near St. Cross, Winchester.
The good tune and merry words lasted me down among the market gardens and florists’ plantations, past the “Shepherd and Flock” at the turning to Moor Park, to the Wey again, and the first oast-house beside it, and so into Farnham at a quarter to nine, which I felt to be breakfast time.
While I drank my coffee the rising wind slammed a door and the first shower passed over. The sun shone for me to go to the “Jolly Farmer” across the Wey, in a waterside street of cottages and many inns, such as the “Hop Bag,” the “Bird in Hand,” and the “Lamb.” The “Jolly Farmer,” Cobbett’s birthplace, a small inn standing back a little, with a flat black and white front, was labelled “Cobbett’s Birthplace,” in letters as big as are usually given to the name of a brewer. It is built close up against a low sandy bank, which continues above the right shore of the Wey, somewhat conspicuously, for miles. Behind the “Jolly Farmer” this bank is a cliff, hollowed out into caves (no one knows how old, or whether made by Druids or smugglers), and overgrown by bushes and crowned by elms full of rooks’ nests. The whole of this waterside is attractive, rustic, but busy. The Wey is already a strong stream there, and timber yards and warehouses abut on it. A small public garden occupies the angle made by one of its willowy bends.
Farnham West Street was for the moment warm in the sun as I walked slowly between its shops to where the perched brick fronts of decent old houses were scarcely interrupted by a quiet shop or two and the last inns, the “Rose and Thistle” and the “Holly Bush.” It is one of those streets in which a hundred houses have been welded into practically one block. There are some very old houses, some that are old, and some not very old, but all together compose one long, uneven wall of rustic urbanity. Castle Street is entirely different. It takes its name from the Bishop of Winchester’s castle, a palace of old red brick and several cedars standing at its upper end. Being about three times as broad as West Street, it is fit to be compared for breadth with the streets of Marlborough, Wootton Bassett, or Epsom. Most of the houses are private and not big, of red or of plastered or whitened brick; but there is a baker’s shop, a “Nelson’s Arms,” and a row of green-porched alms-houses. At the far end the street rises and curves a little to the left, and is narrowed by the encroachment of front gardens only possessed by the houses at that point. A long flight of steps above this curve ascends a green slope of arum and ivy and chestnut trees, past an old episcopal fruit wall, to a rough-cast gateway, with clock and belfry, and beyond that, the palace and two black, many-storied cedars towering at its front door.
I looked in vain for a statue of Cobbett in Farnham. Long may it be before there is one, for it will probably be bad and certainly unnecessary. So long as “Rural Rides” is read he needs not to share that kind of resurrection of the just with Queen Anne and the late Dukes of Devonshire and of Cambridge. The district has bred yet another man who combines the true countryman and the writer. I mean, of course, George Bourne, author of “The Bettesworth Book,” a volume which ought to go on to the most select shelf of country books, even beside those of White, Cobbett, Jefferies, Hudson, and Burroughs. Bettesworth was a Surrey labourer, a neighbour and workman of the author’s. He was an observant and communicative man: his employer took notes from time to time, and the book is mainly a record of conversations. George Bourne gives a brief setting to the old man’s words, yet a sufficient one. Pain and sorrow are not absent, and afar off we see a gray glimpse of the workhouse; but the whole is joyful. Even when Bettesworth “felt a bit Christmassy” there is no melancholy; his head merely seems “all mops and brooms.” His wife tells him that he has been laughing in his sleep. “I was always laughing, then,” he says, “until I was sore all round wi’ it.” We have Bettesworth’s own words in most cases, and George Bourne never interferes except to help. There is no insipid contrast with the outer world, though here and there we have an echo from it; we hear of railways as not particularly convenient, and a dull way of travelling; and of cut-purses, “got up they was, ye know, reg’lar fly-looking blokes, like gentlemen.” Nothing is omitted but what had to be. Bettesworth cleaned cesspools at times, and the best things in the book centre round his “excellent versatility in usefulness.” Well-sinking, reaping, lawn-mowing, pole-pulling in the hop garden, mending of roofs and steeples, and all the glorious activities connected with horses, had come into his work: as for adventure, he drove his first pair of cart horses from Staines to Smithfield Market. He had been a wanderer, too. During a long absence from friends he wrote to a brother, enclosing a gift; but on the way to the post he met an acquaintance, “and I ast’n if he’d ’ave a drink. So when he says yes, I took the letter an’ tore out the dollar an’ chucked the letter over the hedge. An’ we went off an’ ’ad a bottle o’ rum wi’ this dollar. An’ that’s all as they ever heerd o’ me for seven year.”
But the conversations themselves were held while Bettesworth was laying turf, or during the quite genial fatigue following a fifteen-hour day. “Laying Turf” is one of the most charming pieces in the world. The old steeple-mender, reaper, and carter was laying turf under continuous rain and in an uncomfortable attitude, and made the unexpected comment: “Pleasant work this. I could very well spend my time at it, with good turfs.”
“The Bettesworth Book” appeared in 1901. “Memoirs of a Surrey Labourer,” the record of Bettesworth’s last years—1892–1905—appeared in 1907. At first the book may seem tame, a piece of reporting which leaves the reader not unaware of the notebooks consulted by the author. But in the end comes a picture out of the whole, painfully, dubiously emerging, truthful undoubtedly, subtle, not easy to understand, which raises George Bourne to a high place among observers. Apart from his observation, too, he shows himself a man with a ripe and generous, if staid, view of life, and a writer capable of more than accurate writing: witness his picture of frozen rime on telegraph wires, of Bettesworth’s “polling beck” or potato fork, and phrases like this: “Near the beans there were brussels sprouts, their large leaves soaked with colour out of the clouded day.”
Bettesworth had fought in the Crimea, and during sixty years had been active unceasingly over a broad space of English country—Surrey, Sussex, and Hampshire—always out of doors. His memory was good, his eye for men and trades a vivid one, and his gift of speech unusual, “with swift realistic touch, convincingly true;” so that a picture of rural England during the latter half of the nineteenth century, by one born in the earlier half and really belonging to it, is the result. The portrait of an unlettered pagan English peasant is fascinating. He lived in a parish where people of urban habits were continually taking the place of the older sort who dropped out, but he had himself been labourer, soldier, “all sorts of things; but ... first and last by taste a peasant, with ideas and interests proper to another England than that in which we are living now,” and perhaps unconscious of the change since the days when he saw four men in a smithy making an axe-head: “Three with sledge-’ammers, and one with a little ’ammer, tinkin’ on the anvil.... There was one part of making a axe as they’d never let anybody see ’em at.”
The talk, and George Bourne’s comments reveal this man’s way of thinking and speaking, his lonely thoughts, and his attitude in almost every kind of social intercourse. They show his physical strength, his robust and gross enjoyment, his isolation, his breeding and independence, his tenderness without pity, his courage, his determination to endure. No permissible amount of quotation can explain the subtle appeal of his talk, for example, whilst turf-laying,—
“Half unawares it came home to me, like the contact of the garden mould, and the smell of the earth, and the silent saturation of the cold air. You could hardly call it thought—the quality in this simple prattling. Our hands touching the turfs had no thought either; but they were alive for all that; and of such a nature was the life in Bettesworth’s brain, in its simple touch upon the circumstances of his existence. The fretful echoes men call opinions did not sound in it; clamour of the daily press did not disturb its quiet; it was no bubble puffed out by learning, nor indeed had it any of the gracefulness which some mental life takes from poetry and art; but it was still a genuine and strong elemental life of the human brain that during those days was my companion. It seemed as if something very real, as if the true sound of the life of the village had at last reached my dull senses.”