ARCADIA
“I am here with thee and thy goats, as the most capricious poet,
honest Ovid, was among the Goths.”--_As You Like It._
The Lord President might appoint, but the Secretary disappoints, and he
ordered me to Norfolk, there to act as second inspector to the Rev. F.
Synge. The alternative, for there were two places to be filled up, was
Oxford, and I was a good deal annoyed at my billet. At Oxford I could
have dined in hall and common-room, read my _Times_ at the Union, and
at the same time have been within easy reach of my home. But I have
reason to believe that there were thorns on the Oxford rose-trees:
certainly my successful rival made a very short stay in the Civil
Service.
Of Norfolk I knew nothing, and it seemed intolerably remote. In those
days it had no golf links, and its Broads were as little frequented as
Lake Balaton. Its railway system was arranged on the plan of the Roman
camp: there was a Via Principalis running north and south; King’s Lynn
to Wells, Norwich, and London: and a cross line (I forget the Latin
term) running east and west--Yarmouth to Norwich and Ely. The traveller
who wished to wander in the back streets of the county, drove, rode, or
walked. Safety bicycles were not yet: the Boneshaker was not tempting,
and the Spider was perilous. Add to this a curious collection of
third-class inns, and the climate of Siberia. There were days in spring
when one left home in the morning with a bright blue sky overhead and
a N.W. wind far more attractive than Kingsley’s north-easter: but with
little warning the sky would be overcast, and whirlwinds of rain,
snow, or sleet would drive one to depths of misery, and back to the
third-class inn, where the chimney smoked, and there were woolly mutton
chops for dinner.
There were days in April at Yarmouth, for by some perversity of
judgment Yarmouth school inspections had been fixed in April, when the
black east wind, fresh from the Ural Mountains, paid no more heed to
the impediment offered by a brick wall than would the Röntgen rays to
a deal door. There were days in June when a pitiless sun scorched the
traveller till about five in the afternoon, at which time a sea-breeze
from the east rose up and afflicted his throat and lungs with all the
diseases that begin with a cold and end in ’itis. At such times the
parched light soil rose up in clouds, and much real property changed
hands.
Let me offer you the local anecdote of the parts about Brandon and
Thetford, where Suffolk and Norfolk meet:
First farmer: “Neow which county dew your land lay in, Mr. A.?”
Second farmer: “Well, Mr. B., thet dew depend mostly on the wind: last
week, when the wind was so wonnerful strong, thet fare to lay mostly in
Norfolk.”
But, if there were thorns to the roses of Oxford, there were roses
to the thorns of Norfolk. I was singularly fortunate in my chief,
both socially and professionally: singularly fortunate, also, in the
assistant whom we shared: both, alas! gone before. And the North-folk
are among the most lovable of the peoples of the earth. It was told of
Bishop Wilberforce that, after meeting with a brother Bishop, he said
he had often heard of the milk of human kindness, but never hitherto
had he met the cow. That cow family still browses on the Norfolk
pastures, and the east wind does not ruffle its sweet temper.
Our district included, perhaps, two-thirds of the county, and
overflowed into the ragged edges of Suffolk: the remaining fraction,
the Fen district, was annexed to Cambridge. We had only one large town,
Norwich: Great Yarmouth, the next in size, had only nine schools. Then
there were about half a dozen market towns, where generally Church and
Chapel maintained rival schools: the bulk of the work lay in country
parishes, and involved drives of from ten to twenty miles before the
morning’s school was reached.
Our general plan of campaign was that my chief, being a family man
with his home in Norwich, took the Norwich schools, and many others
that were within a morning drive or a railway journey. I, being a
bachelor, whose abode was in Early English lodgings, usually went off
on the Monday morning to one of the outlying settlements, and made that
a centre for the five days. As a rule I got to school about 10 with a
margin. The children did nothing beyond the rudiments. I finished the
work by 11.45, went to the Rectory, and inspected the garden, or played
croquet with the Rector’s daughters: had a noble lunch; drove back to
my inn, marked the school papers, wrote the Report, and posted it: and
then--there was a night of Arctic winter length, and not a soul to
speak to. Coming fresh from London club life, I found this plunge into
solitude quite appalling.
A philosopher, whose name I forget, remarked (see Cicero de Officiis)
that he was never less alone than when he was alone. But he would have
admitted that he was never so much alone as when he was alone in a
market town inn:[12] the banal laughter of the commercial-room, and
the murmurs of talk from the nightly assemblage of local magnates who
frequented the bar-parlour, and interchanged pleasantries with the
young lady at the bar--these rose up, as did similar sounds in Sweet
Auburn, and made the hearer as melancholy as the bard.
