Christopher Crayon's Recollections. The Life and Times of the late James Ewing Ritchie as told by himself

CHAPTER III.
Village Life

In recalling old times let me begin with the weather, a matter of supreme importance in country life – the first thing of which an Englishman speaks, the last thing he thinks of as he retires to rest. When I was a boy we had undoubtedly finer weather than we have now. There was more sunshine and less rain. In spring the air was balmy, and the flowers fair to look on. When summer came what joy there was in the hayfield, and how sweet the smell of the new-mown hay! As autumn advanced how pleasant it was to watch the fruit ripening, and the cornfields waving, far as the eye could reach, with the golden grain! People always seemed gay and happy then – the rosy-cheeked squire, the stout old farmer with his knee-breeches and blue coat with brass buttons, and Hodge in his smock-frock, white as the driven snow, on Sunday, when he went now to his parish church, or more generally to the meeting-house, where he heard sermons that suited him better, and where the musical part of the service, by means of flute and bass violin and clarionet, was ever a gratification and delight. And even winter had its charms in the shape of sliding and skating under a clear blue sky – all the trees and hedges everywhere decked out with diamonds, ever sparkling in the rays of an unclouded sun. We were all glad when the snow came and covered the earth with a robe of white. We were glad when it went away, and the birds began to build their nests, and the plougher went forth to turn up the soil, which had a fragrant savour after the wet and snow of winter, and the sower went forth to sow, while the rooks cawed in the morning air as they followed like an army in search of worms and whatever else they could feed on, and the graceful swallow, under the eaves of the old thatched cottage, built her clay nest, and lined it carefully for the reception of the little ones that were to come. They were always welcome, for in the opinion of the villagers they brought good luck. Abroad in the meadows there were the white woolly lambs, always at their gambols, and leaping all over the meadows.

It was a great happiness to be born in a village. Our village was rather a pretty one. Afar off we heard the murmurs and smelt the salt air of the distant sea, and that was something. There were no beerhouses then, and, alas! few attractions to keep raw village lads under good influence. My father, as I have said, was a Dissenting minister, painful, godly and laborious, ever seeking the spiritual welfare of his people, and relieving as far as possible their temporal wants. I had to accompany him in his pastoral visits, sometimes an irksome task, as the poor were numerous and garrulous, and made the most on such occasions of the infirmities of their lot. Some of the old ones were so worn and withered that their weird faces often haunted me by night and terrified me in my dreams.

Another thing that gave me trouble was the fact of being a Dissenter. It seemed to me a badge of inferiority, as the ignorant farmers and tradesmen around made Nonconformity the subject of deprecating remarks. “Dissenters were sly,” said the son of the village shopkeeper, the only boy of my age in the village, whose father was the most servile of men himself to the parochial dignitaries, and I felt that, as a Dissenter, I was under a cloud. It was the fashion to call us “Pograms,” and the word – no one knew what it meant – had rather an unpleasant sound to my youthful ears. This I knew, that most of the leading men of the place went to church when they went anywhere, and not to our meeting-house, where, however, we had good congregations. Many of our people were farmers who came from a distance for the afternoon service, and at whose homes when the time came I had many a happy day going out ferreting in the winter and in the autumn riding on the fore-horse. As the harvest was being gathered in, how proud was I to ride that fore-horse, though I lost a good deal of leather in consequence, and how welcome the night’s rest after tumbling about in the waggon in the harvest field. Happily did the morning of my life pass away amidst rural scenes and sights. It is a great privilege to be born in the country. Childhood in the city loses much of its zest. Yet I had my dark moments. I had often to walk through a small wood, where, according to the village boys, flying serpents were to be seen, and in the dark nights I often listened with fear and trembling to the talk of the villagers of wretched miscreants who were to be met with at such times with pitch-plaster, by means of which they took away many a boy’s life for the sake of selling his dead body to the doctor for the purposes of dissection. But the winter night had its consolations nevertheless. We had the stories of English history by Maria Hack and other light literature to read. We had dissecting maps to put together, and thus acquire a knowledge of geography. And there was a wonderful game invented by a French abbé, which was played in connection with a teetotum and a map of England and Wales, the benefits of which even at this distance of time I gratefully record. It is true cards were looked upon as sinful, but we had chess and draughts. Later on we had The Penny Magazine, and Chambers’s Journal, and The Edinburgh Review, which had to me all the fascination of a novel. We had also The Evangelical Magazine and The Youth’s Companion, a magazine which, I believe, has long ceased to exist, and the volumes with illustrations of the Society for Diffusion of Useful and Entertaining Knowledge, and we had the book club meetings, when it was the fashion for the members to take tea at each other’s homes, and propose books, and once a year meet to sell the old ones by auction. My father shone on such occasions. He was a good talker, as times went – conversation not being much of a gift among the members of the club, save when the ladies cheered us with their presence. As a Scotchman he had a good share of the dry humour of his nation. But chiefly did he shine when the brethren met. Foremost of the party were Sloper of Beccles, who had talked on things spiritual with Mrs. Siddons, Crisp of Lowestoft, Blaikie of Bungay, Longley of Southwold, and others, who discussed theology and metaphysics all the evening, till their heads were as cloudy as the tobacco-impregnated room in which they sat. At all these gatherings Alexander Creak of Yarmouth was a principal figure; a fine, tall, stately man, minister of a congregation supposed to be of a very superior class. One of his sons, I believe, still lives in Norfolk. As to the rest they have left only their memories, and those are growing dimmer and fainter every year.

