CHAPTER IX

A GALLANT GIRL AND HER FAMILY

“THE Pollards,” praised as a “very fine family” in Borrow’s notebooks, lived at Woolston, in the neighbouring parish of St. Ive. He told them they reminded him of Spaniards. “The gallant girl” of eighteen, who rode with him over the countryside, Mr. Taylor’s daughter, afterwards married Mr. Edward Pollard, and came into possession of Penquite. Miss Taylor was a notorious horsewoman. She owned at one time a very spirited horse, on which she used to ride every Sunday to church at St. Cleer. There was no mounting that horse in the ordinary way, and she invariably got into the saddle with one leap. Outside the church gate there would always be a crowd of people assembled to

“See the young lady Get up on her horse”

when she started home for Penquite. Of that family circle round William Pollard, who was head of the house at Woolston during Borrow’s visit, alternately amazed, bewildered, and enchanted by the visitor, two sons and two daughters still survive. {168} A charming lady of great age, the daughter, has clear recollections of the events of half a century ago. Her impression of “the walking lord of gypsy-lore,” as Dr. Hake called him, is of “a very tall, silvery-headed man of middle age, with wonderful brown eyes, remarkably handsome and well-knit. He seemed to know something about everything. The fact we marvelled at was that, being acquainted with so many languages, he did not confound one with another. He appeared to be a wild, romantic person, a being of whom we had never seen the like before; his energy was unbounded—he almost lived in the open air, though it was in the depth of a bitter winter.”

It has already been indicated that the winter of 1853–4 was unusually severe—at any rate for Cornwall, where the climate is generally as soft as that of Ireland. The hills and tors ascending to the north of the country in which Borrow was staying were mantled in white during the greater part of his visit. The clear air at these altitudes seemed to inspirit him; he was a very different person from the Borrow who had nursed his grievances and been tormented by his melancholy demons on the marshes of Oulton. “One morning,” said Mrs. Edey, “after an exceptionally heavy fall of snow during the night, he was up with the earliest light, ploughing his way through the drifts to Woolston, where he commandeered one of my brothers to be his companion for a whole-day ramble over the snow-bound moors. And, said my brother, he sang as he walked the songs of half-a-dozen nations from the time they left almost without interruption, till they returned.”

There are two interesting passages in her story throwing a sidelight upon his relations with children. On his frequent walks from Penquite to Woolston he was wont to pass a certain desolate, abandoned mine. On the side of its premises was a little rough stone building, occupied as a cottage by a poor woman with a large family. The children’s poverty-stricken condition attracted his notice, and he regularly took with him in his pocket some bit of food to present to them as they stood looking out for the arrival of the tall stranger with the white hair. One of the children was customarily posted on the roadside to watch for him, and this one was dubbed by Borrow “the little sentinel.” Again, at dinner with some legal light of the district, he was suddenly missed during dessert, and a search revealed him in a remote room surrounded by the children of the house, whom he was amusing by his stories and catechising in the subjects of their studies and pursuits. He excused his absence by saying that he had been fascinated by the intelligence of the children, and had forgotten all about the dinner. More than once he expressed a high opinion of the mental average of Cornish children.

Penquite, the “substantial stone house on a hillside,” where Borrow stayed with Mr. and Mrs. Robert Taylor in 1854, is a characteristic Cornish farmhouse of the older and better sort—the native home of yeomen. The parish road ascends a steep hillock in the direct and uncompromising manner which is the distinctive mark of an old way, beaten out before the era of enclosure and before the development of wheeled traffic. At the top a thicket of pine and beech trees stands sentinel beside the “court-gate,” beyond which the road, curling to the south, brings one to a view of orchard land speckled with snowdrops, white gates, cedars of rich green, a slated house, French windows gleaming in the sun, and a garden sloping towards the stream at the bottom of the valley.

