(c) Phonetic changes resembling corruptions, such as the substitution of “j” or English “ch” for “d” or “t” in the bodies or the beginnings of words, and of “s” or “z” for the same letters at the ends of words. [187]
It will be seen that Borrow could have found such differences as these no stumbling-block to his philological excursions. He would readily recognise Tywardreath as the equivalent of the Welsh, Tywardraeth, the house on the sands, and would be assisted thereto by the sight of the wide stretches of white sand fringing St. Austell Bay in the angle where Tywardreath stands on its hill side. He would identify Hendra as Hendre, the old stead; Chyandour as Tyrdwr, the house of the water; Egloskerry as Eglwyscerrig, the stone church; and such forms as nance for nant, a ravine, pons for pont, a bridge, plou for plwyf, a parish, would offer no difficulty to one familiar with parallel changes in other groups of languages.
CHAPTER X
THE BOOK THAT WAS NOT WRITTEN
By January 26th, 1854, Borrow was back among his friends at Penquite, bursting in upon them lyrically with:
“Behold the man who’s been at Kinmel Dray,
Who passed by Kinmel Cres upon his way,
And who at Kinmel Worthey made a stay.”
He and Mr. Taylor undertook a long moorland tramp by tor and bog that day to Kilmar, a jagged and precipitous hill behind the Cheesewring, where is the huge rock structure popularly known as “King Arthur’s Bed.” The Arthurian mood, to be developed presently, was already coming upon him. When, next day, he walked to Liskeard, to visit the ex-Mayor once more, and met the worthy Town Clerk, the talk turned from “Jew houses” to King Arthur’s court, and his imaginative vision darted off to the North and the golden traditions of glorious Camelot. On these he brooded while he walked, and while he sat by the roaring fire of hazel faggots in the kitchen of Penquite. Not that he allowed these ethereal matters to engross him entirely, for he was curious about the cost of hazel-wood as fuel—remembering that he had burnt it at the shrine of Isopel, the “Queen of the Dingle,” thirty years gone. So he notes: “Hazel faggots, 10s. a hundred, at 30 lbs.”
Going about among the natives, he disdained no unconsidered trifle of lore and knowledge. Cornish phrases struck his fancy, such as “bread baked in the clome”—in earthenware “kettles” on the open hearth, covered with burning peat, bread of such a rare flavour and quality, indeed, as twentieth-century man cannot conceive, even in St. Cleer, where the “machine-baked” variety is now hawked by half a dozen enterprising bakers from the neighbouring towns. There is another Cornish delicacy which does persist; it is known as “thunder and lightning”—a soupçon of sugar syrup over the clotted cream of the country. “Poor old Philp,” he records one of his relatives as narrating among the characteristics of a local notoriety—“Poor old Philp used to like ‘triggle’ over cream.”
One story given to him by Mr. Taylor was of an old man who built himself a hovel of turf on Kilmar Tor. In the winter of 1814 there was a great snow-storm, and the old man’s hut was buried in the drifts for two nights and two days. When they dug him out they found that he had been in bed all the time, and declared that it was “the longest night I ever knawed; I thought t’d never end.”
There was another dinner party at the old house of his forefathers. He ploughed to Tredinnick through the drizzle of a “soft” Cornish day. “Ben’t got wet, ha’ thee?” was the salutation of William Borrow, aged seventy, welcoming him to the homestead. One of his few stumbling-blocks was the Cornish dialect. “My relations are most excellent people,” he wrote to his wife, “but I could not understand more than half of what they said.” The simplicity of their mode of life was a surprise to him, and probably a pleasant one; he found no affectation of gentility among them. Wealth to the extent of £70,000 was reported to be in the united hands of the family, but the head of it, Henry Borrow, “lives in a house in which there is not a single grate—nothing but open chimneys.”
Discussions about the character and attributes of the pixies were constant. Henry could hardly tell him whether he believed in the pixies or not; but he did believe in the Durdy Dogs, having himself heard them giving tongue. If Henry had confessed to a faith in pixies, he need not have been ashamed of his intellectual company. The belief was shared by no smaller a person than the redoubtable Hawker of Morwenstow, who saw and chased a pixy two years later as he rode through a gorge on the way home from Wellcombe. He relates how he felt himself “flush and then grow pale” when he saw a “brown, rough shape” start up among the furze bushes, and how, “remembering St. Thomas’s word that every spirit must crouch to the Sign,” he made the sign in the air before urging his horse towards the creature—which, of course, escaped!