But this is merely a matter of habit. At the end of two years I
found the life quite agreeable, and two of the hotels--Dereham and
Fakenham, but I am not sure of the eponymous beasts, or heraldic
bearings--sweetened comfort with an ever genial welcome.
The country schools were usually very small, and sometimes very bad. A
very green girl, fresh from the training college, would take a school,
and at the end of the year would get a poor report. In her second
year she would work with more vigour and more skill, and would get a
Report sufficiently good to earn her Parchment Certificate.[13] Then
she would take another school, or a husband, and the education of the
village would relapse. I wonder whether this alternate method still
obtains. “Amant alterna Camaenae” we are told, but I cannot remember
that any of the Nine Sisters took any interest in Elementary Education.
What girl of 20 to 30 would willingly stay for more than two years in a
country village from five to ten miles distant from a railway station,
with no shop windows to look at, and no eligible young men to look at
her?
“For either it was different in blood,
(O cross! too high to be enthralled to low)
Or else misgraffed in respect of years,
(O spite! too old to be engaged to young.)”
In North Wales I hardly ever saw a village school mistress other
than a married woman. Owing to the deplorably low moral tone of the
people it was said to be impossible for a single girl to hold such an
appointment. In Norfolk there was not a shadow of hesitation on this
account: brains were scarce there, as everywhere, but morals were
sound: a good girl at £50 was better than a bad man at £80, and the
managers took their chance of the good girl who would go, in preference
to the bad man who would stay.
I have my old official note-books of that time, recording the school
statistics and draft reports, and I see that in two autumn weeks
I inspected a total of 606 children at a cost to the country in
travelling expenses of £11. In Manchester, 30 years later, I could find
600 children in a single department of a school by spending twopence
on a tram-car, and the day’s travelling from doorstep to doorstep
might take 40 minutes. In Norfolk the real labour of the day was the
travelling, and it would often take two hours’ drive to reach a school
with no more children than you could put in a tram-car.
Yet there were compensations in these long drives. The dearth of
railways made it worth the while of the hotel proprietors to keep good
cattle, and the horses were splendid. I have driven 14 miles in an
hour, without use of whip, to catch a train. Equally precious were the
drivers. O Charlie B.! aged friend and charioteer for three years. How
many miles we journeyed behind that black horse, or those black horses;
and how delightful was your conversation! We began daily with the same
opening:
He: “Let’s see: where is it tu this marnin? Norton? (_meditatively_)
Norton Red Lion? (_he always associated the village with its inn_).
Neow which way du thet lay, I wonder?”
I: “According to the map it is beyond Weston.”
He: “Weston Black Dog: why I was there last week for a funeral: let me
see, where did I fetch that corpse from?”
For when not driving me and the black horse to school, he was driving
the black horse, or horses, in a hearse to a funeral; and during the
Burial Service he baited the horses and himself at the “Red Lion” or
the “Black Dog.”
Thus guided by the association of ideas, Charlie took my vile body
within three or four miles of Norton, and then hailed a native: “Which
way should I go to get to Norton; _far to go the nighest way?_”
Implying that he knew several routes, but was unable to decide on
the best. The school was then found. Very seldom he put up at the
“Red Lion”; usually he went straight to the Rectory, where he got
entertainment for man and beast, and provided entertainment for the
cook by retailing the latest news from Norwich.
Our conversation was most improving. All that I knew about “The
Principles of Agriculture”--a possible subject of examination in
schools--I got from Charlie in those drives. He did his best to teach
a short-sighted man the difference between swedes, mangolds, and
turnips; and between wheat, oats, and barley, before their ears were
developed. He taught me not to expect a field of wheat where I had
been so much pleased with the crop last year. It would be three years
before the phenomenon recurred, and in those years other vegetables
would be seen. This was not to relieve the monotony of agricultural
life, and so to bring the labourer “back to the land,” but for certain
agricultural-chemical reasons which Charlie did not explain.
