The Retrospect

by Ada Cambridge

I leaned over that low wall and looked into the enclosure. The men were having a game of cricket—such a natural thing to see where one sees a group of official Englishmen doing as they like in their off time (they were playing cricket at Aden and at Suez, regardless of the sweltering heat). When these lighthouse men, coming and going in their game, glanced towards me, watching them, it struck me as such a strange thing that they did not know who I was. I felt almost as if I had more right to be there than they. But when I totted up the years of my absence and the years of the oldest man amongst them, I knew I could be nothing to him but a stranger and an outsider, even as any other summer visitor out for a walk along the cliff. Yet how I longed to beckon him to the wall and ask him if he remembered the old times!

Beyond the lighthouse the cliff fell away gradually to a gradually diminishing sand-bank—as, of course, it had always done; and, descending the sloping path, I saw below me my old village, my own old beach, untouched by the hand of "improvement" which had been so busy near by. No, not quite untouched; the old village inn and coaching-house (when we first frequented the place there was no railway, and we coached the fifteen miles from L——) was now "The Golf Links Hotel," enlarged and modernised, and it had absorbed into its new grounds an old lane between hedges, along which we used to go and come, and which I had desired to perambulate again; but neither the hotel nor the links obtruded into the picture, which was substantially the same as I had known and remembered it. The bathing-machines had been moved from their former prominent position, and they had been a great feature. Every morning a couple of them rolled us into the water, where the bathing-woman was sometimes cruelly employed to dip us under, and haul us out again; and a picture of a little brother squatted naked on the roof of one of them, whither he had leaped from the wheel to evade her, and whence he refused to budge for any threats or blandishments, was plain before me when I looked for the machines where they used to be.

But this was the real thing—this was the old place, sacred to the old times. Once more I waded through heavy sand, that sifted into my boots, as we did before New H——, with its greens and esplanades and Jubilee Shelters, was dreamed of; I had to look about before I could find a clump of sea-grass on which to rest after my walk, while I surveyed and meditated upon the scene.

As was the case with other haunts of childhood and youth revisited, the actual place was not half the size nor of half the importance that I had supposed. To think that this little patch of beach and sandbank, with one occasional sail-boat (old Sam's Rose in June), a few donkeys and four or five bathing-machines for all its furnishing, should have been such a dream of romance, such a memory of joy, for more than half-a-century! But there was no doubt about it, and less than ever now. All the year round, in those old years, from late summer to early summer, I used to be counting days to "the seaside" again; and the rapture of each first evening when, the coach having dropped us at our lodgings, and our tea having been unpacked and eaten, we trooped to the beach (buying our spades and buckets at the post office on the way), to make sure that the sea was there before we went to bed—I could not outlive it in a thousand years. If ever I was happy in this mortal life, I was happy here, although I did break my heart over the corpse of a baby brother and have salt rubbed into a cut foot—also a governess in attendance and lesson-books, at times. But not the governess, fortunately; otherwise old H—— would not have called me back like this.

The tide was in, peacefully lapping the smooth shore. When it went out it went a long way, uncovering many acres of fine ribbed sand, strewn over with sea jewels; and great dark patches, that were mussel beds, the treasure ground of all. What multi-coloured sea-anemones we found there! And how hard it was to remember that the returning tide, with its unseen flank movements, would assuredly drown us if in our absorption we lost count of time! And away there, also hidden under the silver sheet, lay the mysterious buried forest—post-glacial trees with their black trunks and limbs intact, in one of which a stone axe was found sticking, just as the Stone Age man had left it. There were, I had been told, ebon gateposts, dug from this submerged woodland, on farm lands of the neighbourhood, and fragments came into our possession, fashioned into brooches and bracelets, as presents from local friends. I used not to consider the significance of these things. Now I read the buried forest into the pedigree of my native country, the splendour of which is lost upon those who stay at home.

When I was rested and had gazed my fill, I rose and turned to the right, up the low bank, towards the village—to find our old camping-places, if they existed still. I ought to have gone through a wicket at the top of the bank, through the narrow, high-hedged lane, past the windows of the old coaching inn, through which Honor W. used to lean and chat with the casual wayfarer and her father's guests. Where is that pleasant-voiced, happy-faced daughter of the old inn now? Does she sit somewhere, in cap and spectacles, darning socks for her grandchildren, amongst those who never realise that she was once young and handsome? I gave her memory greeting, while I turned my head from her transformed home. Just here I found myself rather alien and astray, but only for a few steps.

