My grandfather writes, 16 November 1841, “I have heard of many who have sent their friends in London casks of prime cider, and not worth anything when arrived: frequently from the tricks of the sailors, but I am told that the Custom House officers open every cask that is sent. Therefore the merchants attend at the opening and see it well secured, otherwise it would be spoiled.”
My brother’s copybooks sometimes throw light on things that are ignored in our grandparent’s letters. In a book that he was using when he had just turned ten, the greater part is occupied by sentiments that they dictated—e.g. “the elegant poems of this amiable divine have ever been highly admired”—but in the vacant spaces there are compositions of his own. Thus, “when Therza came, a cunning jade, | a laughing mischief-making maid, | who laughed at Jane and scouted Grace, | and in the kitchen took her place, | Wreyland, which was always quiet, | now was turned into great riot.” This is followed by what appears to be a verbatim report of an altercation between Grace and Therza, ending “Well, I tell ’e what, Therza, you know nart tall about it.”
He had an extraordinary memory—I see that it was noticed, 25 November 1849, when he had only just turned three. He could repeat whole conversations word for word, and would repeat them to the very people who were not meant to hear them. My grandfather writes to my father about it, 30 November 1857, “I tell them, tho’ he appears to take notice of everything, he cannot at all times be depended on in relating facts, for he often misconstrues things.” But people saw that he was telling them exactly what was said, even if he did not fully grasp the meaning.
When he was six, he was writing letters of such precocity that his elders were suspected of getting him to say things that they could not very well say themselves. My grandfather writes to my father, 20 July 1853, “I fancied by Mr *****’s letter that the boy had written something offensive. You may assure Mr ***** that no one here dictated anything to him, nor can do, for (if attempted) he would sure write contrary.”—I put one of his letters in my former Small Talk, page 105.
My grandfather’s letters have all sorts of words and phrases. After some heavy rains, 9 January 1860, “The waters have been very stiff, but not landed yet,” meaning that the Wrey was high, but had not overflowed its banks. Whilst the railway was being made here, 30 April 1865, “There is a stagnation among the navvies about wages.” He says that my brother “has a little hoarse,” 12 June 1854, and habitually speaks of “having a hoarse” like “having a cough.” He says that one of his neighbours “is confined in the chest,” 18 February 1859, that is, confined to his house by a cold in his chest, and another one “is confined in the same complaint.” Another neighbour was unsystematic in her housekeeping, and he says that “she keeps a disorderly house,” 14 January 1848. Somebody left a letter of his unanswered, 2 February 1859, and he calls this “a very unhandsome thing.”
I am Victorian enough myself to think it rather vulgar to call an omnibus a ’bus, but never had qualms in saying ’van for caravan or ’wig for periwig, that is, peruke. People habitually say You for Ye, yet snigger at our saying Us for We. What they call “a chapter of accidents” is “a proper old pedigree” here. That is etymologically right, as a pedigree is a thing that goes on step by step. Etymologically there is not much difference between a junket and a jonquil, or porcelain and pigs, or venerable and venereal; but a Venerable Archdeacon got quite cross when I applied the other adjective to him. Down here we soften ‘immodest’ into ‘vulgar’ and ‘immoral’ into ‘rough’; and a stranger may give great offence, when only meaning ‘rough’ and ‘vulgar’ in the usual sense.
There is an old word ‘vair,’ still used in heraldry for ‘fur.’ This probably gave Cinderella her slipper of glass (verre) and certainly makes Pharisees into weasels. The word includes all furry things as well as fur—I imagine that the Fairies were once a furry tribe—but now it is restricted to one furry thing, the weasel, just as ‘cider’ and ‘thatch’ and ‘deer’ include all manner of strong drinks and roofs and beasts, but are now restricted to one sort of each. We have reduplicated plurals here, ‘posteses’ for ‘posts,’ and so on, including ‘vaireses’ for ‘vairs’; and naturally the children say that weasels be the only Pharisees they ever see’d.
Weasels were common in my early days, and rabbits comparatively scarce, though now sent off in thousands to the Midland towns. Until the trapping began, the weasels kept them down; but the weasels mostly perished in the traps, and after that the rabbits multiplied.
Devonshire hedges are inordinately large, and take up a great deal of ground. In my early days people used to say they could increase their acreage quite ten per cent. by doing away with hedges. But when they tried it, they generally found that they lost more in shelter than they gained in space: their fields were swept by every wind that blew. They might have learnt a lesson from the Scilly Islands, where people were putting in hedges then, to cut their fields up into little squares for growing things in shelter. Three of my fields here are eight fields on the Tithe Map, dated 1841. Five hedges have gone: three of them merely wasted space, but the other two gave shelter that is wanted now.
Here in Wreyland Manor there were many more hedges than in most places of this size. They were not put here for the sake of shelter, but from four people’s perversity four centuries ago. On the death of the last Lord Dynham in 1501, his property went to his four sisters and their heirs, as he left no children of his own. Apart from Wreyland, he had many manors in different parts of England. Instead of arranging his manors in four groups and taking one group each, they each took a fourth part of each manor and of each tenement in each manor; and by sales and marriages these fractions of the tenements passed into many different owners’ hands. And whenever a tenement was divided, each fraction had to be equipped with a fair share of every sort of land—garden, orchard, meadow, arable, pasture, wood and heath—so that it generally was formed of several patches of ground some way apart. Each of these patches had to be enclosed, and was enclosed in the usual Devonshire way with very big hedges.