That reminds me that a friend of ours, with that same chauffeur, was
driving swiftly in her car the other day, and ran into a butcher's boy
on his bicycle. As I have already remarked, chauffeurs never recognize
meat when they see it unless it is on a plate. The boy was knocked over.
My friend saw the overturned bicycle in the ditch; and a string of
sausages festooned on the hedge, together with a piece of ribs of beef,
and a pound of liver caught on a sweet-briar, and imagined that they
were the scattered internal fittings of the butcher's boy, until he
crawled out from under the car uninjured. She did not recover from the
shock for several days.
* * * * *
To return to the cottage. I am not going to pretend that it had no
drawbacks. There were painful surprises, especially in the honeymoon
period of my affections. Most young couples, if they were honest, which
they never are, would admit that they emerged stunned, if not partially
paralysed, from the strain of the first weeks of wedded life. I was
stunned, but I remembered it was the common lot and took courage. Yes,
there were painful surprises. Ants marched up in their cohorts between
the bricks in the pantry floor. When we enquired into this phenomenon,
behold! there _was_ no floor. For a moment I was as "dumbfounded" as the
bridegroom who discovers a plait of hair on his bride's dressing table.
The bricks were laid in noble simplicity on Mother Earth, no doubt as in
the huts of our forefathers, in the days when they painted themselves
with wode, and skirmished with bows and arrows. I had to steel my heart
against further discoveries. Rats raced in battalions in the walls at
night. Plaster and enormous spiders dropped (not, of course in
collusion) from the ceilings in the dark. Upper floors gave signs of
collapse. Two rooms which had real floors, when thrown into one, broke
our hearts by unexpectedly revealing different levels. That really was
not playing fair.
Frogs, large, active, shiny Suffolk frogs had a passion for leaping in
at the drawing room windows in wet weather. The frogs are my department,
for the Home Ruler, who fears neither God nor man, hides her face in her
hands and groans when the frogs bound in across the matting; and I, _moi
qui vous parle_, I pursue them with the duster, which, in every well
organised cottage, is in the left hand drawer of the writing table.
The great great grandchildren of the original jumpers, jump in to this
day, in spite of the severity with which they and their ancestors from
one generation to another have been gathered up in dusters, and cast
forth straddling and gasping on to the lawn. Frogs seem as unteachable
as chauffeurs!
* * * * *
Very early in the day we realised that in the principal bedroom a rich
penetrating aroma of roast hare made its presence felt the moment the
window was shut. Why this was so I do not know. The room was not over
the kitchen. We have never had a hare roasted on the premises during all
the years we have lived in that delectable place. We have never even
partaken of jugged hare within its walls. But the fact remains: when the
window is shut the hare steals back into the room. Perhaps it is a
ghost!!!
I never thought of that till this moment. I feel as if I had read
somewhere about a ghost which always heralds its approach by a smell of
musk. And then I remember also hearing about an old woman who after her
death wanted dreadfully to tell her descendants that she had hidden the
lost family jewels in the chimney. But though she tried with all her
might to warn them she never got any nearer to it than by appearing as
a bloodhound at intervals. Everyone who saw her was terrified, and the
jewels remained in the chimney.
Is it possible that I have not taken this aroma of roast hare
sufficiently seriously! Perhaps it is a portent. Perhaps it is an
imperfect manifestation--like the bloodhound--of someone on the other
side who is trying to confide in me.
* * * * *
Yes, we sustained shocks not a few, but there was in store for us at any
rate one beautiful surprise which made up for them all.
One bedroom (the one with the hare in it, worse luck) possessed an oak
floor, fastened with the original oak pins. It had likewise a Tudor
door, but the rest of the chamber was commonplace with oddly bulging
walls, covered with a garish flowery wallpaper.
We stripped it off. There was another underneath it. There always is. We
stripped that off, then another, and another, and yet another. (The
reader will begin to think the roast hare is not so mysterious after
all.)
We got down at last to that incredibly ugly paper which in my childhood
adorned every cottage bedroom I visited in my native Shropshire. Do you
know it, reader, a realistic imitation of brickwork? It seems to have
spread itself over Suffolk as well as the Midlands.
After stripping off seven papers the beautiful upright beams revealed
themselves, and the central arch, all in black oak like the floor.
We whitewashed the plaster between the beams, scratched the beams
themselves till they were restored to their natural colour, and rejoiced
exceedingly. We rejoice to this day.
But the hare is still there.
* * * * *
Our cottage is on the edge of a little wood. Great forest trees stand
like sentinels within a stone's throw of the house. In front of the
drawing room windows is a tiny oasis of mown lawn, bounded by a low wall
clambered over by humps of jasmine and montana, and that loveliest of
single roses scinica anemone. The low wall divides the mown grass from
the rough broken ground which slopes upwards behind it till it loses
itself among the tree trunks. Here tall families of pink and white
foxgloves and great yellow lupins jostle each other, and it is all the
Home Ruler can do to keep the peace between them, and to persuade them
to abide in their respective places between stretches of shining ground
ivy and blue periwinkle; all dappled and checkered by the shadows of the
over-arching trees.
If you walk down that narrow path between the leaning twisted hollies
you come suddenly upon an opening in the thicket, and a paved path leads
you into another little garden.
This also has its bodyguard of oaks and poplars on the one side, and on
the other the high hedge dividing it from the lane, over which tilt the
red roofs of the cottages.
Within the enclosure a family of giant docks spread themselves in the
long grass, and ancient fruit trees sprawl on their hands and knees,
each with a rose tree climbing over its ungainliness, making a low inner
barrier between the tall trees, and the little low-lying burnished
garden in the midst. Here ranged and grouped colonies of rejoicing
plants follow each other into flower in an ordered sequence, all
understood and cherished by the earth-ingrained hands of the Home Ruler.