At that time amongst the brethren who occasionally dawned upon our benighted village were Mayhew of Walpole, good old Mr. Dennant of Halesworth (of whom I chiefly remember that he was a bit of a poet, and that he was the author of a couplet which delighted me as a boy – and delights me still – “Awhile ago when I was nought, and neither body, soul nor thought”), and Mr. Ward of Stowmarket, who was supposed to be a very learned man indeed, and Mr. Hickman of Denton, whose library bespoke an erudition rare in those times. Most of them had sons. Few of them, however, became distinguished in after life; few of them, indeed, followed their fathers’ steps as ministers. One of the Creaks did, and became a tutor, I think, at Spring Hill College, Birmingham; but the fact is few of them were trained for contest and success in the world. As regards myself, I own I was led to think a great deal more of the next world than of this. We had too much religion. God made man to rule the world and conquer it, to fight a temporal as well as spiritual battle, to be diligent in business, whilst at the same time fervent in spirit, serving the Lord. What I chiefly remember was that I was to try and be good, though at the same time it was awfully impressed upon me that of myself I could think no good thought nor do one good thing; that I was born utterly depraved, and that if I were ever saved – a fact I rather doubted – it was because my salvation had been decreed in the councils of heaven before the world was. Naturally my religion was of fear rather than of love. It seems to me that lads thus trained, as far as my experience goes, never did turn out well, unless they were namby-pamby creatures, milksops, in fact, rather than men. I have lived to see a great change for the better in this respect, and a corresponding improvement of the young man of the day. It may be that he is less sentimental; but his religion, when he has any, is of a manlier type. I never saw a copy of Shakespeare till I was a young man. As a child, my memory had been exercised in learning passages from Milton, the hardest chapters in the Old or New Testament, and the Assembly Catechism. If that Assembly Catechism had never been written I should have been happier as a child, and wiser and more useful as a man. I have led an erratic life; I have wandered far from the fold. At one time I looked on myself as an outcast. With the Old Psalmist – with brave Oliver Cromwell – with generations of tried souls, I had to sing, as Scotch Presbyterians, I believe, in Northern kirks still sing: —

 
Woe’s me that I in Meshec am
   A sojourner so long,
Or that I in the tents do dwell
   To Kedar that belong.
 

