The Ballavolley cottage was a typical Manx cottage. On one side of the
porch was the parlor, which also served as a dairy, redolent of milk
and bright with rare old Derby china. On the other side was the
living-room, with its undulating floor of stamped earth and grateless
hearthstone in the ingle, to the right and left of which were seats.
Here in the ingle-nook the little boy would sit watching his aunts
cooking the oaten cake on the griddle, over a fire of turf from the
curragh and gorse from the hills, or the bubbling cooking-pot slung on
the slowrie. One of his earliest recollections is of his old
grandmother, seated on her three-legged stool, bending over the fire,
tongs in hand, renewing the fuel of gorse under the griddle. The walls
of this room were covered with blue crockery ware, and through the
open rafters of the unplastered ceiling could be seen the flooring of
the bedrooms above. These were very low dormer rooms, with the bed in
the angle where the roof was lowest. One had to crawl into bed and lie
just under the whitewashed "scraa" or turf roofing, which smelt
deliciously with an odor that at times still haunts the cottage lad in
statelier homes.
[Illustration: HALL CAINE'S LIBRARY. From a photograph by Barton.]
Hall Caine's impressions of his life at Ballavolley are vivid--the old
preacher at the church, the drinking-bouts of "jough"-beer by the
gallon amongst the villagers, the donkey rides upon the curragh. But
what it best pleases him to remember are the times when, seated in the
ingle-nook, he used to listen to his grandmother telling fairy
stories, as she sat at her black oak spinning-wheel, bending low over
the whirling yarn. "Hommybeg"--it was a pet name she had given to
him--"Hommybeg," she would say, "I will tell you of the fairies." And
the story that he liked best to listen to, though it so frightened him
that he would run and hide his face in the folds of the blue Spanish
cloak which Manx women have worn since two ships of the Great Armada
were wrecked upon the island, was the story of how his grandmother,
when a lass, had seen the fairies with her own eyes. That was many
years before. She had been out one night to meet her sweetheart, and
as she was returning in the moonlight she was overtaken by a
multitude of little men, tiny little fellows in velvet coats and
cocked hats and pointed shoes, who ran after her, swarmed over her,
and clambered up her streaming hair.
[Illustration: GREEBA CASTLE, ISLE OF MAN, WHERE MR. CAINE WROTE MOST
OF "THE MANXMAN."
From a photograph by Abel Lewis, Douglas, Isle of Man.]
He was a precocious lad, and knew no greater delight than to read. The
first book that he remembers reading was a bulky tome on the German
Reformation, about Luther and Melancthon, which he had found. He spent
weeks over it, and, staggering under its weight, would carry it out
into the hayfield, where, truant to the harvest, he would lie behind
the stacks and read and read. One night, indeed, his interest in this
book led him to break the rules of his thrifty home--where children
went to bed when it was dark, so that candles should not be
burned--and light the candles and read on about Luther. He was found
thus by one of his aunts as, pails in hand, she returned home from
milking the cows. Her anger was great. "Candles lit!" she cried.
"What's to do? Candles! Wasting candles on reading, on mere reading!"
He was beaten and sent to bed, bursting with indignation at such
injustice, for he felt that candles were nothing compared to
knowledge. He was a bookish boy, wanting in boyishness, and never
played games, but spent his time in reading, not boyish books, indeed,
but books in which never boy before took interest--histories,
theological works, and, in preference, parliamentary speeches of the
great orators, which he would afterwards rewrite from memory. At a
very early age he showed a great passion for poetry and was a great
reader of Shakespeare. His talent for reading passages of Shakespeare
aloud was such that at the school at Liverpool, where he was educated,
his schoolmaster, George Gill, used to make him read aloud before all
the boys. This caused him great nervous agony, he says, and he
suffered horribly. He was a favorite pupil, and, in a school where
corporal punishment was inflicted with great severity, was never once
beaten. He left school at the age of fifteen and was apprenticed by
his father to John Murray, architect and land-surveyor. The lad had no
special faculties for architecture beyond possessing a fair knowledge
of drawing. When only thirteen he drew the map of England which
appeared in the first edition of "Gill's Geography." At this time he
had shown no bent for authorship beyond making the transcriptions from
memory of the speeches he had read, and writing, for a school
competition, a "Life of Joseph," which was not even read by the
arbitrator, because it was much too long. It is noticeable, however,
that on this "Life of Joseph" he had worked with the same
conscientiousness which has distinguished his literary activity
through all his career. "I read everything on the subject that I could
lay my hands upon," he says, "and spent day and night in working at
it." To-day, as then, when Hall Caine has a book to write, he reads
every book bearing on his theme which he can obtain--"a whole library
for each chapter"--and will work at his subject day and night,
all-absorbed, wrapped up, concentrated.
[Illustration: PEEL CASTLE, ISLE OF MAN.]
John Murray was agent for the Lancashire estates of W.E. Gladstone,
and it was in this way that Hall Caine first became known to the
statesman, who from the first has been amongst his keenest admirers.
One of the first occasions on which he attracted Mr. Gladstone's
attention was one day when he was superintending the surveying of
Seaforth, Gladstone's estate. Gladstone was surprised to see so small
a lad in charge of the chainmen, and began to talk with him. He must
have been impressed by the lad's conversation, for he patted his head
and told him he would be a fine man yet. Mr. Gladstone has never
forgotten this incident. Some time later, John Murray having failed in
the meanwhile, an offer was made to Hall Caine, from the Gladstones,
of the stewardship of the Seaforth estate at a salary of one hundred
and twenty pound a year. "Although the thought of so much wealth," he
relates, "overwhelmed me, I did not see in this offer the prospect of
any career--indeed this had been pointed out to me--and I determined
to continue in the architect's office." He accordingly attached
himself as pupil or apprentice to Richard Owens, the architect.
[Illustration: PEEL, ISLE OF MAN, WHERE MR. CAINE FINISHED "THE
MANXMAN." THE LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT, IN THE ROW FRONTING ON THE WATER
AT THE LEFT OF THE PICTURE, IS THE ONE MR. CAINE OCCUPIED.]