The chief aim of this essay is to present to a larger public than the
readers of a country newspaper my father's Suffolk stories; but those
stories may well be prefaced by a sketch of my father's life. Such a
sketch I wrote shortly after his death, for the great 'Dictionary of
National Biography.' It runs thus:--
"Robert Hindes Groome, Archdeacon of Suffolk, was born at Framlingham
in 1810. Of Aldeburgh ancestry, he was the second son of the Rev.
John Hindes Groome, ex-fellow of Pembroke College, Cambridge, and
rector for twenty-six years of Earl Soham and Monk Soham in Suffolk.
From Norwich school he passed to Caius College, Cambridge, where he
graduated B.A. in 1832, M.A. in 1836. In 1833 he was ordained to the
Suffolk curacy of Tannington-with-Brandish; in 1835 travelled through
Germany as tutor to Rafael Mendizabal, the son of the Spanish
ambassador; in 1839 became curate of Corfe Castle, Dorsetshire; and in
1845 succeeded his father as rector of Monk Soham. Here in the course
of forty-four years he built the rectory-house and school, restored
the fine old church, erected an organ, and re-hung the bells. He was
Archdeacon of Suffolk from 1869 till 1887, when failing eyesight
forced him to resign, and when the clergy of the diocese presented him
with his portrait. He died at Monk Soham, 19th March 1889. Archdeacon
Groome was a man of wide culture--a man, too, of many friends. Chief
among these were Edward FitzGerald, William Bodham Donne, Dr Thompson
of Trinity, and Henry Bradshaw, the Cambridge librarian, who said of
him, 'I never see Groome but what I learn something new.' He read
much, but published little--a couple of charges, a sermon and lecture
or two, some hymns and hymn-tunes, and a good many articles in the
'Christian Advocate and Review,' of which he was editor from 1861 to
1866. His best productions are his Suffolk stories: for humour and
tenderness these come near to 'Rab and his Friends.'"
An uneventful life, like that of most country clergymen. But as
Gainsborough and Constable took their subjects from level East Anglia, as
Gilbert White's Selborne has little to distinguish it above other
parishes in Hampshire, {5} so I believe that the story of that quiet life
might, if rightly told, possess no common charm. I have listened to my
father's talks with Edward FitzGerald, with William Bodham Donne, and
with two or three others of his oldest friends; such talks were like
chapters out of George Eliot's novels. His memory was marvellous. It
seems but the other day I told him I had been writing about Clarendon;
and "Clarendon," he said, "was born, I know, in 1608, but I forget the
name of the Wiltshire parish his birthplace. Look it up." I looked it
up, and the date _was_ 1608; the parish (Dinton) was, sure enough, in
Wiltshire. Myself I have had again to consult an encyclopaedia for both
date and place-name, but he remembered the one distinctly and the other
vaguely after possibly thirty years. In the same way he could recall the
whole plot of a play which he had not seen for half a century. Holcroft's
'Road to Ruin,' thus, was one that he once described to me. He was a
master of the art, now wellnigh lost, of "capping verses"; and he had a
rare knowledge of the less-known Elizabethan dramatists. In his first
Charge occurs a quotation from an "old play"; and one of his hearers,
Canon "Grundy," inquired what play it might be. "Ford's," said my
father, "''Tis pity she's no better than she should be.'" And the good
man was perfectly satisfied. But stronger than his love of Wordsworth
and music, of the classics and foreign theology, was his love of
Suffolk--its lore, its dialect, its people. As a young man he had driven
through it with Mr D. E. Davy, the antiquary; and as archdeacon he
visited and revisited its three hundred churches in the Norwich diocese
during close on a score of years. I drove with him twice on his rounds,
and there was not a place that did not evoke some memory. If he could
himself have written those memories down! He did make the attempt, but
too late. This was all the result:--
"_Oct._ 23, 1886.
"I cannot see to read, but as yet I can see to write. That is, I can see
the continuous grey line of writing, and can mechanically write one word
after another. But if I leave off abruptly, I cannot always remember
what was the last word that I wrote, and read it generally I cannot.
{Monk Soham Church: p6.jpg}
"I should be thankful for being able to write at all, and I hope I am;
but I am not enough thankful. The failure of my sight has been very
gradual, but of late it has been more sudden. Three months ago I could
employ myself in reading; now I cannot, save with a book, such as the
Prayer-book, with which I am well acquainted, and which is of clear large
type. So that as yet I can take my duty.
"I was born at Framlingham on January 18, 1810, so that I am now nearly
seventy-seven years old. The house still stands where I was born, little
if at all changed. It is the first house on the left-hand side of the
Market Hill, after ascending a short flight of steps. My father, at the
time of my birth, was curate to his brother-in-law, Mr Wyatt, who was
then rector of Framlingham. I was the younger of two sons, my brother
Hindes being thirteen months older than I was.
"As we left Framlingham in 1813, my recollections of it are very
indistinct. I have an impression of being taken out to see a fire; but
as I have since been told that the fire happened a year before I was
born, I suppose that I have heard it so often spoken of that in the end I
came to believe that I myself had seen it. Yet one thing I can surely
remember, that, being sent to a dame's school to keep me out of mischief,
I used to stand by her side pricking holes in some picture or pattern
which had been drawn upon a piece of paper.