Yet nothing was simpler or more beautiful than the lives of those old Noncons.; I may say so from a wide experience. They were godly men, a striking contrast to the hunting, drinking, swearing parsons of the surrounding district. Hence their power in the pulpit, their success in the ministry. But they failed to understand childhood and youth; childhood, with its delight in things that are seen and temporal, and youth with its passionate longing to burst its conventional barriers, and to revel in the world which looks so fair, and of which it has heard such evil. Ah, these children of many prayers; how few of them came to be pious; how many of them fell, some, alas, to rise no more. One reason was that if you did not see your way to become a church member and a professor of religion you were cut off, or felt inwardly that you were cut off, which is much the same thing, and had to associate with men of loose lives and looser thoughts. There was no via media; you were either a saint or a sinner, of the church or the world. It is not so now, when even every Young Men’s Christian Association has its gymnasium, and the young man’s passions are soothed by temperance and exercise and not inflated by drink. There may not be so much of early piety as there was – though of that I am not sure. There is a great deal more of religion than there was, not so much of sensational enjoyment or of doctrinal discussion perhaps, but more practical religion in all the various walks of life.

We had to teach in the Sunday-school. My services were early utilised in that direction, for the village was badly supplied with the stuff of which teachers were made, and as the parson’s son I was supposed to have an ex-officio qualification for the task. I fear I was but a poor hand in the work of teaching the young idea how to shoot, especially when that idea was developed in the bodies of great hulking fellows, my seniors in years and superiors in size. However, one of them did turn out well. Many years after he recognised me in the Gray’s Inn Road, London, where he had made money as a builder, and where, though he never learned to read – perhaps that was my fault – he figured for a time largely on the walls as the Protestant churchwarden. “You know, sir,” he said to me, “how poor we all were at W – ” (the father, I fear, was a drunkard), “Well, I came to London, resolving to be either a man or a mouse”; and here he was, as respectable-looking a man as any you could see, thus proving what I hold to be the truth, that in this land of ours, however deep in the mire a man may be, he may rise, if he has the requisite power of work and endurance and self-denial. I fear he did not much profit by our Sunday-school, though he told me he had put it down in his will for a small legacy. Our chief man was a shoemaker named Roberts, who sat with the boys under the pulpit in face of all the people; the girls, with the modesty of the sex, retiring to the back seats of the gallery. In his hand he bore a long wand, and woe to the unfortunate lad who fell asleep while the sermon was going on, or endeavoured to relieve the tedium of it by eating apples, sucking sweets, or revealing to his fellows the miscellaneous treasures of his pocket in the shape of marbles or string or knife. On such an offender down came the avenging stroke, swift as lightning and almost as sharp. As to general education, there was no attempt to give it. Later on, the Dissenters raised enough money to build a day-school, and then the Churchmen were stirred up to do the same. There was a school, kept by an irritable, red-faced old party in knee-breeches, who had failed in business, where I and most of the farmers’ sons of the village went; but I can’t say that any of us made much progress, and I did better when I was taken back to the home and educated, my father hearing my Latin and Greek as he smoked his pipe, while my mother – a very superior woman, with a great taste for literature and art – acted as teacher, while she was at work painting, after the duties of housekeeping were over. I ought to have been a better boy. But there were two great drawbacks – one, the absence of all emulation, which too often means the loss of all worldly success; the other, the painful and useless effort to be good.

CHAPTER IV.
Village Sports and Pastimes

It was wonderful the utter stagnation of the village. The chapel was the only centre of intellectual life; next to that was the alehouse, whither some of the conscript fathers repaired to get a sight of the county paper, to learn the state of the markets, and at times to drink more ale than was good for them. About ten I had my first experience of death. I had lost an aged grandmother, but I was young, and it made little impression on me, except the funeral sermon – preached by my father to an overflowing congregation – which still lives in my recollections of a dim and distant past. I was a small boy. I was laid up with chilblains and had to be carried into the chapel; and altogether the excitement of the occasion was pleasing rather than the reverse. But the next who fell a victim was a young girl – whom I thought beautiful – who was the daughter of a miller who attended our chapel, and with whom I was on friendly terms. On the day of her funeral her little brothers and sisters came to our house to be out of the way. But I could not play with them, as I was trying to realise the figure I thought so graceful lying in the grave – to be eaten of worms, to turn to clay. But I shuddered as I thought of what we so often say:

 
There are no acts of mercy past
In the cold grave to which we haste,
But darkness, death, and long despair
Reign in eternal silence there.
 

I was sick at heart – I am sick at heart now – as I recall the sad day, though more than seventy years have rolled over my head since then.

