The Retrospect

by Ada Cambridge

OUTDOOR LIFE

It was not a house or church, or wood or field, here or there, that swarmed with reminiscences of my life half-a-century ago; every bit of Norfolk soil that I passed over or looked upon was thick with history of the old times. I had been so sure that the March of Progress, which in the same period had made a highly modern nation out of nothing on the other side of the world, would have swept away the wild-blooming hedgerows, the divisions of the little fields, the rutty, grassy, tree-shaded lanes, the old fashions, generally, of my native county; and I could hardly believe in the luck which had spared so much that the little taken was scarcely missed. Some thirty years ago an Australian friend of mine made a long-desired pilgrimage to the home and graves of the Brontës, and blessed his fate in having chanced upon the last day before the church at Haworth, as Charlotte and Emily had used it, was closed for restoration. I was just too late for Crosby Hall, and the house of the H. family near T—— was gone; otherwise I had no disappointments in my search for the ancient landmarks. But that England was so beautifully well kept (and perhaps it was so then, although I did not notice it), it was the same England that I had left, and no part so unchanged as the part of Norfolk I returned to, which I called my own.

Driving about with M., I lived my old outdoor life again, as if there had been no break in it.

That there was any outdoor life at all in those benighted times I have heard questioned and denied in various ways by our athletic offspring. "Oh, what did people do before there were tennis and croquet and golf?" Contemporary writers are fond of drawing comparisons—I have done it myself—between the lady of old, with her prunella shoes and her swoons and her genteel incapability, and the stalwart, active, efficient damsel who now fills her place; wholly, of course, to the advantage of the latter. But, looking back, and trying to be strictly fair all round, I am not sure that the women of the fifties were so much less sensible (according to their lesser lights) than their descendants of to-day. It must be remembered that they could not be more sensible than fashion permitted, and that we are just as craven slaves to that impersonal tyrant as they were. I am sure that if fashion were suddenly to forbid tennis and croquet and golf and the rest, those invigorating pursuits would be abandoned to-morrow. You will say that our enlightened views upon physical culture would remain, to operate in other directions; and one must admit that in the fifties physical culture was unknown. There was no sanitation, no philosophy of food, no anything. Yet folks lived, and to a good old age too. They had one thing that we have not—the tranquil mind—than which there is no better foundation on which to build bodily health. We do not want their tranquil mind—certainly not—but that is beside the question.

In the fifties, although golf and tennis were not games for the multitude, bowls and cricket were as dear to the bewhiskered public as now to the clean-shaven or moustached; and women had their lawn diversions for the hours they considered enough to give to them, the balance of their active exercise being put into housework and "duties" generally. There was a primitive sort of lacrosse that we were addicted to, and archery, which was a graceful and quite scientific game. We had a small armoury of bows and arrows, bought cheap at the sale of the furniture of a neighbouring great house, and gave social entertainments on the strength of it while we lived at D——. Women with good figures showed to great advantage before the target, and eye and hand had to be as well trained for the bull's-eye as for the hoop or hole. It is true that archery was for the privileged well-to-do; an archery meeting usually had the background of a green and well-kept park. This rather disqualifies it for the purposes of comparison with our modern outdoor games. But those who did not have it did not miss it. There were nutting and blackberrying and mushrooming and May-daying—plenty of simple merrymakings—within reach of all.

On May mornings—oh, I wish I could have had an English May once more!—we were up with the birds and out in the fields to hunt for the first hawthorn bloom. It was one of the settled customs of the family, if not of the community. Often the morning was terribly cold, mostly the grass was reeking wet, but still the expedition was looked forward to with joy and carried through in the highest spirits. Blackthorn it was, if we found it at all, but it was not our fault if we did not return with some trophy of green bud or white flower to lay upon the breakfast-table. Later in the morning the village girls came round with their May garlands. A structure of crossed hoops of wood thickly wreathed with evergreens and artificial flowers, with a doll in the middle and any procurable odds and ends of ribbon, tinsel, or other finery, hung about it, fairly describes the sort of thing. Two girls carried it between them on a pole, and it was covered from view under a cloth until presented at your house door; the cloth was then whipped off, you gazed admiringly and, if generously disposed, or there were not too many of them, dropped a copper into an expectant hand or bag.

At any rate it was quite understood to be the right thing to take the air. We children were sent out in all weathers for our daily walk. I vividly remember crying with the cold, again and again, as I trudged along the snowy roads and through the bitter winds of those hard winters that used to be. Yet it was a wholesome practice, and we were wisely safeguarded against its risks, except in the matter of headgear, the close fit of which made our ears tender so that we suffered horribly from ear-ache, a malady unknown to the open-hatted head. On how many a night we wailed in sleep, or sobbed in our mother's arms by the fireside, with a roasted onion and a hot flannel pressed to the pain which they could not alleviate; and nobody knew the reason why.

When we went out in snow-time we wore snow-boots. They were woolly and waterproof, very thick, and were laced or buttoned over our other boots. For wet weather we had clogs—wooden soles with leather toe-caps and ankle-straps; the soles were cut with supports like the arched piers of a bridge, that lifted them an inch or two from the ground. Our elders, and especially the working women, used pattens—wooden soles again, but raised upon an iron frame and ring, and with one fixed strap which took the foot at the instep when it was thrust through. One could not imagine the rural housewife and her maids flushing their brick floors and wading through the "muck" of their farmyards without their pattens on, nor imagine another contrivance that would have answered the purpose better. Cheap, durable, put on and off in a moment, and needing no attention, they were most convenient to the wearers, and their effectiveness in keeping the feet dry and petticoats undrabbled must have made for health and cleanliness. Yet I suppose there are no clogs and pattens nowadays—I saw none; and, if so, it seems rather a pity. Things that have been improved upon ought to go, but why abandon those that still remain desirable? What is there to take the place of clogs and pattens in usefulness to the class which once wore them? Not goloshes, surely.

They were not the only sensible footgear of these days either. When the eldest aunt visited us she used to bring our supply of nursery shoes, in which five children scampering about the floors made less noise than one does now. Those shoes were woven of narrow strips of cloth in a flat basket pattern, sole and upper in one, like deerskin moccasins, and as soft; some old man in her village made them to the eldest aunt's order. But it may be that he was the sole manufacturer, whose art died with him, for I never saw their like elsewhere.

We drove as well as walked abroad. Ladies with carriages used them regularly of an afternoon, having paced their garden terraces—skirts held well above the hems of their snowy petticoats—earlier in the day. Mother and I had many outings together in the gig; either to L——, to do shopping, or to her father's house at twice the distance away. And she did not attempt to drive with one hand and hold up an umbrella with the other; indeed, she could not have done it, for the "gig-umbrella"—green cotton with a bulbous yellow handle—took a man's arm to support it. When it rained she drew a mackintosh hood from the box that was the gig seat and tied it over her bonnet, shutting everything in with a drawing-string round the face; there was also a curtain to it for the protection of neck and shoulders. Now, was not that a sensible idea? But we never wear on wet journeys a mackintosh hood or something better than a mackintosh hood, even in the dark when there is nobody to see us.