He took the same view in regard to the career of another eminent
townsman, who, I mentioned, had just been made an F.R.S.
“If he had been wise and carried on his father's business here he might
have been a J.P. by now,” was his solemn comment.
I thought it better to refrain from any further remarks, lest I should
be made to feel more acutely than I did all that I had forfeited by my
premature departure from a town that offered such prizes for obscurity.
There are still a large number of country towns in England where the
feeling still remains that any departure from their precincts is, if not
absolutely fatal, at any rate risky. I have met people in more than one
town who looked on a man's going to America as equivalent to absconding.
I suppose most of these places have some foundation of their own for
the tradition. It is quite plausible that, seventy or eighty or even
a hundred years ago, some wild young men may have found a voyage to
America to offer them a satisfactory alternative to an appearance behind
the spikes of the dock of the County Court-House, and America got a bad
name in consequence, being looked on as a continent peopled by men who
had gone wrong at home. However this may be, I must confess that I was
startled, when I first came to Thurswell and mentioned that I heard that
a young man who had played a good deal of lawn-tennis during the summer
was going to the States, by the inquiry--
“Why, what has he been doing anyway?”
It did not come from one of the rustic population, but from a tradesman
in quite a good way of business--a considerable proportion of it in
canned provisions into the bargain.
I believe that when Dr. Watson, the author of _Beside the Bonnie Brier
Bush_, went on his first lecturing tour to America, the financial
results of which were so satisfactory, an impression prevailed in
certain directions that the act was unworthy of a clergyman of the
Presbyterian Church, and he was made the object of a severe attack in
some quarters.
One can easily appreciate the attitude of people who have lived all
their lives in an English country town in regard to the restless members
of a family. One has only to walk through a churchyard and read the
names on the tombs to understand how deeply rooted in the soil are the
people. So far as Thurs-well and Mallingham are concerned, a stroll
through one of the churchyards is almost equivalent to studying a
directory. The same names as are cut upon the tombs--some of them going
back a hundred and fifty years--are to be seen over the shop windows
to-day and on the dairy carts and the farm carts. In some cases the
name of a yeoman ancestor reappears in a Grand Jury list, indicating a
material advance in the social scale. The migration that has been
going on in our county for the past two hundred years seems to be
interparochial. Individuals moved from village to village and from
village to town. It is only within the past twenty-five or thirty years
that the ablest and the best have occasionally braved public opinion and
set sail for a colony.
Even families that have “got on” seem to love to cling to the county
which saw the very small beginnings of their ancestors. Why should they
not? Love of one's county is only a subdivision of the grand virtue of
love of one's country. It was only when a certain aged doctor, who had
the family history of our neighbourhood at his fingers' ends for over
sixty years, published a volume of interesting reminiscences, in the
course of which he took occasion to refer to the very humble beginnings
of some families that considered themselves very “swagger,” that
we learned how tenaciously they had clung to their county. Even the
slow-moving Mallingham is not without its romances of “getting on.” One
of the most intrepid motorists in the borough is remembered by several
middle-aged burgesses as the wearer of the green baize apron and
the wielder of the broom of the caretaker and window-cleaner of a
solicitor's office; and from what I know of him I am inclined to believe
that that was the best kept office in the town when he had charge of it.