He welcomed the prospect of a rookery here, and wrote to my father, 23 March 1861:—“We have one rooks’-nest in a tall elm in the village, a pleasant look-out from this window to see how busy they are in building. If this saves itself, there will be more next year.” And on 23 February 1862:—“Rooks plentiful here about the trees, but not building yet.” And then on 2 December 1863:—“Six large elms blown up in the village to-day quite across the path, those that the rooks built on, six in a row; so no rooks’-nests in future.” This row of elms was at the west end of the Hall House garden. He says they were blown up; and that is the usual phrase here. Trees are not blown down, nor are rocks blown up. They say:—“Us put in charges, and bursted ’n abroad.”
Although he noted the barometer in that record every day, he knew by experience that there were safer guides. And he writes to my father, 28 March 1847:—“Yet at Moreton, if the sign-board of the Punch Bowl creaked upon its hinges, and the smoke blew down at Treleaven’s corner, rain was sure to follow, let the quicksilver be high or low.”
I find little need of a barometer here. If the wind blows down the valley, the weather is going to be fine. If it blows up the valley, there is going to be wet. And there is going to be a spell of wet, if there is damp upon the hearthstones in the Inner Parlour. When I hear *****’s leg be achin’ dreadful, then I know it will be rainin’ streams.
Sometimes, to make quite sure, I inquire of people who are weather-wise. After surveying every quarter of the sky, an old man told me:—“No, I don’t think it will rain, aless it do rain.” I interpreted the oracle as meaning that there would be heavy rain or none. Another wise one told me that, “when the weather do change, it do generally change upon a Friday.”
The moon was usually held responsible for these changes in the weather, and sometimes for less likely things as well. My grandfather writes to my father, 13 April 1856:—“A Saturday moon, they say, is too late or too soon, and there is no other prospect but a wet moon throughout.” On 29 June 1848:—“The old women here say we may expect to see measles in the growing of the moon: they tell me they never knew a case on the waning of the moon.” Measles were prevalent just then, and the moon was new next day; and on 23 July he remarks that the old women had proved right, so far.
My grandfather had a notion that all ordinary ailments could be cured by Quiet and Diet, and possibly such homely remedies as Coltsfoot Tea, or, better still, “a glass of real Cognac—the sovereign remedy, but not to be obtained down here,” as he writes to my father, 19 July 1869. But, if he did not recognize an ailment, he got medical advice at once.
A visitor being taken ill here, the local doctor was called in; and my grandfather writes to my father, 25 July 1847:—“He said it was occasioned by her imprudently sleeping with her window open one hot night.... I hope you do not admit the night air into your room, however hot—a most injurious practice, I am told. I never did it.” My grandmother writes to him, 15 May 1850:—“I fear you trifle with yourself in some things, such as dressing mornings with your bed-room window open. Nothing can be more injurious than that, particularly this very cold weather—indeed, it is wrong at any season to open it before you are dressed.”
These opinions are supported by Buchan’s Domestic Medicine, ed. 1788, which was one of the books in use here. It says, page 148:—“Inflammatory fevers and consumptions have often been occasioned by sitting or standing thinly cloathed near an open window. Nor is sleeping with open windows less to be dreaded.”
But these old people faced the air outside quite early in the mornings. My grandfather writes, 29 April 1849:—“I often wonder how anyone can lie in bed in May, not witnessing the beauty of the crystalled May-dew.... The barley throws up its blade or leaf about three inches high, quite erect, and on its tip top is this little spangled dew-drop. The leaf else is perfectly dry, if real dew—if from frost, the leaf is wet.” Again, on 7 January 1856:—“This morning the wheat was looking beautiful, like the barley in May. I stayed some time admiring it, with its little spangled tops shining like crystals.”
A child was born here on 20 November 1902, and had a rupture. Some while afterwards I asked the father how the child was getting on, and the answer was—“Oh, it be a sight better since us put’n through a tree.” And I found that they had carried out the ancient rite. The father had split an ash-tree on the hill behind this house, and had wedged the hole open with two chunks of oak. Then he and his wife took the child up there at day-break; and, as the sun rose, they passed it three times through the tree, from east to west. The mother then took the child home, and the father pulled out the chunks of oak, and bandaged up the tree. As the tree-trunk healed, so would the rupture heal also.