What is Surrey English? Lord Macaulay heard it at Esher. He was walking from Esher to Ditton Marsh, he writes on September 22nd, 1854, and he listened to it in a public-house:—
"A shower came on. Afraid for my chest, I turned into a small ale-house, and called for a glass of ginger beer. I found there a party of hop-pickers, come back from the neighbourhood of Farnham. They had had but a bad season, and were returning, nearly walked off their legs. I liked their looks, and thought their English remarkably good for their rank of life. It was in truth Surrey English, the English of the suburbs of London, which is to the Somersetshire and Yorkshire what Castilian is to the Andalusian, or Tuscan to Neapolitan. The poor people had a foaming pot before them; but as soon as they heard the price, they rose and were going to leave it untouched. They could not, they said, afford so much. It was but fourpence halfpenny. I laid the money down, and their delight and gratitude quite affected me. Two more of the party soon arrived. I ordered another pot, and when the rain was over, left them, followed by more blessings than ever, I believe, were purchased for ninepence."
Perhaps the English of the Surrey suburbs was different in Macaulay's days. There is little dialect left anywhere to distinguish Surrey English from any other; even the gypsies speak the English of the suburbs of London. There are still gypsies on Esher common; I came across quite a settlement once, walking over the common to Cobham on a sunny morning after late April snow. The common was patched with sparkling white and blue; the snow lay in blue shadows unmelted under the gorse bushes, and among the gorse and sodden bracken twenty ponies snuffed for grass. Three gypsy boys shuffled through the fern near them. What did they do with the ponies? I asked, and the eldest told me they sold them; they were good ponies; he was voluble in suburban English. What did they fetch? That depended. What was that one worth?—it was a small chestnut creature with a child's pink pinafore for a halter. "Ah! That one," he began, and his eyes became inscrutable. He would have sold it well.
CHAPTER XXVI
LEATHERHEAD
The Millpond.—Magic water.—Leatherhead Bridge.—The Running Horse.—The Tunnyng of Elinour Rumming.—Noppy Ale.—A penny a coffin.—Deflected chancels.—Judge Jeffreys and his daughter.—Emma.—Mr. Woodhouse's gruel.
Leatherhead ought to be entered from the west and left by the south. To meet the little town on the road from Fetcham is to begin with a stretch of water, which is always a good introduction; and to leave it and travel south is to pass through one of the most fascinating valleys of all Surrey.
The stretch of water lying to the west is the millpond, and is unlike any other pond I know. It is two or three hundred yards long and perhaps eighty yards wide, slopes gradually from the sides over a chalky bottom, and is of an intense clear green. Here and there are open spaces in the weeds; patches of deeper blue-green, which can be seen, if you look closely, to be moving—a most uncanny motion. The water wells up incredibly fast and quiet, and surely incredibly cold, from some unplumbed, invisible source below. It would be interesting to try to find the bottom with a plummet, but probably one would be caught by a policeman. All that I have tried to do is to throw in white stones, which disappear as if they were swallowed. But the swallowing is a puzzling thing. The stone strikes the surface and sends out a widening ripple. Then you watch the stone sinking down slowly against the up-rush of water, but distinct and white and wavering. Then another ripple—a mere ring of light, in some way mirroring the real ripple of the surface—leaps out apparently from the side of the pool a foot or so under water, touches the white, wavering stone, and the stone vanishes. There is no stirring of mud, as there would be if it struck the bottom of an ordinary pond; it merely disappears into an invisible mouth in the green.
