Afoot in England: Chapter 6

Chapter 6

By Swallowfield

One of the most attractive bits of green and wooded country
near London I know lies between Reading and Basingstoke and
includes Aldermaston with its immemorial oaks in Berkshire and
Silchester with Pamber Forest in Hampshire. It has long been
one of my favourite haunts, summer and winter, and it is
perhaps the only wooded place in England where I have a home
feeling as strong as that which I experience in certain places
among the South Wiltshire downs and in the absolutely flat
country on the Severn, in Somerset, and the flat country in
Cambridgeshire and East Anglia, especially at Lynn and about
Ely.

I am now going back to my first visit to this green retreat;
it was in the course of one of those Easter walks I have
spoken of, and the way was through Reading and by Three Mile
Cross and Swallowfield. On this occasion I conceived a
dislike to Reading which I have never quite got over, for it
seemed an unconscionably big place for two slow pedestrians to
leave behind. Worse still, when we did leave it we found that
Reading would not leave us. It was like a stupendous octopus
in red brick which threw out red tentacles, miles and miles
long in various directions--little rows and single and double
cottages and villas, all in red, red brick and its weary
accompaniment, the everlasting hard slate roof. These square
red brick boxes with sloping slate tops are built as close as
possible to the public road, so that the passer-by looking in
at the windows may see the whole interior--wall-papers,
pictures, furniture, and oftentimes the dull expressionless
face of the woman of the house, staring back at you out of her
shallow blue eyes. The weather too was against us; a grey
hard sky, like the slate roofs, and a cold strong east wind to
make the road dusty all day long.

Arrived at Three Mile Cross, it was no surprise to find it no
longer recognizable as the hamlet described in Our Village,
but it was saddening to look at the cottage in which Mary
Russell Mitford lived and was on the whole very happy with her
flowers and work for thirty years of her life, in its present
degraded state. It has a sign now and calls itself the
"Mitford Arms" and a "Temperance Hotel," and we were told that
you could get tea and bread and butter there but nothing else.
The cottage has been much altered since Miss Mitford's time,
and the open space once occupied by the beloved garden is now
filled with buildings, including a corrugated-iron dissenting
chapel.

From Three Mile Cross we walked on to Swallowfield, still by
those never-ending roadside red-brick cottages and villas, for
we were not yet properly out of the hated biscuit metropolis.
It was a big village with the houses scattered far and wide
over several square miles of country, but just where the
church stands it is shady and pleasant. The pretty church
yard too is very deeply shaded and occupies a small hill with
the Loddon flowing partly round it, then taking its swift way
through the village. Miss Mitford's monument is a plain,
almost an ugly, granite cross, standing close to the wall,
shaded by yew, elm, and beech trees, and one is grateful to
think that if she never had her reward when living she has
found at any rate a very peaceful resting-place.

The sexton was there and told us that he was but ten years old
when Miss Mitford died, but that he remembered her well and
she was a very pleasant little woman. Others in the place
who remembered her said the same--that she was very pleasant
and sweet. We know that she was sweet and charming, but
unfortunately the portraits we have of her do not give that
impression. They represent her as a fat common-place looking
person, a little vulgar perhaps. I fancy the artists were
bunglers. I possess a copy of a very small pencil sketch made
of her face by a dear old lady friend of mine, now dead, about
the year 1851 or 2. My friend had a gift for portraiture in a
peculiar way. When she saw a face that greatly interested
her, in a drawing-room, on a platform, in the street, anywhere,
it remained very vividly in her mind and on going home she
would sketch it, and some of these sketches of well known
persons are wonderfully good. She was staying in the country
with a friend who drove with her to Swallowfield to call on
Miss Mitford, and on her return to her friend's house she
made the little sketch, and in this tiny portrait I can see
the refinement, the sweetness, the animation and charm which
she undoubtedly possessed.

But let me now venture to step a little outside of my own
province, my small plot--a poor pedestrian's unimportant
impressions of places and faces; all these p's come by
accident; and this I put in parenthetically just because an
editor solemnly told me a while ago that he couldn't abide and
wouldn't have alliteration's artful aid in his periodical.
Let us leave the subject of what Miss Mitford was to those of
her day who knew her; a thousand lovely personalities pass
away every year and in a little while are no more remembered
than the bright-plumaged bird that falls in the tropical
forest, or the vanished orchid bloom of which some one has
said that the angels in heaven can look on no more beautiful
thing. Leaving all that, let us ask what remains to us of
another generation of all she was and did?

