Without Knowing Mr Walkley

by Edith Olivier

  They were tremendous in those days. In the broad spaces between the windows were hung large red wooden shields upon which we emblazoned, in holly leaves and dyed everlasting flowers, mysterious ecclesiastical monograms and devices. This meant many pricked and hammered fingers. But the great undertaking each year was making the wreaths of evergreen, for over six hundred yards were required to twine round the pillars and to hang in festoons between them. The only place in Wilton which was big enough for this wreath-making was the Manège at Wilton House, with its sawdust-covered floor, and here we spent about ten days every December. Wooden benches were placed in rows down the length of the Manège, and upon these were laid pieces of rope, some of which were thirty and some forty-five feet long. One end of each piece was fastened to a nail at the end of the bench, and then we sat down and moved slowly backward, as we tied in the pieces of ilex, holly, box, and laurel, of which the festoon was composed. Our teacher was an old gardener, who had done this kind of thing all his life, and he was very strict about our technique. We had to sit ‘straddle-legged’, and to learn how to graduate the different lengths of stalk in our greenery, so as to make the festoon really strong. It was bitterly cold in the Manège, and round us, as we worked, there rose a cloud of thin dust, made of sawdust and pollen. It always gave me hay-fever, and I sneezed steadily all the time.

  Thus described, those days before Christmas do indeed sound dull and dark, yet Advent had its heavenly splendour. Those heavy clouds were the right setting for the Advent hymn:

  Lo He comes with clouds descending.

  And as one thinks oneself back into those days, what emerges most distinctly is the memory of another austerely grand Gregorian tune:

  Rejoice! Rejoice! Emmanuel

  Shall come to thee O Israel.

  The short winter days were illuminated by the terror, the majesty, and the joy of the Day of Doom.

  For there were many extra services throughout Advent and the hymn-tunes overflowed from the church to the Manège, ringing in out heads as we sneezed among the sawdust.

  In Thy beauty all resplendent,

  In Thy glory all transcendent

  Coming! In the opening east

  Herald brightness slowly swells

  Coming! O my glorious Priest,

  Hear we not thy golden bells?

  I can never forget those radiant visions when Advent comes back now. Every year I remember the old ardent tunes:

  Time appointed may be long

  But the vision must be sure.

  Certainty shall make us strong,

  Joyful patience can endure.

  It is the same all through the year. I owe to my Rectory home the joyful awareness of an eternal significance persisting through the swiftly passing beauty of the seasons. In my mind the Church’s year will always come first. I was born into it. My father and mother gave it to me. It is entangled in all my thoughts.

  Thus to grow up in the Christian year is to learn, in the words of Thomas Treherne, that ‘the World is not this little cottage of Heaven and Earth, though this be fair, it is too small a Gift. When God made the world He made the Heavens, and the Heaven of Heavens, and the Angels, the Celestial Powers. These also are parts of the World: so are all those infinite and eternal Treasures that are to abide for ever, after the Day of Judgement. Neither are these, some here and some there, but all everywhere, and at once to be enjoyed.’

  Christmas is not a special prerogative of Rectories. It is ‘all everywhere, and at once to be enjoyed’. It belongs to all the world, but when it was over, and we went on through the long dreariness of January, we were companioned by the ‘Men of Old’ who once followed their star ‘with gladness’ as they set out on the audacious pilgrimage which sought a king and found a homeless child.

  February was marked by Septuagesima Sunday and by my father’s reading of the first chapter of Genesis as the Lesson that day, and then we always sang Haydn’s anthem, ‘The Heavens are telling’. On the following Sunday, there was Newman’s hymn, ‘Praise to the Holiest in the Height’, and then the week when we prayed for ‘that most excellent gift of charity’.

  It will be seen that our Christian year swung along mainly to the words and tunes of hymns, and they are often a very exciting part of childhood. They recall it for most grown-up people.

  The Charity Collect led into Lent, and at Wilton Rectory this season did indeed mean forty days of penance. Between Advent Sunday and Easter Day, my father made a practice of adding to his usual parish visits, a house to house visitation of all the town. He had a passion for statistics, and in the evenings he loved making up his register, inserting full details of every family from year to year. By the time Lent came, he was already tired, and now there were added special services, addresses and instructions, so that he seemed to be hardly ever at home. Lenten dinners were late because of all these services, and Lenten meals were abstemious in character. To add to their dreariness, they were often attended by a visiting preacher, such as Canon Codd, whom my father once wearily asked to ‘Have some cod, Codd’. This provoked from the family a furtive lenten grin.