This was the destination to which Shorsha, the horse-wizard, and Robert Taylor, the Cornish farmer, cantered up on Christmas Eve of 1853. The Taylors left it in 1877, handing the farm on to Edward Pollard, who had married their only daughter. At Mrs. Pollard’s death (1904), the property passed into the hands of her eldest son, Edward. It was this eldest son who answered my pull at the bell-knob under the ancient granite porch, and gave me a real welcome. He has added a section to the house at the back, but the southern front remains as it has been for many generations. Here was the old low-ceiled parlour where Borrow and Berkeley, the Irish vicar, discussed the comparative beauty and virtue of Cornish women and Irish women; beyond, the stone-flagged kitchen where he got his “hospitable reception, with a log on the fire.” But the march of science has partly spoilt the venerable kitchen. It has left the settle from which Shorsha’s long legs stretched to the blaze, but it has filled up the open hearth and put a modern kitchen range in its place. Mr. William Pollard is the son of one of that “fine family” at Woolston with whom Borrow discoursed of Australia, whence two of the young Pollards had just returned that Christmas. In the early ’fifties Australia was a name to conjure with; Ballarat was a magic incantation. Two of the five Pollard sons adventured there, and it was one of the two that I visited Woolston to see.

Mr. Pollard, in his ninetieth year, was a prisoner in a canopied bed, but with a mind clear and logical, and full of memories and interests. Scattered around him were newspapers and books, and one of the books a contemporary of Borrow himself. “A very strange, wild person,” was his introductory description of Borrow; “a very tall, upstanding man, wiry and lithe, with a strong face and snow-white hair. He looked fit for anything, and I believe he was—that he feared no man nor devil. I remember the first evening he came here. We had tea in the parlour, and, farmhouse fashion, we had some roast beef on the table, which my father carved. After tea, somebody suggested that he should sing a song. He did sing it, and a weird, wailing, outlandish song it was. No—not a gypsy song. . . . Maybe it was the song of Swayne Vonved. He got up and waved his arms as he sang of his hero’s adventures, he fought an imaginary foe, and finally, as he worked himself into a fervour of passionate song, he seized the carving-knife from the table and swished it round his head. We all drew back, and some of us were glad when the song was over and he dropped that carving-knife and sat down. His voice was tremendous—‘as big as Tregeagle’s,’ as we say in Cornwall.”

Not only the legendary lore and the ancient language of Cornwall interested Borrow; he was equally attracted by the physical characteristics of the peninsula, and impressed by the great wealth lying dormant in the incalculable masses of granite on the moors. “If I were a rich man,” he exclaimed, “I would buy up all this granite; it will be wanted one day.” The demand for Cornish granite in various great public works and the present activity of the quarries at the Cheesewring illustrate his foresight.

The Woolston people were particularly struck by Borrow’s intense enthusiasm for the legend and the poetry of the North. He himself relates how, on a walking tour farther west, he faced eight dreary miles on a rainy evening, solacing himself by singing:

“Look out, look out, Swayne Vonved!”

the Danish ballad he had translated more than thirty years before. At Woolston he made the Vikings live again for them. “He gave us Odin and Thor without ceasing.” There never could have been so much Norse mythology in that part of Cornwall before. Some of the ladies seem to have fallen in love with his hair, but could not summon up courage to beg a lock; and one of them saved his combings and preserved them in tissue-paper for years.

The keen, almost boyish, delight which Borrow took in everything he saw and heard in the hills, and his complaisance towards the company he met, are remarkable in the man whose odd misanthropic fancies and wretched, paltry miseries we have been watching during many pages. The contrast is vivid indeed. In Cornwall Borrow was both pleased and pleasing—with occasional outbursts such as the display of spleen against “Uncle Tomfools”—whether he were riding with “the gallant girl” over the snowy country, listening to her superstitions about magpies—

