Dear to you, too, the small "uplandish" town,
The steep stone roofs, the graceful gabled street,
The great beech woods, the rolling purple down,
The golden fields that shimmer in the heat
With molten glow of buttercups ablaze--
Dear to you, too.
Dear to you, too, the folk, slow-spoken, kind,
Wise with a mother-wisdom not of books;
The sturdy "Cotsal-bred" of cautious mind,
That judges men by "doin's, not by looks,"
With sapient nods and trenchant homely phrase--
Dear to you, too.
And since you love them well--people and land--
I bring you stories of them--just a few
Old folk and young--in hope you'll let them stand
With others that I wot of dear to you.
How happy should these prove in future days--
Dear to you, too.
*FOREWORD*
"I'm homesick for my hills again--
My hills again!
To see above the Severn plain,
Unscabbarded against the sky,
The blue high blade of Cotswold lie."
F. W. HARVEY.
I was in the train, and at Swindon a mud-stained "Tommy," hung round
with equipment like the White Knight, and accompanied by an old lame man
and a young lad, tumbled into my carriage just as the train was leaving
the station. The old man and the lad had evidently been to meet the
soldier at the junction, so as to lose no possible moment of the
precious "leaf." They were very cheery, and in turn refreshed
themselves from a bottle, what time the rather uncheerful smell of the
very-small-ale permitted at present was wafted about the carriage.
Mingled with the rattle of the train came scraps of conversation: much
mutual exchange of news in the slow, rumbling Gloucestershire voices, a
little quickened and sharpened, just then, by excitement and the
shamefaced emotion that refused to be entirely hidden. Every now and
then one would hear such sentences as, "Ah, so 'a be, at Armenteers that
was, poor Ernie! and us could never find no trace on 'im."
But as we neared Kemble they fell silent in the last cold gleam of the
fading sunlight of a February afternoon. The soldier reached for his
equipment, slung it, let down the window, and leaned out. Inhaling a
deep breath of the keen Cotswold air, he looked back into the carriage,
and, with a world of love in his voice, said slowly, "There 'a be, dear
old Kemble--'a _do_ look clean."
And faster than they had tumbled in they tumbled out, to be surrounded
by a group of welcoming friends, but not before the soldier had hauled
out my heavy suit-case for me, as I, too, alighted there,. I was going
on to Cirencester, but the only porter left in these strenuous times, a
very elderly porter, was absorbed into the welcoming group, and I
wouldn't have disturbed him for the world. I wondered rather forlornly
who would carry my suit-case up the stairs and across the bridge for me,
when out of the gathering twilight there appeared another khaki-clad
figure, who turned out to be a soldier of my very own, just then
training a battery at Codford, who was coming to join me for a week-end
with friends at Cirencester.
As we reached the long platform that runs alongside the shuttle line, he
too sniffed delightedly at the good Cotswold air, and said, "Dear old
place--how clean it feels!"
This is just an epitome of what is happening all over England every time
a leave train starts inland from the coast. It's not only home and
family our men are so glad to see--it's the land that bred them.
"God gives all men all earth to love,
But, since man's heart is small,
Ordains for each one spot shall prove
Beloved over all."
And for some of us that spot happens to be in the Cotswolds.
Nowhere has the spirit of place been more insistent and persistent.
Surely no county has more melodious names than Gloucestershire. They
chime in the ears of those that love them like a peal of old mellow
bells. No ugly place could ever be called Colne St. Aldwyns or Fretherne
or Minsterworth, and there is something in the very sound of Bibury,
Pinbury and Sapperton, Rendcombe and Miserden, that carries with it a
sense of wide grass glades and great old trees gathered together in
sun-flecked woods that, in May, are carpeted with bluebells and, in
October, are glorious in the vivid reds and yellows of the turning
beeches. What pleasaunces to dream in when you are amongst them! What
faerielands to dream of when you are far away!
Listen to the names. Say them over softly--Maisemore, Hartpury,
Lassington: these are in the vale. Don't you hear how homesick we are
who whisper them lovingly where there are none to recognise them? And
the King of the Cotswolds is Cissister (the railway may call it
Cirencester if it likes, but that is how the natives know it)--Cissister
of the wide market-place and narrow irregular streets, with the
wise-looking old gabled houses that have smiled down upon so many
generations of sturdy Cotswold folk. Grey are the Cotswold houses,
stone-roofed and steeply gabled, welcoming, friendly, venerable; and
surely there is something very delightful in the thought that just now
young America looks down (from a considerable height too) on those same
stone roofs and gables. For young America is flying (literally, not
figuratively) all over the Cotswolds. One wonders what the Church and
the Abbey and the House think when the light-hearted airmen almost shave
their roofs.
The mention of young America brings me to what so entirely occupies all
our thoughts just now, that there might seem something almost
impertinently irrelevant in daring to write of anything else. But just
inasmuch, as the old, easy-going, comfortable England has been in the
melting-pot for nearly four years, and because the new, nobler, more
strenuous England will change most things, it has seemed to me that it
might not be amiss to collect these little sketches of some dear
Cotswold folk, old and young, of what will soon seem an almost forgotten
time.
Much has been written, and admirably written, of the Cotswolds
themselves; but not much to my knowledge--except in the ever-delightful
"Cotswold Village," by Arthur Gibbs--about the people.
Most of the people in this book belong to those old easy times of over
twenty years ago. Only one of the stories deals with anything
approaching "present day," and it is nearly four years old. One
story--I may as well confess it here--has nothing to do with the
Cotswolds; but Teddy in "A Soldier's Button" was Paul's cousin--and a
dear, and the Cotswold country is the most hospitable country in the
world, so we let him in. Mrs. Birkin, Mrs. Cushion, Williams, and Dorcas
Heaven are of the soil, and so are the children.
Mrs. Birkin, Mrs. Cushion, and hundreds like them, have had their hand
in the making of our men. They are but humble, simple folk. In their
lives they asked but little of fate, and what fate sent they accepted
with the patient philosophy of the poor. They belonged to their period,
and their period has passed.
Cotswold names are so much prettier than any one can imagine that it has
always been a self-denying ordinance to refrain from using them, but
generally I have resisted temptation. Otherwise somebody might go
seeking Mrs. Birkin in Arlington Row and be angry with me because she is
no longer there. I live in terror of accurate people with large-scale
maps, who seek to pin me down to this place or that. But they may take
it from me that all the places are, as the Cotswold folk would say,
"thar or thar about."
London, _May_ 1918.
*CONTENTS*