“I am four score years and more,
But never saw such a roast before.”
Then, as they were too young to have a child over eighty, the parents had proof positive that it was a pisky. The murder being out, after some time it disappeared, and their own child was magically restored to them.
CHAPTER IX
A GALLANT GIRL AND HER FAMILY
“The Pollards,” praised as a “very fine family” in Borrow’s notebooks, lived at Woolston, in the neighbouring parish of St. Ive. He told them they reminded him of Spaniards. “The gallant girl” of eighteen, who rode with him over the countryside, Mr. Taylor’s daughter, afterwards married Mr. Edward Pollard, and came into possession of Penquite. Miss Taylor was a notorious horsewoman. She owned at one time a very spirited horse, on which she used to ride every Sunday to church at St. Cleer. There was no mounting that horse in the ordinary way, and she invariably got into the saddle with one leap. Outside the church gate there would always be a crowd of people assembled to
“See the young lady
Get up on her horse”
when she started home for Penquite. Of that family circle round William Pollard, who was head of the house at Woolston during Borrow’s visit, alternately amazed, bewildered, and enchanted by the visitor, two sons and two daughters still survive. [168] A charming lady of great age, the daughter, has clear recollections of the events of half a century ago. Her impression of “the walking lord of gypsy-lore,” as Dr. Hake called him, is of “a very tall, silvery-headed man of middle age, with wonderful brown eyes, remarkably handsome and well-knit. He seemed to know something about everything. The fact we marvelled at was that, being acquainted with so many languages, he did not confound one with another. He appeared to be a wild, romantic person, a being of whom we had never seen the like before; his energy was unbounded—he almost lived in the open air, though it was in the depth of a bitter winter.”
It has already been indicated that the winter of 1853–4 was unusually severe—at any rate for Cornwall, where the climate is generally as soft as that of Ireland. The hills and tors ascending to the north of the country in which Borrow was staying were mantled in white during the greater part of his visit. The clear air at these altitudes seemed to inspirit him; he was a very different person from the Borrow who had nursed his grievances and been tormented by his melancholy demons on the marshes of Oulton. “One morning,” said Mrs. Edey, “after an exceptionally heavy fall of snow during the night, he was up with the earliest light, ploughing his way through the drifts to Woolston, where he commandeered one of my brothers to be his companion for a whole-day ramble over the snow-bound moors. And, said my brother, he sang as he walked the songs of half-a-dozen nations from the time they left almost without interruption, till they returned.”
There are two interesting passages in her story throwing a sidelight upon his relations with children. On his frequent walks from Penquite to Woolston he was wont to pass a certain desolate, abandoned mine. On the side of its premises was a little rough stone building, occupied as a cottage by a poor woman with a large family. The children’s poverty-stricken condition attracted his notice, and he regularly took with him in his pocket some bit of food to present to them as they stood looking out for the arrival of the tall stranger with the white hair. One of the children was customarily posted on the roadside to watch for him, and this one was dubbed by Borrow “the little sentinel.” Again, at dinner with some legal light of the district, he was suddenly missed during dessert, and a search revealed him in a remote room surrounded by the children of the house, whom he was amusing by his stories and catechising in the subjects of their studies and pursuits. He excused his absence by saying that he had been fascinated by the intelligence of the children, and had forgotten all about the dinner. More than once he expressed a high opinion of the mental average of Cornish children.
Penquite, the “substantial stone house on a hillside,” where Borrow stayed with Mr. and Mrs. Robert Taylor in 1854, is a characteristic Cornish farmhouse of the older and better sort—the native home of yeomen. The parish road ascends a steep hillock in the direct and uncompromising manner which is the distinctive mark of an old way, beaten out before the era of enclosure and before the development of wheeled traffic. At the top a thicket of pine and beech trees stands sentinel beside the “court-gate,” beyond which the road, curling to the south, brings one to a view of orchard land speckled with snowdrops, white gates, cedars of rich green, a slated house, French windows gleaming in the sun, and a garden sloping towards the stream at the bottom of the valley.
This was the destination to which Shorsha, the horse-wizard, and Robert Taylor, the Cornish farmer, cantered up on Christmas Eve of 1853. The Taylors left it in 1877, handing the farm on to Edward Pollard, who had married their only daughter. At Mrs. Pollard’s death (1904), the property passed into the hands of her eldest son, Edward. It was this eldest son who answered my pull at the bell-knob under the ancient granite porch, and gave me a real welcome. He has added a section to the house at the back, but the southern front remains as it has been for many generations. Here was the old low-ceiled parlour where Borrow and Berkeley, the Irish vicar, discussed the comparative beauty and virtue of Cornish women and Irish women; beyond, the stone-flagged kitchen where he got his “hospitable reception, with a log on the fire.” But the march of science has partly spoilt the venerable kitchen. It has left the settle from which Shorsha’s long legs stretched to the blaze, but it has filled up the open hearth and put a modern kitchen range in its place. Mr. William Pollard is the son of one of that “fine family” at Woolston with whom Borrow discoursed of Australia, whence two of the young Pollards had just returned that Christmas. In the early ’fifties Australia was a name to conjure with; Ballarat was a magic incantation. Two of the five Pollard sons adventured there, and it was one of the two that I visited Woolston to see.