“One for sorrow, two for mirth; Three for a wedding, four for death” {174a}

—or visiting patriarchal villagers at Tremar to hear their stories of pixies and foxes, {174b} or attending rural dinner parties, with all the neighbourhood beaten up in his honour. Some of the pixy stories have been given. The attitude of the countryside towards the fox in that day was shockingly unorthodox. He was vermin to be destroyed whenever and wherever discovered: did he not wreak incalculable damage in the farmyard by various and subtle devices, such as taking his brush in his teeth and whirling round like a teetotum under the poultry perches, till the unhappy fowls, rendered dizzy by the unaccustomed spectacle, fell an easy prey to his rapacious appetite? How a fox was shot and the murderer brought his victim for admiration both of the brush and the deed, is related without the turning of a hair. The crime was so common as to be merely a habit; Mr. Baring-Gould, in his story of Parson Jack Russell, has given a similar account of the ethics of certain districts in Devonshire about the same period.

Borrow revealed his curiosity and enthusiasm in many ways. On one occasion a young lady named Every was of the party at Woolston. Part of the conversation turned—as it inevitably would where Borrow was concerned—on Cornish names and their derivations. The girl asked him if he could tell her anything about her name. His mind flew at once to the one Every or Avery whose career was familiar to him, that Captain John, of Plymouth, the fierce pirate of the Eastern Seas, the mortal enemy of John Company, who was reputed to have become a king in Madagascar—one of the choicest villains in the history of the world. “I said that the most celebrated person who ever bore it was a buccaneer, whereupon she informed me that her grandmother had told her that she was descended from a famous pirate.” And he adds the suggestive commentary, “Very pleasant party!” {176}

One of the most interesting gatherings arranged for him, of course, was the family dinner party at the old farmhouse of Tredinnick, where his father was born. According to Berkeley, who was among the guests, nearly all the Borrows of the district were present, and George was highly excited, with his mind constantly running upon the father whom he had worshipped. The circumstances of the feast and the memories it aroused were too much for him; he ceased to be merry and talkative, and closed up his store of song and story; instead of exerting himself to amuse his friends, he sat with restless glance wandering around the rooms in which old Captain Tom had spent his boyhood; his eyes were moist. Suddenly he left the party and burst into the open air—meeting with an ugly tumble over a low wall into the yard. “Well,” said he to Berkeley as they parted for the night, “we have shared the old-fashioned hospitality of old-fashioned people in an old-fashioned house.” He was overwrought to an extraordinary extent, and the excitement, together with the shock of his little accident, brought on an indisposition that kept him laid up all next day.

Having been a little more than a fortnight at Penquite, he began his walking tour through Cornwall to the extreme west. At Mousehole, not far from the Land’s End, lived one Burney, an officer of the coastguard, who was a distant connection of the family. Taylor had given Borrow a letter of introduction to him. “You can only see Cornwall or know anything about it by walking through it,” he wrote to his wife. The secrets of Cornwall, the conditions of its detachment, the spell of its romance, can only be penetrated by the man who “the known track . . . deserts, and has a by-way of his own.” He must explore its hills and combes, and its remoter villages for their archæological treasures—whether of the prehistoric races who have left their mark upon its sad grey stones, or of the saints and heroes of the early Christian time, or of the authors and the actors of its Mystery Plays—and he must know the simple folk of its ancient blood to probe the riches of their lore. Even Borrow hardly turned far enough aside from the beaten paths to get more than a very general impression of the country; but he was a man who observed readily and absorbed eagerly.

Nicholas Borrow, his cousin, was his topographical mentor and guide on many expeditions, and, now that he was leaving for the West, accompanied him on horseback across country to set him in the main road. He saw Tremewth, where his father’s comrade, Thomas Honey, lived on the top of the hill, and the field near Redgate containing the grave of King Doniert (or Dungerth), the lord of the Western Britons in the ninth century, with its broken pillar and Latin inscription. Parting with his cousin, he walked on to Lostwithiel, the end of his first day’s journey, took his ease in the Talbot Inn, and feasted on roast fowl and bacon. The ancient stannary town, with its shire hall dating from the thirteenth century, and its memories of the Civil War—when Essex stabled his horses in the church, and his troopers brought a horse to the font and with a mock baptism sardonically gave it the name of Charles—produced mingled emotions in Borrow’s mind, for, in spite of his militant Protestantism, he was a staunch Tory and a Royalist. Turning aside to see the hoary Castle of Restormel, which had been a ruin since the time of Edward the Third, he recorded some vivid impressions of the neighbourhood as “the most beautiful he ever saw.”