"In 1813, after the death of Mr Wyatt, my father took the curacy of
Rendlesham, where we lived till the year 1815. The rector of Rendlesham
at that time was Dr Henley, {8} who was also principal of the East India
College of Haileybury, so that we lived in the rectory, Dr Henley rarely
coming to the parish. That house remains unchanged, as I shall have
occasion to tell. Lois Dowsing was our cook, and lived nearly forty
years in my father's service--one of those faithful servants who said
little, but cared dearly for us all.
"Of Rendlesham I have clear recollection, and things that happened in it.
It was there I first learnt to read. My mother has told me that I could
not be taught to know the letter H, take all the pains she could. My
father, thinking that the fault lay in the teacher, undertook to
accomplish the task. Accordingly he drew, as he thought, the picture of
a hog, and wrote a capital H under it. But whether it was the fault of
the drawing--I am inclined to think that it was--or whether it was my
obstinacy, but when it was shown me, I persisted in calling it 'papa's
grey mare.'
"There was a high sandbank not far from the house, through which the
small roots of the bushes growing protruded. My brother and I never
touched these. We believed that if we pulled one of them, a bell would
ring and the devil would appear. So we never pulled them. In a ploughed
field near by was a large piece of ground at one end, with a pond in the
middle of it, and with many wild cherry-trees near it. I can remember
now how pretty they were with their covering of white blossoms, and the
grass below full of flowers--primroses, cowslips, and, above all,
orchises. But the pond was no ordinary one. It was always called the 'S
pond,' being shaped like that letter. I suspect, too, that it was a pond
of ill repute--perhaps connected with heathen worship--for we were warned
never to go near its edge, lest the Mermaid should come and _crome_ us
in. _Crome_, as all East Anglians know, means 'crook'; and in later
years I remember a Suffolk boy at Norwich school translated a passage
from the 'Hecuba' of Euripides, in which the aged queen is described as
'leaning upon a crooked staff,' by 'leaning upon a _crome_ stick,' which
I still think was a very happy rendering.
"Not far also from the rectory was a cottage, in which lived a family by
the name of Catton. Close to the cottage was a well, worked by buckets.
When the bucket was not being let down, the well was protected by a cover
made of two hurdles, which fell down and met in the middle. These
hurdles, be it noted, were old and apparently rotten. One day I was
playing near the well, and nothing would, I suppose, satisfy me but I
must climb up and creep over the well. In the act of doing this I was
seen by Mrs Catton, who saved me, perhaps, from falling down the well,
and carried me home, detailing the great escape. Well do I remember, not
so much the whipping, as the being shut up in a dark closet behind the
study. So strong was and is the impression, that, on visiting Rendlesham
as archdeacon, when I was sixty years old, on going up to the rectory-
house I asked especially to see this dark closet. There it was, dark and
unchanged since fifty-six years ago; and at the sight of it I had no
comfortable recollection, nor have I now.
"In the year 1814 was a great feast on the Green--a rejoicing for the
peace. One thing still sticks to my memory, and that is the figure of
Mrs Sheming, a farmer's wife. She was a very large woman, and wore a
tight-fitting white dress, with a blue ribbon round her waist, on which
was printed 'Peace and Plenty.'
"In the year 1815 we spent the summer in London, in a house in Brunswick
Square, which overlooked the grounds of the Foundling Hospital. Three
events of that year have always remained impressed on my memory. The
first was the death of little Mary, our only sister. She must have been
a strangely precocious child, since at barely three years old she could
wellnigh read. My mother, who died fifty-two years after in her eighty-
third year, on each year when Mary's death came round took out her
clothes, kept so long, and, after airing them, put them away in their own
drawer. The second event, which I well remember, was being taken out to
see the illuminations for the battle of Waterloo. I can perfectly
remember the face of Somerset House, all ablaze with coloured lamps. The
third event was the funeral of a poor girl named Elizabeth Fenning." {11}
And there those childish reminiscences broke off--never to be resumed.
But from recollections of my father's talk--and he loved to talk of the
past--I will attempt to write what he himself might have written; no set
biography, but just the old household tales.
After the visit to London the family lived a while at Wickham Market,
where my father saw the long strings of tumbrils, laden with Waterloo
wounded, on their way from Yarmouth to London. Then in 1818 they settled
at Earl Soham, my grandfather having become rector of that parish and
Monk Soham. His father, Robinson Groome, the sea-captain, had purchased
the advowson of Earl Soham from the Rev. Francis Capper (1735-1818),
whose long tenure {12} of his two conjoint livings was celebrated by the
local epigrammatist:--
"Capper, they say, has bought a horse--
The pleasure of it bating--
That man may surely keep a horse
Who keeps a Groome in waiting."
It was in the summer-house at Earl Soham that my father, a very small
boy, read 'Gil Blas' to the cook, Lois Dowsing, and the sweetheart she
never married, a strapping sergeant of the Guards, who had fought at
Waterloo. And it was climbing through the window of this summer-house
that he tore a big rent in his breeches (he had just been promoted to
them), so was packed off to bed. That afternoon my grandfather and
grandmother were sitting in the summer-house, and she told him of the
mishap and its punishment. "Stupid child!" said my grandfather; "why, I
could get through there myself." He tried, and he too tore his small-
clothes, but he was not sent to bed.
