Springtime and Other Essays

by Sir Francis Darwin

To return to my childhood: I came between George and Leonard, and was a companion to both of them, but I do not think we made a trio as Leonard and Horace and I did more or less. I have a clear recollection of Leonard in a red fez, and bare legs covered with scratches, but I cannot distinctly call up images of the others. I seem to remember a great deal of purposeless wandering with my younger brothers; but with George, playing was an organised affair in which I was an obedient subordinate, as I have described in Rustic Sounds. Our chief game was playing at soldiers; we had toy guns to which home-made wooden bayonets were fixed, knapsacks, and I think shakos—whether we had any uniform coats I cannot remember. In the cloakroom under the stairs our names and heights were recorded, and George conscientiously constructed a short foot-rule so that our height should come to something like six feet. I had to keep sentry at the far end of the kitchen garden until released by a bugle-call. George being a sergeant was exempt from sentry work, and was merely responsible for the bugle-blowing. Indoors there was much playing with tin soldiers. I remember a regiment of dragoons whose coats my mother had laboriously reddened with sealing-wax to convert them into British soldiers. The troopers were in a ferocious charging attitude with swords raised, but the blades were mostly broken, and I innocently believed that they were all raising crusts of bread

to their mouths. Another indoors game was the hurling of darts at one another in the long passage upstairs; we had wooden shields on which the javelins used to strike briskly enough, since they were weighted with lead. On these occasions we were knights or men-at-arms, but out of doors we were savages. George could hurl hazel-spears, using the Australian throwing-stick, an art I never acquired, but I was fond of slinging stones. To make a sling a bit of leather was necessary, and this meant a visit to the village cobbler, Parker by name, who was a short, sallow man with the bristling chin which, according to Dickens, [60] is the universal attribute of cobblers. I remember the pleasure of sending, with my sling, a pebble crashing into the big ash-tree in the field from what seemed to me a great distance.

Another pursuit was walking on stilts, of which we had two kinds; on the smaller ones even girls had been known to walk, but of the larger (which I remember as of imposing height) only the male sex was capable. The garden at Down was originally a bare and windy wilderness, but our parents constructed mounds of raw red clay on which laurel and box finally grew and made shelter. One of these mounds, covered with dwarf box-trees, was known to us as the Pyrenees, and our pleasure was to traverse the passes on stilts. There was a slight sense of danger and a certain romance in climbing the heights from the lawn and descending in what was legally a part of the orchard, where

the last of the limes grew and a particular crab-tree of which I was fond.

Then there were two swings, one of the orthodox kind between those twin yew-trees that gave a special character to the lawn, and one consisting of a long rope fixed high up on the tall Scotch fir that grew on the mound. The rope of the latter had a short cross-bar at its lower end which served as a seat or a handle. There were various tricks, some of which were almost sure to bump the head of a strange child against the tree trunk, to our private satisfaction.

A similar rope hanging from the ceiling of the long passage at the top of the house supplied a more complicated set of tricks, which all had special names. Of these, I remember that spangle meant a method of sitting on one side of the cross-bar at the end of the rope. The stairs leading to the second floor jutted out into the passage; we used to stand with one foot on each banister-supporting post and make it a starting-point for a swing on the rope, also a landing-place, and if we succeeded in getting back into position with a foot on each banister-post we were pleased with ourselves, especially if it was done at night without a light. The rope, working on the hooks fixed into the ceiling, made a grinding or squeaking noise which must have been annoying to guests, especially when mixed with much crashing and banging and shouting.

In later years we played stump cricket and lawn tennis, but in the early days of which I am thinking the only game I clearly remember was the practice

of the village cricketers in our field. It seems improbable, yet I am decidedly of opinion that the pitch was the footpath, the unmown condition of the grass making bowling elsewhere an impossibility; on the other hand it made fielding an easy affair. I remember clearly the runs being recorded by notches cut on a stick, a method of scoring which has its place in literature in the match between All Muggleton and Dingley Dell. [62]

It is curious to remember how solitary our life was. We had literally no boy-friends in the whole neighbourhood; there were plenty of boys within reach but we never amalgamated with them, and were, I imagine, despised by them as outside the pale of Eton-dom. No opportunity was made for us to learn to shoot; I used to wander with a gun and shoot an occasional hare and various blackbirds, but I never had even the meanest skill, and after suffering miseries of shame at one or two shooting-parties I am glad to think I gave it up.

Fishing there was none in our dry country, and it was only very much later, on the beautiful Dovey in North Wales, that I learned something of the art.