"What are you going to do with the fruit?" I asked the old woman; and this innocent question raised a tempest in her breast, for I had unwittingly touched on a sore subject.
Past and present times
"Do!" she exclaimed rather fiercely, "I'm going to do nothing with it! I've made elderberry wine years and years and years. So did my mother; so did my grandmother; so did everybody in my time. And very good it were, too, I tell 'e, in cold weather in winter, made hot. It warmed your inside. But nobody wants it now, and nobody'll help me with it. How'm I to do it—keep the birds off and all! I've been fighting 'em years and years, and now I can't do it no longer. And what's the good of doing it if the wine's not good enough for people to drink? Nothing's good enough now unless you buys it in a public-house or a shop. It wasn't so when I were a girl. We did everything for ourselves then, and it were better, I tell 'e. We kep' a pig then—so did everyone; and the pork and bacon it were good, not like what we buy now. We put it mostly in brine, and let it be for months; and when we took it out and biled it, it were red as a cherry and white as milk, and it melted just like butter in your mouth. That's what we ate in my time. But you can't keep a pig now—oh dear, no! You don't have him more'n a day or two before the sanitary man looks in. He says he were passing and felt a sort of smell about—would you mind letting him come in just to have a sniff round? He expects it might be a pig you've got. In my time we didn't think a pig's smell hurt nobody. They've got their own smell, pigs have, same as dogs and everything else. But we've got very partickler about smells now.
"And we didn't drink no tea then. Eight shillings a pound, or maybe seven-and-six—dear, dear, how was we to buy it! We had beer for breakfast and it did us good. It were better than all these nasty cocoa stuffs we drink now. We didn't buy it at the public-house—we brewed it ourselves. And we had a brick oven then, and could put a pie in, and a loaf, and whatever we wanted, and it were proper vittals. We baked barley bread, and black bread, and all sorts of bread, and it did us good and made us strong. These iron ranges and stoves we have now—what's the good o' they? You can't bake bread in 'em. And the wheat bread you gits from the shop, what's it good for? 'Tisn't proper vittals—it fills 'e with wind. No, I say, I'm not going to git the fruit—let the birds have it! Just look at the greedy things—them starlings! I've shouted, and thrown sticks and all sorts of things, and shaken a cloth at 'em, and it's like calling the fowls to feed. The more noise I make the more they come. What I say is, If I can't have the fruit I wish the blackbirds 'ud git it. People say to me, 'Oh, don't talk to me about they blackbirds—they be the worst of all for fruit.' But I never minded that—because—well I'll tell 'e. I mind when I were a little thing at Old Alresford, where I were born, I used to be up at four in the morning, in summer, listening to the blackbirds. And mother she used to say, 'Lord, how she do love to hear a blackbird!' It's always been the same. I's always up at four, and in summer I goes out to hear the blackbird when it do sing so beautiful. But them starlings that come messing about, pulling the straws out of the thatch, I've no patience with they. We didn't have so many starlings when I were young. But things is very different now; and what I say is, I wish they wasn't—I wish they was the same as when I were a girl. And I wish I was a girl again."
Listening to this tirade on the degeneracy of modern times, it amused me to recall the very different feeling on the same subject expressed by the old Wolmer Forest woman. But the Itchen woman had more vigour, more staying-power in her: one could see it in the fresh colour in her round face, and the pure colour and brightness of her eyes—brighter and bluer than in most blue-eyed girls. Altogether, she was one of the best examples of the hard-headed, indomitable Saxon peasants I have met with in the south of England. She was past seventy, impeded by an old infirmity, the mother of many men and women with big families of their own, all scattered far and wide over the county,—all too poor themselves to help her in her old age, or to leave their work and come such a distance to see her, excepting when they were in difficulties, for then they would come for what she could spare them out of her hardly-earned little hoard.
I admired her "fierce volubility"; but that sudden softening at the end about the blackbird's beautiful voice, and that memory of her distant childhood, and her wish, strange in these weary days, to have her hard life to live over again, came as a surprise to me.
Migration of swallows
In days like these, so bright and peaceful, one thinks with a feeling of wonder that many of our familiar birds are daily and nightly slipping away, decreasing gradually in numbers, so that we scarcely miss them. By the middle of September the fly-catchers and several of the warblers, all but a few laggards, have left us. Even the swallows begin to leave us before that date. On the 8th many birds were congregated at a point on the river a little above the village, and on the 10th a considerable migration took place. Near the end of a fine day a big cloud came up from the north-west, and beneath it, at a good height, the birds were seen flying down the valley in a westerly direction. I went out and watched them for half an hour, standing on the little wooden bridge that spans the stream. They went by in flocks of about eighty to a couple of hundred birds, flock succeeding flock at intervals of three or four minutes. By the time the sun set the entire sky was covered by the black cloud, and there was a thick gloom on the earth; it was then some eight or ten minutes after the last flock, flying high, had passed twittering on its way that a rush of birds came by, flying low, about on a level with my head as I stood leaning on the handrail of the bridge. I strained my eyes in vain to make out what they were—swallows or martins—as in rapid succession, and in twos and threes, they came before me, seen vaguely as dim spots, and no sooner seen than gone, shooting past my head with amazing velocity and a rushing sound, fanning my face with the wind they created, and some of them touching me with their wing-tips.