In whatever way you may choose to travel through Surrey, it is difficult to avoid making Woking a centre and a rendezvous. All the trains stop there; at least, I cannot remember ever passing through the station without stopping, either to change trains, which generally takes three quarters of an hour, or to wait in the station until it is time to go on again, which usually takes eleven minutes. I never found anything else to do at Woking, unless it were at night, when the railway lights up wonderful vistas and avenues of coloured lamps. Then the platform can be tolerable. Once when I had a long time to wait I walked out to the church which stands rather finely on the ridge north of the railway. I thought then it was Woking church: it belongs to Horsell. It was that Woking, the Woking of the station, which for many years I imagined to be the only Woking in Surrey. One did not wish for another.
But there is another Woking, and it is as pretty and quiet as the railway Woking is noisy and tiresome. It stands with its old church on the banks of the Wey two miles away, a huddle of tiled roofs and old shops and poky little corners, as out-of-the-way and sleepy and ill-served by rail as anyone could wish. I found it first on a day in October, and walked out from the grinding machinery of the station by a field-path running through broad acres of purple-brown loam, over which plough-horses tramped and turned. It was a strange and arresting sight, for over the dark rich mould there was drawn a veil of shimmering grey light wider and less earthly than any mist or dew. The whole plough land was alive with gossamer; and Old Woking lay beyond the gossamer as if that magic veil were meant to shield it from the engines and the smoke.
Old Woking, indeed, lies in country deep enough to forget the railway altogether, and to take to the water as the highway. The Wey wanders in and out by the village, and half-a-mile away at Send the Navigation canal joins the Wey proper, as the little river has come to be called to distinguish it from the canal. The canal cuts businesslike corners and straight lines when the Wey, having plenty of time to spare, wants to wander an extra two or three miles about a field. From Send to Weybridge or to Guildford, down stream or up, by the canal towing-path or by boat, is a delightful journey in spring or summer. As good a round as can be taken walking is from Woking through Send by Newark Priory, Pyrford and Wisley to Byfleet, where the railway can be joined or the journey continued to Weybridge or back to Woking. But there are, of course, twenty ways of seeing the little villages that cluster round the Wey so closely in this corner of Surrey, either on foot or by boat, or rowing and walking both.
But Woking has not always been quiet and old-fashioned and sleepy. Once it was a royal manor, and contained a royal residence. William the Conqueror held Woking in demesne himself, and it passed through the hands of every king until James I, who gave it to one of his foresters, Sir Edward Zouch. Sir Edward had to pay something for his privilege. He held the manor on condition that he was to bring to the king's table, on the Feast of St. James each year, the first dish at dinner, and with the dish the satisfactorily large rent of a hundred pounds in coined gold of the realm. Perhaps he still made something out of his tenants; at all events, a further token of gratitude, he was to wind a call in Woking Forest on Coronation Day. He may have liked the rental, but he could not have liked the old palace, for he knocked down every brick of it. The strangest and most melancholy fate seems to wait on every palace in Surrey built or lived in by an English king,—even by the friend of a king. Of Oatlands, Guildford, Woking, Nonsuch, Sheen, each a king's palace, scarcely a stone remains; Wolsey's palace by the Mole is nothing but a gateway; the Archbishops' palace at Croydon has sunk as low as a wash-house. Kingston owns the stone on which English kings have been crowned; but elsewhere in Surrey the royal hand has touched only to destroy.
A persistent association hangs to the name of the town by the station, undeserved but traditional. Woking, like the Duke of Plaza-toro, "likes an interment." Much of the land near the town is owned by a company which, while it builds villas for the living, especially those who find advantages in a fast train service, has named itself Necropolis, which is grim enough for anybody living or dead. But the Necropolis Company, whether it knows it or not, did not found the tradition. That stands to the record of an old grave-digger interviewed by Aubrey. He conversed grimly and with authority on the places and seasons for the proper digging of graves. He "had a rule from his father to know when not to dig a grave." That was "when he found a certain plant about the bigness of the middle of a tobacco-pipe, which came near the surface of the earth, but never above it. It is very tough, and about a yard long; the rind of it is almost black, and tender, so that when you pluck it, it slips off and underneath is red; it hath a small button at the top, not much unlike the top of an asparagus; of these he sometimes finds two or three in a grave." He was "sure it was not a fern-root" and had with diligence traced to its root; and since he had satisfied himself of its grisly origin, he knew better than to dig a grave near where the root grew.
View from the Bridge, Woking.
On the maps Send looks like a single tiny village, south of Woking by half a mile. It is in reality a large parish, and since the name is corrupted simply from Sand, it is natural enough to find it dotted all round the neighbourhood with other names tacked on to it—Sendholme, Sendgrove, Sendhurst, Send Heath, and Sendmarsh. The names are scattered only less widely than the parish itself. The church stands a mile from the little hamlet of Send, on the banks of the Wey, like the churches of Pyrford and Woking, and the ruins of the great Priory of Newark, to which Send Church and her chapel at Ripley both belonged. The three villages with their churches are still, perhaps, not much larger than they were two or three hundred years ago; the Priory is shattered; only the village with the chapel has grown.
By Send churchyard stands the bole of a mighty elm, riven and iron-bound. I like to imagine that it may have been climbed by one of the great Surrey cricketers of the old days of the Hambledon Club. Edward Stevens, the famous "Lumpy," was born at Send, and spent his boyhood there till he went to Chertsey and became, as John Nyren describes him, one of the two greatest bowlers he ever saw. "Lumpy" got his queer name either because he was, in Nyren's words, "a short man, round-shouldered and stout" or, according to another tradition, because at one of the dinners of the Hambledon Club he ate an apple-pie whole. Surely he must have been "Lumpy" before, besides after, that achievement. Yet another story has it that he was given his name because of some trick in his bowling. Certainly his methods were not what we should call exactly orthodox to-day. It was the privilege of visiting elevens in his day to choose the pitch on which the match should be played, and that was "Lumpy's" opportunity. Nyren explains his plan:—
"He would invariably choose the ground where his balls would shoot, instead of selecting a rising spot to bowl against, which would materially have increased the difficulty to the hitter, seeing that so many more would be caught out by the mounting of the ball. As, however, nothing delighted the old man like bowling the wicket down with a shooting ball, he would sacrifice the other chances to the glory of that achievement. Many a time have I seen our General twig this prejudice in the old man when matched against us, and chuckle at it. But I believe it was almost the only mistake he ever made, professional or even moral, for he was a most simple and amiable creature."