I have spoken of the excitement of the Reform struggle. It was to most of us a time of fear. A mob was coming from Yarmouth to attack Benacre Hall, and then what would become of Sir Thomas “Guche”? But older heads began to think that the nation would survive the blow, even if Benacre Hall were burnt and Sir Thomas “Guche” had to hide his diminished head. As it happened, we did lose Sir Thomas’s services. He was thrown out for Suffolk, and Mr. Robert Newton Shaw, a Whig, reigned in his stead. How delighted we all were! Now had come the golden age, and the millennium was at hand. Pensioners and place men were no longer to fatten on the earnings of a suffering people, Radical politicians even looked forward to the time when the parson would lose his tithes.

The villagers rarely left the village; they got work at the neighbouring farms, and if they did not, they did not do so badly under the old Poor Laws, which paid a premium to the manufacturers of large families. The cottages were miserable hovels then, as they mostly are, and charity had full scope for exercise, especially at Christmas time, when those who went to the parish church were taught the blessedness of serving God and mammon. At one time the dear old chapel would hold all the meetingers; but soon came sectarian divisions and animosities. There was a great Baptist preacher at Beccles of the name of Wright, and of a Sunday some of our people walked eight miles to hear him, and came back more sure that they were the elect than ever, and more contemptuous of the poor blinded creatures who, to use a term much in common then, sat under my father. Now and then the Ranters got hold of a barn, and then there was another secession. Perhaps we had too much theological disputation. I think we had; but then there was nothing else to think about. The people had no cheap newspapers, and if they had they could not have read them, and so they saw signs and had visions, and told how the Lord had converted them by visible manifestations of His presence and power. Well, they were happy, and they needed somewhat to make them happy amidst the abounding poverty and desolation of their lives. By means of a vehicle – called a whiskey – which was drawn by a mule or a pony, as chance might determine, the family of which I was a member occasionally visited Southwold, prettier than it is now, or Lowestoft, which had no port, merely a long row of houses climbing up to the cliff; or Beccles, then supposed to be a very genteel town, and where there was a ladies’ boarding school; or to Bungay, where John Childs, a sturdy opponent in later years of Church rates and Bible monopoly, carried on a large printing business for the London publishers, and cultivated politics and phrenology. It was a grand outing for us all. Sometimes we got as far as Halesworth, where they had a Primitive meeting-house with great pillars, behind which the sleeper might sweetly dream till the fiddles sounded and the singing commenced. But as to long journeys they were rarely taken. If one did one had to go by coach, and there was sure to be an accident. Our village doctor who, with his half-dozen daughters, attended our chapel, did once take a journey, and met with a fall that, had his skull been not so thick, might have led to a serious catastrophe. Then there was Brother Hickman, of Denton, a dear, good man who never stirred from the parish. Once in an evil hour he went a journey on a stage coach, which was upset, and the consequence was a long and dangerous illness. If home-keeping youths have ever homely wits, what homeliness of wit we must have had. But now and then great people found their way to us, such as Edward Taylor, Gresham Professor of Music, who had a little property in the village, which gave him a vote, and before the Reform Bill was carried elections were elections, and we knew it, for did not four-horse coaches at all times, with flags flowing and trumpets blowing, drive through with outvoters for Yarmouth, collected at the candidates’ expense from all parts of the kingdom? In the summer, too, we had another excitement in the shape of the fish vans – light four-wheel waggons, drawn by two horses – which raced all the way from Lowestoft or Yarmouth to London. They were built of green rails, and filled up with hampers of mackerel, to be delivered fresh on the London market. They only had one seat, and that was the driver’s. At the right time of year they were always on the road going up full, returning empty, and they travelled a good deal faster than the Royal mail. They were an ever-present danger to old topers crawling home from the village ale-house, and to dirty little boys playing marbles or making mud pies in the street. Of course, there was no policeman to clear the way. Policemen did not come into fashion till long after; but we had the gamekeeper. How I feared him as he caught me bird-nesting at an early hour in the Park, and sent me home with a heavy heart as he threatened me with Beccles gaol.