He had views about cattle, too, and their approximate value, and
attributed the introduction of cattle plague to Gu-anner. Also he
discoursed upon birds, plants, and flowers under their Norfolk names,
such as Stubin wood, Pretty Betsy, Mergule, and White Rim, and gave me
much information. In return one day, as I travelled with my colleague,
I taught him indirectly the mysteries of Roadside Cribbage: you know
the game? A. and B., sitting right and left, count all the men and
beasts on their respective sides of the road within the limits of two
hedges, marking ten for a white horse and ten for a windmill: the
higher score at the end of an agreed distance or time wins the game,
but a cat on the window-sill, or an old woman in spectacles is Game
at once. Charlie was referee about the shade of the horses claimed
as “white”; he watched the game with the keenest interest, and once,
when I snatched a victory at the last moment in the face of a heavy
majority, by espying a spectacled hag, he rolled about in tearful
laughter till the black horse wondered if we had been to a funeral in
his dog-cart.
The scenery was tame as a rule. On the east side about Yarmouth, and
on the west edge towards the Fens it was hideous. But in May and
June the rest of the district was pleasant enough, and the typical
English village, with its broad main street edged with white-walled,
thatch-roofed cottages; its old grey church and snug Rectory and
neat school, all in a ring fence, made such a charming picture that
I recommended an American tourist visiting England in search of
antiquity to drive 20 miles in East Anglia in June. I suppose he would
think little of a hundred-acre field of wheat; but to us men of small
standards--I am told you may put all England into New York State--this
great expanse of rolling gold, when
“A light wind blew from the gates of the sun,
And _waves of shadow_ went over the wheat,”
atoned for a long drive on a burning August day.
September in Norfolk is said to be delightful. I distrust people who
boast of only one month in the year, and that a month which falls in
the holidays. (We began our year’s work on October 1.) But I love them
much, and I am ready to concede September.
The records of those old note-books are often astonishing. These are
village schools noted in one volume:
A. Certificated Teacher’s salary, £36 without house; 72 children
present: 34 examined: passed 22¹⁄₂ per cent.
B. Out of 121 children on the books only 36 have made 250 attendances:
deep snow kept away 11 of these on the day of inspection.
C. 76 children on the books: 38 examined: passed 18 per cent.
D. 17 examined: passed 37¹⁄₂ per cent.
Let me explain the technical terms. If a child did not come to school
250 times in the year he could not be examined. As the schools were
usually open 440 times (that is 220 days) in the year, it was not a
hard bargain. This was before the Act of 1876, which made attendance
compulsory everywhere. Now in the case of School C, which “passed
18 per cent.,” each of the 38 children might have passed in three
subjects, called the Three R’s, making 114 passes in all: instead of
which, 12 passed in Reading, 5 in Writing, and 4 in Arithmetic.
A little further on I have a note of a poem in use at a school, marking
an early attempt at the co-ordination of elementary education with
undenominational morality:
20 pence are ¹⁄₈,
Wash your face and comb your hair.
30 pence are ²⁄₆,
Every day to school repair.
(_Here is a lamentable gap_.)
80 pence are ⁶⁄₈,
Mind what you are taught in school:
90 pence are ⁷⁄₆,
Never call your brother a fool.
Write it myself? Certainly not. I could have managed the mathematical
part, but the ethical deductions would never have occurred to me.
Elsewhere I come to notes of odd names borne by the children. Here is
a girl called Himalaya, because she was born in the troopship of that
name, the ship that carried Charles Ravenshoe to Malta and the East.
She was a lucky girl, _felix opportunitate nativitatis_, for the other
troopers were Serapis and Crocodile. Who would marry a Crocodile?
Also there is a child named Laste. I asked the Rector whether I should
say Last, or Lastee? and whether It was a boy or a girl. It was a boy,
and the Rector well remembered baptizing It. “Name this child,” he
said, and the father replied “Last.” “How do you spell it?” said the
puzzled priest. The father said he didn’t spell it at all, but It was
the tenth, and he wasn’t going to have any more. But he had three more.
“What did he call them?”
The Rector did not know! What amazing indifference! The Curate
suggested “Knave, Queen, King,” and was “Highly Commended.”
The ingenuity of parents in choosing names for their offspring was
truly remarkable. At the end of one note-book I find this list, the
result of six months’ collection: in each case I have the name of the
school in which the child was enrolled:
“Loral, Iho, Bylettia, Jerusia, Fitty, Belden (girl), Asabiah (boy),
Dees (boy), Atelia, Ebert.”
I suspected Jerusia and Asabiah of Biblical extraction, and after
searching Smith’s Dictionary I can identify them with Jerusha, and
Hashabiah, whose history I do not remember. Atelia must have been
Athaliah. “Fitty,” the note says, “is a nickname, but his mother
doesn’t know any other.” Why not Commodus? “who, under the appellation
of Commodious, was held by Mr. Boffin not to have acted up to his name.”
