Jeremy

by Hugh Walpole

This famous fair has been, from time immemorial, a noted event in Glebeshire life. Even now, when fairs have yielded to cinematographs as attractions for the people, Pauper's Fair gives its annual excitement. Thirty years ago it was the greatest event of the year in Polchester. All our fine people, of course, disliked it extremely. It disturbed the town for days, the town rocked in the arms of crowds of drunken sailors, the town gave shelter to gipsies and rogues and scoundrels, the town, the decent, amiable, happy town actually for a week or so seemed to invite the world of the blazing fire and the dancing clown. No wonder that our fine people shuddered. Only the other day—I speak now of these modern times—the Bishop tried to stop the whole business. He wrote to the Glebeshire Morning News, urging that Pauper's Fair, in these days of enlightenment and culture, cannot but be regretted by all those who have the healthy progress of our dear country at heart. Well, you would be amazed at the storm that his protest raised. People wrote from all over the County, and there were ultimately letters from patriotic Glebeshire citizens in New Zealand and South Africa. And in Polchester itself! Everyone—even those who had shuddered most at the fair's iniquities—was indignant. Give up the fair! One of the few signs left of that jolly Old England whose sentiment is cherished by us, whose fragments nevertheless we so readily stamp upon. No, the fair must remain and will remain, I have no doubt, until the very end of our national chapter.

Nowadays it has shed, very largely, I am afraid, the character that it gloriously maintained thirty years ago. Then it was really an invasion by the seafaring element of the County. All the little country ports and harbours poured out their fishermen and sailors, who came walking, driving, singing, laughing, swearing; they filled the streets, and went peering, like the wildest of ancient Picts, into the mysterious beauties of the Cathedral, and late at night, when the town should have slept, arm in arm they went roaring past the dark windows, singing their songs, stamping their feet, and every once and again ringing a decent door-bell for their amusement. It was very seldom that any harm was done. Once a serious fire broke out amongst the old wooden houses down on the river, and some of them were burnt to the ground, a fate that no one deplored; once a sailor was murdered in a drunken squabble at “The Dog and Pilchard,” the wildest of the riverside hostelries; and once a Canon was caught and stripped and ducked in the waters of the Pol by a mob who resented his gentle appeals that they should try to prefer lemonade to gin; but these were the only three catastrophes in all the history of the fair.

During the fair week the town sniffed of the sea—of lobster and seaweed and tar and brine—and all the tales of the sea that have ever been told by man were told during these days in Polchester.

The decent people kept their doors locked, their children at home, and their valuables in the family safe. No upper class child in Polchester so much as saw the outside of a gipsy van. The Dean's Ernest was accustomed to boast that he had once been given a ride by a gipsy on a donkey, when his nurse was not looking, but no one credited the story, and the details with which he supported it were feeble and unconvincing. The Polchester children in general were told that “they would be stolen by the gipsies if they weren't careful,” and, although some of them in extreme moments of rebellion and depression felt that the life of adventure thus offered to them, might, after all, be more agreeable than the dreary realism of their natural days, the warning may be said to have been effective.

No family in Polchester was guarded more carefully in this matter of the Pauper's Fair than the Cole family. Mr. Cole had an absolute horror of the fair. Sailors and gipsies were to him the sign and seal of utter damnation, and although he tried, as a Christian clergyman, to believe that they deserved pity because of the disadvantages under which they had from the first laboured, he confessed to his intimate friends that he saw very little hope for them either in this world or the next. Jeremy, Helen and Mary were, during Fair Week, kept severely within doors; their exercise had to be taken in the Cole garden, and the farthest that they poked their noses into the town was their visit to St. John's on Sunday morning. Except on one famous occasion. The Fair Week of Jeremy's fifth year saw him writhing under a terrible attack of toothache, which became, after two agonised nights, such a torment and distress to the whole household that he had to be conveyed to the house of Mr. Pilter, who had his torture-chamber at No. 3 Market Square. It is true that Jeremy was conveyed thither in a cab, and that his pain and his darkened windows prevented him from seeing very much of the gay world; nevertheless, in spite of the Jampot, who guarded him like a dragon, he caught a glimpse of flags, a gleaming brass band and a Punch and Judy show, and he heard the trumpets and the drum, and the shouts of excited little boys, and the blowing of the Punch and Judy pipes, and he smelt roasting chestnuts, bad tobacco, and beer and gin. He returned, young as he was, and reduced to a corpse-like condition by the rough but kindly intentioned services of Mr. Pilter, with the picture of a hysterical, abandoned world clearly imprinted upon his brain.

“I want to go,” he said to the Jampot.

“You can't,” said she.

“I will when I'm six,” said he.

“You won't,” said she.

“I will when I'm seven,” said he.