In the winter I used to go out rabbiting. A young farmer in our neighbourhood was fond of the sport, and would often take me out with him, not to participate in the sport, but simply to look on. It might be that a friend or two would bring his gun and dog, and join in the pastime, which, at any rate, had this advantage as far as I was personally concerned, that it gave me a thundering appetite. The ferrets which one of the attendants always carried in a bag had a peculiar fascination for me, with their long fur, their white, shiny teeth, their little sparkling black eyes. The ferret is popped into the hole in which the rabbit is hidden. Poor little animal, he is between the devil and the deep sea. He waits in his hole till he can stand it no longer, but there is no way of escape for him out. There are the men, with their guns and the dogs eager for the fun. Ah! it is soon over, and this is often the way of the world.

To us in that Suffolk village the sports of big schools and more ambitious lads were unknown. For us there was no cricket or football, except on rare occasions, when we had an importation of juveniles in the house, but I don’t know that we were much the better for that. We trundled the hoop, and raced one with another, and that is capital exercise. We played hopscotch, which is good training for the calves of the legs. We had bows and arrows and stilts, and in the autumn – when we could get into the fields – we built and flew kites, kites which we had to make ourselves. If there was an ancient sandpit in the neighbourhood how we loved to explore its depths, and climb its heights, and in the freshness of the early spring what a joy it was to explore the hedges, or the trees of the neighbouring park, when the gamekeepers happened to be out of sight in search of birds’ nests and eggs; and in the long winter evenings what a delight it was to read of the past, though it was in the dry pages of Rollin, or to glow over the poems of Cowper. We were, it is true, a serious family. We had family prayers. No wine but that known as gingerbeer honoured the paternal hospitable board. Grog I never saw in any shape. A bit of gingerbread and a glass of water formed our evening meal. Oh, at Christmas what games we had of snap-dragon and blind man’s buff. I always felt small when a boy from Cockneydom appeared amongst us, and that I hold to be the chief drawback of such a bringing up as ours was. The battle of life is best fought by the cheeky. It does not do to be too humble and retiring. Baron Trench owned to a too great consciousness of innate worth. It gave him, he writes, a too great degree of pride. That is bad, but not so bad as the reverse – that feeling of humility which withers up all the noblest aspirations of the soul, and which I possessed partly from religion, and partly from the feeling that, as a Dissenter, I was a social Pariah in the eyes of the generation around. My modesty, I own, has been in my way all through life. The world takes a man at his own valuation. It is too busy to examine each particular claim, and the prize is won by him who most loudly and pertinaciously blows his own trumpet. At any rate, in our Suffolk home we enjoyed

 
Lively cheer of vigour born;
The thoughtless day – the easy night —
The spirits pure – the slumbers light —
That fly the approach of morn.
 

The one drawback was the long-drawn darkness of the winter night. I slept in an old attic in an old house, where every creak on the stairs, when the wind was roaring all round, gave me a stroke of pain, and where ghastly faces came to me in the dark of old women haggard and hideous and woebegone. De Quincy hints in his numerous writings at boyish times of a similar kind. I fancy most of us in boyhood are tortured in a similar way. Fuseli supped on pork chops to procure fitting subjects for his weird sketches. But we never had pork chops; yet in the visions of the night what awful faces I saw – almost enough to turn one’s brain and to make one’s hair stand on end like quills upon the fretful porcupine.

