Nobody thought of fasting here on any day except Good Friday; and fasting meant no more than eating hot-cross-buns in addition to the usual food. But whether it came as early as March 20 or as late as April 23, Good Friday was the great day for potato-planting. Whatever the season was, potatoes planted on Good Friday came up better than potatoes planted any other day—at least, that was the common belief here. There must have been a religious or superstitious base for this, and perhaps also for the custom of kicking a football round when the planting had been done. (In my early years a football was hardly ever seen here except on a Good Friday.) I have seen the sailors flogging Judas Iscariot on Good Fridays in Mediterranean ports, and I hear it may be seen on foreign ships in English ports. Judas Iscariot is there a dummy like Guy Fawkes and here, I think, he had become a football. But it is always hard to judge the meaning of such things. Some fifty years ago an acquaintance of mine, a midshipman, went up to Jerusalem with a lot of other midshipmen when the Mediterranean squadron was cruising off that coast; and they marched into Jerusalem singing a song (which then was popular) of Kafoosalum, ... the barber of Jerusalem, ... the daughter of the barber. And good Mahommedans were much impressed, thinking it was a holy song that these young angels sang so fervently.
There is now a service of Three Hours at Lustleigh on Good Friday. I inquired what authority there was for this, and was informed (officially) that it was a service licensed by the Bishop under the Shortened Services Act. That was quite good as a bit of cynicism or a joke, but rather past a joke if one remembers how that Act was passed through Parliament. Its promoters said that it was only to be used for shortening the old services, not for introducing anything new.
On the coronation of Queen Victoria there was a service in Exeter Cathedral and ‘rejoicings’ in the town; and my father’s diary finds fault—“the stupid dun of cannon, which even fired during the anthem, shaking the edifice and distracting everyone’s attention”—and so on for a couple of pages, finishing, “it seemed somewhat like a Good Friday: by no means a favourite day of mine.”
There is no desire here for more Good Fridays or Ash Wednesdays, but only for Shrove Tuesdays at all seasons of the year; and these Carnivals are not followed by Lenten fasts. Carnivals are superseding Fêtes and Galas, here called Feets and Gaylers; but knowing that a Swarry (or a Soirée) consisted of a leg of mutton, I should say that every Carnival or Feet or Gayler consists of a brass band ‘with the usual trimmings’ like the leg. It seems perverse of people to speak of fêtes as feets when they invariably speak of beans as banes, and even more perverse to want these foreign words at all. This coast is getting known as a Riviera, which they pronounce Riveerer as if it were a German word.
I have got a bill here for ‘mendin gardin oz’—hose—and I have seen a bill in Bedfordshire for ‘hoke’ and ‘hellum’ and ‘hash.’ With phonetic spelling there would be as many written languages as there are dialects now—water would be ‘warter’ in the Eastern counties, and ‘watter’ or ‘wetter’ here—but fonetic fanatics would take the cockney dialect and foist it on us all. On looking at an Elementary English Grammar, of which 350,000 have been sold, I found it said—“Take c out of the alphabet, and we could write, kat, sity, speshal, instead of cat, city, special, and in thus writing those words, we should be writing them according to their pronunciation.” No doubt, the cockney news-boys screech out ‘Extra Speshal’; but if we are to get pronunciation down from town, we might get it from the West End rather than the East.
Sometimes people make mistakes here about the origin of words—Reformatory is not Reform-a-Tory, as ardent Liberals said—and sometimes they make mistakes about the words themselves. During the War there was an entertainment for wounded soldiers at a house not far from here; and they came up in chars-à-banc with bagpipes playing all the way. I heard a small boy calling out, “Hearken to that music there,” and another one snubbing him, “Bain’t music, ‘tbe the magpies.” On first hearing of a Turkish bath, a girl assumed that it must be a turkeys’ bath. I picture an old turkey-cock jerking his head about and gobbling while he was screwing up his courage for a header into the cold plunge.
A cockney was greeted by a man down here with courteous inquiries about her health, “And how be you now? Be you all right?” The reply was, “No, half right, half left, like you”; and he told me that he had to do a bit of thinking afore he saw the sense of it. An old lady here surprised me just as much in town. She had not been there before, though well advanced in years; and I took her up in the Great Wheel at Earl’s Court to get a good look round. She told me afterwards, “I were a-thinkin’ all the time how Satan took our Lord up into an exceedin’ high place a-seein’ all the kingdoms of the world.”
I once heard a cockney expressing her contempt for everybody born elsewhere. She said with pride, “I was born and bred where I stand,” and she was standing in a gutter in a slum. Londoners do not often give themselves away like that: they usually are people of resource. I complained to an umbrella-maker that a new umbrella kept turning inside-out, and with a jerk I turned it inside out at once. He took the umbrella, jerked it the other way and said, “You see, sir, it comes back again quite easily.” I complained to a stationer that his envelopes did not stick. He replied with dignity, “No, sir, they do not: we use only the purest gum.”
On a spring morning I was coming out of Charing Cross station on my way back from Algeria with a very sun-burnt face, about the colour of a red geranium; and while my hansom was going slowly through the gates, I heard a loafer say, “Look, Bill, ee’s come into bloom early this year.” People are more courteous here. At a harvest supper there was a general desire to sing, “For he’s a jolly good fellow,” but also a general feeling that it would not be quite respectful: so they softened the familiar term and sang without restraint, “For he’s a jolly good gentleman.” And this version suits the tune so well that anyone would think the tune was written for it.—I am told that when I go to sleep, I snore. One afternoon I asked why the letters had not been brought in to me as soon as they arrived; and the answer was, “I was afraid I might disturb you, sir, I thought I heard you sleeping.”
There is a House of Mercy at Bovey, a Gothic Revival building designed by Woodyer about 1865. Its inmates come from every part of England, not especially from Devon; and they have been described to me as “Maidens as hath gotten babies without ever goin’ nigh a church,” in other words, unmarried mothers. But less courteous terms were used when laundry-work was started there. One old lady gave me her whole mind—not merely a bit of it—about “they paltry gentry as took their washin’ away from honest folk to give it to they hussies.” The practical mind thought it a waste of money to have such institutions: the inmates could be married off, at much less cost, by giving them dowers. And really there is just as much marrying for money among the poorer classes as among the rich, though the amount of money may be smaller and sometimes very small indeed.