Part 5

I looked in vain for a statue of Cobbett in Farnham. Long may it be before there is one, for it will probably be bad and certainly unnecessary. So long as “Rural Rides” is read he needs not to share that kind of resurrection of the just with Queen Anne and the late Dukes of Devonshire and of Cambridge. The district has bred yet another man who combines the true countryman and the writer. I mean, of course, George Bourne, author of “The Bettesworth Book,” a volume which ought to go on to the most select shelf of country books, even beside those of White, Cobbett, Jefferies, Hudson, and Burroughs. Bettesworth was a Surrey labourer, a neighbour and workman of the author’s. He was an observant and communicative man: his employer took notes from time to time, and the book is mainly a record of conversations. George Bourne gives a brief setting to the old man’s words, yet a sufficient one. Pain and sorrow are not absent, and afar off we see a gray glimpse of the workhouse; but the whole is joyful. Even when Bettesworth “felt a bit Christmassy” there is no melancholy; his head merely seems “all mops and brooms.” His wife tells him that he has been laughing in his sleep. “I was always laughing, then,” he says, “until I was sore all round wi’ it.” We have Bettesworth’s own words in most cases, and George Bourne never interferes except to help. There is no insipid contrast with the outer world, though here and there we have an echo from it; we hear of railways as not particularly convenient, and a dull way of travelling; and of cut-purses, “got up they was, ye know, reg’lar fly-looking blokes, like gentlemen.” Nothing is omitted but what had to be. Bettesworth cleaned cesspools at times, and the best things in the book centre round his “excellent versatility in usefulness.” Well-sinking, reaping, lawn-mowing, pole-pulling in the hop garden, mending of roofs and steeples, and all the glorious activities connected with horses, had come into his work: as for adventure, he drove his first pair of cart horses from Staines to Smithfield Market. He had been a wanderer, too. During a long absence from friends he wrote to a brother, enclosing a gift; but on the way to the post he met an acquaintance, “and I ast’n if he’d ’ave a drink. So when he says yes, I took the letter an’ tore out the dollar an’ chucked the letter over the hedge. An’ we went off an’ ’ad a bottle o’ rum wi’ this dollar. An’ that’s all as they ever heerd o’ me for seven year.”

But the conversations themselves were held while Bettesworth was laying turf, or during the quite genial fatigue following a fifteen-hour day. “Laying Turf” is one of the most charming pieces in the world. The old steeple-mender, reaper, and carter was laying turf under continuous rain and in an uncomfortable attitude, and made the unexpected comment: “Pleasant work this. I could very well spend my time at it, with good turfs.”

“The Bettesworth Book” appeared in 1901. “Memoirs of a Surrey Labourer,” the record of Bettesworth’s last years--1892-1905--appeared in 1907. At first the book may seem tame, a piece of reporting which leaves the reader not unaware of the notebooks consulted by the author. But in the end comes a picture out of the whole, painfully, dubiously emerging, truthful undoubtedly, subtle, not easy to understand, which raises George Bourne to a high place among observers. Apart from his observation, too, he shows himself a man with a ripe and generous, if staid, view of life, and a writer capable of more than accurate writing: witness his picture of frozen rime on telegraph wires, of Bettesworth’s “polling beck” or potato fork, and phrases like this: “Near the beans there were brussels sprouts, their large leaves soaked with colour out of the clouded day.”

Bettesworth had fought in the Crimea, and during sixty years had been active unceasingly over a broad space of English country--Surrey, Sussex, and Hampshire--always out of doors. His memory was good, his eye for men and trades a vivid one, and his gift of speech unusual, “with swift realistic touch, convincingly true;” so that a picture of rural England during the latter half of the nineteenth century, by one born in the earlier half and really belonging to it, is the result. The portrait of an unlettered pagan English peasant is fascinating. He lived in a parish where people of urban habits were continually taking the place of the older sort who dropped out, but he had himself been labourer, soldier, “all sorts of things; but ... first and last by taste a peasant, with ideas and interests proper to another England than that in which we are living now,” and perhaps unconscious of the change since the days when he saw four men in a smithy making an axe-head: “Three with sledge-’ammers, and one with a little ’ammer, tinkin’ on the anvil.... There was one part of making a axe as they’d never let anybody see ’em at.”

The talk, and George Bourne’s comments reveal this man’s way of thinking and speaking, his lonely thoughts, and his attitude in almost every kind of social intercourse. They show his physical strength, his robust and gross enjoyment, his isolation, his breeding and independence, his tenderness without pity, his courage, his determination to endure. No permissible amount of quotation can explain the subtle appeal of his talk, for example, whilst turf-laying,--

“Half unawares it came home to me, like the contact of the garden mould, and the smell of the earth, and the silent saturation of the cold air. You could hardly call it thought--the quality in this simple prattling. Our hands touching the turfs had no thought either; but they were alive for all that; and of such a nature was the life in Bettesworth’s brain, in its simple touch upon the circumstances of his existence. The fretful echoes men call opinions did not sound in it; clamour of the daily press did not disturb its quiet; it was no bubble puffed out by learning, nor indeed had it any of the gracefulness which some mental life takes from poetry and art; but it was still a genuine and strong elemental life of the human brain that during those days was my companion. It seemed as if something very real, as if the true sound of the life of the village had at last reached my dull senses.”