With his elder brother, John Hindes (afterwards Rector of Earl Soham), my
father went to school at Norwich under Valpy. The first time my
grandfather drove them, a forty-mile drive; and when they came in sight
of the cathedral spire, he pulled up, and they all three fell a-weeping.
For my grandfather was a tender-hearted man, moved to tears by the
Waverley novels. Of Valpy my father would tell how once he had flogged a
day-boy, whose father came the next day to complain of his severity.
"Sir," said Valpy, "I flogged your son because he richly deserved it. If
he again deserves it, I shall again flog him. And"--rising--"if you come
here, sir, interfering with my duty, sir, I shall flog you." The parent
fled.
The following story I owe to an old schoolfellow of my father's, the Rev.
William Drake. "Among the lower boys," he writes, "were a brother of
mine, somewhat of a pickle, and a classmate of his, who in after years
blossomed into a Ritualistic clergyman, and who was the son of a
gentleman, living in the Lower Close, not remarkable for personal beauty.
One morning, as he was coming up the school, the sound of weeping reached
old Valpy's ears: straightway he stopped to investigate whence it
proceeded. 'Stand up, sir,' he cried in a voice of thunder, for he hated
snivelling; 'what is the matter with you?' 'Please, sir,' came the
answer, much interrupted by sobs and tears, 'Bob Drake says I'm uglier
than my father, and that my father is as ugly as the Devil.'"
Another old Norwich story may come in here, of two middle-aged brothers,
Jeremiah and Ozias, the sons of a dead composer, and themselves
performers on the pianoforte. At a party one evening Jeremiah had just
played something, when Ozias came up and asked him, "Brother Jerry, what
was that _beastly_ thing you were playing?" "Ozias, it was our
father's," was the reproachful answer; and Ozias burst into tears.
{Monk Soham Rectory: p14.jpg}
When my father went up to Cambridge, his father went with him, and
introduced him to divers old dons, one of whom offered him this sage
advice, "Stick to your quadratics, young man. _I_ got my fellowship
through my quadratics." Another, the mathematical lecturer at
Peterhouse, was a Suffolk man, and spoke broad Suffolk. One day he was
lecturing on mechanics, and had arranged from the lecture-room ceiling a
system of pulleys, which he proceeded to explain,--"Yeou see, I pull this
string; it will turn this small wheel, and then the next wheel, and then
the next, and then will raise that heavy weight at the end." He
pulled--nothing happened. He pulled again--still no result. "At least
ta should," he remarked.
Music engrossed, I fancy, a good deal of my father's time at Cambridge.
He saw much of Mrs Frere of Downing, a pupil of a pupil of Handel's. Of
her he has written in the Preface to FitzGerald's 'Letters.' He was a
member of the well-known "Camus"; and it was he (so the late Sir George
Paget informed my doctor-brother) who settled the dispute as to
precedence between vocalists and instrumentalists with the apt quotation,
"The singers go before, the minstrels follow after." He was an
instrumentalist himself, his instrument the 'cello; and there was a story
how he, the future Master of Trinity, and some brother musicians were
proctorised one night, as they were returning from a festive meeting,
each man performing on his several instrument.
He was an attendant at the debates at the Cambridge Union, _e.g._, at the
one when the question debated was, "Will Mr Coleridge's poem of 'The
Ancient Mariner' or Mr Martin's Act tend most to prevent cruelty to
animals?" The voting was, for Mr Martin 5, for Mr Coleridge 47; and
"only two" says a note written by my father in 1877, "of the seven who
took part in the debate are now living--Lord Houghton and the Dean of
Lincoln. How many still remember kind and civil Baxter, the
harness-maker opposite Trinity; and how many of them ever heard him sing
his famous song of 'Poor Old Horse'? Yet for pathos, and, unhappily in
some cases, for truth, it may well rank even with 'The Ancient Mariner.'
And Baxter used to sing it so tenderly."
Meanwhile, of the Earl Soham life--a life not unlike that of "Raveloe"--my
father had much to tell. There was the Book Club, with its meetings at
the "Falcon," where, in the words of a local diarist, "a dozen honest
gentlemen dined merrily." There were the heavy dinner-parties at my
grandfather's, the regulation allowance of port a bottle per man, but
more _ad libitum_. And there was the yearly "Soham Fair," on July 12,
when my grandfather kept open house for the parsons or other gentry and
their womankind, who flocked in from miles around. On one such occasion
my father had to squire a new-comer about the fair. The wife of a
retired City alderman, she was enormously stout, and had chosen to appear
in a low dress. ("Hillo, bor! what are yeou a-dewin' with the Fat
Woman?"--one can imagine the delicate raillery.)
A well-known Earl-Sohamite was old Mr P---, who stuttered and was
certainly eccentric. In summer-time he loved to catch small "freshers"
(young frogs), and let them hop down his throat, when he would stroke his
stomach, observing, "B-b-b-b-eautifully cool." He was a staunch believer
in the claims of the "Princess Olive." She used to stay with him, and he
always addressed her as "Your Royal Highness." Then, there was Dr
Belman. He was playing whist one evening with a maiden lady for partner.
She trumped his best card, and, at the end of the hand, he asked her the
reason why. "Oh, Dr Belman" (smilingly), "I judged it judicious."
