“Hob-hole Hob!
My bairn’s gotten t’kin cough:
Tak ’t off—tak ’t off!”
If Hob refused to be propitiated, they tried another way, and catching a live hairy worm, hung it in a bag from the child’s neck, and as the worm died and wasted away so did the cough. If this failed, a roasted mouse, or a piece of bread-and-butter administered by the hands of a virgin, was infallible; and if the cough remained still obstinate, the child, as a last resort, was passed nine times under the belly of a donkey. To avoid risk of exposure, it was customary to lead the animal to the front of the kitchen fire.
I found a party of jet-diggers at work in the low cliff near the cave, and stayed to watch their proceedings. Eleven weeks had they been labouring, and found nothing. It was astonishing to see what prodigious gaps they had made in that time, and the heap of refuse, which appeared twice as big as all the gaps put together. I thought the barrow-man gave himself too little trouble to wheel the waste out of the way; but he, who knew best, answered, “Bowkers! why should I sweat for nothin’? The sea’ll tak ’t all away the fust gale.”
Judging from what they told me, jet-digging is little, if any, less precarious than gold-digging. Their actual experience was not uncommon; and at other times they would get as much jet in a week as paid them for six months’ labour. Then, again, after removing tons of superincumbent rock, the bed of jet would be of the hard stony-kind, worth not more than half-a-crown a pound; or a party would toil fruitlessly for weeks, losing heart and hope, and find themselves outwitted at last by another crafty digger, who, scanning the cliff a few yards off with a keen eye, would discover signs, and setting to work, lay bare a stratum of jet in a few days. The best kind is thoroughly bitumenized, of a perfect uniform black, and resembles nothing so much as a tree stem flattened by intense pressure, while subjected to great heat without charring.
If Bay Town be remarkable, much more so is Runswick, for the houses may be said to hang on the abrupt hill-side, as martens’ nests on a wall, among patches of ragwort, brambles, gorse, elders, and bits of brown rock, overtopped by the summit of the cliff. Boats are hauled up on the grass, near the rivulet that frolics down the steep; balks of pine and ends of old ship timbers lie about; clothes hung out to dry flutter in the breeze; and the little whitewashed gables, crowned by thatch or red tiles, gleam in the sunshine. There is no street, nothing but footpaths, and you continually find yourself in one of the little gardens, or at the door of a cottage, while seeking the way through to the heights above. Two public-houses offer very modest entertainment, and The Ship better beer than that at Kilnsea. About the end of the seventeenth century the alum shale, on which the village is built, made a sudden slip, and with it all the houses but one. Since then it has remained stationary; but with a rock so liable to decomposition as alum shale, a site that shall never be moved cannot be hoped for.
The view from the brow in the reverse direction, after you have climbed the rough slope of thorns and brambles above the village, is striking. Kettleness rears its head proudly over the waters; and looking inland from one swelling eminence to another, till stopped by a long bare hill, which in outline resembles the Hog’s-back, your eye completes the circle and rests at last on the picturesque features of the bay beneath. There is no finer cliff scenery on the Yorkshire coast than from Kettleness to Huntcliff Nab.
Then turning my face northwards, I explored the shortest way to Staithes, now on the edge of the cliff, now cutting across the fields, and leaving on the left the village of Hinderwell—once, as is said, St. Hilda’s well, from a spring in the churchyard which bore the pious lady’s name. About four miles of rough walking brought me to a bend in the road above a deep ravine, which, patched or fringed with wood towards its upper end, submits its steep flanks to cultivation on approaching the sea. Garden plots, fenced and hedged, there chequer the ground; and even from the hither side you can see how well kept they are, and how productive. Facing the south, and sheltered from the bitter north-easters, they yield crops of fruit and vegetables that would excite admiration anywhere, and win praise for their cultivators. In some of the plots you see men at work with upturned shirt-sleeves, and you can fancy they do their work lovingly in the golden evening light. The ravine makes sharp curves, each wider than the last, and the brook spreads out, with a few feet of level margin in places at which boats are made fast, and you wonder how they got there. Then the slope, with its gardens, elders, and flowers, merges into a craggy cliff, near which an old limekiln comes in with remarkably picturesque effect.
A few yards farther and the road, descending rapidly, brings you in sight of the sea, seemingly shut in between two high bluffs, and at your feet, unseen till close upon it, lies the little fishing-town of Staithes. And a strange town it is! The main street, narrow and painfully ill-paved, bending down to the shore of a small bay; houses showing their backs to the water on one side, on the other hanging thickly on a declivity so steep that many of the roofs touch the ground in the rear: frowsy old houses for the most part, with pantile roofs, or mouldy thatch, from which here and there peep queer little windows. Some of the thatched houses appear as if sunk into the ground, so low are they, and squalid withal. Contrasted with these, the few modern houses appear better than they are; and the draper, with his showy shop, exhibits a model which others, whose gables are beginning to stand at ease, perhaps will be ambitious to follow. Men wearing thick blue Guernsey frocks and sou’-westers come slouching along, burdened with nets or lobster-pots, or other fishing gear; women and girls, short-skirted and some barefooted, go to and from the beck with ‘skeels’ of water on their head, one or two carrying a large washing-tub full, yet talking as they go as if the weight were nothing; and now and then a few sturdy fellows stride past, yellow from head to foot with a thick ochre-like dust. They come from the ironstone diggings beyond Penny Nab—the southern bluff. Imagine, besides, that the whole place smells of fish, and you will have a first impression of Staithes.
The inns, I thought, looked unpromising; but the Royal George is better than it looks, and if guests are not comfortable the blame can hardly lie with Mrs. Walton, the hostess—a portly, good-humoured dame, who has seen the world, that is, as far as London, and laughs in a way that compels all within hearing to laugh for company. Though the tap-room and parlour be sunk some three feet below the roadway, making you notice, whether or not, the stout ankles of the water-bearers, you will find it very possible to take your ease in your inn.
I was just sauntering out after tea when a couple of negro minstrels, with banjo and tambourine, came down the street, and struck up one of their liveliest songs. Instantly, and as if by magic, the narrow thoroughfare was thronged by a screeching swarm of children, who came running down all the steep alleys, and from nooks and doorways in the queerest places, followed by their fathers and mothers. I stepped up the slope and took a survey of the crowd as they stood grinning with delight at the black melodists. Good-looking faces are rare among the women; but their stature is remarkably erect—the effect probably of carrying burdens on the head. How they chattered!