My father’s two old sisters were wonderful raconteuses, and if they would, they could have told us some good stories of Wiltshire in the old days. Unluckily they entered with such violent prejudice into all the contemporary family events, that when they had finished with the misdemeanours of their nephews and nieces they had few words left for the past. But Aunt Margaret Bruce could sometimes be drawn, and then she was always entertaining.
She was staying once in a house where Keble was a fellow guest, and one evening their host read aloud, with great enthusiasm, The Raven of Edgar Allen Poe. In the impressed silence which followed, Mr. Keble remarked:
‘Don’t you think it would have been better if that had never been printed?’
Thomas Moore was in those days a neighbour, and he often came to Potterne to hear my grandmother sing his ‘Irish Melodies’. She had a very beautiful voice, and he used to stand by the piano as she sang, regulating her interpretation by gestures with his hands. He also liked to be asked to sing his own songs, and he sang one night at Wans when Aunt Margaret was there. During the song, two of the guests exchanged a whispered remark. Tommy Moore was extremely conceited and touchy, and now he seized his music and rushed out of the room. In the awed silence which followed, the front door slammed loudly. Unfortunately the poet possessed no bump of locality, and though Wans was very near to his cottage at Sloperton, he lost his way and wandered all night. His wife thought he was dead, but the next morning he was seen in a neighbouring field, sitting quietly on a gate waiting for someone to pass by and tell him where he was.
A good deal might be written about the things which the oldest inhabitant has forgotten to tell. There was, for instance, the Lord Radnor who died without telling his successor the whereabouts of some papers essential to the ownership of Longford. The wife of the heir was that intrepid spiritualist of whom I have already spoken, and although in his lifetime her father-in-law’s temper had been such that no one ever dared ask him an awkward question, yet now she dauntlessly called him back from the shades. There was no doubt as to the identity of the ghost who returned. Lord Radnor’s vigorous language was easily recognizable; and now in his well-known idiom, he told the family what they wanted to know, and the lost papers were discovered.
The beautiful Elizabeth Countess of Pembroke must have been, when she died in 1831, Wilton’s oldest inhabitant. Two years before this, she had carried into Hoare’s Bank in Fleet Street, a locked box to be deposited in one of the strong rooms. There it remained when she died, for she had told none of her family about it; and there it lay unclaimed for eighty years. Its existence was quite unknown to the then Lord Pembroke when Messrs. Hoare asked him his wishes about it. The box was sent to Wilton, but no key could be found for it. It was forced open, and then there was disclosed a treasure which sounds more like the Arabian Nights than a Wiltshire country house at the beginning of the twentieth century. Displayed on a series of trays was the celebrated collection of gems made by Cardinal Mazarin, and which had been the talk of Europe three hundred years before.
Lady Pembroke knew what she was doing when she handed those jewels to Messrs. Hoare, and then died without saying anything about them. Her son George Augustus had died in 1827, and his successor Robert (the ‘wicked’ though charming and romantic earl) was living in Paris, where he made a practice of selling any heirloom on which he could lay his hands. Lady Pembroke had not the power to will the Mazarin gems away from the head of the family, but at ninety-two she still possessed the tact and judgment which had not failed her throughout her long and difficult life. Her loyalty and wisdom told her what to do. She kept silence, and she also kept the Mazarin jewels for the Pembroke family.
Chapter Eight
CLOCKS AND CALENDARS
Well may we rejoice and sing .
When St. Augustine was asked what he thought on the nature of time, he replied: ‘ When I think of it, I know. When I speak of it, I cannot say,’ and most people would agree with the second part of this pronouncement. Baron von Hugel habitually used two different words when he spoke of time, for he was both a profound thinker and a careful speaker, and he would use twenty words where other people would use one, if he could thus express more clearly and candidly what he had in mind. The Baron spoke of ‘Time’ and of ‘Clock-Time’, and this distinction is now used by many other writers. Countrymen will easily respond to its truth and delicacy. The nearer one lives to nature, the more one realizes the artificial character of that clock-time by which town-dwellers automatically and unquestioningly regulate their lives. To this day, when the true Wiltshireman wants to know the time, a clock is the last thing he will consult. He looks at the sun or the shadows, or at the smoke of a far-off passing train.
Yet we had timepieces in Wiltshire when the rest of England had not even thought of wanting them. Mrs. Markham first taught me that King Alfred told the time by candles painted with coloured bands of regular widths, and these early clocks were of Wessex invention. But their use was never very general, and most people still watched the sun in the heavens, rather than the candle in the house.
The oldest clock in Wiltshire is centuries older than King Alfred and his candles. It is Stonehenge, which ignores the hours, and tells the time of the year rather than of the day. Stonehenge is indeed the holy place of an ancient religion, but it also told the men of that religion, as it tells the men of to-day, the dates of the summer and the winter solstices, as well as the equinoxes in autumn and in spring. It is almost a disaster that so many people have now heard that on the longest day, the sun rises over the Hele Stone far away to the east of the circle, throwing its long shadow upon the Altar Stone in the centre. This quiet miracle of the dawn was once an object of pilgrimage: now it is a centre of jollification. On the evening before the longest day, a hurlyburly of charabancs can be seen and heard converging upon Stonehenge. These disgorge a crowd of merrymakers who spend some jolly hours drinking barrels of beer and bottles of ‘mineral water’—a dreary phrase which it is impossible to associate with the merry pop of ginger beer. Gramophones and other noises keep this rout awake till sunrise, but they would be far more sure of getting what they want, if they stayed in Bournemouth and went to a cinema, where a good sunrise can be guaranteed without exposure to rough weather, and without disturbing the shepherds of Salisbury Plain.