For there, across the road, were the coastguard quarters, as surely their old selves as I was. And no feature of the place could have appealed to me more eloquently, if only because in one of them the antiseptic surgery I have spoken of was practised on my foot. That was in a summer when all of the few regular lodging-places had been bespoken ahead of us, and we could only get in by the desperate expedient of subsidising the coastguard. Three of the little dwellings divided the family amongst them, the largest available parlour being the rendezvous for meals. I slept with two sisters in a four-post bed with blue-and-white-checked curtains, and the dispossessed rightful occupiers used to cross a corner of the room to get to their makeshift couch elsewhere, after we had retired and were supposed to be asleep. We did not like to miss the event of the stealthy passage of our coastguardsman from door to door, creeping in his stockinged feet, shading his candle with his hand, on such nights as he was off duty.

One of his brother officials was a clever worker in jet, amber and cornelian, found on the coast; his jewel-trays, prepared for summer visitors, held ornaments that were an ever-recurring joy to inspect and finger, especially if we could buy something—a cross or heart or string of beads for the neck, or a "faith-hope-and-charity" to add to one's bunch of charms. Another and particularly dear coastguardsman employed his genius and leisure for years upon a large model of a battleship of the period. It was the glory of his spotless parlour, which it quite monopolised. He said he was going to present it to the boy Prince of Wales—afterwards Edward our King. Crowns and palaces would be as naught to him, we were sure, when he found himself in possession of this wonder of the world. And did he ever?

Wandering on, I came to the cobbled courtyard, closed with a wide door at night, in the recesses of which we kept house through another summer. The very cobbles were there still! And farther on, the terrace of larger houses—the houses, snapped up by the early birds—where we sojourned for the summer of several years, and where the little brother died. Dear little golden-head! Dolls were nowhere in the season when he reigned. It was the end of the summer, through which his sunny beauty had been the admiration of the beach and the adoration of his family, that he was snatched from us. The terrace reminded me of one forgotten shadow upon the shining picture of the Past—the black day when father and mother drove away with the little coffin in a closed carriage, to lay him with his baby forerunners in the churchyard at H——, leaving us behind with our governess in a paradise despoiled. Miss W. it was, father's favourite, she of the Rowland's Kalydor-and-ink affair. And, by the way, I remember that, soon after our return home that year, I went to L—— with her, and accompanied her when she paid a call on the lady principal of the school where she had been educated, who had recommended her to us. This lady had an imposing presence—I can see her now—in dark blue poplin or black moire antique, adorned with a collar of choice lace. She and Miss W. were brightly chatting together, when I interposed with the great and solemn news that I had been bursting to impart: "Our baby is dead." I think I expected her to collapse under the shock, but the shock was mine. She glanced at me casually, then turned to Miss W. with a laugh. "Well," said she, "it's one less for you to be bothered with." And Miss W. laughed back as she replied that, yes, it was. Oh, no doubt she was a cat, the pretty and amiable Miss W. And the lady principal, a wife and mother, was just the sort to have had the training of her.

I did not get as far as the old church on these occasions, when I rambled alone between tea and dinner. The pony carriage took me there, when we drove about for two hours between breakfast and luncheon, and through the beautiful old park, that even now was so proudly exclusive that the public might pass through the gates on but one day of the week. But I had not forgotten the tombs of the old family—fourteenth and fifteenth and sixteenth century monuments—and its great home, where it had dwelt since William the Conqueror, when the Norman founder took a Saxon lady to wife. Never, from that day to this, has the line of descent been broken, or the lord of that line been dispossessed of these lands. The charters that gave them are still in the muniment-room of the Hall, and Mrs B. showed me an enclosed copse, a dark piece of wild woodland, which she said was Saxon land that had never been touched since a Saxon kingdom owned it. The key was a sacred heirloom of the family, and one of the articles of the family creed was that no feet should enter there except its own. The whole history of England had passed it by—this one bit, probably the only bit in all England, of virgin Saxon territory!