They will not appear exaggerated to those who have approached it as Borrow did through the wonderful Glyn Valley, by the road which follows the river brawling down from its moorland birthplace towards the sea at Fowey. The second day he covered twenty-four miles to Truro. The sight of a cairn on a hill top “brought the Spirit of Old upon my mind.” _Antiquis debetur reverentia_ was always a potent principle with Borrow; nevertheless, the modern Protestant within him sometimes got the better of the antiquary. On the previous day he had seen a cross, and examined it. This monument “seemed to have been raised by some Puseyite. The base contained a nonsensical inscription to the effect that it had been erected on a place which had been devoted to ‘Druidic Idolatry.’ The Druids were no idolaters, though the Papists are.” {179} It was darkening to evening when he passed through Grampound, one of the minute derelict boroughs of Cornwall, whose disfranchisement in 1821 was the one and only result of Lord John Russell’s first agitation against electoral corruption. The appearance of The Dolphin Inn, looking snug with its lighted windows and air of warmth and comfort, was a strong invitation to a tired wayfarer who had more often than most men

“. . . by care oppressed Found in an inn a place of rest.”

He looked wistfully at it, but withstood the temptation (with the assistance of Swayne Vonved), and pushed on through the rainy night to Truro, and to dinner and bed at the Royal Hotel.

In the morning he inspected the town, and visited the church—which no longer exists save as a fragment built into the northern side of Benson’s great cathedral—and then started again for the West. His walk extended no farther than ten miles that day. On his arrival at Redruth, one of the centres of the mining district, he was arrested by the great hill of Carn Brea, to the north-west of the town. Its noble summit is one of the most striking features of the landscape viewed from any part of West Cornwall, and it is the haunt of many legends—mostly unauthentic and nearly all ridiculous. The entertaining old Borlase, in his “Antiquities of Cornwall,” invented a grotesque set of theories about the origin of the curiously-shaped rocks that strew the long length of the hill’s crest. Borlase saw Druids everywhere, and Druidical sculpture in every freak Nature had played through countless centuries with the granite which she found so pliable. It was inconceivable in his time that the “basins” and channels in the rocks of Carn Brea could have been merely the result of “weathering,” as the geologists inform us now they must have been. “In yonder grave a Druid lies” was predicated by Borlase of every mound he saw. One perceives that Borrow adopted all his theories without modification. On Carn Brea he was not merely on a magnificent precipitous hill, with a wide-stretching view away to the Atlantic on the north; he was in the midst of a thousand memories of the past; the “Spirit of Old” came upon him again; white-robed priests defiled along the heather, and performed their sacrificial rites upon the granite altars. The notes he made about Carn Brea were, says he, “written on the top of the sacrificial rock. In the upper basin, the horrid place of sacrifice, there are outlets for the blood to stream down. There seem to be about eight basins in all.” William Borlase himself could have accomplished nothing better than that.

On January 12th he set off from Redruth towards Penzance in torrents of rain. Just above Rosewarne he came across a gypsy caravan, and of necessity must go to find its inhabitants and talk with them. A dark woman addressed him; he asked her her name in Romany. She pretended at first not to understand, but finally answered him. Presently her husband, “a remarkably knavish-looking personage,” put out his head and began to discourse with him. He told him that their name was Bosvile. It will be remembered that the “Flaming Tinman” of Mumper’s Dingle was called Bosvile. The Bosviles, or Boswells, as they were called in later days, were, in fact, a well-known tribe of gypsies in the West of England. Another family, real Cornish in all their associations, formed a branch of the ubiquitous Smiths. In 1866 they departed from England almost in a body for America, where most of the Stanleys and the Coopers had already gone.

