(Can ye tell me, fisher laddies,
What’s gotten into the heads o’ the baddies?)
‘Licky Pasties’ too, of which one of the constituents is a leek, were the fine fare and one that the women would wrap in hot flannel and give to their men-folk to take to the fishing. Delicacies indeed.
And the westerly weather appealed to Kenneth, not only in its idylls of summer evenings and estuaries, the gorse yellow on the cliff-tops, the hunting-call of the swifts loud and low down about the boat that drew to her moorings, but the great gales also that praise the Lord. He loved the roar of the rain that rattles like small shot against an ‘oily’, he loved the salt sting of the spume that flies over the cliff when the great, grey seas, swinging out of the mist, explode below and, recoiling like a mill-race, suck the gravel beaches after them in thunder — a moil of green water, a turmoil of white suds.
This Lizard that Kenneth took to his heart is the last of English land to be sighted by down-Channel shipping. Two lighthouses wink there when the dark falls. The peregrine nests on the sea cliffs and there the fulmar flies. Off shore that grim coast is fortressed with rocks, it is fringed and fanged with reefs where, even in the endless summer days, the blue-and-white fountains spout continually.
But, rugged and gigantic, a hard and scanty land is this and its people wring want from the sea which in turn takes her toll of them. And those who do not fish toil in serpentine, for so the colour-veined rock of Lizard is called. Kenneth Grahame, in his time, bought many a ‘tourist article’ — a candlestick here, an inkstand there, or, perhaps a photograph frame, all in this heavy granite, and just to ‘help-along’ a Cornishman.
Salvage occurred sometimes. Kenneth has been remembered as he stood on the turf-covered cliff-top among an acreage, and much more, of fleeces from Morocco. A great ship had driven, head on, into the black fangs of the reef and there she had broken asunder. Her cargo of valuable sheepskins was to salve. Throughout the parish every occupation, from the boiling of an egg to the building of a church, was suspended and, creeping child to nonogenarian, all hands were to the salving, grabbing and drying and cleaning the wool which, high in quality, promised a noble dividend to those who could get it — a dividend greater than any that pollock or pilchard could pay.
For a while Kenneth Grahame stood among the salvors. Then he too went to the beaches — an amateur of might. What the sea brought to him or what, waist-deep, he wrested from her he gave to the oldest of the gleaners, or to the brown-faced youngest who had, he said, ‘much cry and little wool’. Anyhow it was a great harvest and, at the end of the week, more watches were bought at The Lizard than had been sold in the memory of man.
For in Cornwall the possession of a watch is a hall-mark of a solid prosperity and the owner of a silver watch is a man of luxury, even leisure, whom all must respect. For only the luxurious possess a silver watch. At The Lizard, and in sea-faring Cornwall generally, gold is unknown. Silver is the only ware. Watches are of silver and so are wedding-rings. In fact when Kenneth, about to be married at Fowey, wanted a wedding-ring, the ‘plain gold ring’ of the ballad, it was to Plymouth that he must journey before he could buy one. But, as I have said, after the wreck of the Suevic, silver watches were common at The Lizard—’ common as pilchards at Looe’. Indeed one granddad, the richer for the flotsam, the extra wool that Kenneth had won for him, treated himself to two silver watches. And lived twice as happy ever after.
Tom Roberts was Kenneth’s friend who took him to the fishing. Tom was, for twenty-one years, coxswain of the lifeboat and, at seventy-four years of age (when he could still go aloft ‘like a boy’) he had taken his boat out through the tumbling rock-staked tides to the sinking Suevic. He had climbed on board the wreck and calmed the crew with the tidings that ‘she was so fast on the rocks that she couldn’t sink — not yet awhile, anyway’.
Mary Ellen was the daughter of Tom Roberts, she was married to Mr. Squibb the signalman of the lifeboat. She has lately written a letter telling of these Cornish days. I quote a few lines of it, just as Mrs. Squibb has written them down: ‘I remember young Mr. Kenneth, he was very fond of my father and was always very nice to us and to my family. He used to love going out fishing all night with father. They used to set a boulter and they would catch very big fish, cod-fish and ling, which people used to salt and dry for the winter. They don’t seem to do that now. Father named his boat the Mary Ellen after me. Rather a funny name for a boat but he thought a lot of me. I think the first time I remember Mr. Kenneth was in 1887. He had been out with father fishing that day and he called in on his way back. I happened to be out getting something and when I came in he was sitting in his sea-boots with my two little girls in their nightgowns one on each knee. They had heard some one come in and come creeping down for to peep who it was and he had taken them up. I can see the three of them now.’
Mrs. Squibb still lives at Gue Graze, The Lizard. And she lets lodgings and one of ‘the two little girls’ cooks most beautifully.
Another of Kenneth Grahame’s Cornish friends was ‘Captain James’. He was not really a captain but, after years of strenuous toil, he had (something like Mr. Kipling’s McPhee) amassed a reasonable competence — and the two watches which confer the honorary rank of Captain. So he built himself a fine house and then Mrs. Captain James invited her old acquaintance, Mr. Kenneth Grahame, to take tea.
The new house had a ‘slab’ which is Cornish for kitchen range and marks the millionaire. Kenneth arrived punctually. The Captain was seated on one side of the ‘slab’ (which, polished like a mirror, was ‘too good to use’), on the other side sat ‘the girl’, an appendage of new-found state, who shuffled her feet in agonies of shyness, crossing and uncrossing them, and bending a flushed face above a new duster which she made pretence to darn.
The two supported Mrs. James who stood between them to receive the guest. This done, Mrs. James, leaving her husband to his new-found, and tedious, inaction, began the ‘showing-over’. The furniture was from Plymouth, the parlour was ‘Louis-quinsey’ and the dining-room ‘Chewter’ (Tudor). There were four upstairs rooms, two furnished individually, in period styles, by the free-hand Plymouth firm. Both, sighed Mrs. James, were ‘too good to use But the Captain and she made the best of it by putting ‘the girl’ to sleep in the box-room and sleeping themselves in the latter’s very modest bedroom which, being of no particular period, seemed more homelike than the ‘Queen Annie’ and the ‘George-g-i-an’ of the other two chambers.
As the viewing became more prolonged Mrs. James became the more melancholy, until, exhibiting the labour-saving contrivances of the larder, she, who had lived her happy married life in a wooden shanty, broke down and broke out—’ I doubt whether we shall ever get our healths in this close place (the gale-swept Lizard!) and besides I do belong to work and there’s naught to do here but polish the “slab” and “the girl” does that.’ (To ‘belong to’ means in Cornwall, to be accustomed to; as, for instance, if one asked for fish-hooks, one might be told by the vendors, ‘we do belong to keep them but we’re out of them this day’.)
So Kenneth spoke kind words and the two returned to the kitchen and the Captain, who ‘belonging to work’ (just as did his old wife) had not even ‘the girl’s’ consolation of darning a duster and might but sit and admire the ‘slab Kenneth was touched, he has told, by the pathos of a dream of Kubla Khan so sadly fulfilled as to be, in the fact, a nightmare. But the tea was excellent.
In his ‘private ledger’ I have found these lines written down. I like to imagine that they were composed on a summer evening while the Mary Ellen beat out to the conger grounds and, of a sudden, the orange beam stabbed the blue dusk.
THE LIZARD LIGHTS
Lizard Lights, our eyes were dim
When we watched your beacon swim
Down the gloom and disappear,
Last of all we held most dear,
On that far distant night of nights
When last we saw you, Lizard Light
s!
Now, what magic spell is shed, —
Like a dream the years have sped;
Dream-like, gone the fears and frets,
Gone the longings and regrets;
Your glad ray at last requites
All our sorrow, Lizard Lights!
The above verses sound so sadly that only a happy young man, an after-tea pipe in his mouth and a night’s conger fishing before him, could have made them.
Kenneth Grahame first went to Fowey in 1899. It was at St. Fimbarrus Church that he was married. St. Fimbarrus of Cork (of all places) and not of Cornwall! Fowey is pronounced Foy. It lies on the west shore of the estuary of the river Fowey. It has a deep sea harbour and the big ships go in and out of it. It has a Fort and a Ferry — but most people know Fowey best because it is ‘the little grey sea town that clings along one side of the harbour’ which the Sea-Rat describes, so exactly, in The Wind in the Willows. Therefore there is no need that I should describe Fowey.
Beyond saying (the Sea-Rat has omitted to say this) that when elephants visit Fowey — sometimes elephants do and a circus toward — they find the street of Fowey so perpendicular, such a toboggan-slide of a place, that they must go down it philosophically, and in all their gilt trappings, seated upon their poor tails. Which the boys of Fowey, of which Kenneth was ever one, think is comical.
