HAPPY MEMORIES
The market of old days used to be held in an open space where East
Street and West Street meet, near to the Bell Inn, whose gilded sign,
in the form of a bas-relief, is displayed over its entrance.
Here we can fancy the little Mary being taken to see the gay booths
with their display of toys or of ginger-bread, and the sheep or pigs in
pens.
Miss Mitford was warmly attached to the place of her birth, and often
alludes to it, but usually under the pseudonym of “Cranley.”
“One of the noisiest inhabitants,” she writes, “of the small, irregular
town of Cranley, in which I had the honour to be born, was a certain
cobbler by name Jacob Giles. He lived exactly over-right our house in
a little appendage to the baker’s shop.... At his half-hatch might he
be seen stitching and stitching, with the peculiar, regular two-handed
jerk proper to the art of cobbling, from six in the morning to six at
night.... There he sat with a dirty red night-cap over his grizzled
hair, a dingy waistcoat and old blue coat, darned, patched and ragged,
and a greasy leathern apron....
“The face belonging to this costume was rough and weather-beaten,
deeply lined and deeply tinted of a right copper colour, with a nose
that would have done honour to Bardolph, and a certain indescribable
half-tipsy look, even when sober. Nevertheless the face, ugly and tipsy
as it was, had its merits.... There was good humour in the half-shut
eye, the pursed-up mouth and the whole jolly visage.... There he sat
in that small den, looking something like a thrush in a goldfinch’s
cage, and singing with as much power and far wider range—albeit his
notes were hardly as melodious—Jobson’s songs in the ‘Devil to Pay’ and
‘A cobbler there was, and he lived in a stall, which served him for
parlour, for kitchen and hall’ being his favourites.
“... Poor as he was Jacob Giles had always something for those poorer
than himself; would share his scanty dinner with a starving beggar, and
his last quid of tobacco with a crippled sailor. The children came to
him for nuts and apples, for comical stories and droll songs; the very
curs of the street knew that they had a friend in the poor cobbler.
[Illustration: MARY RUSSELL MITFORD’S BIRTHPLACE.]
“For my own part I can recollect Jacob Giles as long as I can
recollect anything. He made the shoes for my first doll (pink I
remember they were)—a doll called Sophie, who had the misfortune to
break her neck by a fall from the nursery window. Jacob Giles mended
all the shoes of the family, with whom he was a universal favourite....
He used to mimic Punch for my amusement, and I once greatly offended
the real Punch by preferring the cobbler’s performance of the closing
scene.”
Writing in after years, Miss Mitford remarks: “Where my passion for
plays began it is difficult to say. Perhaps at the little town of
Alresford, when I was somewhat short of four years old, and was taken
by my dear father to see one of the greatest tragedies of the world set
forth in a barn. Even now I have a dim recollection of a glimmering row
of candles dividing the end which was called the stage from the part
which did duty as pit and boxes, of the black face and the spangled
turban, of my wondering admiration, and the breathless interest of the
rustic audience.”
Among some of her happiest recollections of early childhood were her
rides on horseback with her father. “This dear papa of mine,” she
writes, “whose gay and careless temper all the professional etiquette
of the world could never tame into the staid gravity proper to a
doctor of medicine, happened to be a capital horseman, and abandoning
the close carriage almost wholly to my mother used to pay his country
visits on a favourite blood mare, whose extreme docility and gentleness
tempted him into having a pad constructed, perched upon which I might
occasionally accompany him, when the weather was favourable and the
distance not too great.
“A groom, who had been bred up in my grandfather’s family, always
attended us, and I do think that both Brown Bess and George liked to
have me with them almost as well as my father did. The old servant,
proud, as grooms always are, of a fleet and beautiful horse, was almost
as proud of my horsemanship, for I, cowardly enough, Heaven knows, in
after years, was then too young and too ignorant for fear—if it could
have been possible to have any sense of danger when strapped so tightly
to my father’s saddle, and enclosed so fondly by his strong and loving
arm. Very delightful were those rides across the breezy Hampshire downs
on a sunny summer morning!”