Without Knowing Mr Walkley

by Edith Olivier

  In those days there was a good deal of drunkenness in the country, and this was a distress to old Mrs. Rawlence. Still, she was well aware that on Sundays, when the public houses were shut, the men would miss their pint of beer, and might feel depressed. Mrs. Rawlence remembered the Children of Israel who picked up a double portion of manna before the Sabbath Day, and so Saturday was her greatest day for driving about. She went to the drunkards’ houses bringing them jugs of strong coffee and of delicious and very concentrated consommè. Thus she hoped, not only to minister to the thirst of the coming day, but also to suggest that other drinks might always take the place of beer.

  When Mrs. Rawlence died, her husband endowed a Wilton Parish Nurse, thinking mainly of the old people who would miss the kind friend visiting them in their poverty. Nurse Turner filled this post to perfection. Hers is one of the unforgettable Wilton figures. She was a tall woman, with an affectionate rolling gait, and an expression of calm beneficence. She always carried a round basket in her hand, and in summer she wore, instead of her nurse’s bonnet, a very wide white straw hat. She was a liaison officer between those people in Wilton who had enough and to spare, and those who didn’t know how to make ends meet. She was equally at home in the houses of both sorts, and she knew people’s possessions better than they knew them themselves. She came into a house, with her quiet deaf smile, to ask for the loan of ‘the drinking-cup on the top shelf of your china cupboard’, for ‘those warm woollen slippers that your dear mother found such a comfort when she was ill’, or for ‘the hatbox that came with your hat from Style and Gerrish, which I could use to make a cradle over a little boy’s broken leg’. People were delighted to know that their treasures had been observed by Nurse Turner, and also that they could so easily do something to give comfort to a sick neighbour.

  This ‘Lady Bountiful’ system is discountenanced today, and of course it could never have touched the fringe of the poverty in large industrial towns; but in Wilton we all knew each other well and were naturally neighbourly without any touch of patronage or of pauperizing.

  Past generations of Wilton people took their part in supplementing the inadequate Poor Relief of those days. Wilton is rich in old ‘Charities’, bequests made by eighteenth century weavers or other manufacturers, to provide schooling, marriage portions, old age pensions, and almshouses for poor people in Wilton. Thus the prosperity of the town two hundred years ago overflows into to-day.

  Then there was the Church. The Wilton Almshouses are mostly the modern forms of medieval priories and hospitals, of which there were many in the town, and the spirit of their founders has lived on. Out-relief was at first only an allowance supplementary to the charity of Christian people, and certainly Wilton congregations never thought their responsibilities over when they had paid their rates. My father, as Rector, made it his personal care that no one in his parish should be without a fire; and every month the Church people subscribed largely for the ‘Sick and Poor’. This money was chiefly distributed by District Visitors in the form of food tickets.

  So no one was quite forgotten in Wilton when they were in difficulties; yet, however well these funds were spent, life must have been a precarious affair for Mrs. Jeffery and her friends. To-day, old age pensions are paid on a more adequate scale than the Poor Relief of my youth, and the Guardians augment them too with grants towards the rent. The recipients are ‘independent’. The ‘half-crown and a loaf’ have gone for ever. There are few things which I did at Wilton which gave me more pleasure at the time than the immense task of copying Baptismal Registers, which was handed over to me by my father in 1908. In that year, old people of seventy received their first Old Age Pensions of five shillings a week. But they were first called upon to prove their ages, and for years after 1838, birth certificates did not exist. You could only prove that you had been born by proving that you had been baptized, and the unfortunate thing was that some of these old people found that they had not been christened till they were four or five years old. Their parents sometimes took them to church in batches. Though some of them could remember scampering round the Font on the day of the baptism, that did not count as evidence. Documentary proof was essential, and documentary proof meant the Parish Registers. This experience shook my faith in the relative value of written and of traditional evidence in all matters of history. Still, the Pensions authorities demanded copies of the Register; and if some early nineteenth-century parents had been dilatory over the admission of their children to the Church, the Sins of the Fathers were now visited on the septuagenarian children, who were not seventy in the eyes of the law till seventy years after their belated entry into the Church.

  For many years, the Relieving Officer at Wilton was Mr. Wiles, a bustling little man with a kind heart and a sense of justice. He achieved the difficult combination of kindness to the poor with fairness to the ratepayers. He was entirely familiar with the resources of the families under his care, and he always knew when people could not live on the allowance granted them. Then he got more for them, either from the Guardians or from the Church. On the other hand, he was most severe on people who tried to throw dust in his eyes by making false statements, and he once said to me, about a very eccentric old woman:

  ‘Have you ever noticed anything peculiar about the shape of Patty’s chest?’

  I modestly denied it.

  ‘I have then,’ said Mr. Wiles. ‘ It’s my belief that she’s got a silver teapot in there. I know she had one once, and I don’t know what has become of it. Some day, I shall take hold of it and give it a shake.’