"_Judicious_! JUDICIOUS!! JUDICIOUS!!! _You old fool_!" She never
again touched a card. Was it the same maiden lady who was the strong
believer in homoeopathy, and who one day took five globules of aconite in
mistake for three? Frightened, she sent off for her homoeopathic
adviser--he was from home. So, for want of a better, she called in old
Dr Belman. He came, looked grave, shook his head, said if people would
meddle with dangerous drugs they must take the consequences. "But,
madam," he added, "I will die with you;" and, lifting the bottle of the
fatal globules, swallowed its whole contents. {17}
To the days of my father's first curacy belongs the story of the old
woman at Tannington, who fell ill one winter when the snow was on the
ground. She got worse and worse, and sent for Dr Mayhew, who questioned
her as to the cause of her illness. Something she said made him think
that the fault must lie with either her kettle or her tea-pot, as she
seemed, by her account, to get worse every time she drank any tea. So he
examined the kettle, turned it upside down, and then, in old Betty's own
words, "Out drop a big toad. He tarned the kittle up, and out ta fell
flop." Some days before she had "deeved" her kettle into the snow
instead of filling it at the pump, and had then got the toad in it, which
had thus been slowly simmering into toad-broth. At Tannington also they
came to my father to ask him to let them have the church Bible and the
church key. The key was to be spun round on the Bible, and if it had
pointed at a certain old woman who was suspected of being a witch, they
would have certainly ducked her.
A score of old faded letters, close-written and crossed, are lying before
me: my father wrote them in 1835 to his father, mother, and brother from
Brussels, Mainz, Leipzig, Dresden, Prague, Munich, &c. At Frankfurt he
dined with the Rothschilds, and sat next the baroness, "who in face and
figure was very like Mrs Cook, and who spoke little English, but that
little much to the purpose. For one dish I must eat because 'dis is
Germany,' and another because 'dis is England,' placing at the word a
large slice of roast-beef on my plate. The dinner began at half-past
two, and lasted three mortal hours, during the first of which I ate
because I was hungry, during the second out of politeness, and during the
third out of sheer desperation." Then there is a descent into a silver-
mine with the present Lord Wemyss (better known as Lord Elcho), a
gruesome execution of three murderers, and a good deal besides of some
interest,--but the interest is not of Suffolk.
During his six years' Dorset curacy my father was elected mayor of the
little borough of Corfe Castle; and it was in Dorset, on 1st February
1843, that he married my mother, Mary Jackson (1815-93), the youngest
daughter of the Rev. James Leonard Jackson, rector of Swanage, and of
Louisa Decima Hyde Wollaston. Her father, my grandfather, was a great
taker of snuff; and one blustery day he was walking upon the cliffs when
his hat blew off. He chased it and chased it over two or three fields
until at last he got it in the angle of two stone walls. "Aha! my
friend, I think I have you now," said my grandfather, and proceeded to
take a leisurely pinch of snuff, when a puff of wind came and blew the
hat far out to sea. There are many more Dorsetshire stories that recur
to my memory; but neither here is the interest of Suffolk. So to Suffolk
we will come back, like my father in 1845, in which year he succeeded his
father as rector of Monk Soham.
Monk Soham is a straggling parish of 1600 acres and 400 inhabitants. {20}
It lies remote to-day, as it lay remote in pre-Reformation times, when it
was a cell of St Edmundsbury, whither refractory monks were sent for
rustication. Hence its name (the "south village of the monks"); and
hence, too, the fish-ponds for Lenten fare, in the rectory gardens. Three
of them enclose the orchard, which is planted quincunx-wise, with yew
hedge and grass-walk all round it. The "Archdeacon's Walk" that grass-
walk should be named, for my father paced it morning after morning. The
pike and roach would plash among the reeds and water-lilies; and "Fish,
fish, do your duty," my father would say to them. Whereupon, he
maintained, the fish always put out their noses and answered, "If _you_
do your duty, _we_ do our duty,"--words fully as applicable to parson as
to sultan.
{"Fish, fish, do your duty.": p20.jpg}
The parish has no history, unless that a former rector, Thomas Rogerson,
was sequestrated as a royalist in 1642, and next year his wife and
children were turned out of doors by the Puritans. "After which," Walker
tells us, "Mr Rogerson lived with a Country-man in a very mean Cottage
upon a Heath, for some years, and in a very low and miserable Condition."
But if Monk Soham has no history, its church, St Peter's, is striking
even among Suffolk churches, for the size of the chancel, the great
traceried east window, and the font sculptured with the Seven Sacraments.
The churchyard is pretty with trees and shrubs--those four yews by the
gates a present from FitzGerald; and the rectory, half a mile off, is
almost hidden by oaks, elms, beeches, and limes, all of my father's and
grandfather's planting. Else the parish soon will be treeless. It was
not so when my father first came to it. Where now there is one huge
field, there then would be five or six, not a few of them meadows, and
each with pleasant hedgerows. There were two "Greens" then--one has many
years since been enclosed; and there was not a "made" road in the entire
parish--only grassy lanes, with gates at intervals. "High farming" has
wrought great changes, not always to the profit of our farmers, whose
moated homesteads hereabouts bear old-world names--Woodcroft Hall, Blood
Hall, Flemings Hall, Crows Hall, Windwhistle Hall, and suchlike. "High
farming," moreover, has swallowed up most of the smaller holdings. Fifty
years ago there were ten or a dozen farms in Monk Soham, each farm with
its resident tenant; now the number is reduced to less than half. It
seems a pity, for a twofold reason: first, because the farm-labourer thus
loses all chance of advancement; and secondly, because the English yeoman
will be soon as extinct as the bustard.
