In North Wales I hardly ever saw a village school mistress other than a married woman. Owing to the deplorably low moral tone of the people it was said to be impossible for a single girl to hold such an appointment. In Norfolk there was not a shadow of hesitation on this account: brains were scarce there, as everywhere, but morals were sound: a good girl at £50 was better than a bad man at £80, and the managers took their chance of the good girl who would go, in preference to the bad man who would stay.
I have my old official note-books of that time, recording the school statistics and draft reports, and I see that in two autumn weeks I inspected a total of 606 children at a cost to the country in travelling expenses of £11. In Manchester, 30 years later, I could find 600 children in a single department of a school by spending twopence on a tram-car, and the day’s travelling from doorstep to doorstep might take 40 minutes. In Norfolk the real labour of the day was the travelling, and it would often take two hours’ drive to reach a school with no more children than you could put in a tram-car.
Yet there were compensations in these long drives. The dearth of railways made it worth the while of the hotel proprietors to keep good cattle, and the horses were splendid. I have driven 14 miles in an hour, without use of whip, to catch a train. Equally precious were the drivers. O Charlie B.! aged friend and charioteer for three years. How many miles we journeyed behind that black horse, or those black horses; and how delightful was your conversation! We began daily with the same opening:
He: “Let’s see: where is it tu this marnin? Norton? (meditatively) Norton Red Lion? (he always associated the village with its inn). Neow which way du thet lay, I wonder?”
I: “According to the map it is beyond Weston.”
He: “Weston Black Dog: why I was there last week for a funeral: let me see, where did I fetch that corpse from?”
For when not driving me and the black horse to school, he was driving the black horse, or horses, in a hearse to a funeral; and during the Burial Service he baited the horses and himself at the “Red Lion” or the “Black Dog.”
Thus guided by the association of ideas, Charlie took my vile body within three or four miles of Norton, and then hailed a native: “Which way should I go to get to Norton; far to go the nighest way?” Implying that he knew several routes, but was unable to decide on the best. The school was then found. Very seldom he put up at the “Red Lion”; usually he went straight to the Rectory, where he got entertainment for man and beast, and provided entertainment for the cook by retailing the latest news from Norwich.
Our conversation was most improving. All that I knew about “The Principles of Agriculture”—a possible subject of examination in schools—I got from Charlie in those drives. He did his best to teach a short-sighted man the difference between swedes, mangolds, and turnips; and between wheat, oats, and barley, before their ears were developed. He taught me not to expect a field of wheat where I had been so much pleased with the crop last year. It would be three years before the phenomenon recurred, and in those years other vegetables would be seen. This was not to relieve the monotony of agricultural life, and so to bring the labourer “back to the land,” but for certain agricultural-chemical reasons which Charlie did not explain.
He had views about cattle, too, and their approximate value, and attributed the introduction of cattle plague to Gu-anner. Also he discoursed upon birds, plants, and flowers under their Norfolk names, such as Stubin wood, Pretty Betsy, Mergule, and White Rim, and gave me much information. In return one day, as I travelled with my colleague, I taught him indirectly the mysteries of Roadside Cribbage: you know the game? A. and B., sitting right and left, count all the men and beasts on their respective sides of the road within the limits of two hedges, marking ten for a white horse and ten for a windmill: the higher score at the end of an agreed distance or time wins the game, but a cat on the window-sill, or an old woman in spectacles is Game at once. Charlie was referee about the shade of the horses claimed as “white”; he watched the game with the keenest interest, and once, when I snatched a victory at the last moment in the face of a heavy majority, by espying a spectacled hag, he rolled about in tearful laughter till the black horse wondered if we had been to a funeral in his dog-cart.