  So our pleasures in Lent might be called extremely subdued ones, though there was one which I still remember with peculiar affection. Some of the special services were held in the ‘ Old church’, which was really the chancel of a ruined church standing in the middle of the town. This building was then safe enough to be used, and the services there were much liked by poor people who fancied that their clothes were not grand enough for the parish church. The little chancel was very badly lit, so that shabby hats were not conspicuous, though Mildred and I studied them as well as we could from the choir seats, whence we led Moody and Sankey hymns, to be ardently taken up by the congregation, singing slowly, loudly, and plaintively.

  The smell of those services is unforgettable. It was a mixture of flannel, lamp-oil, dripping umbrellas and mackintoshes, mingled with the very old immured damp, which was being drawn by the stoves from the walls, and from the heavy curtains made of red cloth powdered with black fleurs-de-lis.

  Over the heads of the congregation, through the thick smoky air, my eyes always came to rest on the numbers of memorial tablets which covered the walls. To preserve them had been the main reason for the preservation of the chancel when the church was pulled down in 1845. These memorials pointed to a timepiece of yet another type—a timepiece, the pendulum of which beat out the passing of separate human lives, while the family remained. Underlying these eighteenth century epitaphs was the assumption that though the individuals passed, yet their houses would continue in Wilton and be for ever known there. Some of the tablets contained the records of four of five successive generations in a family of unpretentious burgesses, who had played their parts in the life of the town, as mayors, aldermen, manufacturers, surgeons, or shopkeepers. Their sense of the permanency of the community was not affected by their awareness of the short span of life allotted to each poor mortal. When a man bequeathed a benefit to the town, he decreed that it should continue ‘for ever’.

  The Phelps family memorial tablet is typical.

  ‘John Phelps. Master of the Free School in this town, died the 21st of November 1823, aged 57. Endowed with qualities of mind and manners that might have graced a higher rank of society, he walked humbly in his own, and at the peaceful close of a tranquil and useful life, he feelingly confessed his own unworthiness, resting all his hope for eternity on the mercy of God, through the merits of his Saviour.

  ‘As Master of the Free School, he succeeded his father, William Phelps, who had conducted it for twenty-eight years, whose virtues he copied, whose memory he tenderly cherished, and with whose ashes his own are now mingled.’

  The writer of that epitaph had a great sense of rhythm, and a genius for selecting peacefully-sounding words. The family history is continued to 1878, but by another hand, and with less of music or meaning. In the next generation, ‘John Phelps, M.A.’ (the University degree suggests a new tradition) ‘was for twenty-on
e years his father’s successor in the school’. He died as Vicar of Hatherleigh; while another son of old John Phelps carried ‘his qualities of mind and manners to a higher rank of society’, and died an Archdeacon and Canon of Carlisle.

  The seventeenth-century inscriptions mostly described only the dead man’s trade or profession, saying little or nothing of his family. Thomas Mell, for instance, was ‘once servante to the Right Honourable William Earle of Pembroke, afterwards to Kinge James and Kinge Charles, and also Mayor of this Borough of Wilton’. He died in 1625; and another tablet commemorates Edmund Phillips, ‘Sweeper of Burbidg and Farer to the Earl of Penbruck, hoo died the 19th of January 1677.’

  After these, the earliest of the eighteenth-century epitaphs are very tender and touching. Two sisters, Susannah and Mary Bignell, both died in 1726, their ages being eighteen and twenty-three. Of them it is written:

  In the spring and flower of my time,

  My life to God I did resign,

  Being in my years so young,

  Yet my day was spent, my glass was run.

  The Rev. Henry Pitt was evidently a favourite, when he died aged twenty-seven, in 1733.

  ‘His days of nature were as an agreeable tale that is soon told, not tedious, trifling, idle, or insignificant, but short, instructive, moral, and entertaining.’

  Poor little Eliuzay Jones must have been a lonely child, with no one very near to lament her when she died. This is her epitaph:

  In memory of Eliuzay, a granddaughter of the Rev. Mr. Barford, by Catherine the wife of Mr. Jones of London, who died January 28, 1733, aged 14. Erected by the order of Mr. Sharpe, who died October 28, 1738, aged 71.

