Is Cromer a choiceworthy place in which to spend a summer holiday? The answer, not perhaps the answer which appears at first to be given, lies in or under this extract from The Gurneys of Earlham. Mr. Hare began by saying, "A picture of the summer family life at Cromer, much like that of the present day, is given in the following letter." It is one from Richenda Gurney to Elizabeth Fry—the Elizabeth Fry, good angel of gloomy Newgate Prison, of course.
"Cromer, September 8, 1803.—Our party is now complete, as John continues with us, and the Buxtons arrived yesterday; it was extremely pleasant to us, seeing them both again, particularly Fowell; their being here will add very much to our pleasure, as there is a suitability between us and the Buxtons which always makes it pleasant for us to be together. Our time here is spent in a way that exactly suits the place and the people. All are left in perfect liberty to do as they like all day, or to form any engagement. Yet the party is so connected that hardly a day passes but some plan is fixed for us all to meet. When all are met it is an uncommonly pretty sight, such a number of young women, and so many, if not pretty, very nice-looking. I wish thee could have seen us the other afternoon. Sally gave a grand entertainment at the Hall, where everybody met—the ladies almost all dressed in white gowns and blue sashes, with nothing on their heads. After dinner we all stood on a wall, eighteen of us, and it was really one of the prettiest sights I ever saw.
"To give thee an idea how we are going on, I will tell thee how we generally pass the day. The weather since we came has on the whole been very fine; so imagine us before breakfast, with our troutbecks [hats] on and coloured gowns, running in all directions on the sands, jetty, etc. After breakfast we receive callers from the other houses, and fix with them the plans for the day; after this, we now and then get an hour's quiet for reading and writing, though my mind has been so much taken up with other things, that I have found it almost impossible to apply to anything seriously. At eleven we go down in numbers to bathe and enjoy the sands, which about that time look beautiful: most of our party and the rest of the Cromer party come down, and bring a number of different carriages, which have a very pretty effect. After bathing, we either ride on horseback or take some pleasant excursion or other. I never remember enjoying the sea so much, and never liked Cromer a quarter so well. Some of us continually dine out, whilst the others receive company at home.... John has been a great addition to our party. I hope he has enjoyed himself; we have had two or three most merry days since he came. The day before yesterday we spent at Sherringham, wandering about the woods and sketching all the morning. Every one met at a beautiful spot for dinner, with three knives and forks and two or three plates between twenty-six people. All manner of games took place after dinner, which John completely entered into and seemed to enjoy as much as any of the party. We completed our day by a delightful musical evening. Miss Gordon, our old Cromer friend, came to tea: she played and sang to us all the evening in a wonderful style. John goes away on Sunday; he stays over to-night to be at a dance which some very agreeable people who are at Cromer—Mr. and Mrs. Windham—are going to give, and which, I think, must be very pleasant."
"Could anything be more simply delightful? What can the man mean by hinting that the answer to the question whether Cromer is a choiceworthy place for a summer holiday is not plainly to be read on the face of this artless letter?" Such, it is easy to imagine, would be the question asked if the early Victorian practice continued, if somebody read these pages aloud, with pauses for comment and criticism, while ladies of various ages embroidered or contrived trousers for unwilling heathens to wear as a cover for their natural nakedness and as a testimony of recently acquired Christianity. My dear Madam, as Thackeray might have said, pause for a moment and reflect. Are you a Gurney, a Fry, a Buxton? Do you bear any of the other names, perfectly well known, which are a password to this most admirable and worthy society? Read also what Mr. Walter Rye has to say on the same topic. Pray note that the letter is of 1803, but that Mr. Hare's book, published in 1895, says that the picture of 1803 would serve very well for a picture of the present day. Have you ever tried, as a stranger, a summer holiday at a seaside place which has been frequented by the same families for a few years, let alone a place to which the same families have resorted for generations, as is the case at Cromer and in its vicinity? Or, again, have you ever, being a member of such a society, known what it is to see new families discover the oasis which seemed your very own, and what have been your feelings towards those new families? Have you not in the first case felt uncomfortable, a goat among sheep, in the second case perceived at once that the new-comers were of goat-like nature? In all this vivid letter there are but two allusions to persons outside the charmed circle, Miss Gordon and the Windhams. Miss Gordon was clearly a Cromer institution, and it is probable to the verge of certainty, if only from the name, that the Windhams were a Norfolk family. Less than ten years before "William Windham, the statesman and darling of the county" had distinguished himself, when stoned during an election at Norwich, by jumping out of his carriage and collaring his assailant. He was the same William Windham who quelled a mutiny in the local militia by "seizing the leader and thrashing two of his followers." Such conduct was not, perhaps, entirely to the mind of the Gurneys and their friends, but, for all that, the chances are that this Mr. and Mrs. Windham were kinsfolk of one who was no man of peace at any price.
