This seems to be a very rambling sort of chapter, but who has a right to ramble if it be not an old lady who has seen more than seventy summers? I must not finish this chapter without giving a place in it to George Hammond the historian. I never knew, I think, a more delightful conversationalist. He was often at Greylands, and I was always trying to draw him out, having that worst habit of hostesses, the habit of making a man talk on his own subject. Once, for example, I asked him what he thought was the really salient characteristic of the early twentieth century (his special period) which distinguished the people of that time from ourselves. “I have often wondered,” he said, “but I think you get nearest to the truth by saying that they had no sense of humour—that is, they had not got what we mean by the sense of humour. I’ve been at the British Museum a good deal lately (that it, at the Cippenham annexe), looking through the old newspapers of that period, the cheap newspapers especially, and I think it’s quite impossible to suppose that the people who liked to have that kind of thing served up with their breakfasts had any sense of humour at all. If you took one of our grandfathers and put him down opposite a series of drawings like, say, McGillivray’s, I don’t think he’d see anything in them. Or take that joke in Punch last week—did you see last week’s Punch? Well, there are two men travelling by railway, and one looks out of the window and says, ‘Cholsey and Moulsford, change for Wallingford.’ And the other man says, ‘I should jolly well think you did.’ Clever, isn’t it? But, you know, I don’t believe they’d have seen anything funny in it in the twenties.”
There, I had forgotten the humorists! Lancelot Briggs-Wilde, what a creator of merriment! And then there was the old Bishop of Birkenhead, who had the reputation of being quite unrivalled as a raconteur. It was he, I remember, who described to us how once at a missionary festival he had a very shy curate staying with him; and at breakfast, it seems, the eggs were not all that they should have been. The curate had one that was really very far gone, and the Bishop, by way of apology, said, “I’m afraid, Mr. So-and-so, your egg’s not very good.” “Oh, not at all,” was the mild reply, “it’s excellent in parts.” We all told the Bishop that he ought to send that up to Punch, but I don’t know if he ever did.
We did not, I am afraid, see a great deal of the Anglican episcopate, but of course Cardinal Smith was our near neighbour at Hare Street. He was a great walker: and when he came over to luncheon he would nearly always come on foot, although the distance was nearly three miles, and he had an excellent helico. “I don’t like going the pace in this part of Hertfordshire, Lady Porstock,” he once told me. “You see, I was brought up in these parts—twelve years of my life—and somehow I’ve got the leisurely spirit of them into my bones. When I die, I want them to bury me under the station platform at St. Margaret’s, so that I can wait for the Day of Judgment there; it’s easier waiting when you’re accustomed to it.”
CHAPTER XIV
AN OLD WAY OF MAKING A NEW DEPARTURE
Nor blame the Rock, whose slippery edge was splashed
Only by waves your frantic struggling washed.
E. P. Mason.
My political career did not survive my husband’s death. The Holroyd ministry, it will be remembered, went out in ’63, and the sense of loneliness and depression I then felt did not allow me to stand again. Since, however, a certain misunderstanding has arisen about this, and it is necessary for me to clear, not only my own character, but the august memory of James Holroyd, I may be pardoned for printing here the letter which I received from him on its being made known that I did not intend to seek re-election:
Aix-les-Bains, Oct. 12.
Dear Lady Porstock,—