My Father--The Murrays--The Courage of Childhood--The Girl
from the Workhouse--Witchcraft--The Dudley Devil--The
Deformed Methodist--A Child's idea of the Creator--The
Policeman--Sir Ernest Spencer's Donkey--The High Street Pork
Butcher.
My father was a printer and stationer, and would have been a bookseller
if there had been any book buyers in the region. There was a good deal
of unsaleable literary stock on the dusty shelves. I remember _The
Wealth of Nations_, Paley's _Evidences of Christianity, Locke on
the Human Understanding_, and a long row of the dramatists of the
seventeenth century. I burrowed into all these with zeal, and acquired
in very early childhood an omnivorous appetite for books which has never
left me.
There was a family legend, the rights and wrongs of which are long since
drowned in mist, to the effect that our little Staffordshire branch of
the great Murray family belonged to the elder and the higher, and the
titular rights of the Dukedom of Athol were held by a cadet of the
house. My father's elder brother, Adam Goudie Murray, professed to hold
this belief stoutly, and he and the reigning duke of a century ago had
a humorous spar with each other about it on occasion. “I presume your
Grace is still living in my hoose,” Adam would say.
“Ay, I'm still there, Adam,” the duke would answer, and the jest was
kept up until the old nobleman died. Sir Bernard Burke knew of the
story, but when as a matter of curiosity I broached the question to him,
he said there were too many broken links in the chain of evidence to
make it worth investigation. My father had, or humorously affected, a
sort of faith in it, and used to say that we were princes in disguise.
The disguise was certainly complete, for the struggle for life was
severe and constant, but there was enough in the vague rumour to excite
the imagination of a child, and I know that I built a thousand airy
day-dreams on it.
To me the most momentous episodes of life appear to resolve themselves
naturally into first occasions. Those times at which we first
feel, think, act, or experience in any given way, form the true
stepping-stones of life. Memory is one of the most capricious of the
faculties. There is a well-known philosophical theory to the effect that
nothing is actually forgotten or forgetable which has once imprinted
itself upon the mind. But, bar myself, I do not remember to have
encountered anybody who professed to recall his very earliest triumph
in pedestrianism--the first successful independent stagger on his feet.
When I have sometimes claimed that memory carries me back so far, I have
been told that the impression is an afterthought, or an imagination, or
a remembrance of the achievement of some younger child. I know better.
It is an actual little fragment of my own experience, and nothing which
ever befell me in my whole lifetime is more precise or definite. I do
not know who held my petticoats bunched up behind to steady me for the
start, nor who held out a roughened finger to entice me. But I remember
the grip, and the feel of the finger when I reached it, as well as I
remember anything. And what makes the small experience so very definite
is, that after all this lapse of time I can still feel the sense of
peril and adventure, and the ringing self-applause which filled me when
the task was successfully accomplished. There was a fire in the grate on
my right hand side, and beneath my feet there was a rug which was made
up of hundreds of rough loops of parti-coloured cloth; and it was the
idea of getting over those loops which frightened me, and brought its
proper spice of adventure into the business. There is nothing before
this, and for two or three years, as I should guess, there is nothing
after it. That little firelit episode of infancy is isolated in the
midst of an impenetrable dark.
Where a child is not beaten, or bullied, or cautioned overmuch, it
is almost always very courageous to begin with. Where it survives
the innumerable mishaps incident to the career of what Tennyson calls
“dauntless infancy,” it learns many lessons of caution. But the great
faculty of cowardice, which most grown men have developed in a
hundred forms, is no part of the child's original stock in trade. Even
cowardice, in its own degree, is a wholesome thing, because it is a part
and portion of that self-protective instinct which helps towards the
preservation of the individual of the race. But it would be a good
thing to place, if such a thing were possible, a complete embargo on
its importation into the infant kingdom. I suppose the true faculty for
being afraid belongs to very few people. There are many forms of genius,
and it is very likely, I believe, that the genius for a true cowardice
is as rare as the genius for writing great verse, or constructing a
great story, or guiding the ship of state through the crises of tempest
to a safe harbour. But every human faculty may be cultivated, and this
is a field in which, with least effort, and with least expenditure of
seed, you may reap the fullest crop.
