What I Remember, Volume 1

by Thomas Adolphus Trollope

The excuse that my father might have alleged was that he was by no means wholly dependent either on his profession or on his farm, or on the not inconsiderable property which he had inherited from his father or enjoyed in right of his wife. He had an old maternal uncle, Adolphus Meetkerke, who lived on his estate near Royston in Hertfordshire, called Julians. Mr. Meetkerke—the descendant of a Dutchman who had come to this country some time in the eighteenth century as diplomatic representative of his country, and had settled here—lived at Julians with an old childless wife—the daughter, I believe, of a General Chapman—and my father was his declared heir. He had another nephew, Mr. John Young, as flourishing and prosperous an attorney as my father was an unsuccessful and unprosperous barrister. John Young, too, was as worthy and as highly-respected a man as any in the profession. But my father, as settled long years before, was to be the heir; and I was in due time shown to the tenantry as their future landlord, and all that sort of thing. I suppose my grandfather, the Rev. Anthony Trollope, of Cottenham in Hertfordshire, married an elder sister of old Adolphus Meetkerke, while the father of John Young married a younger one. And so, come what might of the Harrow farm and the new house, I was to be the future owner of Julians, and live on my own acres.

Again, Dîs aliter visum!

I well remember more than one visit to Julians with my parents about this time—visits singularly contrasted with those to my Grandfather Milton, the vicar of Heckfield. The house and establishment at Julians were on a far more pretentious scale than the home of the vicar, and the mode of life in the squire’s establishment larger and freer. But I liked Heckfield better than Julians; partly, I think, even at that early age, because the former is situated in an extremely pretty country, whereas the neighbourhood of the other is by no means such. But I please myself with thinking, and do really believe, that the main reason for the preference was that the old Bristol saddler’s son was a far more highly-cultured man than the Hertfordshire squire.

He was a good man, too, was old Adolphus Meetkerke; a good landlord, a kindly natured man, a good sportsman, an active magistrate, and a good husband to his old wife. But there was a sort of flavour of roughness about the old squire and his surroundings which impressed itself on my observation even in those days, and would, I take it, nowadays be deemed almost clownish rusticity.

Right well do I remember the look and figure of my Aunt Meetkerke, properly great-aunt-in-law. She was an admirable specimen of a squiress, as people and things were in that day. I suppose that there was not a poor man or woman in the parish with whose affairs of all sorts she was not intimately acquainted, and to whom she did not play the part of an ever-active providence. She always came down to breakfast clad in a green riding-habit, and passed most of her life on horseback. After dinner, in the long low drawing-room, with its faded stone-coloured curtains and bookless desert spaces, she always slept, as peacefully as she does now in Julians churchyard. She never meddled at all with the housekeeping of her establishment. That was in the hands of “Mrs. Anne,” an old maiden sister of Mr. Meetkerke. She was a prim-looking, rosy-apple-faced, most good-natured little woman. She always carried a little basket in her hand, in which were the keys, and a never-changed volume of Miss Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, which she always recommenced as soon as she had worked her way to the end of it. Though a very precise sort of person, she would frequently come down to breakfast a few minutes late, to find her brother standing on the hearth-rug with his prayer-book open in his hand waiting for her arrival to begin prayers to the assembled household. He had a wonderfully strong rasping voice, the tones of which were rarely modulated under any circumstances. I can hear now his reverberating, “Five minutes too late again, Mrs. Anne; ‘Dearly beloved brethren,’” ... etc., the change of person addressed, and of subject, having been marked by no pause or break whatever save the sudden kneeling at the head of the breakfast table; while at the conclusion of the short, but never missed prayers, the transition from “Amen” to “William, bring round the brown mare after breakfast” was equally unmarked by pause or change of voice or manner.