Country villages are always fifty years behind the times, and so it was with us. In the farmyard there was no steam engine, and all the work was done by manual labour, such as threshing the corn with the flail. In many families the only light was that of the rushlight, often home made. Lucifer matches were unknown, and we had to get a light by means of a flint and tinder, which ignited the brimstone match, always in readiness. Cheap ready-made clothes were unknown, and the poor mother had a good deal of tailoring to do. In the cottage there was little to read save the cheap publications of the Religious Tract Society, and the voluminous writings of the excellent Hannah More, teaching the lower orders to fear God and honour the king, and not to meddle with those that were given to change. Her “Cœlebs in Search of a Wife” was the only novel that ever found its way into religious circles – with the exception of “Robinson Crusoe” and “The Pilgrim’s Progress,” and that was awfully illustrated. Anybody who talked of the rights of man at that time was little better than one of the wicked. One of Hannah More’s characters, Mr. Fantom, is thus described: – “He prated about narrowness and ignorance (the derisive italics are Hannah’s own), and bigotry and prejudice and priestcraft on the one hand, and on the other of public good, the love of mankind, and liberality and candour, and above all of benevolence.” Dear Hannah made her hero, of course, come to a shocking end, and so does his servant William, who as he lies in Chelmsford gaol to be hung for murder confesses, “I was bred up in the fear of God, and lived with credit in many sober families in which I was a faithful servant, till, being tempted by a little higher wages, I left a good place to go and live with Mr. Fantom, who, however, never made good his fine promises, but proved a hard master.” Another of Hannah’s characters was a Miss Simpson, a clergyman’s daughter, who is always exclaiming, “’Tis all for the best,” though she ends her days in a workhouse, while the man through whose persecution she comes to grief dies in agony, bequeathing her £100 as compensation for his injustice, and declares that if he could live his life over again he would serve God and keep the Sabbath. And such was the literature which was to stop reform, and make the poor contented with their bitter lot!

But the seed, such as it was, often fell on stony soil. The labourers became discontented, and began more and more to feel that it was not always true that all was for the best, as their masters told them. They were wretchedly clad, and lodged, and fed. Science, sanitary or otherwise, was quite overlooked then. The parson and the squire took no note of them, except when they heard that they went to the Baptist, or Independent, or Methodist chapel, when great was their anger and dire their threats. Again Hannah More took the field “to improve the habits and raise the principles of the common people at a time when their dangers and temptations – social and political – were multiplied beyond the example of any former period. The inferior ranks were learning to read, and they preferred to read the corrupt and inflammatory publications which the French Revolution had called into existence.” Alas! all was in vain. Rachel, weeping for her children who had been torn from her to die in foreign lands, fighting to keep up the Holy Alliance and the right divine of kings to govern wrong, or had toiled and moiled in winter’s cold and summer’s heat, merely to end their days in the parish workhouse, refused to be comforted. Good people grew alarmed, and goody tracts were circulated more than ever. The edifying history of the “Shepherd of Salisbury Plain” was to be seen in many a cottage in our village. The shepherd earned a shilling a day; he lived in a wretched cottage which had a hole in the thatch which made his poor wife a martyr to rheumatism in consequence of the rain coming through. He had eight children to keep, chiefly on potatoes and salt, but he was happy because he was pious and contented. A gentleman says to him, “How do you support yourself under the pressure of actual want? Is not hunger a great weakener of your faith?” “Sir,” replied the shepherd, “I live upon the promises.” Yes, that was the kind of teaching in our village and all over England, and the villagers got tired of it, and took to firing stacks and barns, and actually in towns were heard to cry “More pay and less parsons.” What was the world coming to? said dear old ladies. It was well Hannah More had died and thus been saved from the evil to come. The Evangelicals were at their wits’ end. They wanted people to think of the life to come, while the people preferred to think of the life that was – of this world rather than the next.

I am sure that in our village we had too much religion. I write this seriously and after thinking deeply on the matter. A man has a body to be cared for, as well as a soul to be saved or damned. Charles Kingsley was the first to tell us that it was vain to preach to people with empty stomachs. But when I was a lad preaching was the cure for every ill, and the more wretched the villagers became the more they were preached to. There was little hope of any one who did not go to some chapel or other. There was little help for any one who preferred to talk of his wrongs or to claim his rights. I must own that the rustic worshipper was a better man in all the relationships of life – as servant, as husband, as father, as friend – than the rustic unbeliever. It astonished me not a little to talk with the former, and to witness his copiousness of Scripture phraseology and the fluency of his religious talk. He was on a higher platform. He had felt what Burke wrote when he tells us that religion was for the man in humble life, to raise his nature and to put him in mind of a State in which the privileges of opulence will cease, when he will be equal by nature and more than equal by virtue. Alas! we had soon Lord Brougham’s beershops, and there was a sad falling away. Poachers and drunkards increased on every side. All around there seemed to be nothing but poverty, with the exception of the farmers – then, as now, always grumbling, but apparently living well and enjoying life.