Cromer seems to me on a priori grounds and, if the truth may be told, "from information received" also, to be entirely the place for the members of a justly respected circle, whose title to it is clear and not to be begrudged, but a place in which a stranger to that circle is, as the common saying goes, "out of it." It is emphatically a good place for a golfer; but otherwise, all along this piece of the coast, there is precious little for the ordinary man or woman to do. There is the sea of course, but the coastline is too regular and the sea too open to provide that variety of scenery which gives to little pleasure cruises their chief pleasure. Also, of course, there are the roads, upon which the motorist may take his pleasure, and some of them pass through or near places attractive in the present as they were in the past, nay, even more attractive, since to see them stir up the memories of the past. But two things must be said. A seaside place, as a centre for motoring, walking or bicycling, is by its very essence one-sided or even less. Lay a pen across the map horizontally at Cromer, and it is plain that there is no way for the motorist towards more than half the points of the compass. As for the coast scenery, of which we shall shortly take a considerable sample, it is full of individual character, the kind of scenery one may visit with pleasure once or twice or even three times, but, to a man not of Norfolk blood, it seems no more than that. Such, certainly, is the final impression left by the coast drive to the west of Cromer, and in Cromer itself are far too many new houses. To the eastward, especially if the coast be left behind, the scenery is better, possessed of, if it may be so put, more abiding charm. To the westward it is more strange, weird and individual than beautiful, and its weirdness is of the kind inspiring to melancholy, not to awe. This summary of opinion, however, is in the nature of an anticipation. It shall be justified piecemeal so soon as we are fairly under way so that a new chapter can be begun.
Let this chapter close with the last unhappy episode in a supremely happy tour, with which episode it would be discordant to mix the undiluted pleasure of the next chapter. We started, for us, rather early; that is to say we breakfasted at half-past seven and left the hotel door slightly after eight. All down the zigzag hill into the town the machinery said nothing at all. There was no reason why it should make any demonstration, since it had no work to do. Once called upon to work, however, the car soon began to crackle and to splutter again. There was no room for doubt what was the matter. Foreign matter had found its way into the petrol tank and beyond; and it was hard stuff, genuine grit, undissolved by a night's soaking. Whether the ostler at the "Maid's Head" or he of Bury St. Edmunds was to blame, and in justice to the former it must be said that it might have been either, the nuisance was beyond question. It was Sunday morning, too; it was hardly likely that the repair shops would be of any assistance, at any rate so early in the morning, and, empty as the streets were then, it would not have been seemly to begin in them, at about the hour of the earliest service, an operation which might very likely consume an hour or more. So up the hill on the far side of the town we crawled—for Cromer lies in the hollow of a cup—snorting and grunting not a little, in sickly fashion and with much trouble, as the Latin exercises used to put it, and out on to the sandy road, leading between sandy and wind-swept fields, towards Runton.
There, thanking our stars that few wayfarers were astir, we stopped, and Mr. Johnson, cheerfully remarking that those who could be of no help, because there is only room for one big man face upwards under a car, had better go for a little walk and see some of the country, addressed himself with a smile and a half-groan to his odious task with its infinite possibilities in the way of black and viscous lubricant dropping into his hair or on to his face. In this posture I left him, his legs alone visible, for a little tour of inspection; but there was no temptation to prolong it.
A walk of a hundred yards or two along a bank, covered sparsely with harsh and wiry grass, and dividing two fields, both equally poverty-stricken, brought me to the crumbling edge of a sandy cliff, not high enough to impose by its grandeur, not rugged enough to please by its outline. Below was a beach of sand, beyond that the smooth, grey, hazy sea with not a vessel of any kind visible on its sluggish surface. To the westward was Runton, a conglomeration of commonplace brick houses, glaringly new, obviously intended for lodgings. A windmill and its house were the only buildings in any way calculated to give satisfaction to the eye. From there it roved on to undulating hills, probably of sand, as indeed was everything else except the raw houses of Runton. Rambling, in this Poppy Land sans poppies, seemed weary, flat, stale and unprofitable. A return to the car revealed Mr. Johnson still in the back position, as riflemen say, and sundry stray bits of the car and tools lying on the road by his side. A glance at him, obtained by crouching, showed him to be much hotter, much dirtier than before, more smilingly determined than ever, if possible, to make nothing of his personal trouble. He was not so much a good man fighting against adversity as a master of science wrestling with a problem he knew that he could solve in time: and solve it with triumph he did. A few minutes more and he half wriggled half rolled into the open road, dusty, but jubilant, holding a little piece of pipe some five inches long and of infinitesimal bore in his hand. "Here is the little brute," he said, with a gentle smile—and then made his one mistake of the day, and it cost him dear. Just touching one end of the pipe with his lips, and holding his hollowed palm by the other end, he blew one breath. Out came the obstruction, hardly bigger than a snapdragon seed, surely the tiniest little imp of a particle that ever hampered the circulation of a mighty machine. The mechanical trouble was over for ever, or at any rate for that expedition. A very few minutes sufficed to prepare the car for the road again, and she accomplished over two hundred miles more that day without, so to speak, turning a hair. So did the man who cured her, because he knew her complaint to a nicety; but he was in my company all that day until seven or eight in the evening and the thoroughly abominable taste of petrol was in his mouth to the end. In fact
You may rinse with raw brandy your mouth if you will,
But the reek of the petrol will cling to it still.
Such is a valuable little piece of experience gained by proxy. The morals are three and obvious. First, every tank or funnel should be fitted with an irremovable strainer. Secondly, if this be not so, superintend refilling yourself and see that a temporary strainer is used. Thirdly, if grit does get into the petrol through omission of these precautions, and blowing a pipe becomes necessary, wrap up the mouth of that pipe with care, or preferably get somebody else, and best of all an idle bystander, to do the blowing for you. For this service, if rendered by a boy, a shilling is a sufficient recompense, and you may depart at your leisure; but if it be done by a man, especially if he be large and rough, give him half a crown, and stand not on the order of your going.