She was a prolific writer, both prose and verse, and, as we
know, had an extraordinary vogue in her own time. Anything
that came from her pen had an immediate success; indeed, so
highly was she regarded that nothing she chose to write,
however poor, could fail. And she certainly did write a good
deal of poor stuff: it was all in a sense poor, but books and
books, poor soul, she had to write. It was in a sense poor
because it was mostly ambitious stuff, and, as the proverb
says, "You cannot fly like an eagle with the wings of a
wren." She was driven to fly, and gave her little wings too
much to do, and her flights were apt to be mere little weak
flutterings over the surface of the ground. A wren, and she
had not a cuckoo but a devouring cormorant to sustain--that
dear, beautiful father of hers, who was more to her than any
reprobate son to his devoted mother, and who day after day,
year after year, gobbled up her earnings, and then would
hungrily go on squawking for more until he stumbled into the
grave. Alas! he was too long in dying; she was worn out by
then, the little heart beating not so fast, and the bright
little brain growing dim and very tired.

Now all the ambitious stuff she wrote to keep the cormorant
and, incidentally, to immortalize herself, has fallen
deservedly into oblivion. But we--some of us--do not forget
and never want to forget Mary Russell Mitford. Her letters
remain--the little friendly letters which came from her pen
like balls of silvery down from a sun-ripened plant, and were
wafted far and wide over the land to those she loved. There
is a wonderful charm in them; they are so spontaneous, so
natural, so perfectly reflect her humour and vivacity, her
overflowing sweetness, her beautiful spirit. And one book too
remains--the series of sketches about the poor little hamlet,
in which she lived so long and laboured so hard to support
herself and her parents, the turtledove mated with a
cormorant. Driven to produce work and hard up for a subject,
in a happy moment she took up this humble one lying at her own
door and allowed her self to write naturally even as in her
most intimate letters. This is the reason of the vitality of
Our Tillage; it was simple, natural, and reflected the author
herself, her tender human heart, her impulsive nature, her
bright playful humorous spirit. There is no thought, no mind
stuff in it, and it is a classic! It is about the country,
and she has so little observation that it might have been
written in a town, out of a book, away from nature's sights
and sounds. Her rustic characters are not comparable to those
of a score or perhaps two or three score of other writers who
treat of such subjects. The dialogue, when she makes them
talk, is unnatural, and her invention so poor that when she
puts in a little romance of her own making one regrets it.
And so one might go on picking it all to pieces like a
dandelion blossom. Nevertheless it endures, outliving scores
of in a way better books on the same themes, because her own
delightful personality manifests itself and shines in all
these little pictures. This short passage describing how she
took Lizzie, the little village child she loved, to gather
cowslips in the meadows, will serve as an illustration.

They who know these feelings (and who is so happy as not to
have known some of them) will understand why Alfieri became
powerless, and Froissart dull; and why even needlework, the
most effective sedative, that grand soother and composer of
women's distress, fails to comfort me today. I will go out
into the air this cool, pleasant afternoon, and try what
that will do. . . . I will go to the meadows, the beautiful
meadows and I will have my materials of happiness, Lizzie
and May, and a basket for flowers, and we will make a
cowslip ball. "Did you ever see a cowslip ball, Lizzie?"
"No." "Come away then; make haste! run, Lizzie!"

And on we go, fast, fast! down the road, across the lea,
past the workhouse, along by the great pond, till we slide
into the deep narrow lane, whose hedges seem to meet over
the water, and win our way to the little farmhouse at the
end. "Through the farmyard, Lizzie; over the gate; never
mind the cows; they are quiet enough." "I don't mind 'em,"
said Miss Lizzie, boldly and' truly, and with a proud
affronted air, displeased at being thought to mind anything,
and showing by her attitude and manner some design of proving
her courage by an attack on the largest of the herd, in the
shape of a pull by the tail. "I don't mind 'em." "I know
you don't, Lizzie; but let them, alone and don't chase
the turkey-cock. Come to me, my dear!" and, for wonder,
Lizzie came.

In the meantime my other pet, Mayflower, had also gotten
into a scrape. She had driven about a huge unwieldy sow,
till the animal's grunting had disturbed the repose of a
still more enormous Newfoundland dog, the guardian of the
yard.

The beautiful white greyhound's mocking treatment of the
surly dog on the chain then follows, and other pretty
scenes and adventures, until after some mishaps and much
trouble the cowslip ball is at length completed.