While talking with Bosvile and his mort, Borrow heard the sound of fiddles in an adjoining tent, and was invited to join the company, for doubtless his perfect knowledge of the language and his unfailing fascination over the gypsies had overcome all their first suspicions; but he told them that he was “mokhado” (muddy and dirty), gave them a four-penny piece, and departed. He went through Hayle, then, and now, one of the Cornish homes of industry, which he contemptuously dismisses as “a filthy place.” Reaching Penzance in the evening, he dined at the Union Hotel, and held converse with a mining agent, whom he discovered to be “a sensible man, full of Cornish patriotism.”

On the 13th he turned up Mr. Burney at Mousehole, one of the quaintest fishing villages among the hundred peppered round the Cornish coast, and found him excellent company. There is just a glimpse in his memoranda of the kind of miscellany Borrow might have given to the world if he had ever written his book on Cornwall—a mixture of travel and religion, legend and dialogue, philology and adventure. A page or two would certainly have been occupied by the story which Burney told him the first day they met of his doings on the West Coast of Africa—many naval officers of the mid-century could relate good stories of slave-chasing in those regions—and especially of the triumphant expedition to the town of a native king, who at first resisted their demands, his capital being fortified and defended by thirty guns of sorts. The essence of the tale was that while the palaver was in progress Burney’s gunner went round and drenched the touch-holes of all the thirty defending pieces. Borrow returned to Penzance that night: again, had the book been written, we should doubtless have been in possession of the full narrative of the experiences of that mining agent who had been in Greenland; but he is only just dotted down, a bare, unclothed lay figure in the surviving Notes. For the rest of his time in West Penwith, Borrow was the guest of Mr. Burney, exploring the country of Dolly Pentreath, who in the eighteenth century had spoken the Cornish language, and examining the traces there remaining of the Spanish expedition against the Cornish coasts in 1595. On the Sunday he went to church at Paul (where Dolly Pentreath was buried), and in the evening “read the Bible and prayers to the family” of Burney.

There was, of course, a trip to St. Michael’s Mount, the show-place of those parts, that castle on an island in Mount’s Bay, which approaches in singularity and beauty, if it does not quite reach the glory of, its namesake Mont St. Michel on the coast of Normandy. Borrow went with Burney by boat from Mousehole, and observed with curiosity the points of greatest interest on the island and about the buildings—the bastion by which the Parliamentarians were said to have entered when they attacked the place during the Civil War, the chapel within the castle, and the stone vault underneath it in which a skeleton was found. Full of his scheme for the book on Cornwall, he made his memoranda as he went in order that the impressions might be quite fresh. Just as he set down old William Borlase’s superstitions “on the top of the sacrificial rock” at Carn Brea, so he records that his notes on St. Michael’s Mount were written in the vault.

Borrow returned from the Mount on foot to Mousehole, and two days later started upon an expedition to the most impressive part of the Cornish coast—the Logan Rock and Tol-Pedn-Penwith, the spot where Charles Wesley is reputed to have written his famous hymn:

“Here on a narrow neck of land ’Twixt two unbounded seas I stand.”

The traveller, however, says very little about the magnificent scenery, and a great deal about the companion of his travels. In “The Romany Rye,” when Lavengro has succeeded in divorcing his old friend Murtagh from the disreputable trade of a thimble-engro, it will be remembered that, in order to elevate the Irish boy’s spirits, he induces him to tell a story.

“Cheer up, man,” said I, “and let’s have the story, and let it be about Ma-Coul and the salmon and his thumb.”