Fowey is also the ‘Troy Town’ of Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch. To whom Kenneth Grahame, writing to thank Sir Arthur for the dedication of his book, The Mayor of Troy, says, ‘I feel now really officially connected with the place, through its Mayor; and some day I shall put in for an almshouse, if you have any.’ The Mayor is, of course, dedicated to ‘My friend Kenneth Grahame and the rest of the crew of the Richard and Emily The Richard and Emily was the rowing-boat used by Mr and Mrs. Grahame when on their honeymoon, which was spent at Fowey.
Mrs. Grahame writes of the two children of Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch thus:
‘The eight-year-old page at our wedding was Bevil Quiller-Couch the only son of “Q” — a splendid little fellow who, even at that age, was so clever and so sensible that his opinion was weighed and gravely taken, as later it came to be sought and valued, alike by towns-people and sailor-men. He grew up to be what he then promised — a tower of strength, ever to be relied on — cheerful, charming — with a genius for friendship in every walk of life, and for those of all ages. Always a great man in a boat, sailing, rowing — and indeed as much at home in, or on, the water as on land — full of courage, as when he scaled an all but unsurmountable cliff to get succour for an old friend whose small yacht had filled and sunk in the bay below. As much loved at Winchester, at Oxford and in the Army, as he was in his native place, he lived to serve through the War, from August 1914 to the end, taking all risks yet being miraculously spared.
‘He won the M.C. and later, the D.S.O. Going out as a Subaltern he rose rapidly to his Majority, and then to command a Battery — his beloved “Royal Ninth” of the Second Division during the last two years of fighting in France. He died of pneumonia in the Army of Occupation, to which he had returned, when he could have been demobilized, in order to see the story of his Battery closed to perfection and provide that its horses were sent home to England, in the pride they had deserved. They and his men, so he had written home to his parents on Armistice Day, “were my children”.
‘Who would have thought that the little laughing boy in his white sailor suit with the bunch of roses for a buttonhole would have played so brave and enduring a part in so terrible a war, from the start to the finish of it, only to die of illness on the eve of his marriage? Some one at our long-ago wedding remarked to the little page, “Well, Bevil, it will be your turn next” — to which Bevil, with the common sense he shared with Dr. Johnson, replied calmly, “There are a good many in this town to be married before me.”
‘He was a boy who then, and as long as his short life lasted, held a great place in the hearts of those who knew him, and in leaving this world left a great sense of grief and permanent loss, because somehow that place which he held would for ever remain empty — as no other could fill it as he had, with his cheery kindness, his unfailing courage and his vivid individuality. His resourcefulness was remarkable, and he was always a character and a personage, counselling and ruling those far older and (presumably) wiser than himself. But Bevil was always wise even as a child.
‘Fowey was the best place in the world. The skies so blue, the sun so golden, and the moon so silver. Picnics with the Q’s, long sails in their yacht, the Vida, over the Bay to Penrice, the home of Admiral and Lady Graves Sawle, the latter, in her youth, an inspiration to Savage Landor. Rowing with the Q’s in their red boat, the Picotee, later to be”manned” by the golden-haired girl who at the earliest age was put into a tiny boat of her very own to be coached by her brother Bevil, who, eight years older than she, carried her up and down the room as a long-clothes baby, and cried exultingly, “See how good she is with me, I believe she likes a man’s step” (the man being eight!).
‘That long-clothes baby when arrived at the age of four, came to spend an afternoon with us at the Fowey Hotel, and on her nurse coming for her at bedtime said, “You needn’t try to fetch me, Nurse, but you can get my nightie, for I am going to live with the Grahames.”