What a concentration of fragrance and beauty it was!
Golden and sweet to satiety! rich in sight, and touch, and
smell! Lizzie was enchanted, and ran off with her prize,
hiding amongst the trees in the very coyness of ecstasy, as
if any human eye, even mine, would be a restraint on her
innocent raptures.

Here the very woman is revealed to us, her tender and lively
disposition, her impulsiveness and childlike love of fun
and delight in everything on earth. We see in such a passage
what her merit really is, the reason of our liking or
"partiality" for her. Her pleasure in everything makes
everything interesting, and in displaying her feeling without
art or disguise she succeeds in giving what we may call a
literary expression to personal charm--that quality which is
almost untranslatable into written words. Many women possess
it; it is in them and issues from them, and is like an essential
oil in a flower, but too volatile to be captured and made use
of. Furthermore, women when they write are as a rule even more
conventional than men, more artificial and out of and away
from themselves.

I do not know that any literary person will agree with me; I
have gone aside to write about Miss Mitford mainly for my own
satisfaction. Frequently when I have wanted to waste half an
hour pleasantly with a book I have found myself picking up
"Our Village" from among many others, some waiting for a first
perusal, and I wanted to know why this was so--to find out, if
not to invent, some reason for my liking which would not make
me ashamed.

At Swallowfield we failed to find a place to stay at; there
was no such place; and of the inns, named, I think, the
"Crown," "Cricketers," "Bird-in-the-Hand," and "George and
Dragon," only one, was said to provide accommodation for
travellers as the law orders, but on going to the house we
were informed that the landlord or his wife was just dead, or
dangerously ill, I forget which, and they could take no one
in. Accordingly, we had to trudge back to Three Mile Cross
and the old ramshackle, well-nigh ruinous inn there. It was a
wretched place, smelling of mould and dry-rot; however, it was
not so bad after a fire had been lighted in the grate, but
first the young girl who waited on us brought in a bundle of
newspapers, which she proceeded to thrust up the chimney-flue
and kindle, "to warm the flue and make the fire burn," she
explained.

On the following day, the weather being milder, we rambled on
through woods and lanes, visiting several villages, and
arrived in the afternoon at Silchester, where we had resolved
to put up for the night. By a happy chance we found a
pleasant cottage on the common to stay at and pleasant people
in it, so that we were glad to sit down for a week there, to
loiter about the furzy waste, or prowl in the forest and haunt
the old walls; but it was pleasant even indoors with that wide
prospect before the window, the wooded country stretching many
miles away to the hills of Kingsclere, blue in the distance
and crowned with their beechen rings and groves. Of Roman
Calleva itself and the thoughts I had there I will write in
the following chapter; here I will only relate how on Easter
Sunday, two days after arriving, we went to morning service in
the old church standing on a mound inside the walls, a mile
from the village and common.

It came to pass that during the service the sun began to shine
very brightly after several days of cloud and misty windy wet
weather, and that brilliance and the warmth in it served to
bring a butterfly out of hiding; then another; then a third;
red admirals all; and they were seen through all the prayers,
and psalms, and hymns, and lessons, and the sermon preached by
the white-haired Rector, fluttering against the translucent
glass, wanting to be out in that splendour and renew their
life after so long a period of suspension. But the glass was
between them and their world of blue heavens and woods and
meadow flowers; then I thought that after the service I would
make an attempt to get them out; but soon reflected that to
release them it would be necessary to capture them first, and
that that could not be done without a ladder and butterfly
net. Among the women (ladies) on either side of and before me
there were no fewer than five wearing aigrettes of egret and
bird-of-paradise plumes in their hats or bonnets, and these
five all remained to take part in that ceremony of eating
bread and drinking wine in remembrance of an event supposed to
be of importance to their souls, here and hereafter. It
saddened me to leave my poor red admirals in their prison,
beating their red wings against the coloured glass--to leave
them too in such company, where the aigrette wearers were
worshipping a little god of their own little imaginations, who
did not create and does not regard the swallow and dove and
white egret and bird-of-paradise, and who was therefore not my
god and whose will as they understood it was nothing to me.

It was a consolation when I went out, still thinking of the
butterflies in their prison, and stood by the old ruined walls
grown over with ivy and crowned with oak and holly trees, to
think that in another two thousand years there will be no
archaeologist and no soul in Silchester, or anywhere else in
Britain, or in the world, who would take the trouble to dig up
the remains of aigrette-wearers and their works, and who would
care what had become of their pitiful little souls--their
immortal part.

Back to chapter list of: Afoot in England