  I don’t know whether he ever took this desperate step; but if Patty really had a teapot in her bust, its shape must have been ‘peculiar’ enough to give her away without any shaking.

  Mr. Wiles could always be relied on to turn a blind eye if he chanced to pass the cottage of one of his old women at the moment when one of the ladies of the town was carrying in a chicken to be plucked, or a piece of needlework to be done. Anyone who thus earned a few pence to augment her weekly allowance of two shillings and elevenpence (without the loaf) was liable to have it withdrawn altogether; but if Mr. Wiles knew nothing about it, of course he couldn’t report it to the Guardians. These august personages themselves would look over the head of Mrs. Jeffery when she happened to be mending a carpet in a house belonging to one of them; for Guardians and Relieving Officers alike knew the difference made by the earning of those few forbidden pence.

  The lovely word Charity is out of favour to-day; and the personal gifts which brightened the days I write of, are now looked back on as ugly symptoms of a state of society in which the rich alternately trampled upon, and patronized, the poor. Yet the unhappy people in those days were those who lived in big towns out of reach of this simple and friendly giving and receiving. In little country places, these presents often passed between people whose circumstances were not actually very far apart; and they carried with them a personal friendship which an Income-Tax return cannot convey. The columns of figures which fill our Rates and Taxes Demand Notes have taken the place of the basins which used to bring dinners from one house to another, and a great deal of flavour is lost in this exchange.

  Chapter Ten

  SCENES AND SAYINGS

  ‘Talking about talking’—with this arresting phrase, I once heard old Mr. Rawlence cut his way into a conversation which was not about talking at all. I had certainly been chattering more than was seemly on the part of a young girl in the presence of her elders, and it was time for a well-earned snub, as well as for the company to hear Mr. Rawlence speak.

  Talking is, however, quite a good subject for conversation, and I like to remember good talks in the past, or even isolated phrases. I often find in my old diaries, a telling phrase I heard, or a little picture I saw, written down with no context, and I can remember nothing else about them. Yet those passages make my diary worth while. They interrupt the record of every day, with its inevitable everyday-ness.

  Mrs. Stephen Musselwhite bub
bled with phrases and was a rattling good talker. Every time one went to see her, she threw off something which was worth jotting down. Her neighbours called her ‘ False Emma’; but, as she said: ‘ Folks say I’m proud, but I’m not. I just don’t care about talking to anyone but you, and the Saviour, and the Clutterbucks.’ She was as fastidious about books as about the company she kept, and she returned a book which had been lent to her saying: ‘ No thank you. I only like good books, about God and death.’

  ‘That’s my slop basin,’ she called out recklessly, as she gave herself another cup of tea, and threw into the grate the tea leaves from her first cup; and then she turned to me with an appraising look, and said: ‘You’re little and desperate. You ought to marry a lord with a thousand a year.’

  One of her sons emigrated to Canada, where he bought a farm, and my father said he was glad to hear he had fallen on his feet.

  ‘Fallen on his feet?’ said Mrs. Musselwhite, indignant. ‘Indeed he hasn’t. He rides a ’orse.’

  A few years later, this son died in Canada, and Mrs. Musselwhite who, as we know, liked ‘God and death’ was much consoled by hearing of the ‘Glass ’earse’ which was used at the funeral. ‘Something better’n what we ’as ’ere,’ she said. She was rather puzzled when she heard that the funeral had taken place some way from the farm, and she decided that her son ‘must have lived in a little country place just outside Canada, much like Barford is to Wilton.’

  Mrs. Strong was another phrase-maker, and she said scornfully of a somewhat feckless neighbour whose child had died:

  ‘I ’ad to do everything for her this morning. She couldn’t so much as lay out a cat, as the saying is.’

  Excited, speakers at Suffragette meetings have been known to let fall some unexpected utterances.

  ‘I don’t stand before you as a woman,’ declared a rather peculiarly dressed female speaker on the Market Cross at Wilton one day. She then condoled with those unfortunate women ‘whose nearest male relative is a MAN’, and defiantly demanded—‘No Taxation without Legislation’.

  In those same pre-war days of Suffrage debate, I once heard Lady Robert Cecil (herself an ardent Suffragist) say impatiently, on hearing that a publisher had refused Walter de la Mare’s Nursery Rhymes as ‘unsuitable for children’:

  ‘I suppose they sent it to be read by some idiotic woman.’

  Whereat Sir Henry Newbolt took her ear-trumpet and said gravely down it:

  ‘Not a case for giving women the vote then?’

  At a missionary meeting, the speaker declared fervently: ‘I believe—in fact I know—that there will be black men in Heaven.

  They want to go there as much as we do, but they don’t know the way. WE DO.’

  It was, however, neither the salvation of black men, nor votes for women, but a friendly tea-party for Sunday School teachers which brought forth this, said very rapidly:

  ‘I didn’t hear direct, but I heard sideways, and I wished the earth would sink and open me up.’

