Men can easily get drunk on cider; but they do not suffer for it next day, if they have had pure cider of fermented apple-juice and nothing else. Unhappily, this wholesome drink has given way to other drinks that are less wholesome. A shrewd observer said to me:—“When each man had three pints of cider every day, there was not half this bickering and quarrelling that goes on now.” And that, I think, is true. They were always in the genial stage of drunkenness, and seldom had the means of going beyond that. A few, however, very often went beyond; and they have been described to me as “never proper drunk, nor proper sober neither, but always a-muddled and a-mazed.”
This failing was not confined to Devonshire. My father notes in his diary, 7 August 1847, at Dinan in Brittany:—“The apples thick beyond conception, and the priests already praying to avert the evil consequences they apprehend from the plenty and cheapness of cider.” He writes to my grandmother from Dinan, 15 August 1847:—“The apples are so abundant this year that the country will almost be drowned in cider. How they will consume it all, is a wonder, for they export none. The lower orders are drunk, it seems, a great deal of their time. The priests always pray for a bad apple crop as the only hope of saving the people from perpetual drunkenness.”
A former rector of Lustleigh was remonstrating with a man one afternoon for reeling through the village very drunk. But the man had his reply:—“Ay, ’tbe all very fine for you to talk, but you goes home to dinner late, and us doesn’t see you after.”
On the whole, less harm is done by cider than by tea; but cider gets more blame, as its ill effects are visible at once, whereas tea works its mischief slowly. Nobody says anything against tea-drinking now; but Parson Davy in his System of Divinity, vol. xix, page 235, which he printed at Lustleigh in 1803, spoke with indignation of “the immeasurable use of that too fashionable and pernicious plant, which weakens the stomach, unbraces the nerves, and drains the very vitals of our national wealth; to which nevertheless our children are as early and as carefully enured, from the very breast, as if the daily use of it were an indispensable duty which they owed to God and their country.” And in his Letter to a Friend concerning Tea, published in 1748, John Wesley spoke of tea-drinking as tea-drinkers speak of drinking alcohol now:—“wasteful, unhealthy self-indulgence”—“no other than a slow poison”—“abhor it as a deadly poison, and renounce it from this very hour.”
My grandfather had a new cider-press in 1842, and I had a new one in 1901. He set up his in what is now the potting-shed, and I set up mine in what is now the donkey’s house, but shifted it in 1904 to its present place in what had hitherto been the stables. The cider-press of 1901 is quite unlike the cider-press of 1842, and is practically the same as the wine-presses that are used in France. With three men at work, it will turn 800 lbs. of apples into 60 gallons of cider in about two hours. The old press was not so quick or clean, but was more picturesque.
Cider-making is not a very pleasant sight; and I have known people say that they would never touch cider again, having once seen how it was made. A crushed apple is not a pretty thing at any time, and is none the prettier for being in company with several thousand others. However, cider-making is not quite as bad as wine-making in Southern Italy and Sicily. There they tread the grapes: if the vat is small, they get the cramp; and I have seen men jump out of the vat, take a sharp run up and down a very un-swept road, and jump straight in again.
The Asti wine of Northern Italy is curiously like the wine that we make out of rhubarb here; and one might suspect the Asti of being rhubarb wine, only rhubarb costs much more than grapes down there. Our wine is not pure rhubarb: sugar and other things are used as well. And one year it was an utter failure. The sugar had been given to a certain damsel to put in, “and ’stead of tendin’ her duty, her were a-talkin’ to that Jarge, and atween’m they put pretty nigh all the sugar in one of they barryels and scarce any in t’other.”
Another liquor might be made here, as this soil grows the fungus that is used for Vodka. That liquor is in bad repute just now; but I must say that I found it very comforting on a long and dreary journey from Moscow down to Warsaw in the autumn of 1889.
My grandfather writes to my father on 3 December 1857:—“A glass of good mellow full-bodied cider is far superior to your Rhenish wine: there is no body in that.” And if Devonshire cider is to be compared with any class of wines, the Rhine wines certainly come closest to it. He thought the very best cider was wasted on the country-folk, and he writes on 18 September 1868:—“They do not much care what it is, so as its cider.” But they cared very much for that. He writes on 16 March 1845:—“The old workmen here think we shall have cider plenty: they think more about that than the crops in the fields.” And again on 17 July 1856:—“As you know, the men here are passionately fond of cider.”
He writes to him on 18 June 1851:—“People say that Ashburton Fair is past, and the apples are safe.” People still say that, meaning that all frosts have ceased by the first Thursday in June. But many of these sayings are of earlier date than 1752: the calendar was altered then by cutting out eleven days; and the seasons did not alter with the calendar. Father Christmas should arrive in snow, but seldom has it now: the snow comes with Old Christmas Day in January.