Small Talk at Wreyland. Second Series

by Cecil Torr

We have substitutes for most things now, even substitutes for witches. My father noted in his diary on 7 April 1844, “Witch-craft a common belief to this day in Lustleigh, and prevalent even among the better-informed classes.” And now I note that alien-espionage has been just as common a belief from 1914 onwards, and especially among those classes. They scent spies and aliens as keenly as the old folk scented witches; but the mania is more expensive now.—Two young men had bought a lonely cottage in a wood, and were living their own life up there. Until the War nobody ever suggested that they were anything but English. Then people said that they were German, and would as readily have said that they were Japanese or Russian, if we had been at war with Russia or Japan. And then a more inventive person said they had a gun-platform of concrete underneath their lawn. In a careless moment the editor of a local paper put that in. It was a costly blunder, and the lawyers profited.

There are people everywhere just now with such a comprehensive hate of Germany that they tell us to abjure all German things for evermore; but I notice that the men who talk like this, are almost always wearing German hats. Instead of saying that the hat is Tyrolese or Homburg or whatever German type it really is, they say it is of English make and call it Trilby or some other name like that. Yet these same men are always preaching that a German is a German always, although he has been naturalized or born here and has assumed an English name.

In speaking of the politicians who governed France in 1871, Bismarck said that some of them had Jewish names but several more had Jewish noses. People here think only of the alien name, forgetting that the alien blood is just as active in descendants in the female line, though the name has lapsed on marriage. There is the progeny of a Dutchman who settled at Exeter in the reign of William the Third. Nobody bothered about the female line; but descendants in male line were hunted out as Germans by a pack of people who knew too little of language or of history to recognize the name as Dutch.

There is probably more alien blood in England than these people think. They say that so-and-so is tainted by having an alien ancestor some generations back. But in nine cases out of ten they cannot give a complete list of their own great-great-grandparents, or even their great-grandparents; and the completest lists may not be quite conclusive. There was a wonderful old lady on a Dartmoor farm, ostensibly of English ancestry, but born about the time when French prisoners-of-war were out on parole there. I have seen her towering form, with eagle eye and outstretched hand, directing geese into their pond; and I have fancied that I saw a Marshal in Napoleon’s army launching a charge of cuirassiers.

I have heard her say Bo to a goose. Few people say it now, and they never say it properly. If it is said in the right way, the goose turns round and waddles off at once, however much it may have hissed before. It is like Ahi with a horse in Italy. When the driver has flogged and progged in vain, as a last resort he says Ahi, and then the brute moves on.

In my early days my grandfather would often talk of the French prisoners-of-war whom he remembered here a century ago; and I never imagined then that I was going to have prisoners-of-war working for me here, and that these prisoners would be German. They were quartered at Newton Abbot in the workhouse, and came out each day to work, returning for the night. I had nineteen here in the summer of 1918, though never more than six at once. There were six from Bavaria, three from Baden, two from Wurtemberg and one from Saxony; and seven were reckoned as Prussians, but two of these were from the Rhineland, two from Hannover, two from Hamburg and the other one from Silesia. They were the same kind of people that I have always met in rural parts of Germany—good-tempered and good-natured countryfolk, exceedingly unlike the Huns depicted by our Propaganda.

However little we may like it, the Germans are our own kith and kin. Sixteen of those nineteen prisoners would certainly have passed as English, if they had been in English clothes and had not cut their hair so short. A person here confounded Hannover with Andover, and thought the Hannoverians were of English birth. Of course, language makes a gulf; and here it was not merely a matter of English and German. The prisoners spoke such different dialects that they could hardly understand each other, and the Yorkshire of the corporal in charge of them was not exactly like our Devonshire here.

Quite early in the War the people here discovered that all Belgians were not angels, and I think they are discovering that all Germans are not devils. But at first the prisoners were not welcome. Looking at them from the road, a man declared he would not stand in the same field with them. A girl who heard him, looked at him, and was unkind enough to say, “No, not in the same battle-field.”

Standing in the wheat field, I was watching two good-looking cheery youths at work there. They were the same sort and evidently liked each other; but one belonged to Lustleigh and the other one to Dueren near Cologne. I felt some doubts about the state of things that had put them into hostile armies, to maim or kill each other if they could.

On an outlying farm the clock went wrong, and struck one at three and two at four and so on. This was a nuisance, as people were unable to remember which was wrong, the striking or the hands. But the farmer settled it by keeping the clock an hour fast; and then, when it pointed to one and struck eleven, everybody knew that it was twelve.