Some few disappointments there are, but many successes. Wire worm may
get in. Cuttings may "damp off." Brompton stocks may not always "go
through the winter." But the flowers respond in that blessed little
place. They do their best, for the best has been done for them. If it is
essential to their well being that their feet should be shaded from the
sun, their feet _are_ shaded, by some well-bred low growing plant in
front of them, which does not interfere with them. If they need the
morning sun they are placed where its rays can pour upon them.
It is a garden of vivid noonday sunshine, when we sit and bask among the
rock pinks on the central bit of brickwork; and of long velvet afternoon
shadows: a garden of quiet conversation, and peaceful intercourse, and
of endless, endless loving labour in sun and rain.
I contribute the quiet conversation, and the Home Ruler contributes the
loving labour; and, while we thus each do our share, the manifold
voices of the village reach us through the tall hedge: the cries of the
children playing by the bridge, the thin complaint of the goats, the
jingle of harness, and the thud of ponderous slow stepping hoofs, the
whistle of the lad sitting sideways on the leading horse; all the
_paisible rumeur_ of the pleasant communal life of which we are a part.
* * * * *
Our village is not really called Riff. It has a beautiful and ancient
name, which I shall not disclose, but I don't mind telling you that it
is close to Mouse Hold,[1] a hamlet in the boggy meadows beyond the
Deben; and not so very far from Gobblecock Hall. Of course if you are
not Suffolk born and bred you will think I am trying to be humourous and
that I have invented this interesting old English name. I can only say.
Look in any good map of Suffolk. You will find Gobblecock Hall on it
near the coast. Riff is only a few miles from Kesgrave Church, where you
can still see the tombstone of the gipsy queen in the churchyard. The
father of one of the oldest inhabitants of Riff witnessed the immense
concourse of gipsies who attended the funeral.
[1] Probably originally Morass Hold.
Riff is within an easy walk of Boulge, where Fitzgerald lies under his
little Persian rose tree, covered in summer with tiny yellow roses. You
see how central Riff is. And, if you cross the Deben, and walk steadily
up the low hill to that broomy, gorsy, breezy upland, Bromswell Heath,
then you stand on the very spot where, a little over a hundred years
ago, British troops were encamped to await Napoleon. And a few years ago
our soldiers assembled there once more to resist the invasion which
Kitchener at any rate expected, and which it now seems evident Germany
intended.
* * * * *
We in Riff learned the meaning of war early in the day. Which of us will
forget the first Zeppelin raid, and later on the sight of torn,
desolated Woodbridge the day after it was bombed: the terrified blanched
faces peeping out from the burst doorways, the broken smoking buildings,
the high piles of shredded matchwood that had been houses yesterday, the
blank incredulous faces of friends and neighbours. No doubt our faces
were as incredulous as those we saw around us. It seemed as if it could
not, could not be! We had seen photographs of similar havoc in Belgium
and France, but Woodbridge! our own Woodbridge, that pleasant shopping
town on its tidal river with the wild swans on it. _It could not be!_
But so it was.
Yes, the war reached us early, and it left us late. Riff suffered as
every other village in Great Britain suffered. Our ruddy cheerful lads
went out one after another. Twenty-two came back no more.
As the years passed we became inured to raids. Nevertheless, just as we
remember the first, so all of us at Riff remember the last in the small
hours of Sunday morning, June 17th, 1917.
I was awakened as often before, by what seemed at first a distant
thunderstorm, at about 3 o'clock in the morning.
I got up and went downstairs in the dark. By this time the bombs were
falling nearer and nearer. As I felt my way down the narrow staircase it
seemed as if the trembling walls were no stronger than paper. The
cottage shook and shook as in a palsy, and C. and E. and I took refuge
in the garden. M. kept watch in the lane. It was, as far as I could see,
pitch dark, but their younger eyes descried, though mine did not, the
wounded Zeppelin lumber heavily over us inland, throwing out its bombs.
Our ears were deafened by the sharp rat-tat-tat of the machine guns, and
by our own frantic anti-aircraft fire. In that pandemonium we stood, how
long I know not, unaware that a neighbour's garden was being liberally
plastered by our own shrapnel. Then, for the second time, the stricken
airship blundered over us, this time in the direction of the sea.
When it had passed overhead we groped our way through the cottage, and
came out on its eastern side. A mild light met our eyes. The dawn was at
hand. It trembled, flushed and stainless as the heart of a wild rose,
behind the black clustered roofs of the village, and the low church
tower.
And above the roofs, some miles away, outlined against the sky, hung the
crippled Zeppelin, motionless, tilted. We watched it fascinated. Slowly
we saw it right itself, and begin to move. It headed towards the coast,
but it could only flee into its worst enemy--the dawn. It travelled, it
dwindled. The sea haze began to enfold it. The clamour of our gun fire
suddenly ceased. It toiled like a wounded sea bird towards its only
hope--the sea.
As we watched it fierce wings whirred unseen overhead. Our aeroplanes
had taken up the chase.
The Zeppelin travelled, travelled.
_What was that?_
A spark of light appeared upon it. It stretched, it leaped into a great
flame. The long body of the Zeppelin was seen to be alight from end to
end.
Then rose simultaneously from every throat in Riff a shout of triumph,
the shrill cries of the children joining with the voices of the elders.
And, after that one cry, silence fell upon us, as we watched that
towering furnace of flame, freighted with agony, sink slowly to the
earth. At last it sank out of sight, leaving a pillar of smoke to mark
its passing.
So windless was the air that the smoke remained like some solemn
upraised finger pointing from earth to heaven.
No one stirred. No one spoke. The light grew. And, in the silence of our
awed hearts, a cuckoo near at hand began calling gently to the new day,
coming up in peace out of the shining east.