Another book contains an epitaph. There are many collections of such
things published, but I do not possess one, and for anything I know
this may be as well known to collectors as the epitaph of her who was
“first cousin to Burke, commonly called the Sublime.” For those who
share my ignorance I subjoin it, premising that it was in memory of a
former Rector of--let us call it Cornerstone:
“Who for his uniform exemplary practice
of the moral and Social virtues
and a faithful discharge of
the duties of his Ministerial office
was greatly and deservedly esteemed,
and with that decent unconcern
which the Review of a well-spent life
naturally inspires,
Quitted this world Aug--, 1769.”
I like “decent unconcern.”
But Cornerstone is memorable in another way not recorded in my school
note-book. The Rectory had at one time been haunted by two ghosts. One
was a former Rector with a wooden leg, who every night at the midnight
hour came stumping down the cellar steps to fetch himself beer. I like
to think that he was the “decently unconcerned” one, who had found
out his mistake. The other was a lady, and an illustrious one: no
less than Amy Robsart. How it came to pass that Amy (who, according
to Sir Walter, lived “on the frontiers of Devon” and was murdered at
Cumnor) haunted a Norfolk Rectory, you must ask Mr. Andrew Lang. Sir
Walter never let history or geography stand in his way, and one would
not condemn a ghost on his evidence. There she was; she was known as
Mistress Amy, and she walked about at the midnight hour _in a silk
dress that rustled_. The Rector for the time being no doubt regarded
this strangely assorted couple of incorporeal hereditaments with decent
unconcern, but no servant would stay in the house. I think it was my
host who put an end to the servile war by importing some Breton lasses
who spoke no word of English. As it was impossible that any villager
should forewarn them, they were not on the look out: or perchance the
ghosts were only
“Doomed for a certain term to walk the night”
and the term had expired. Certainly the plague ceased, and the
confidence of the village was restored. Thenceforth servants were
plentiful.
That veritable history is not in my note-book: there is little in it
of the slightest interest: there is no record of the human element in
our inspecting life; no record of the constant succession of anxious
managers, distracted teachers, half-distracted and half-delighted
children, whose absorbing interest in the day’s work was a constant
reproach to me.
The teachers alone would fill a volume:
“with your remembered faces,
Dear men and women, whom I sought and slew,”
as an Inspector-poet[14] once sang--the note-books record only your
names with a few dry official details; but memory brings back much
more. It was a hard life for the pioneers in the back-woods of Arcady
in the early ’seventies. You laboured, and other men have entered
into your labours. Ill-paid, often ill-housed; worried by inspectors;
worried by managers and managers’ wives; worried by parents, and
worried by children, who came to school as a personal favour, and, if
affronted, stayed away for a week, you served your generation. There
can be few, if any, still at work whom I knew in Arcady thirty years
ago; but as I look through these books I see the names of many whom
all men honoured, and who reaped a full reward in the affectionate
gratitude of the children.
And those children! shall they have never a word? How they assembled
in the early morning, and haunted the precincts till 8.50, when they
were admitted into school, and harangued on behaviour; how they,
beribboned, brought down flaxen-haired, blue-eyed infants still more
beribboned, and too much pleased with the ribbons to take thought for
the inspector; while comely matrons stood at their doors representing
the past, but carrying in their arms the scholars of the future: how
they waited wearily till the Man arrived, and then in audible whispers
discussed the question whether It was The Same--with apparent reference
to the inspection of the previous year; how they struggled tearfully
through the morning; fled home; and, what time the Inspectors had
emerged from the ever hospitable Rectory, and were gazing at the tombs
of the rude forefathers in the churchyard, were ready, clad in their
workaday suits, to see their enemies off with faintly subdued derisive
cheers.
And the Rector and Rectoress said, “Well, that’s over for another year.”
And the teachers said, “Thank Goodness, that is done; he seemed in a
pretty good temper.”
And H.M.I. said to his colleague: “Nice old boy. What induced him to
marry _her_? Never mind; sha’n’t see her again for a year. What school
to-morrow? Home, Charlie.”
FOOTNOTES:
[12] “In respect that it is solitary I like it very well, but in
respect that it is private it is a very vile life,” said Touchstone.
[13] Certificate printed on parchment, attesting competence as teacher.
See Chapter on “Reports.”
[14] F. H. Myers, _St. Paul_.