Scarcely half a mile separates the churches of Effingham and Little Bookham, the latter a tiny building considerably altered by various restorations, but containing some interesting remains of Norman work. Almost touching the church stands, and has stood since days before Domesday book was written, a great yew, dark and shining, with another thousand years' life in it, if its vigorous branches tell the truth. The village itself is not much more than a cottage or two, but Little Bookham must always be a place of interest, at all events for those who read and write newspapers, for the Manor House is the home of one of the doyens of English journalism, Mr. Meredith Townsend, for forty-four years joint-editor of the Spectator.
"Master and friend, whose ardent soul
Burns brighter as it nears the goal,
Whose indefatigable pen
Stirs envy in us younger men——"
So has Mr. Charles Graves addressed him, and so might others feel a noble envy.
Great Bookham, less than a mile away, was once the home of another writer. Fanny Burney lived there for four years after she had married General d'Arblay, and the two of them with their baby, and an income of £125, were superlatively happy. Here she wrote Camilla, which was to build and to christen the house she lived in later, and it was from Bookham that she set out to take the first bound copies to King George and the Queen at Windsor. "About how much time did you give to it?" asked the good-natured King, and "Are you much frightened? As much frightened as you were before?" The Queen asked M. and Madame d'Arblay to dine the next day, and in the interval the General, having been introduced to the Queen's gardener at Frogmore, "a skilful and famous botanist," consulted him seriously about the Bookham cabbages. M. d'Arblay was a gardener of greater courage than science. His wife sends her father a picture of the work done among the Bookham fruits and flowers.
"Our garden," she writes, "is not yet quite the most profitable thing in the world; but M. d'A. assures me it is to be the staff of our table and existence." But M. d'Arblay had very little luck. He planted strawberries hoping to gather fruit within three months, and was disappointed:—
"Another time, too, with great labour, he cleared a considerable compartment of weeds, and, when it looked clean and well, and he showed his work to the gardener, the man said he had demolished an asparagus bed! M. d'Arblay protested, however, nothing could look more like des mauvaises herbes.
"His greatest passion is for transplanting. Everything we possess he moves from one end of the garden to another, to produce better effects. Roses take place of jessamines, jessamines of honeysuckles, and honeysuckles of lilies, till they have all danced round as far as the space allows; but whether the effect may not be a general mortality, summer only can determine."
The picture of the General turning his sword into a reaping hook is even more alluring:—
"I wish you had seen him yesterday, mowing down our hedge—with his sabre, and with an air and attitudes so military, that, if he had been hewing down other legions than those he encountered—i.e. of spiders—he could scarcely have had a mien more tremendous, or have demanded an arm more mighty. Heaven knows, I am 'the most contente personne in the world' to see his sabre so employed!"
The garden in which these severely military operations took place still surrounds the same windows, gay with wistaria and roses. Possibly the gnarled apple trees which fringe the lawn are actual survivors of the general's sabre.