Tom Pepper was the last of our Monk Soham yeomen--a man, said my father,
of the stuff that furnished Cromwell with his Ironsides. He was a strong
Dissenter; but they were none the worse friends for that, not even though
Tom, holding forth in his Little Bethel, might sometimes denounce the
corruptions of the Establishment. "The clargy," he once declared,
"they're here, and they ain't here; they're like pigs in the garden, and
yeou can't git 'em out." On which an old woman, a member of the flock,
sprang up and cried, "That's right, Brother Pepper, kitch 'em by the
fifth buttonhole!" {22} Tom went once to hear Gavazzi lecture at
Debenham, and next day my father asked him how he liked it. "Well," he
said, "I thowt I should ha' beared that chap they call _Jerry Baldry_,
but I din't. Howsomdiver, this one that spook fare to laa it into th'
owd Pope good tidily." Another time my father said something to him
about the Emperor of Russia. "Rooshur," said Tom; "what's that him yeou
call Prooshur?" And yet again, when a concrete wall was built on to a
neighbouring farm-building, Tom remarked contemptuously that he "din't
think much of them consecrated walls." Withal, what an honest, sensible
soul it was!
Midway between the rectory and Tom Pepper's is the "Guildhall," an
ancient house, though probably far less ancient than its name. It is
parish property, and for years has served as an almshouse for ten or a
dozen old people. My father used to read the Bible to them, and there
was a black cat once which would jump on to his knees, so at last it was
shut up in a cupboard. The top of this cupboard, however, above the
door, was separated from the room only by a piece of pasted paper; and
through this paper the cat's head suddenly emerged. "Cat, you bitch!"
said old Mrs Wilding, and my father could read no more. Nay, his father
(then in his last illness) laughed too when he heard the story.
The average age of those old Guildhall people must have been much over
sixty, and some of them were nearly centenarians--Charity Herring, who
was always setting fire to her bed with a worn-out warming-pan, and James
Burrows, of whom my father made this jotting in one of his note-books:
"In the year 1853 I buried James Burrows of this parish at the reputed
age of one hundred years. Probably he was nearly, if not altogether that
age. Talking with him a few years before his death, I asked if his
father had lived to be an old man, and he said that he had. I asked him
then about his grandfather, and his answer was that he had lived to be a
'wonnerful owd man.' 'Do you remember your grandfather?' 'Right well: I
was a big bor when he died.' 'Did he use to tell you of things which he
remembered?' 'Yes, he was wery fond of talking about 'em: he used to say
he could remember the Dutch king coming over.' James Burrows could not
read or write, nor his father probably before him: so that this statement
must have been based on purely traditional grounds. Assume he was born
in 1755 he would have been a 'big bor,' fifteen years old, in 1770; and
assume that his grandfather died in 1770 aged ninety-six, this would make
him to have been born in 1675, fourteen or fifteen years before William
of Orange landed."
Then there were Tom and Susan Kemp. He came from somewhere in Norfolk,
the scene, I remember, of the 'Babes in the Wood,' and he wore the only
smock-frock in the parish, where the ruling fashion was
"thunder-and-lightning" sleeve-waistcoats. Susan's Sunday dress was a
clean lilac print gown, made very short, so as to show white stockings
and boots with cloth tops. Over the dress was pinned a little black
shawl, and her bonnet was unusually large, of black velvet or silk, with
a great white frill inside it. She was troubled at times with a
mysterious complaint called "the wind," which she thus described, her
finger tracing the course it followed within her: "That fare to go round
and round, and then out ta come a-raspin' and a-roarin'." Another of her
ailments was swelled ankles. "Oh, Mr Groome!" she would say, "if yeou
could but see my poare legs, yeou'd niver forget 'em;" and then, if not
stopped, she would proceed to pull up her short gown and show them. If
my father had been out visiting more than to her seemed wise, she would,
when he told her where he had been to, say: "Ah! there yeou go
a-rattakin' about, and when yeou dew come home yeou've a cowd, I'll be
bound," which often enough was the case. Susan's contempt was great for
poor folks dressing up their children smartly; and she would say with
withering scorn, "What do har child want with all them
wandykes?"--_vandykes_ being lace trimmings of any sort. Was it of
spoilt children that she spoke as "hectorin' and bullockin'
about"?--certainly it was of one of us, a late riser, that she said, "I'd
soon out-of-bed har if I lived there."
Susan's treatment of Harry Collins, a crazy man subject to fits, was wise
and kind. Till Harry came to live with the Kemps, he had been kept in
bed to save trouble. Susan would have no more of bed for him than for
ordinary folks, but sent him on many errands and kept him in excellent
order. Her commands to him usually began with, "Co', Henry, be
stirrin';" and he stood in wholesome awe of her, and obeyed her like a
child. His fits were curious, for "one minute he'd be cussin' and
swearin', and the next fall a-prayin'." Once, too, he "leapt out of the
winder like a roebuck." Blind James Seaman, the other occupant of
Susan's back-room, came of good old yeoman ancestry. He wore a long blue
coat with brass buttons; and his favourite seat was the sunny bank near
our front gate.