The parish in which Julians is situated is a small vicarage, the incumbent of which was at that time a bachelor, Mr. Skinner. The church was a very small one, and my great-uncle and his family the only persons in the congregation above the rank of the two or three small farmers and the agricultural labourers who mainly composed it. Whether there was any clerk or not I do not remember. But if any such official existed, the performance of his office in church was altogether not only overlaid but extinguished by the great rough “view-halloa” sort of voice of my uncle. He never missed going to church, and never missed a word of the responses, which were given in far louder tones than those of the vicar. Something of a hymn was always attempted, I remember, by the rustic congregation; with what sort of musical effect may be imagined! I don’t think my Uncle Meetkerke could have distinguished much between their efforts and the music of the spheres. But the singers were so well pleased with the exercise that they were apt to prolong it, as my uncle thought, somewhat unduly. And on such occasions he would cut the performance short with a rasping “That’s enough!” which effectually brought it to an abrupt conclusion. The very short sermon—probably a better one for the purpose in hand than South or Andrews would have preached—having been brought to an end, my uncle would sing out to the vicar, as he was descending the pulpit stairs, “Come up to dinner, Skinner!” And then we all marched out, while the rustics, still retaining their places till we were fairly out of the door, made their obeisances as we passed. All which phenomena, strongly contrasted as they were with the decorous if somewhat sleepy performance in my grandfather’s church at Heckfield, greatly excited my interest. I remember that I had no dislike to attending service either at Heckfield or Julians, while I intensely disliked making one of a London congregation.

If I remember right there were two or three Dissenters and their families at Heckfield, generally considered by their neighbours much as so many Chinese settled among them might have been—as unaccountably strange and as objectionable. But nothing of the sort existed at Julians; and I take it, as far as may be judged from my uncle’s general tone and manner in managing his parish, that any individual guilty of such monstrous and unnatural depravity would at once have been consigned to the parish stocks.

Mr. Meetkerke was, as I have said, an active magistrate. But only one instance of his activity in this respect dwells in my recollection. I remember to have seen, in the nondescript little room that he called his study, a collection of some ten or a dozen very nasty-looking pots, with some white pasty looking substance in each of them, and to have wondered greatly what mystery could have been attached to them. I learned from the butler’s curt word of information that they were connected with my uncle’s magisterial duties, and my mind immediately began to construct all kinds of imaginings about wholesale poisonings. I had heard the story of the “Untori” at Milan, and had little doubt that we were in the midst of some such horrible conspiracy. A few days later I learned that the nasty-looking pots were the result of a magisterial raid among the bakers, and contained nothing worse than alum.

These reminiscences of Julians and its little world recurred to me when speaking of my father’s financial position at the time he took a farm at Harrow and built a handsome house on another man’s land. He was at that time Mr. Meetkerke’s declared heir, and would doubtless have inherited his property in due time had childless old Mrs. Meetkerke lived. But one day she unexpectedly took off her green habit for the last time, and in a day or two was laid under yet more perennial green in the little churchyard! Mr. Meetkerke was at that time over sixty. But he was as fine an old man physically as anybody could wish to see. Before long he married a young wife, and became the father of six children! It was of course a tremendous blow to my father, and never, as I can say from much subsequent information, was such a blow better or more bravely borne. As for myself, I cannot remember that the circumstance impressed me as having any bearing whatsoever on my personal fate and fortunes. In after years I heard it asserted in more than one quarter that my father had in a great measure himself to thank for his disappointment. He was a Liberal in politics after the fashion of those days, (which would make excellent Conservatism in these,) while Mr. Meetkerke was a Tory of the very oldest school. The Tory uncle was very far indeed from being an intellectual match for his Liberal nephew, and no doubt used to talk in his fine old hunting-field voice a great deal of nonsense which no consideration of either affection, respect, or prudence, could induce my father to spare. I fear he used to jump on the hearty old squire very persistently, with the result à la longue of ceasing to be a personâ gratâ to the old man. It may be that had it been otherwise he might have sought affection and companionship elsewhere than from a young wife. But ...!

My father, as I have said, struggled bravely with fortune, but as far as I have ever been able to learn, with ever increasing insuccess. His practice as a barrister dwindled away gradually till it became not worth while to keep chambers; and his farming accounts showed very frequently—every year, I suspect—a deficit.