Whilst I was yet a very little fellow, a certain big-boned,
well-fleshed, waddling wench from the local workhouse became a unit in
my mother's household. Her chief occupation seemed to be to instruct
my brothers and sisters and myself in various and many methods of being
terrified. Three score years ago there was, in that part of the country,
a fascinating belief in witchcraft. There was in our near neighbourhood,
for example, a person known as the Dudley Devil, who could bewitch
cattle, and cause milch kine to yield blood. He had philtres of all
sorts--noxious and innocuous--and it was currently believed that he went
lame because, in the character of an old dog-fox, he had been shot by
an irate farmer whose hen-roost he had robbed beyond the bounds of
patience. He used to discover places where objects were hidden which
had been stolen from local farmhouses, and he was reckoned to do this by
certain forms of magical incantation. In my maturer mind, I am disposed
to believe that he was a professional receiver of stolen goods, and I
am pretty sure that the modern police would have made short work of him.
But from the time that foolish, fat scullion came into the household
service, we were all impressed with a dreadful sense of this gentleman's
potentialities for evil; and darkened rooms and passages about the
house, into which we had hitherto ventured without any hint of fear,
were suddenly and horribly alive with this man's presence.
Speaking for myself, as I have sole right to do, I know that he haunted
every place of darkness. He positively peopled the back kitchen to which
we went for coals. He haunted a little larder on the left, and stood on
each of the three steps which led down to its red brick floor, whilst at
the same instant he was horribly ready to pounce upon one from the rear;
was waiting in the doorway just in front; was crouching in each corner
of the darkened chamber, and hidden in the chimney. That fat, foolish
scullion slept in the same room with my brother and myself. He, as I
find by reference to contemporary annals, was seven at this time, and
I was five, and we got to know afterwards that the sprawling wench grew
hungry in the night-time, and went downstairs to filch heels of loaves
and cheese, or anything our rather spare household economy left open to
her petty larcenies. And in order that these small depredations should
be hidden, she used to play the ghost upon us, and I suppose it to be a
literal fact that many and many a time when she stole back to our room,
and found us awake and quaking, she must have driven us into a clean
swoon of terror by the very simple expedient of drawing up the hinder
part of her nightdress, and making a ghostly head-dress of it about her
face. That I fainted many a time out of sheer horror at this apparition,
I am quite certain; but the sense of real fear was, after all, left in
reserve. I had rambled alone, as children will, along the High Street on
a lovely summer day, each sight, and scent, and sound of which comes to
me at this moment with a curious distinctness, and I had turned at
the corner; had wandered along New Street, which by that time was
old-fashioned enough to seem aged, even to my eyes; had diverged into
Walsall Street, which was then the shortest way to the real country, and
on to the Ten Score; past the Pearl Well, where Cromwell's troops once
stopped to drink; through Church Vale, and on to Perry Bar, and even
past the Horns of Queeslett, beyond which lay a plain road to Sutton
Coldfield, a place full of wonder and magic, and already memorable to
a reading child through its association with one Shakespeare, and a Sir
John Falstaff, who afterwards became more intimate companions.
I had never been so far from home before, and the sense of adventure was
very strong upon me. By-and-bye, I found myself in what I still remember
as a sort of primeval forest, though a broad country lane was cut
between the umbrageous shade on either side. I saw a rabbit cross the
road, and I saw a slow weasel track him, and heard the squeak of despair
which bunny uttered when the fascinating pursuer, as I now imagine,
first fixed upon him what Mr Swinburne calls “the bitter blossom of
a kiss.” I very clearly remember an adder, with a bunch of its young,
disporting in the sunlight; but there was nothing to alarm a child,
and everything to charm and enlist the fancy. The sunlight fell broadly
along the route. Birds were singing, and butterflies were fanning
their feathery, irresponsible way from shade to shade. I saw my first
dragonfly that day, and tried to catch him in my cap, but he evaded me.
All on a sudden, the prospect changed. A cloud floated over the sun,
and a sort of preliminary waiting horror took possession of the harmless
woods on either side. Just there the road swerved, and I could hear a
halting footstep coming. Somehow, the Dudley Devil was associated in my
mind with that halting step, and there was I, in the middle of a waste
universe, in which all the bird voices had suddenly grown silent, and
the companionable insects had ceased to hum and flutter, left to await
the coming of this awful creature. The stammering step came round the
bend of the lane, and I saw for the first time a person whom I grew to
respect and pity later on, but who struck me then with such an abject
sense of terror as I have sometimes since experienced in dreams.
One might have travelled far before meeting a more harmless creature.
He was on the local Plan of the Wesleyan Methodists, as I found out
afterwards. He had been a metal-worker of some sort, and the victim of
an explosion which had wrecked one side of his face and figure, and had
made nothing less than a ghastly horror of him. The upward-flying stream
of metal had struck him on the cheek and chin, and had left him writhen
and distorted there almost beyond imagination. It had literally boiled
one eye, which revolved amid its facial seams dead-white in a sightless
orbit. The sideward and downward streams had left him with a dangling
atrophied arm and a scalded hip, so that he came down on me, with my
preconceived ideas about him, like an actual lop-sided demon. I let
out one screech, and fled; but even in the act of flight I saw the
poor fellow's face, and read in it the bitter regret he felt that the
disaster which had befallen him should have made him unbearable to the
imagination of a child.
A great many years after, when I was quite a young man, and was invited
to read a paper on “Liberty” before a society of earnest Wes-leyan
youths who called themselves the “Young Bereans,” this identical man
stood up to take a part in the discussion, and I knew him in a flash.
He began his speech by saying something about the inscrutable designs of
Providence, and I recall even now some fragmentary idea of the words he
used. “I was a handsome lad to begin with,” he said, “but God saw fit to
deform me, and to make me what I am.” And now, when I am settling down
to these reminiscences in late middle age, the most dreadful waking
sense of real horror, and the first real touch of human pity, seem to
meet each other, and to blend.
It is fully half a century ago, for I could not have been quite six
years of age, when my brother Will and I were taken to chapel on one
very well-remembered Sunday evening. The preacher was the grandfather
of a gentleman who now lives in a castle, and does an enormous trade in
soap. His theme was the omniscience of the Deity, and he told his simple
audience how the same God who made all rolling spheres made the
minutest living things also, and all things intermediate. It was a very
impressive sermon for a child to listen to, and I can recall a great
deal of it to this day. It set my brother's mental apparatus moving, and
he thought to such effect that he started a new theory as to the origin
of the universe. If God had made all things, it appeared clear to him
that somebody must have made God. He suggested that it might have been a
policeman. I accepted this idea with an absolutely tranquil faith, and I
was immediately certain of the very man. The High Constables Act was not
passed until some fourteen or fifteen years later, and it was that Act
which finally abolished the old watchman and installed the policeman
in his place, even in our remotest villages. But I cannot recall a
time when there was not a police barracks in my native High Street. Its
inmates were all “bobbies” or “peelers,” out of compliment to “Bobby”
Peel, who called them officially into being in 1829. I know no better
grounds than those afforded by a baby memory that the particular
policeman whom I supposed to have created the Creator was a somewhat
remarkable person in his way. He was six feet four in height, for one
thing, and he was astonishingly cadaverous. I once found a tremulous
occasion to speak to him, and as I looked upward from about the height
of his knee at God Almighty's maker, I thought his stature more than
Himalayan. I forget what I asked, or what he answered; but the sense of
incredible daring is with me still.
I learned later that this elongated solemn coffin of a man was the
champion eater of the district I am not inclined to be nice in
my remembrance of recorded weights and measures; but they had him
registered to an ounce at the “Lewisham Arms,” which was only a yard
or two beyond the police barracks, on the road to Handsworth, where he
figured as having consumed a shoulder of mutton, a loaf of bread, a pan
of potatoes, and a dish of cabbage, each of such and such a weight, in
such and such a time. I cannot be sure whether it were at this house
of entertainment, or at another in the neighbourhood, where there was a
glass case on view in which was displayed the ashy remnant of a pound of
tobacco smoked, and the desiccated remnant of a pound of tobacco chewed,
within so many given minutes by the local champion in these inviting
arts. I am pretty certain now that the local glutton was not identical
with the local champion consumer of tobacco; but at that time I
heaped all these honours on his head, and my belief in his original
responsibility for the launching of the universe was not, so far as I
remember, in any way disturbed by the contemplation of these smaller
attributes of power.