In the room over Susan Kemp's lived Will Ruffles and his wife, a very
faithful old couple. The wife failed first. She had hurt herself a good
deal with a fall down the rickety stairs. Will saw to her to the last,
and watched carefully over her. The schoolmistress then, a Miss
Hindmarsh, took a great liking for the old man; and a friend of hers, a
widow lady in London, though she had never seen him, made him a regular
weekly allowance to the end of his life--two shillings, half-a-crown, and
sometimes more. This gave Will many little comforts. Once when my
sister took him his allowance, he told her how, when he was a young man,
a Gipsy woman told him he should be better off at the end of his life
than at the beginning; and "she spook truth," he said, "but how she knew
it I coon't saa." Will suffered at times from rheumatism, and had great
faith in some particular green herb pills, which were to be bought only
at one particular shop in Ipswich. My sister was once deputed to buy him
a box of these pills, and he told her afterwards, "Them there pills did
me a lot of good, and that show what fooks saa about rheumatics bein' in
the boones ain't trew, for how could them there pills 'a got into the
boones?" He was very fond of my father, whom he liked to joke with him.
"Mr Groome," he once said, "dew mob me so."
Will, like many other old people in the parish, believed in
witchcraft,--was himself, indeed, a "wise man" of a kind. My father once
told him about a woman who had fits. "Ah!" old Will said, "she've fallen
into bad hands." "What do you mean?" asked my father; and then Will said
that years before in Monk Soham there was a woman took bad just like this
one, and "there wern't but me and John Abbott in the place could git her
right." "What did you do?" said my father. "We two, John and I, sat by
a clear fire; and we had to bile some of the clippins of the woman's
nails and some of her hair; and when ta biled"--he paused. "What
happened?" asked my father; "did you hear anything?" "Hear anything! I
should think we did. When ta biled, we h'ard a loud shrike a-roarin' up
the chimley; and yeou may depind upon it, she warn't niver bad no more."
Once my father showed Will a _silhouette_ of his father, old Mr Groome of
Earl Soham, a portly gentleman, dressed in the old-fashioned style.
"Ruffles, who is this?" he asked, knowing that Will had known his father
well, and thinking he would recognise it. After looking at it carefully
for some time, Will said, "That's yar son, the sailor." My eldest
brother at that time might be something over twenty, and bore not the
faintest resemblance to our grandfather; still, Will knew that he had
been much abroad, and fancied a tropical sun might have blackened him.
By his own accounts, Will's feats of strength as a younger man, in the
way of reaping, mowing, &c., were remarkable; and there was one great
story, with much in it about "goolden guineas," of the wonderful sale of
corn that he effected for one of his masters. At the rectory gatherings
on Christmas night Will was one of the principal singers, his
_chef-d'oeuvre_ "Oh! silver [query _Sylvia_] is a charming thing," and
"The Helmingham Wolunteers." That famous corps was raised by Lord Dysart
to repel "Bony's" threatened invasion; its drummer was John Noble,
afterwards the wheelwright in Monk Soham. Once after drill Lord Dysart
said to him: "You played that very well, John Noble;" and "I know't, my
lord, I know't," was John's answer--an answer that has passed into a
Suffolk proverb, "I know't, my lord, I know't, as said John Noble."
Mrs Curtis was quite a character--a little woman, with sharp brown eyes
that took in everything. Her tongue was smooth, her words were soft, and
yet she could say bitter things. She had had a large family, who married
and settled in different parts. One son had gone to New Zealand--"a
country, Dr Fletcher tell me, dear Miss, as is outside the frame of the
earth, and where the sun go round t'other way." It was for one of her
sons, when he was ill, that my mother sent a dose of castor-oil; and next
day the boy sent to ask for "some more of Madam Groome's nice gravy."
Another boy, Ephraim, once behaved so badly in church that my father had
to stop in his sermon and tell Mrs Curtis to take her son out. This she
did; and from the pulpit my father saw her driving the unfortunate
Ephraim before her with her umbrella, banging him with it first on one
side and then on the other. Mrs Curtis it was who prescribed the honey-
plaster for a sore throat. "Put on a honey-plaster, neighbour dear; that
will draw the misery out of you." And Mrs Curtis it was who, having
quarrelled with another neighbour, came to my father to relate her
wrongs: "Me a poor lone widow woman, and she ha' got a father to protect
her." The said father was old James Burrows, already spoken of, who was
over ninety, and had long been bedridden.
Mrs Mullinger was a strange old woman. People said she had an evil eye;
and if she took a dislike to any one and looked evilly at their pigs,
then the pigs would fall ill and die. Also, when she lived next door to
another cottage, with only a wall dividing the two chimneys, if old Mrs
Mullinger sat by her chimney in a bad temper, no one on the other side
could light a fire, try as they might.
