CHAPTER XXI
Travel in the old days—Sequestered Sussex—Country homes—A mellow land—A gibbet post and its story—Chiddingly and its church—The Pelham buckle—Wayside crosses—St. Dunstan's tongs and his anvil—A curious brass—Iron stocks—Home again.
From Worthing our road led for three or four miles along "the beached margin of the sea," a straight stretch of dreary and shelterless shingly road, looking doubly dreary after the pleasant green lanes we had so recently travelled. At the end of this we crossed the Arun close above where it joins the Channel, its short race run, its life almost too brief to grow into a real river; sea-gulls were whirling about it, but what they did there I could not make out; they were not catching fish, nor did they alight on the land or the water, but kept whirling round and round restlessly just over one spot in an apparently purposeless manner; but it pleased me to watch them, for the freedom of the wing is a glorious thing. When sea-gulls do this away from the sea I am told it is a sign of bad weather.
On the other side of the river stood the old town of Shoreham with its shipping, and above the town rose its weather-beaten, ancient Norman church tower; square, massive, grey and stern like its builders, strangely sculptured, too, by the salt spray and sea winds that have wrought their will upon it. From our point of view the town had an ancient look, though much of it is modern enough, but the grime of its smoke had toned down the new to the old. Beyond Shoreham lies Brighton, and to avoid the tedious and unprofitable drive through both towns and along a mere succession of houses we turned up by the river-side and went northward inland in search of old-fashioned places.
We paid a toll at the bridge by which we crossed the Arun, and that was the only toll we had on the way. Years ago, when I was much younger and took long driving tours, the tolls I had to pay at the toll-gates often cost me more than my dinner, to say nothing of the provoking fact of having frequently to pull up, and often besides be kept waiting for change. Those old toll-keepers were a race apart, and in remote places would dally at the gate whilst they asked me for the news of the day. Such trifles seem to make those old times appear farther off than they are. It was slow travelling then, and with tired horses often your choice of an inn for the night was "Hobson's choice," for you could not go farther—yet these leisured old times make pleasant memory. Now wherever you go you can rarely escape the morning newspaper; to do so is a test of remoteness indeed. What with telegraphs, telephones, railways and motors, news travels fast and the world is made smaller. It was the coach that brought the first tidings of events in times past, and its arrival was eagerly watched for in the towns and villages on the way: so was the news of Trafalgar and Waterloo spread through the land. Some of those toll-keepers, it is said, were in league with the highwayman, and signalled to him about any likely passing and lonely traveller by an open or a shut window, at night by means of a light in the same window; but this may be scandal. At least we know that some rascally landlords of inns were accomplices of the highwayman; rumour indeed has it that Dick Turpin was so indignant at a certain landlord giving information to a rival "when under articles to him" that he threatened to shoot that landlord. In return for his services the toll-keeper was never robbed of his day's takings. There is a tale told of a certain lady of quality who in those exciting times of travel always used to take with her a purse filled with base coin to hand over: but how, I wonder, did that lady become possessed of so much base coin?
It was a pleasant drive by the side of the river to the pretty village of Bramber, with its half-timber cottages and fragment of a Norman castle on a wooded knoll. I think it was at Bramber that a friend told me a few years ago he visited an interesting little museum and found the following admission notice: "Adults twopence, Children One penny, Ladies and gentlemen what they will." I wonder how many extra pennies good folk were induced to part with for the glory of being in the latter category? A somewhat similar notice I read in an inn garden: "People must not pluck the flowers. Ladies and gentlemen never do." There was some art in that notice.
From Bramber we drove through a fine open country of wide prospects, the forgathering of the hedgerow trees making the distance look like one vast forest—a forest never reached but that always circles the horizon. Next we came to Henfield, a quiet and picturesque village. After Henfield we got into a sequestered land beyond railways and on to some pleasant by-roads and narrow lanes where in sunny nooks hosts of wild flowers flourished, and the hedges delighted in tangled disorder. We were again in a land of sleepy farmsteads of the old Sussex type, farmsteads of time-toned walls, weather-tinted tiling, long, low, lichen-laden roofs, and great chimney-stacks—always a great and shapely chimney-stack of much the same pattern, but of a very good and pleasing pattern. This type of farmhouse is not confined to Sussex, but may be found over its near borders both in Kent and in Surrey. Such farmhouses are much sought after to-day, I am told, to be converted into homes for town people, because of their picturesque charm. This has come about, I believe, in a measure owing to the motor-car making accessible even remote country places; no longer do people depend wholly on the railway as formerly; indeed an estate agent told me that often the stipulation of country home seekers now is "not near a railway." People,
Weary of men's voices and their tread,
Of clamouring bells and whirl of wheels that pass,
desire to get into the real country and away from the crowd. I have just been reading in that delightful book, An Odd Farmhouse, how such an old house was found, and the charm of the life in it. "It lay in a dimple of the Downs, all around it were meadows.... A long, low, Jacobean building of simple but beautiful lines.... I looked through the dining-room windows and saw the tiled floor, the oak cupboards built into the wall, the great beams traversing the ceiling, the Gargantuan chimney-place, some eleven feet long, and deep enough to hold settles in the ingle-nook. There was a raised platform for logs, an old Sussex iron fire-back and a swinging crane with many hooks and arms." Such a picture sets me longing to live in some similar old Jacobean farmhouse: would only such good fortune were mine. I know the picture is true, for I have more than once, and in different old Jacobean homes, spent a night with mine hosts in them. I have sat in their ingle-nooks before blazing fires of logs on their hearths, watching the fitful flames leap up their wide chimneys, as they threw a ruddy glow on beamed ceiling and panelled wall whilst casting mysterious shadows around; and I have fed my full of the poetic charm and the romance, rare in these commonplace days, of those nights. The builder of a house never invented a better thing than the old-fashioned big ingle-nook: not the poor pretence affair that the modern architect calls one, with a cheerless, slow, combustion coal grate in its centre; but an ingle-nook at least ten feet wide—and many are more—with a big oak beam above, and deep enough to hold settles to seat comfortably four about the wide hearth, with its fire-back and fire-dogs intended for the burning of wood, such as they built in the Jacobean age when men knew how to build homes to live in and joy in, not merely houses for shelter—homes that were pictures without and within.