Those Plain-dwellers watch the sun all round the year, and he regulates their lives and their work. Clock-time is not for them, and their hours cannot be codified as if they worked in factories at the call of sirens and whistles. Their times and seasons are nature’s own.
Many farmers dislike summer time, but it is at least an acknowledgement of the truth, that day and night are not the same thing in summer and in winter. To me, living in the country, summer time is pure joy. I can never forget the first day when that miraculous movement of the clock seemed suddenly to release upon us in one day all the sunshine of a summer. It was May 21st, 1916, and life had for many months been darkened for us by the war. I am convinced that the sun was confused by the change in the clocks, so that he shone that day for more hours than he knew. We were in London, and my brother Reginald suggested a drive into the country, so we drove away from our own troubled times and back into the eighteenth century, down the Avenue in Bushey Park where the chesnut trees were lit by their thousands of flowery chandeliers. Then to Hampton Court, where man has for long dominated nature, and where the art of one generation has never feared to impose itself upon the work of bygone predecessors.
The huge bell of the palace clock was indeed striking that day for the first time, an hour ahead of the sun, but at Hampton Court, the human race expects to be supreme. Wolsey’s Tudor Palace had accepted the new formality of Wren’s Fountain Court: horticulture had produced in the English climate those stupendous bunches of grapes which rivalled Joshua’s spoils from Palestine: the formal eighteenth century flower beds had been adapted to the free grace of flowers grown to accord with the taste of another day. The royal palace knows how to ad
apt itself to the vagaries of kings, and Hampton Court obeyed the new law of Summer Time, with a zest unequalled elsewhere.
Nature too rejoiced in the sun. At luncheon in a copse near Chertsey we saw the clear liquid rays work miracles as they slipped through the pale green foliage of the birches, and at Ascot, the azaleas in my uncle’s garden smelt like Hymettus honey. We reached Windsor in the evening. There we stayed, watching the long-delayed sunset lighting the castle walls when night had begun at last to creep over the forest trees in the park. It was unforgettable—the red flame which illuminated that vast conglomeration of buildings, where the passing centuries had slowly achieved a triumph of dignity and strength. Thus lit, in proud isolation, Windsor Castle seemed to be plus royaliste que le roi.
The coming each year of summer time always recalls to me that long lovely day, though putting on the clocks was no new thing at Wilton. Like the King at Sandringham, Sidney Lord Pembroke had always advanced his clocks half an hour in the shooting season, though this made endless confusions over fixing engagements with people who were keeping Greenwich time. The Wilton people called Lord Pembroke’s manipulated clock-time ‘The Lord’s Day’.
On the downs, Lord’s Day and Commoners’ Day are lost in a wide awareness of the rise and fall of daylight which cannot be experienced by people who live in the valleys. The shepherds in their huts in the lambing season watch the eternal wonder of the sky, and so do the gipsies in their tents. I was nearest to it when I was once isolated by whooping-cough, and lived for three weeks in the grand stand on Salisbury Race Plain. There I saw the weather as never before, and I saw too, that if you can only see enough of it, all weather has beauty. My companion in exile was Foyle, our delightful maid, and we had great fun together, for she was an extremely racy conversationalist. We shared a bedroom, the only room in which it was possible to light a fire, and in it we lay, side by side, on camp beds.
On our first night, we had the worst thunderstorm of a generation, and half Wilton hurried up to see us next morning, convinced that the grand stand must have been struck by lightning. The storm made us feel very little and futile, as it roared round us, filling the sky with blazing darkness; and yet it was strangely exhilarating to be there alone on the downs, with all the powers of nature screaming past our room. We talked to one another in subdued voices during the din.
The storm was the opening of a fortnight of bad weather, and those wild days were wonderful to watch. I used to lie out in the shelter, watching the Cathedral as it changed its aspect every hour. Sometimes it appeared to be quite near by, and then it was of a brilliant transparent texture, lit up from within. A quarter of an hour later, it had receded into the distance, and stood miles away, a dull and sulky grey. Then it warmed to a deep yet threatening blue, after which it lost all appearance of solidity, and became an ethereal building of sunlit mist. In the evening it shone as red as the sunset which illuminated it; and often there played about it wide sheets or narrow spears of summer lightning, which shivered upon the delicately carved pinnacles of the spire.