{Monk Soham Schoolhouse and Guildhall: p30.jpg}
Phoebe Smith and her husband Sam lived in one of the downstair rooms. At
one time of her life Phoebe kept a little dame's school on the Green. One
class of her children, who were reading the Miracles, were called "Little
Miracles"; and whenever my father went in, "Little Miracles" were called
up by that name to read to him. Old Phoebe had intelligence above the
common; she read her Bible much, and thought over it. She was fond, too,
of having my sister read hymns to her, and would often lift her hands in
admiration at any passage she particularly liked. She commended a cotton
dress my sister had on one day when she went to see her--a blue Oxford
shirting, trimmed with a darker shade. "It is a nice solemn dress," she
said, as she lifted a piece to examine it more closely; "there's nothing
flummocky about it."
Among the other Guildhall people were old Mrs "Ratty" Kemp, widow of the
Rat-catcher; {31} old one-eyed Mrs Bond, and her deaf son John; old Mrs
Wright, a great smoker; and Mrs Burrows, a soldier's widow, our only
Irishwoman, from whom Monk Soham conceived no favourable opinion of the
Sister Isle. Of people outside the Guildhall I will mention but one,
James Wilding, a splendid type of the Suffolk labourer. He was a big
strong man, whose strength served him one very ill turn. He was out one
day after a hare, and a farm-bailiff, meeting him, tried to take his gun;
James resisted, and snapped the man's arm. For this he got a year in
Ipswich jail, where, however, he learnt to read, and formed a strong
attachment for the chaplain, Mr Daniel. Afterwards, whenever any of us
were driving over to Ipswich, and James met us, he would always say, "If
yeou see Mr Daniel, dew yeou give him my love." Finally, an emigration
agent got hold of James, and induced him to emigrate, with his wife, his
large family, and his old one-legged mother, to somewhere near New
Orleans. "How are you going, Wilding?" asked my father a few days before
they started. "I don't fare to know rightly," was the answer; "but we're
goin' to sleep the fust night at Debenham" (a village four miles off),
"and that'll kinder break the jarney." They went, but the Southern
States and the negroes were not at all to their liking, and the last
thing heard of them was they had moved to Canada.
So James Wilding is gone, and the others are all of them dead; but some
stories still remain to be cleared off. There was the old farmer at the
tithe dinner, who, on having some bread-sauce handed to him, extracted a
great "dollop" on the top of his knife, tasted it, and said, "Don't chuse
none." There was the other who remarked of a particular pudding, that he
"could rise in the night-time and eat it"; and there was the third, who,
supposing he should get but one plate, shovelled his fish-bones under the
table. There was the boy in Monk Soham school who, asked to define an
earthquake, said, "It is when the 'arth shug itself, and swallow up the
'arth"; and there was his schoolmate, who said that "America was
discovered by British Columbia." There was old Mullinger of Earl Soham,
who thought it "wrong of fooks to go up in a ballune, as that fare {33}
so bumptious to the Almighty." There was the actual balloon, which had
gone up somewhere in the West of England, and which came down in (I
think) the neighbouring parish of Bedfield. As it floated over Monk
Soham, the aeronaut shouted, "Where am I?" to some harvesters, who,
standing in a row, their forefingers pointed at him, shouted back,
"Yeou're in a ballune, bor." There was old X., who, whenever my father
visited him, would grumble, talk scandal, and abuse all his neighbours,
always, however, winding up piously with "But 'tis well." There was the
boy whom my father put in the stocks, but who escaped by unlacing his
"high-lows," and so withdrawing his feet. There was the clergyman,
preaching in a strange church, who asked to have a glass of water in the
pulpit, and who, after the sermon, remarked to the clerk in the vestry,
"That might have been gin-and-water, John, for all the people could
tell." And, taking the duty again there next Sunday, he found to his
horror it _was_ gin-and-water: "I took the hint, sir--I took the hint,"
quoth John, from the clerk's desk below. There was the Monk Soham woman
who, when she got a letter from her son in Hull, told the curate that
"that did give me a tarn at fust, for I thought that come from the hot
place." There was another Monk Soham woman who told my sister one day
that she had been reading in the Bible "about that there gal Haggar," and
who, after discussing the story of Hagar, went on, "When that gal grew up
she went and preached to some fooks in a city that were livin' bad
lives." My sister did not know about this, so inquired where she had
found it, and she turned to the Book of the Prophet Haggai--Hagar and
Haggai to her were one and the same. There was the manufacturer of
artificial manures who set up a carriage and crest; and a friend asked my
father what the motto would be. "Mente et manu res," was the ready
answer. There was the concert at Ipswich, where the chairman, a very
precise young clergyman, announced that "the Rev. Robert Groome will sing
(ahem!) '_Thomas_ Bowling.'" The song was a failure; my father each time
was so sorely tempted to adopt the new version. There was the old woman
whom my father heard warning her daughter, about to travel for the first
time by rail, "Whativer yeou do, my dear, mind yeou don't sit nigh the
biler." There was the old maiden lady, who every morning after breakfast
read an Ode of Horace; and the other maiden lady, a kinswoman of my
father's, who practised her scales regularly long after she was sixty.
She, if you crushed her in an argument, in turn crushed you with,
"_Well_, _there it is_." There was much besides, but memory fails, and
space.