  Miss Aikman then asked the meaning of the word ‘Bounder’, which she had heard used about one of her friends.

  No one was quite sure as to this, but everyone agreed that it was something complimentary.

  This scrap of conversation is very unintelligible:

  He said: ‘ How’s your mother?’

  I said, most sarcastically: ‘Quite well thank you.’

  But that delicate sarcasm has evaporated.

  For many years we had at the Rectory a most inspired gardener named Chalke. He was not a great talker, but if anyone ever had the Green Thumb, it was he. The garden was his one thought. He could not live away from it, and on summer evenings, when we were at dinner with the windows open, we never failed to see Old Chalke come back from his cottage, to slip through the garden gate for a last prowl round his flower beds. He was like a mother who shades her candle with her hand as she steals into the night nursery to see that the little ones are safely asleep.

  When my sister once showed Old Chalke a particularly delightful photograph she had taken of the garden, he looked at it for some time with his ‘fat affectionate smile’, and said:

  ‘Wheelbarrer comes out jolly.’

  There was poetry in Chalke’s last words. He had got up at five one morning, and was smoking a pipe by the window, when he said meditatively to his wife:

  ‘We’ve had a lovely rain. Do ’ee hear that blackbird whistling?’

  She heard a sudden movement and looked towards him. The old gardener was sitting dead in his chair while the blackbird whistled.

  Remembered scenes are often scenes of choirs, for choirs naturally make pictures. I wish I had seen the old west gallery choirs—trombones, flutes, and the round mouths of singing girls; and still more I wish I heard them oftener now, the music floating freely down from above, and compelling the congregation to join. There is lovely singing of this kind in the little village Church of Untergrainau not far from Oberammergau, where on any Sunday it seems as if every person in the church was breaking into spontaneous and rapturous devotion in the music of Bach or of Handel, and this entirely because the choir is behind them. I heard something of the same sort at a wedding in Woodford Church in Wiltshire.

  Choir practices are often more delightful to see than to hear. As children we were sometimes allowed to be present at a special anthem practice which was held once a month in the church before Sunday Evensong. Ordinary practices were in the School or Church Room, but anthems had a final polish in situ. We sat at the far end of the dark church, and the only lights were the romantic gas flares from the old Italian hanging lamps in the choir. It looked like a scene on the stage. The choir wore cassocks, the boys with white frills round their necks, and a cassocked clergyman watched the proceedings. Perhaps it was the gaslight above and the dark cassocks below which made the faces of the singers look abnormally white.

  After some preliminary stamping and walking about, the choir burst forth into what sounded in the empty church to be the most glorious singing in the world. It was a well-known chorus from the Messiah, and the singers let themselves go with complete certainty. But every few bars, this joyous abandon was interrupted by the organist taking his hands off the keys and clapping them smartly. The basses were always enjoying themselves with such tremendous force, that they sang on for several bars before they realized that they had been left in the air without support from the organ. When they stopped, at last, there came an angry shouting voice from the side of the chancel. From where we heard it, it had a doubled, echoing sound. Mr. Ridley, the organist, was expressing his horror at the discords which had sounded to us so magnificent; and the choir had to ‘ Go back to Letter A’. There was a flutter of paper, and then they sang again. No music has ever had for me quite the same quality as those Handel choruses, swinging boldly along, sharply interrupted, and then gradually falling to pieces, one voice breaking off after another, till a solitary tenor was left suspended on a high note, quite out of his reach, from which he suddenly came down in panic.

  When I taught the choir at Netherhampton, our practices were far more primitive. We met in the very small school of this little hamlet, and the members of the choir doubled their legs under them, and squatted on the Infants’ benches. There were no lamps, and as it grew dark, each man lit his own candle and held it near his book. It made an enchanting scene. There was old Dimmer the Ploughman, with his grandly carved face, his grey beard and thick grey hair, and the patient humorous eyes which are often seen in men who spend their lives in watching the earth and the sky. Dimmer could read a few words, but no music. He learnt the words of the hymns at the practice, while he extemporized a perfectly harmonious bass which he sang in a full musical voice. Toomer, a gentle furtive man with a black beard, said he liked to ‘sing air’ but he stammered so badly that he had hardly ever begun to sing before the hymn was over. Mr. Cox was a very grand musician, who had sung in a town choir, and who looked on us all as rather despicable amateurs, while Mrs. Terrill, with her pretty c
omplexion and fair hair, did not make much noise, but always came because she liked to support the Church. Then there was Dorothy Hayden, who could easily have carried the service on her own shoulders if no one else came at all. She was our only real singer; and she was a rock in the midst of the usual little group of shuffling children which completed our choir.

  If I was away, Mr. Tutt, the churchwarden, sometimes took charge with such enterprise as to disconcert the rest of the choir completely. Old Dimmer came to me one day in tears because Mr. Tutt had changed the music on Sunday, so that he ‘knew no more about it than that tree, and couldn’t sing all through the service, but just stood up there looking silly’.