But the tale of the finding of Finn-Ma-Coul in Veintry Bay, his servitude of Dermod David Odeen, his cooking of the salmon, the blister on his skin, his discovery of all witchcraft by the sucking of his thumb, and all the rest of it, was not related to Lavengro in the ’twenties by Murtagh at Horncastle Fair. It was told to him on the Cornish cliff paths by one Cronan, the Irish guide who was conducting him to the Logan Rock, as the Notebook shows, and inserted after Borrow got back to Norfolk to lend the colour of romance to the end of “The Romany Rye.” Of Cronan’s fairy stories, one is cited at length—the tale of the Clog Vreach, or the parti-coloured stone, under the heading, “An Irish Fairy Tale, told on a Wild Road by a Wild Native.” {185} It is a tale of a drunken blackguard and tyrannical landlord, who vowed that he would shoot all the fairies to be found on the moor where the Clog Vreach stood. He went there and fired off all his ammunition, but when he returned his body was bent, his tongue was hanging out, and his servants, seeing that he was next door to dead, put him to bed, and four people poured raw brandy down his throat all night. After that it is not surprising to learn that in twenty-four hours his body had turned black and life had left him. Cronan did not attribute his death to this remarkable prescription, but rather to the vengeance of the supernatural powers. “And,” says he, “a very fitting end it was for a person who was a tyrant and interfered with the fairies.”

These things seem to have occupied Borrow on the journey to the exclusion of all else. Before he left the district, however, he made some extracts from the register of Paul Church, recording the death of a Keigwin killed by the Spaniards in 1595, and the death of Dolly Pentreath (entered in her married name of Dorothy Jeffery) in 1777. He had hunted up an old man of eighty at Mousehole, who in his boyhood had seen and heard Dolly Pentreath, and he had made a long list of Cornish words taken down from the lips of aged persons in that village. No doubt the Cornish book was intended to include a vocabulary of the old tongue.

I do not know of any evidence that Borrow had made a study of the Cornish language in previous years, but his command of Welsh, and in a less degree his knowledge of the three variants of Gaelic, made almost the whole of the Cornish words surviving, in names of places and people, and in peculiarities of local dialect, easily understood of him. There is a general resemblance between Cornish and Welsh about which, I am told, all writers agree, though they differ as to its exact extent. But the truth is probably not far from the statement of Sir John Dodridge, who in 1630 said of the Cornish: “They have a particular language called Cornish (although now much worn out of use), differing but little from the Welsh and the language of the Britaines of France.” Mr. Henry Jenner, F.S.A., in his admirable “Handbook of the Cornish Language,” states that Welsh, Cornish, and Breton “may be said to be as near together as three separate languages can well be, but to have drifted too far apart to be accounted three dialects of the same language.”

The principal differences between Cornish and Welsh can be stated very briefly. The following points show the main divergences between the Cornish of the later literary remains and the Welsh of the books and newspapers of the present day:—

(_a_) Certain grammatical differences, such as the occasional use of an indefinite article, never employed in Welsh.

(_b_) A number of variations in vocabulary, in which Cornish will often be found to have used a word current in contemporary Breton in place of one current in contemporary Welsh. This is not surprising, even if it be not assumed that the language was taken into Brittany from England, for the relations between the shipping ports of Cornwall and Brittany were exceedingly close, especially those relations of contraband traffic so dear to the hearts of the writers of romance.

(_c_) Phonetic changes resembling corruptions, such as the substitution of “j” or English “ch” for “d” or “t” in the bodies or the beginnings of words, and of “s” or “z” for the same letters at the ends of words. {187}

It will be seen that Borrow could have found such differences as these no stumbling-block to his philological excursions. He would readily recognise _Tywardreath_ as the equivalent of the Welsh, Tywardraeth, the house on the sands, and would be assisted thereto by the sight of the wide stretches of white sand fringing St. Austell Bay in the angle where Tywardreath stands on its hill side. He would identify _Hendra_ as Hendre, the old stead; _Chyandour_ as Tyrdwr, the house of the water; _Egloskerry_ as Eglwyscerrig, the stone church; and such forms as _nance_ for nant, a ravine, _pons_ for pont, a bridge, _plou_ for plwyf, a parish, would offer no difficulty to one familiar with parallel changes in other groups of languages.