George had some Latin and a little Greek, picked up at Huddersfield and Edinburgh and Clonmel, but he had probably found Murtagh a more congenial authority than the excellent Lilly, and his Erse was more than his Greek. Now that his body was moored to the desk at Norwich, his mind wandered wantonly from the languages he had to study to those for which, in the Valpeian régime, there was no provision. With his never-failing capacity for picking up the quaintest and most out-of-the-way people to be found about him, he made the acquaintance of Father D’Éterville, the “elderly personage . . . rather tall and something of a robust make,” who wore “a snuff-coloured coat and drab pantaloons . . . an immense frill, seldom of the purest white, but invariably of the finest French cambric,” and told the young student that if he wished to be a poet he should emulate Monsieur Boileau rather than the vagabond Dante! The Rev. Thomas D’Éterville was a French émigré who had come over in 1792, and had qualifications from the University of Caen. With him George studied French and Italian, and made a beginning of Spanish.
Among his contemporaries drilled and thrashed by Valpy were several men who obtained varying degrees of fame in the world of thought and action. The Grammar School boys of the time included James Martineau, Sir Archdale Wilson, and Rajah Brooke of Sarawak. Their achievements were considerable, but it is, in one mind at all events, an open question whether Borrow’s did not excel them all. Certainly no man of them made so many idolatrous friends, and probably no man so many bitter enemies.
George was no ordinary schoolboy. His devotion to learning was intense, but peculiar to himself. In his boyish pranks and recreations he was just as unconventional. On one occasion, the wander-fever having seized him, he communicated it to three friends of his own age. They decided to run away from school, with some wild idea of emulating the feats of his favourite Robinson Crusoe. The plan, worked out by Borrow, was that they should escape to the Norfolk coast and take any ship that would convey them out of England. Till they could find some convenient means of emigration, they proposed to conceal themselves in a lair upon the shore, and to subsist by forays upon the portable and comestible property of the people of the district. The adventure began early in the morning and terminated within a few hours. They were discovered some dozen miles away by a gentleman who recognised one of them, and ignominiously restored to the affection of their parents—and the insatiable wrath of Valpy. The “head” took Borrow, as the ringleader, and flogged him severely. It was said that for this purpose the culprit was “horsed” on the back of Martineau, and that the punishment was so bad that Borrow had to keep his bed for a fortnight. George could with difficulty forget a slight or forgive an injury, real or imaginary, and Dr. Knapp declares that he hated Martineau ever afterwards, and up to the time of his death would never visit any house where he knew he must meet the theologian. It is true that he did not care to meet Martineau, but the reason assigned for his aversion must be given up as a fable. Martineau ridiculed the story, and asserted with every show of truth that he never “horsed” Borrow.
Dr. Jessopp was another of his schoolfellows. He has an anecdote of Borrow appearing at school one day, his face stained brown with walnut juice, and of Valpy, inquiring sententiously, “Borrow, are you suffering from jaundice, or is it only dirt?”
Such hours of leisure as were not occupied by D’Éterville and his French and Italian, or by the explorations into Spanish and the Romany, were given up to his worship of Nature and his devotion to sport. He fished in the Yare at Earlham, and went fowling over the surrounding fields and marshes with “a condemned musket bearing somewhere on its lock in rather antique characters, ‘Tower, 1746.’” But, above all, he haunted Harford Bridge. For at Harford Bridge did not the amazing John Thurtell reside? This son of a respectable alderman of Norwich had been in warlike adventures abroad, but now that the wars were over had returned to his native parts to get such entertainment out of life as a man might to whom every form of sport came gaily welcome, and the more violent it was the more gaily. So distinguished a patron of the prize-ring and so ungenteel a gentleman was certain to make a strong appeal to young Borrow, who made his acquaintance and acquired from him the art of boxing. As we have seen, his father, the captain, had been a bruiser when occasion demanded, and had fought Ben Bryan. His fondness for the sport was hereditary. He developed it during his visits to Thurtell, and it never left him. One of the kinds of “canting nonsense” denounced in the Appendix to “The Romany Rye” is the “unmanly cant”—a phrase in which he summed up all objections to the practice of fisticuffs. His mentor in the noble art is lightly sketched in “The Zincali” in connection with the description of a prize-fight. The “terrible Thurtell, lord of the concourse,” made a sad ending. He committed the murder which inspired the familiar ballad of “William Weare”:
“He cut his throat from ear to ear,
His brains he battered in;
His name was Mr. William Weare,
He lived in Lyon’s Inn.”
Thurtell induced Weare, who had relieved him of £400 at a gaming-table, to drive to Elstree in Hertfordshire, where he disposed of him in the artistic fashion just related. One of his companions turned King’s evidence, and he was hanged at Hertford in 1823. [34]
So, learning his grammar at school, visiting D’Éterville at Strangers’ Hall for French and Italian, trespassing on the grounds of the admirable Mr. Gurney in search of fish, being initiated into the art and mystery of pugilism, strolling to Thorpe, and Eaton, and Cringleford, George passed two years. He was fourteen when he saw the fight depicted in “The Zincali.” The next year he was one of the spectators at the great annual Tombland Fair, when he encountered once more the gypsy Ambrose Smith, and went with him to the encampment on Mousehold Heath, discoursing by the way of the quality of beauty, as exemplified in the person of Tawno Chikno and the earl’s daughter who fell in love with him, and making the acquaintance of the weird old hag “whose name was Herne and she came of the hairy ones.” While the gypsies remained in camp on Mousehold Heath, the lad visited them frequently, and was introduced by Jasper—terribly angering his mother-in-law, Mrs. Herne—into the mysteries of the Romany language. His extraordinary facility in acquiring and retaining words obtained for him the nickname of Lavengro, or “word-fellow.”
George left school in 1819, and was articled to the firm of Simpson & Rackham, solicitors, of Tuck’s Court, Norwich, apparently on the advice of his friend Roger Kerrison, son of a substantial citizen. Though it is clear that he never entertained any enthusiasm for the profession, he diligently pursued his studies at the irksome desk. They were not, however, those of the law, but of languages and poetry. By devoting himself to his parchments and his law books, and seeking to fill the station of life to which he had been dedicated, he might have made an indifferently bad country solicitor. Thank heaven, nothing was further from his thoughts. He was taken specially under the wing of the head of the firm, William Simpson, then Town Clerk, and an excellent good fellow. George lodged in his house in the Upper Close. Tuck’s Court, where he sat at the desk, was nearly opposite the old Norfolk Hotel.
It was not long before he added another to his strange gallery of cronies—a Welsh groom employed by a gentleman living at the end of the court, a queer, mis-shapen man, the butt of George’s fellow-clerks, who hailed his every appearance with the ballad of: