make one for himself at Alde House, his Aldeburgh home. It was a rough-and-ready affair, and I do not think it was very long-lived. A groom, not Barham, rubbing down a horse in the stable yard, was heard grumbling, “Master is buildin’ hisself a sweatin’ house: if he’d rub the hosses down he wouldn’t want no sweatin’ house.”

He was extraordinarily helpful and generous in aiding young men in their first difficult steps towards a career. Many letters describing what the writers had owed to him in early life poured in upon my mother in the first weeks of her widowhood. But in this direction I think the most remarkable thing he ever did was to give active help and support to my sister Elizabeth, then aged about twenty, to enter the medical profession: at that time, of course, all the usual methods of entering the profession were not only closed, but barred, banged, and bolted against women. These bars and bolts a young, inexperienced girl, aided by her father, a country merchant, proposed to destroy and throw the gates open. My mother gave no help: she not only was unsympathetic, but intensely averse to the proposal. Sometimes he wavered, and would burst out to one of us, “I don’t think I can go on with it, it will kill your mother”; but it did not kill her, and her affectionate nature, aided by her strong practical common sense, in time reconciled her to seeing her daughter the pioneer in this great enterprise. When all the obstacles were at length overcome, and my sister an M.D. with her name upon the British register and very much held in honour by leading physicians and surgeons such as Sir James Paget and Sir T. Smith, and when Elizabeth (then Mrs. Anderson), as a member of the B.M.A., entertained the East Anglian branch at her house and garden at West Hill, Aldeburgh, none took part in the festival with more pleasure and graciousness than our dear mother.

She was an intensely religious woman, but all that side of her life, and the more real part of it, was a closed book to my father. His stumbling over the reading of family prayers must have been a constant thorn in her side. His idea was to make the necessary ceremony short: occasionally with this end in view he used to turn over two pages of the book of prayers instead of one: but this was apt to frustrate his object, for he might turn over the end of one prayer and land himself in the middle of another. When this happened, his resourcefulness stood him in good stead; he would go on to a full stop, then pause and add, “For what we have received, the Lord make us truly thankful.” My mother would rise from her knees pained and sad-looking; but we irreverent children had mostly to bolt for the door so that our laughter should not further distress her. She worshipped my father, and admired him and everything about him. She was proud of his gift, for instance, in laying out grounds and gardens, and would say, “I can see it well enough when it is done; but he can see it before it is begun.” Devoted as she was to him, she took no part in his quarrels. One of his antagonists rushed out at her on some public occasion, and said, “Mrs. Garrett, I love you and all belonging to you, but your husband I will never forgive.” She replied quite gently, “You will have to, Mr. ——, if you love all belonging to me, because he comes first of them all.” I remember, too, at Christmas, when the usual gifts of the season were being prepared, her bringing her list to show him the names of those to whom she was sending turkeys, etc. He glanced over it, and exclaimed, “Why, don’t you know I have quarrelled with that fellow?” “Oh, yes, I know, father dear,” she said, “but it don’t matter.” Thereupon he would leave her to do as she liked.

It was curious that my father and mother, though they differed greatly from each other in character and outlook, each maintaining his or her own, almost wholly uninfluenced by the other, yet retained almost an awe of one another; this was particularly evident in my father’s case, as I can illustrate by an example. He and my sister Alice (Mrs. Cowell) took an excursion together in an Orient liner which was making a summer cruise in the Norwegian fjords. One Sunday morning the ship was lying in one of these, within full view of a village and its little church. My father expressed a wish to attend this church and hear the morning service. Alice acquiesced, and they were put ashore together. But the church was not so near as it had seemed to be from the deck of the liner, and there were other unforeseen difficulties in getting to it. However, nothing seemed to damp my father’s determination to reach it, and presently Alice suggested that it was really of not very much consequence whether they reached it or not, because even if they did get there they would not be able to understand a single word of the service; but my father rejoined at once, “Oh! I know that, but I shall be able to tell your mother that I’d been.” It was really he who bent to her more than she to him; but neither of them had the least idea of the true state of the case.

My mother’s religion was of the strict Evangelical type. She was a rigid Sabbatarian and read the Record and took in Spurgeon’s Sermons. In theory, no doubt, she had no sympathy with the Roman custom of Prayers for the Dead; but after my father’s death she mentioned to us quite simply that as she had prayed for him every day for nearly sixty years of their life together she meant to go on praying for him now that death had parted them.

In domestic affairs she was orderly and methodical; every department of her big household was well organized and thoroughly under her control. If such things had come her way, she would have proved a very capable organizer of a big business. But the management of her house and her correspondence with her ten children completely absorbed and satisfied her. She used to say with a happy smile, “The lines have fallen to me in pleasant places; yea, I have a goodly heritage.”

On my father’s death, in May 1893, there was a passage about him in the Aldeburgh Magazine. It was anonymous, but I am practically certain that it was written by Canon Thompson, the very delightful man who succeeded Mr. Dowler as vicar of Aldeburgh. The writer speaks of Aldeburgh having lost a large-hearted and generous friend, and continued: “In Mr. Garrett a strong will and unfailing courage were added to a temperament almost overloaded with enthusiasm, energy, and activity. None of his virtues were passive. It may be supposed that this combination of qualities did not always in a small community make for peace, but below an occasionally stormy surface Mr. Garrett had a great heart, full of love for the town he had known so long and full of deep and kindly sympathy with his fellow-men. He was one in whom the instinct to help, when help was wanted, was unusually strong. Everyone in trouble turned to him, certain of aid if it could be given, and certain, too (even when in fault), of generous judgment.”

Ten years after this, in January 1903, on the death of our dear mother, Canon Thompson wrote these lines to my brother Edmund:

The Vicarage,

Second Sunday after the Epiphany, 1903.

My dear Mr. Garrett,

I write a few words, not because of your need to be told how we honour and love your dear mother, but because it soothes my sorrow to dwell a moment thus upon her worth. For in sorrow we most sincerely are: we feel that in our second degree we, too, have lost a mother. Such she ever showed herself to us; in spite of the unusually wide circle of interests she had, she always found room in her large heart for our interests—joyful or painful.... I used to seek her counsel not only because she was a wise woman, as she was, but more because she sought her counsel from God. Many will miss her kindness, but I think a greater loss will be her goodness, her holiness; of that we shall have the memory, but no more the pattern, before our eyes. A more consistent Christian I never knew, and I love to recall the downrightness with which she used to say and write what she thought, all the while accusing herself, dear soul, of not confessing herself as she ought. As for my ministrations to her, I used to go to her feeling I wanted help and could get it, not that I carried it. If I did not feel that we should still have her prayers, I should feel the loss irreparable. These things I write—not in depreciation of those who are to take her place, but in sympathy with the thoughts which I am sure are in their hearts as they take up their duties.

You can show this to anyone who you would like to see it; I want the family to know how thankful we are for the inspiration of such a life and death.

Believe me, ever yours sincerely,

Henry Thompson.

[3] There is a tale hanging to this which I feel I must not leave out. Some thirty years later my brother was walking with his eldest boy in the neighbourhood of Snape Church, and, pointing to it, said, “Father was christened in that church, Douglas.” Whereupon the child replied, “What a menjously old church it must be!”