The Retrospect

by Ada Cambridge

all under the jurisdiction of our rector, Canon W., and the church without a steeple, that took turns with the church of H—— in providing our Sunday services, stood at the gate of the park-like home field surrounding the grandfather's house. I think it was mostly in the afternoons that we attended it, and it was our custom to go and come through that little park instead of by the road, and to call on him by the way. These visits were our Sunday treat. There was a warm, luxurious atmosphere inside that house—which I was on the way to be entertained in for the first time since then; there was also a motherly housekeeper and an unfailing supply of cakes and sweets. We were regaled on these, inspected and catechised by the patriarch, and sent rejoicing on our way. Other families of grandchildren passed the same saluting point at about the same time, often melting into and mingling with ours before the armchair was reached (and these were the last times that M.G., my present hostess, and I had had cousinly intercourse together). His sons, farmers like himself, but none of them inheriting his force of character, lived within a walk of him, and each household looked to his for dower of various kinds. Every week he had a sheep killed to be distributed amongst them. Mutton was a sacred thing with him. Killed at a certain age—four years, I think—at the climax of condition; hung a stated number of days, according to the season, it was always a dish, if of his providing, "fit to set before a gentleman." The meat-safe of his own establishment was hung, to my eyes, quite in the clouds. It was sent up with running ropes, as a flag to a masthead, to the top of a tall tree, where the contents ripened in pure air above the range of flies (and I stood under that tree again and told his great-grandson's wife about it, his great-great-grandson holding my hand and looking up at it with me). He left a comfortable fortune to his five children, of whom my father was the youngest; and the sons quarrelled over their shares and flung the property into Chancery—where it is still if it is anywhere. Certainly it never came out again.

Well, I stood by his winged chair on a Sunday afternoon, and he looked at me with his watery and red-rimmed old eyes, set in a still fine old face that is as distinct to me as ever; then he drew me between his knees, laid his hands on my head, and formally and solemnly blessed me. The oddness of the incident impressed it indelibly on my mind. We had always been great friends, and it was our last parting. I suppose he knew it, although I did not.

I was fortunate in picking up, amongst the family relics, a little memoir of him. It told me more of his life and character than I knew before, and I think it is interesting enough to quote from briefly.

His uncommon name has aristocratic associations, as his descendants have not forgotten, and armorial bearings have been claimed on the strength of it, but as a matter of fact there is no sign of an authentic pedigree behind him. And I think, if there had been, it would be a cheapening of the dignity of his own simple excellence to obtrude it. His whole history presupposes the qualities of manhood essential to the ideal gentleman. As Landor says: "The plain vulgar are not the most vulgar," and it is only stating the proposition another way to say that the plain gentleman is more genuinely a gentleman than the fine gentleman. I know well how, when he rose in the world, he would have treated a suggestion to rake up a coat-of-arms! My father inherited that good taste which abhorred pretentiousness, as he showed in making us say "father" and "mother" at a time when every child above the labouring class said "pa" and "ma," and in refusing to let any one of the ten of us have more than one short Christian name.

He was born—the grandfather—on the 2nd of January 1770, at T——, but in which of the three farmhouses that, with their five labourers' cottages, composed the "parish without a church" (it had one once—in the fourteenth century) I do not know; not, I think, the one that was afterwards my home, as that property belonged to a different estate. All three houses were of a character to preclude the supposition that he sprang from what is figuratively termed the gutter, but the records clearly imply that it was not from a bed of ease. He used to get up early and milk the cows, and then walk to D——, about four miles off, to school. When he was seventeen the chronicle states he "did not leave his home as a runaway" but seeing no chance of advancing himself there, he, with only a small bundle of clothes, made his way to a farm at O——, where "he hired himself as a team-lad to a widow for four pounds a year and his living in the house." It is recorded that he "always spoke of her afterwards as his first friend and helper in the battle of life." From there he went to another Norfolk village, engaging himself again as a farm hand (waggoner); but soon he was a farm steward elsewhere, and soon after that manager of the estate of his father's landlord, one of the beautiful seats of the neighbourhood—which looked more beautiful than ever when I saw it again.

W—— Woods (meeting overhead on the highroad and glorious with rhododendrons in the spring), and W—— Hall, must have a word or two in passing. The splendid old house has been, since the reign of Elizabeth, the only one in W—— which represents the "parish without people" and the "steeple without a church" of the local rhyme; but before that period, when it was the seat of the Coningsbys, there was a village, also a church, where the lonely tower now stands in the park, a hoary head with no body to it. From the Coningsbys the place passed to a certain Chief Justice of the Common Pleas, and he profaned the church (which then "ceased to be used for sacred purposes") by turning it into a hay-house and dog-kennel, and "depopulated the town to make the extensive park which still exists." For his sins this wicked squire's "dead corps" (I am quoting Blomefield, writing in 1810) "could for many days find no place of burial, but growing very offensive he was at last conveyed to the church of R——," which was the church at the grandfather's gate already alluded to, "and buried there without any ceremony, and lyeth yet uncovered (if the visitors have not reformed it) with so small a matter as a few paving stones; and indeed no stone memorial was there ever for him, and if it was not for this account it would not have been known that he was buried there."

Certainly there was no visible trace of the unhallowed grave in that burial-ground of my family when I revisited it. The little "church without a steeple" I had always supposed a creation of our day, but it has a fine dog-toothed Norman doorway, and M. told me she could remember when it stood there amid ruins, and remember seeing the chapel built to enclose it. This Norman doorway, like the lovely ivied steeple, is all that speaks of the wicked judge to-day. It belonged to the church of his time. His beautiful home survived his occupation. It passed at his death to the Earls of Warwick through the marriage of his granddaughter; from them, by purchase, to the families of our times. I visited it in childhood, and I wish I could have visited it again.

Here my grandfather, while still in his twenties, administered the estate for the owner, who appears to have held him in high esteem. His first official act, we are told, was to "make the park around the mansion, and to beautify the hedges." He was not only a conspicuously practical agriculturist, but a great lover of natural beauty of the orderly kind; his care of hedges, in particular, would have been his "fad," if the word had been invented. For several years he held his post, "having at the same time a farm of his own at South R——," which was his later and last home. When he was thirty he married a lady from Surrey. My grandmother predeceased him, but I dimly remember her as a gentle and dainty old lady, fastidious in dress, manners and the ordering of her house; or it may be only this tradition of her that I remember—I cannot be sure. Richard Brinsley Sheridan was at their wedding. He is said to have been closely connected, by blood or friendship, with her people.

"Coke of Norfolk" was his friend; I knew that always. The memoir speaks of "great gatherings of agriculturists at Holkham," which he attended as his squire's representative while at W——; but after he was his own man the kindred spirits must have met and mingled, for it was Lord Leicester, I have been told, who gave to my grandfather's place at R—— the flattering nickname of "Little Holkham," which clung to it for many years. They used to compare their respective experiments and the results, and my grandfather would come from these investigations to say (according to the memoir): "We beat him in some things, and he beat us in others."

I read that he (my grandfather) "was the first to make underdraining tiles in the county. The cost to buy them was four guineas per thousand, each tile weighing eighteen pounds, with holes perforated in them, and put down without soles to rest upon; he had as few joints as possible, and did not approve of the herring-bone shape on that account"—whatever that may mean.