In the summer of 1899, Kenneth, at Fowey and writing to a lady, says: ‘My sister said that she went along the cliffs and climbed down to a little cove and as she sat there a big rat came out and sat beside her and ate winkles! Said I to my sister, “Did he buy them off a barrow and drop them into his hat?” But she looked puzzled and said, “No, he only scraped in the seaweed with his little paws and fetched them out.” Then I began again—” Was it a black pin that he ate them with?” And she thought I was raving so I dropped the subject. But had I been there he’d have given me winkles and I’d have lent him a pin out of my tie. Another T.B. Destroyer has just come in. This looks like war and the chaffinch on the pea-stick is swearing at it like anything because, I suppose, his motto is “Peas at any Price Talking of peas there’s a vegetable cart here that goes around and the driver, instead of bellowing, plays on a comet, “Then you’ll remember me” and “Come to the Cook House Door”, while his missus sells taters from the back of the cart. And talking of taters reminds me of flowers. In the lanes, they are pink and yellow and blue like the boats. There’s valerian in masses of pink which sets off the blue of the sky as the Judas trees do in Italy — by the way I saw a Judas tree in blossom just lately at Torquay — and there’s pink campion and In Pretoria, at that time, Kruger was being obdurate. cranesbill and blue speedwell and white stitchwort thrown in and yellow wild-mustard — and here and there a scarlet poppy, not many, but big ones. The Dashing Wave (brig) is loading up with china-clay. A beautiful schooner yacht is slowly passing out under my very nose. It’s a fortnight now come Monday and I continue to “be a nigger”, which is to like the place and loaf around it and never want to leave it. The schooner won’t let me alone, she’s just tacked across — like a minx. The sea has all the blues in the world and a few over. And thank you for the book, I shall enjoy it and it shall be duly returned (even though there is no book-plate) which is rather a concession, since one has to acquire books somehow!’
This letter, apart from being in itself a delightful letter, is instructive because it is, so far as I know, the earliest indication of the writer’s interest in the Rat and his literary possibilities, an inspiration afterwards, of course, to come fully to flower in The Wind in the Willows. And as for the black pin, Kenneth Grahame, even in the eating of a winkle, was always gourmet.
It has been seen that Kenneth hankered for the simple Cornish fare he ate on the quays and in the country places. He was impatient, in the more fashionable hotels, of the fashionable menus served to him by waiters in black swallowtails and reasonably white shirts. To one of such who (bringing hors d’ oeuvres, after a quarter of an hour’s inactivity) volunteered the information that his great-grandfather had been a bish
op, Kenneth made no direct reply. Though he said presently, to his companion, that he’d liefer the waiter had had a butler for an ancestor than a bishop for then he might have inherited a talent for his profession. ‘Though even so,’ he added, ‘the fellow’s a natural fool and would probably have hidden it in a napkin.’
He says, in a letter of much later years, ‘I get down to Fowey occasionally where Time always seems to stand still at the same point as on that bright summer day when you and your mother touched at the quayside; it is always holiday to me to catch a sight of the shipping there once more.’
But I best like to think of the Kenneth of the Cornish days as the jolly young giant in the dark-blue jersey, the brown face and the fish scales who stands at the top of the worn old water-steps after a night with the pilchard boats, stands and looks back at a blueness of sky and morning sea, a very blueness, the joy of which seems to him, even at that moment, better than breakfast.
CHAPTER XI. BOHAM’S: (PART I)
MAYFIELD, Cookham Dene, whither the Grahames had gone when the Durham Villa days were done, was not meant to be a permanency. Mayfield had a carriage-sweep and educational advantages and Kenneth Grahame wanted neither. The neighbourhood too was a social one and he had no desire for society. Early in 1910 he heard of a farmhouse that sounded suitable. He went to see it and it was as suitable as it sounded. He had made a point of it having no billiard-room. He had wished it to be difficult of access. In both respects it met his views. The nearest billiard-table was ten miles away and folk who wanted to get to Boham’s usually walked.
The disadvantages of carriage-sweeps had been illustrated when Mr and Mrs. Grahame had gone to lunch with Mr and Mrs. Thomas Hardy. The Grahames arrived at Dorchester early on a fine morning and, hiring a fly, they told the driver to drive to various places of interest in the neighbourhood. Towards one o’clock Kenneth, now ravenously hungry, told the cabman to go to Max Gate (the novelist’s house). The latter said that to do so was as much as his licence was worth. He turned his horse and drove in the opposite direction. Indignantly told to obey orders, he stopped and, from his box, addressed his fares. He explained that Mr. Hardy had been so much annoyed by Americans and (pointedly) others driving up to his door and peeping through his windows that he had forbidden the public vehicles of Dorchester to accept a charter to his house. If his (the driver’s) present passengers wished to go to Max Gate they must walk there. But he advised them not to risk it and he took no responsibility. In the end he compromised by putting them down ‘as near as he dared’ — about a mile’s walk from the flesh-pots.
Complete Works of Kenneth Grahame Page 90