It is something, even in the flights of baby fancy, to have known and
conversed with the origin of all created things. It is perhaps something
of a throwback to be forced to the recognition of that prodigious figure
as it really was. But, after all, it is not quite impossible that a
similar awaking may await the grown man who imagines himself to have
mastered something of the real philosophies of life. The cadaverous
peeler with the abnormal appetite fades out of recollection, and my
next hero is a blacksmith, who, in a countryside once rich in amateur
pugilists, had earned a local distinction for himself before he made a
settlement for life at the “Farriers' Arms,” in Queen Street. His
name was Robert Pearce, and he dawns on me as second hero because of
a physical strength which must have been remarkable even when all
allowance for the childish ideal is made.
Sir Ernest Spencer, who was for many years the Parliamentary
representative of my native parish, was an infant schoolfellow of mine,
and on a birthday, or some other such occasion for celebration, his
father made him a present of a small donkey; and we two took the beast
to Bob Pearce's to be shod. I can see the great, broad-shouldered, hairy
farrier at this minute, as if I saw him in a picture, with his smoky
shirt thrown wide open at the collar, and his breast as bearded as his
chin. When the small beast was trotted in to the farriery, the grimy
giant laughed aloud. He stooped, and, placing his great palm under the
donkey's belly, he raised the animal in one hand, and poised him at the
ceiling, swaying him here and there as if he had been a weathervane in
a high and varying wind. I suppose that the donkey was a little donkey;
but I am sure that he was only an averagely little donkey, and that not
one man in a British regiment could have performed Bob Pearce's feat
with any approach to the air of ease and dexterity he gave it. There
was no effort at all about the action, and no apparent idea that any
exhibition of strength was being offered. There was a conquering
comic spontaneity in that exhibition of great muscular power which
irresistibly appealed to the imagination, and made the Queen Street
farrier a god for years to come.
When I was sent to a regular day-school, many years afterwards, there
were legends amongst us of this man's super-normal strength. There was
a great lath of a fellow who kept the “Star and Garter” public-house.
After all this lapse of time one hopes that one may not hit on any
surviving prejudice against the use of names and places. His name was
Tom Woolley, and I saw Pearce set his big hand underneath the chair on
which he sat, and place him on an ordinary table in a smoke-room
for some slight wager of a pint of beer or so. This was one of the
ameliorations of the rigours of a committee meeting, of which my father
was chairman, called to decide on the form of the public reception of
a returning Chartist, who had spent six months in Stafford Gaol for the
expression of such extreme opinions as are now daily enunciated in the
columns of _The Times_.
There are no such liars as schoolboys, and no set of men could possibly
be found who could as religiously believe each other's lies as they do.
We used to invent for each other's delight stories about this particular
hero which went beyond grown-up credence altogether. But there are some
few narratives that survive the application of the laws of evidence. For
instance, it is recorded that, taking advantage of the temporary absence
of a rival smith, he carried away an anvil under his cloak without
exciting suspicion that he was bearing any weight at all.
There was a pork butcher in the High Street who sprang to the most
dazzling height of fame amongst the schoolboys and other well-practised,
self-believing liars of the parish. On the Wednesday the man was as mere
and simple a salesman of dead pig as might be found within the limits
of the land. On the Thursday he had obliterated the memory of the
achievements of Nelson and Six-teen-String Jack. Surveying the
circumstances from a considerable distance, I am inclined to think that
there was some authenticity in the story which sent the whole parish
into a gaping admiration. The tale was that the pork butcher had gone
money-hunting on the afternoon of that eventful day which made a hero of
him. He had gathered, so the local story ran, something like two hundred
pounds, and he made an incautious brag of this fact in the bar-room of
the old “Blue Posts,” at Smethwick. Midway up Roebuck Lane, which was
then without a house from end to end, three men sprang out upon him
from the shadows of the bridge then just newly-erected across the Great
Western line of railway, over which, if I remember rightly, no train at
that time had ever travelled.
Then that pork butcher proved himself a paladin. He thrust one of his
assailants to the rails at the bottom of the cutting with his foot;
he laid out another upon the pathway with one prodigious buffet; and,
seizing the third by the coat collar, he kicked him half a mile to the
police station. Even now, I believe this story to be true, or near the
truth; and the sympathetic reader may fancy what we boys made of
the hero of it. I have worshipped many people in my time, and I have
thrilled at the thought of many splendid deeds; but I have never since
reached that high-water mark of hero-worship at which I sailed when
I followed that pork butcher down the West Bromwich High Street, and
persuaded myself beyond the evidence of my senses that he was ten feet
high.