From country clergyman to country archdeacon may seem no startling
transition; yet it meant a great change in my father's tranquil life. For
one thing it took him twice a-year up to London, to Convocation; and in
London he met with many old friends and new. Then there were frequent
outings to Norwich, and the annual visitations and the Charge. On the
first day of his first visitation, at Eye, there was the usual luncheon,
and the usual very small modicum of wine. Lunch over, the Rev. Richard
Cobbold, the author of 'Margaret Catchpole,' proposed my father's health
in a fervid oration, which wound up thus: "Gentlemen, I call upon you to
drink the health of our new archdeacon,--to drink it, gentlemen, in
flowing bumpers." It sounded glorious, but the decanters were empty; and
my father had to order (and pay for) two dozen of sherry. At an Ipswich
visitation there was the customary roll-call of the clergy, among whom
was a new-comer, a Scotchman, Mr Colquhoun. "Mr--, Mr--," faltered the
apparitor, coming unexpectedly on this uncouth name; suddenly he rose a-
tiptoe and to the emergency,--"Mr Cockahoon."
In one of the deaneries my father found a churchyard partly sown with
wheat. "Really, Mr Z---," he said to the incumbent, "I must say I don't
like to see this." And the old churchwarden chimed in, "That's what I
saa tew, Mr Archdeacon; I saa to our parson, 'Yeou go whatin' it and
whatin' it, why don't yeou tater it?'" This found its way into 'Punch,'
with a capital drawing by Charles Keene, whom my father met often at
FitzGerald's. But there is another unrecorded story of an Irish
clergyman, the Rev. "Lucius O'Grady." He had quarrelled with one of his
churchwardens, whose name I forget; the other's was Waller. So my father
went over to arbitrate between the disputants, and Mr "O'Grady" concluded
an impassioned statement of his wrongs with "Voila tout, Mr Archdeacon,
voila tout." "Waller tew," quoth churchwarden No. 1; "what ha' _he_ to
dew with it?" And there was the visit to that woful church, damp,
rotten, ruinous. The inspection over, the rector said to my father,
"Now, Mr Archdeacon, that we've done the old church, you must come and
see my new stables." "Sir," said my father, "when your church is in
decent order, I shall be happy to see your new stables." And "the next
time," he told me, "I really could ask to see them."
Two London reminiscences, and I have done. A former Monk Soham
schoolmistress had married the usher of the Marlborough Street police
court. My father went to see them, and as he was coming away, an
officious Irishman opened the cab-door for him, with "Good luck to your
Rivirince, and did they let you off aizy?" And once my father was
waiting on one of the many platforms of Clapham Junction, when suddenly a
fashionably dressed lady dropped on her knees before him, exclaiming,
"Your blessing, holy Father." "God bless me!" cried my father,--then
added quietly, "and you too, my dear lady."
So at last I come to my father's own Suffolk stories. In 1877-78 I made
my first venture in letters as editor for the 'Ipswich Journal' of a
series of "Suffolk Notes and Queries." They ran through fifty-four
numbers, my own set of which is, I fancy, almost unique. I had a goodly
list of contributors--all friends of my father's--as Mr FitzGerald, Mr
Donne, Captain Brooke of Ufford, Mr Chappell, Mr Aldis Wright, Bishop
Ryle, and Professors Earle, Cowell, and Skeat. Of them I was duly proud;
still, my father and I wrote, between us, two-thirds of the whole. He
was the "Habitans in Alto" (_High_ Suffolk, forsooth), _alias_ "Rector,"
_alias_ "Philologus," "Hippicus," &c.--how we used to laugh at those
aliases. Among his contributions were three papers on the rare old
library of Helmingham Hall (Lord Tollemache's), four on Samuel Ward, the
Puritan preacher of Ipswich, three on Suffolk minstrelsy, and these
sketches written in the Suffolk dialect. Of that dialect my father was a
past-master; once and once only did I know him nonplussed by a Suffolk
phrase. This was in the school at Monk Soham, where a small boy one day
had been put in the corner. "What for?" asked my father; and a chorus of
voices answered, "He ha' bin tittymatauterin," which meant, it seems,
playing at see-saw. I retain, of course, my father's own spelling; but
he always himself maintained that to reproduce the dialect phonetically
is next to impossible--that, for instance, there is a delicate _nuance_
in the Suffolk pronunciation of _dog_, only faintly suggested by _dawg_.
I.
OLD TIMES.
Fooks alluz saa as they git old,
That things look wusser evry day;
They alluz sed so, I consate;
Leastwise I've h'ard my mother saa,
When she was growed up, a big gal,
And went to sarvice at the Hall,
She han't but one stuff gownd to wear,
And not the lissest mite of shawl.
But now yeou caan't tell whue is whue;
Which is the missus, which the maid,
There ain't no tellin'; for a gal,
Arter she's got her wages paid,
Will put 'em all upon her back,
And look as grand as grand can be;
My poor old mother would be stamm'd {39}
_Her_ gal should iver look like she.
And 'taint the lissest bit o' use
To tell 'em anything at all;
They'll only laff, or else begin
All manner o' hard names to call.
Praps arter all it 'tain't the truth,
That one time's wusser than the t'other;
Praps I'm a-gittin' old myself,
And fare to talk like my old mother.
I shaan't dew nowt by talkin' so,
I'd better try the good old plan,
Of spakin' sparing of most folks,
And dewin' all the good I can.