Thomas Borrow, handsome, tall, and muscular, was an adept in the athletic sports for which Cornwall is famous, and early signalised himself by his prowess as a boxer. As he grew up, George Borrow himself became an ardent admirer of “the Fancy,” and when asked “What is the best way to get through life quietly?” was wont to say, “Learn to box, and keep a civil tongue in your head.”
In 1778, when nineteen years of age, Thomas Borrow was articled for five years to a maltster; but just as that period expired, at Menheniot Fair a bicker arose in which Borrow and other young heroes triumphed over the braves of that town. Constables appeared,
but were promptly felled by the brawny Borrow, and, to crown his misdeeds, he knocked over the head-borough, who happened to be his maltster master. He wisely fled, and shortly after enlisted as a private soldier in the Coldstream Guards, and was soon quartered in London. In 1792, as a sergeant, he was transferred to the West Norfolk Regiment of Militia, with headquarters at East Dereham. A company of players from Norwich frequently visited that nice little town, and in one of them appeared, as a supernumerary, Ann Perfrement, the pretty daughter of a small farmer of Dumpling Green, on the outskirts of the town. This maiden, of Huguenot descent, fascinated the Cornish soldier, and the two were married at Dereham Church on February 11th, 1793. The regiment was then about to start a wandering course over the highways of England—at Colchester; in Norfolk; then at Sheerness, Sandgate, and Dover; at Colchester once more; in Kent; Essex again, and then, in 1802-3, at East Dereham, where George was born July 5th, 1803, in the house of his maternal grandparents. On July 17th he was baptized
George Henry, names of the king and of the eldest brother of Captain Thomas Borrow.
As a mere infant Borrow was gloomy and fond of solitude, “ever conscious,” he says, “of a peculiar heaviness within me, and at times of a strange sensation of fear, which occasionally amounted to horror, and for which I could assign no real cause whatever.” Of this earliest period he tells a characteristic story of drawing strange lines in the dust with his fingers, when a Jew pedlar came up and said: “The child is a sweet child, and he has all the look of one of our own people”; but when he leaned forward to inspect the lines in the dust, “started back, and grew white as a sheet; then, taking off his hat, he made some strange gestures to me, cringing, chattering, . . . and shortly departed, muttering something about ‘holy letters,’ and talking to himself in a strange tongue.” This, in the first chapter of “Lavengro,” is in the true Borrovian mystery-man style.
Again and again Borrow, throughout his life, suffered from some nervous ailment which defied definition; thus, when he was fifteen, his strength and appetite deserted him and he pined and drooped, but an ancient female, a kind of doctress, who had been his nurse in his infancy, gave him a decoction of a bitter root growing on commons and desolate places, from which he took draughts till he was convalescent. In any estimate of Borrow’s life the strange attacks of what he called “the Fear” or “the Horrors” must be taken into account. At times they even produced a suicidal tendency, as when, in 1824, he wrote to his friend Roger Kerrison, “Come to me immediately; I am, I believe, dying.” The facsimile of this note in Knapp’s “Life of Borrow” is as tremulous as if the writer was suffering from delirium tremens, which, of course, he was not.
We have in “Lavengro” a very interesting account of the boy Borrow being taken twice every Sunday to the fine parish church at East Dereham, where, from a corner of a spacious pew, he would fix his eyes on the dignified high-Church rector and the dignified high-Church clerk, “from whose lips would roll many a portentous word descriptive of the wondrous works of the Most High.” The rector was the Rev. F. J. H. Wollaston, B.D., who was himself patron of