Lots of people came to visit me in this beautiful isolation, riding up singly or in parties, driving pony-carts, or walking through the Hare Warren, for this was in 1907, when few country neighbours possessed motor cars. We often had large tea-parties, when the guests sat at the correct quarantine distance, and Foyle gave round tea and cakes. When everyone had gone home, we retired to our little sitting-room, with all round us the endless silence of the downs, and then, often, we heard again the thud of hoofs. Foyle hurried out to welcome the belated visitors, but no one could be seen, and the galloping horses passed invisibly by. We liked to think that we were hearing the echoes of the horse races of long ago, perhaps that one when even the bitterness of the Civil Wars did not prevent the bells of St. Thomas at Salisbury from ringing when Lord Pembroke won the Salisbury Cup.
These memories seem far from clocks and calendars, yet they lead back towards them. Years before my whooping-cough visit, my brother Frank had also been sent in quarantine to the Race Plain, where he lodged with the caretaker. These cottagers told the time by the smoke of the trains which passed in the valley. They got up by the milk train between four and five: they had breakfast by the paper train at half-past seven: the London express at half-past twelve was their dinner bell. If they had a clock, they did not use it or even wind it up.
More surprising than this, however, was the fact that many people living in the Square at Wilton, within sight of the town clock, preferred to tell the time by my father. He was the most punctual of men, and every morning in the week, he read Matins in the church at eight, and prayers at Wilton House at nine. He always walked through the Square at ten minutes to nine, and then the people set their watches, left to catch their trains, or started their day’s work.
My brother Harold was for five years in a fort in Central Africa with a detachment of the King’s African Rifles. In his district of twenty-thousand natives, no one possessed any means of measuring time. Harold was in fact their King Alfred, for he first taught them that it was possible to divide a day into hours. His watch became the town clock of the district, regulating the routine of his command. At last it went wrong, and then he made a sundial, and taught his soldiers to tell the time by it. Two buglers were always stationed beside it, bugling the hours as the shadow moved round. This gave immense delight to the people in the district, and all went well till the rainy season began. Then one morning two scared soldiers rushed in saying that ‘the spirit was dead’. So indeed it was, till the sun shone again. Afterwards Harold gave his sergeants Waterbury watches, which made them very proud.
These natives loved my brother, and when he came home they wrote him many letters in their pictorial language which contains few words for abstract ideas like joy and sorrow.
‘When we think of you, we laugh,’ one of them wrote. ‘And when we think that you have gone away, we cry.’
Those words said what we all felt after Harold had been killed in France.
I hope that Easter will not become a fixed date as long as I live, for when this is done, it will mean another long step taken towards the mechanization of life. The changing date of Easter is in harmony with our variable spring.
For people who live in towns, the calendars and timetables which can be bought in shops must be useful and even indispensable, but primitive people, countrymen, and creative workers will continue to make their own. What poet ever produced his poem on the date scheduled by the publisher for its appearance? Probably other painters are like Rex Whistler, who never buys an engagement book, but scribbles his dates on to a long narrow strip of paper, always decorated with absurd or graceful drawings. No one ever understood better the convenience of his agricultural parishioners than did Archdeacon Lear when he announced from the pulpit that the next evening service would be on the night of the full moon.
In his book Farmer’s Glory, my friend and neighbour Mr. Street writes of the farmers’ year, as it unrolled itself before the eyes of a little boy between thirty and forty years ago. Ploughing in the autumn; lambing and sowing wheat after Christmas; putting in barley and oats in February and March; turnips in April; swedes and kale in May. Then followed the hay harvest, the corn harvest, and the root harvest. As he says: ‘The system swept you with it, round and round, year after year, like a cog in a machine.’ In truth, the system made the year. It was the year; and if ever Mr. Street found himself imprisoned for life in a sausage factory at Chicago, he would never get out of his bones, that sense of the pattern made for him by the months as they swung their unchanging round on Ditchampton Farm.
Half a mile away, we lived at the Rectory, in the orbit too of those agricultural seasons, and yet our year was not the farmer’s year. We had our own. Ours was the Christian year.
Our year, like Mr. Street’s, did not begin on January the first. Ann Thorp, my grandmother’s old maid who lived with us, remarked each year on the ‘dull, dark days before Christmas’, and it was in these dull, dark days that
our year began, with Advent Sunday. My father’s preaching turn as a Prebendary of Salisbury often fell on the Sunday before Advent, and we generally went with him to the Cathedral Service that afternoon. So the approach of the new year was heralded for us by the anthem from Mendelssohn’s ‘Lobgesang’.
Watchman, will the night soon pass?
The night is departing, depar … ting. The day is approaching,
approa … ching.
The incredible high note was flung unto the arches in the pure fearless tones of the chorister. Each year I still hear in my mind those soaring notes of confidence in the ‘ dull, dark days before Christmas’.
Dull and dark they may have been, but they were busy days for us. We were counting the Sunday School marks, and buying the prizes, and then visiting old people to ask what they wanted as Christmas presents. They were always ready for our tap on the door, and had hardly opened it before their own answer rapped out: ‘ Trowsers’, ‘Blankets’, or ‘A dress length’. We noted this down and hastened back into the dull, dark weather. There were our own Christmas presents to make or buy, and we were often rehearsing a play to be performed directly after Christmas. And there were always the church decorations.
Without Knowing Mr Walkley Page 8