  ‘The Righteous shall be had in everlasting remembrance.’

  It seems as if the ‘righteousness’ must refer to Mr. Sharpe who thus parsimoniously ordered a tablet to include his own epitaph with that of little Eliuzay.

  In a very dark corner was the almost-obliterated tablet to the memory of John Hickey Gent, who ‘deceased ye 25th of March Ano 1709.’ On it I thought I read the words:

  ‘Earth lies on thy heart,’ followed by more which was illegible, till a candle disclosed what was less poetical though hardly less ominous. The inscription really ran thus:

  Reader, write on thy heart and still bear it in mind, the Wicked go into everlasting punishment, the righteous into life eternal.

  Of Robert Powell Whitmarsh, surgeon and apothecary and alderman of this borough, one of the Coroners for the County, who died in 1829, aged fifty-seven, it is written:

  The summons came while yet life’s onward stage

  He walked, not worn by sickness, nor by age

  Dust sank to dust: th’ unbodied spirit’s eye

  Saw—Reader! ask not what, but learn to die.

  Found if well sought, seek early thou, and find

  Pardon in Christ, in pardon, peace of mind.

  So shalt thou stand when life’s worst ills arise,

  Nor be ‘found sleeping’ at the Great Surprise.

  By this time, the piety of the earlier epitaphs was turning to didacticism, but in the eighteenth century, when the writers dwelt unflinchingly on the dust to which all men were doomed to return and when the sculptors depicted urns, hour-glasses, skeletons, and other emblems now sometimes considered ‘pagan’—the message of the epitaphs was unshakenly Christian. They taught a tender calm.

  The tablet I looked at most often was to the memory of ‘Caroline Letitia Hetley, wife of Richard Hetley, Esq., who died universally loved and lamented on the 25th of November 1829, aged twenty-nine years.’

  Thirty years later, another epitaph had been added, that of Richard Hetley himself, of whom it was only said that he died in his seventy-fourth year, ‘ the widower of the above Caroline Letitia’.

  Lent ended at last, even at Wilton Rectory. In the two months from mid-April to midsummer, the beauty of nature is intoxicating. Each day seems to be the loveliest of all. But however much one revels simply in the flowery glory of those weeks, they must always for me fall into their place in the Christian year. A radiance falls upon the earth from the celestial festivals of Easter, Ascension Day, and Whit-Sunday, as light drips from the stars upon the quiet fields. Snow may fall on Easter Sunday, and indeed it often does, yet the Easter hymns do not fail to awake the very soul of spring. When Ascension Day comes, the thin young green on the trees carries the heart upward through it to the sky; and Whit-Sunday always seems to be the most beautiful day in the year. As a child I was taught that the Day of Pentecost was the Birthday of the Church: it is also the birthday of millions of flowers.

  Undeniably there were times when the discipline of the Christian year, as administered by my father, did chafe on the young. These things were for him not only the chief things in the world—they were the only things. And he demanded that they should be this for everyone else. That complete singleness of mind was the secret of his influence. After a vain protest against a Field Day for Volunteers which was held on Good Friday, he resigned his Commission as Chaplain to the Fourth Wilts; and for years he fought a losing battle with the Jockey Club in the endeavour to change the date of Salisbury Races, held on Ascension Day. On such points he would not compromise.

  Equally, he would never allow his daughters to be away from home on any of the great Church festivals. It was our duty to keep them in our own parish church. This cut out many pleasures, and we often rebelled inwardly. But my father’s system was like Mr. Street’s. It ‘swept you round and round with it’; and as it did so, it left with you something greater than yourself which was to remain through life.

  Chapter Nine

  POOR PEOPLE

  Poor people were terribly poor when I was a child. Mrs. Jeffery was one of the poorest. She ‘lived on’ the parish, or rather, she received from the Guardians a weekly allowance of half a crown and a loaf of bread, the under part of which she sold, every week, for two-pence, to a neighbour who had a large family of children. She paid a rent of two shillings a week for her house in Fancy Row, an L-shaped group of quite well built houses dating from early in the last century. They stood off the street, round a piece of garden land. Her sitting-room was of a good size, and was well-proportioned, as rooms in the smallest houses still were at that date. Here she sat, facing life on eightpence a week and the top of a loaf. Her case was not exceptional. Hers was the usual allowance given to a solitary woman; and probably the Guardians hoped, by means of this economic pressure, to induce the poor lonely old things to go into the Workhouse. There, even in those days, they would have been cared for as they never could be in their own homes, but they one and all dreaded the prospect. However few and valueless one’s personal belongings may be, they make the familiar setting of one’s life; and it is hard that the world should prematurely bring home to one that ‘we brought nothing into this world, neither may we carry anything out’, especially when it invites us to leave this world, not for a Heavenly Mansion, but for an ‘Institution’. It must seem like a first and agonizing death thus to be torn from all one’s little treasures; and everyone collects a few of these in the course of a long life, even though it may be a long life of unbroken poverty.

  Mrs. Jeffery’s neighbour, for instance, Mrs. Wilkins, lived in equal penury, and apparently had always done so, yet both her dress and her cottage indicated that, if she had been born in another sphere, she would have been a dilettante collector of objets d’art. Her thin bony form was clothed in the most poverty-stricken garments, but she draped them about her person in the arty manner of the ’eighties, fastening them here and there with baroque brooches and buckles, while her meagre arms tinkled with bracelets. Round the bent and broken brim of her dilapidated hat, she tossed a fluttering blue veil, through which she peered at her visitors with bleary, half-blind eyes. Her dirty little room was a museum. Its walls were covered with her collection of jugs. She possessed hundreds of these—a mixed and motley jumble, none of them of much beauty or value; yet they ensured for their owner a happy variety
of colours, shapes, and memories, upon which to rest her worn-out eyes. This storehouse of rather dirty antiques was no doubt a less hygienic abode for Mrs. Wilkins’s declining years than would have been a ward at the Workhouse, with its clean sanitary walls; and yet, who would hesitate if asked to choose between the two?

  Lean as she was, Mrs. Wilkins looked less starved than Mrs. Jeffery, so that possibly at some time in her life she had been better nourished. She had perhaps been in service in some house where she acquired her artistic tastes. Mrs. Jeffery, on the other hand, had always eked out a poor living by part-time labour on a farm. She had often slung across her shoulders the baby she was nursing at the time, while she ran up to the fields for a few hours’ weeding or hoeing; or she had gleaned a few ears of corn to be ground into flour by the miller. At eighty years of age, she frequently told us of a red-letter day in her life when, as a little girl, she had gone to tea at the farmhouse, and had been given ‘real butter’.

  Mrs. Jeffery once came to see me in great distress.

  ‘I’ve ’ad a misfartune,’ she said. ‘I’ve a-broke me po, and ’e was such a beautiful po. ’E ’adn’t got ne’er an ’andle, but ’e ’ad a very nice rim. ’E wer old Mr. Rawlence’s po, and when I did use to go up there to mend the carpet, I did see this po, and I allers liked un. And then, when I ’ad me fire and all me things was burnt, Master Freddy Rawlence brought un down to me, and I’ve a ’ad un ever since.’

  We both felt very shy at the idea of going into a shop, to replace this indispensable piece of property, but at last I faced a lady shopkeeper who promised to ‘pack it invisibly’, as they say.

  Yet, in spite of Mrs. Jeffery and Mrs. Wilkins, we often remarked in those old days that there was little acute poverty in Wilton. This sounds incredible in face of the actual incomes of these old women, but although I have told the truth about their allowances, that is not the whole truth. Wilton was and is a small place, and in those days at least, we made a family party. Nobody sat down to a hot joint for dinner, without making sure that at least one of their poorer neighbours was doing the same. Every day, in the streets of Wilton, we saw, between twelve and one, three or four of the pony carriages in which old ladies were then in the habit of taking the air. These were low basket-shaped vehicles containing two seats which faced each other. The owner of the carriage usually held the reins, with another lady seated at her side. If there was a third member of the party, this rather unlucky person was perched on the opposite seat, ducking her head and trying to avoid the reins which were passed over her shoulder. The pony-carriages I speak of contained Mrs. Rawlence, Mrs. Naish, and Miss Nightingale, and during those pre-luncheon drives, the front seats were usually stacked with baskets containing basins. In these were slices of meat cut off the steaming joints, and surrounded by vegetables and gravy. But people without pony-carriages were about the same business at the same time; and my early memories of the Wilton streets about the hour of noon, show them peopled with women running into each other’s houses, carrying steaming basins covered with cloths.