It will now reach duller senses than George Bourne’s. No one has told better how a peasant who has not toned his other virtues with thrift is deserted in the end by God and even the majority of men. The “Memoirs” are shadowed from the first by the helplessness of Bettesworth’s epileptic wife. The whole of his last year was a dimly lighted, solitary, manly agony.... Now, a statue of Frederick Bettesworth might well be placed at the foot of Castle Street, to astonish and annoy, if a sculptor could be found.

As I was passing the “Jolly Sailor” and its jolly signboard, a gypsy, a sturdy, black-haired, and brown-faced woman, was coming into Farnham carrying a basket packed tight with daffodils. The sun shone and was warm, but the low road was still wet. It was the Pilgrim’s Way now, not merely a parallel road such as I had been on since Dorking. For some miles it kept the Wey in sight, and over beyond the river, that low wall and ledge of sand, used by the railway, crested with oak and pine here and there, and often dappled on its slope with gorse. The land on my right was different, being largely sodden, bare, arable, with elms. But it was a pleasure to ride and walk and always to see the winding river and its willows, and that even green terrace now near, now far. Looking across at this scene were a number of detached houses, old and new, at good intervals along the right hand side of the road: some of them could see also the long Alice Holt woods of oaks and larches, the tips of certain small groups of trees gilded fitfully by the sunshine. At Willey Mill, soon after leaving Farnham, the road actually touched the river, and horses can walk through it parallel to the road and cool their feet; and just past this, I entered Hampshire. More often the river was midway between my road and the terrace, touching an old farm-house of brick and timber in the plashy meadows, or turning a mill with a white plunge of water under sycamores. But the gayest and most springlike sign was the fresh whitewash on every fruit tree in an orchard by the wayside; it suggested a festival. The poles were being set up in the hop gardens. The hedges enclosing them had been allowed to grow up to a great height for a screen against wind, and to make a diaphanous green wall. Many were the buildings related to hops, whose mellow brickwork seemed to have been stained by a hundred harvests.

Bentley, the first village in Hampshire, seemed hardly more than a denser gathering, and all on the right hand, of the houses that had been scattered along since Farnham, with the addition of two inns and of a green which a brooklet crosses and turns into a pond at the road’s edge. After Bentley the road ascended, the place of houses was taken by trees, chiefly lines of beeches connected with several embowered mansions at some distance, one of pale stone, one of dark brick. Several rookeries inhabited these beeches. Froyle House, perhaps the chief in this neighbourhood, stood near where the road is highest, and yet closest to the river--a many-gabled pale house next to a red church tower among elms and black-flamed cypresses. Up to the church and house a quarter of a mile of grass mounted, with some isolated ancient thorns and many oaks, which in one spot near the road gathered together into a loose copse. The park itself ran with not too conspicuous or regular a boundary into hop gardens and ploughland. A low wall on a bank separated it from the road, and where a footpath had to pass the wall the stile was a slab of stone pierced by two pairs of foot-holes, approached up the bank by three stone steps. It was here, and at eleven, that I first heard the chiffchaff saying, “Chiff-chaff, chiff-chaff, chiff-chaff, chiff!” A streamlet darted out of the park towards the Wey, and on the other side of the road, and below it, had to itself a little steep coomb of ash trees. An oak had been felled on the coomb side, and a man was clearing the brushwood round it, but the small bird’s double note, almost as regular as the ticking of a clock, though often coming to an end on the first half, sounded very clear in the coomb. He sang as he flitted among the swaying ash tops in that warm, cloudy sun. I thought he sang more shrilly than usual, something distractedly. But I was satisfied. Nothing so convinces me, year after year, that Spring has come and cannot be repulsed, though checked it may be, as this least of songs. In the blasting or dripping weather which may ensue, the chiffchaff is probably unheard; but he is not silenced. I heard him on March 19 when I was fifteen, and I believe not a year has passed without my hearing him within a day or two of that date. I always expect him and always hear him. Not all the blackbirds, thrushes, larks, chaffinches, and robins can hide the note. The silence of July and August does not daunt him. I hear him yearly in September, and well into October--the sole Summer voice remaining save in memory. But for the wind I should have heard him yesterday. I went on more cheerfully, as if each note had been the hammering of a tiny nail into Winter’s coffin.

My road now had the close company of the railway, which had crossed the river. The three ran side by side on a strip not more than a quarter of a mile in breadth; but the river, small, and not far from its source, was for the most part invisible behind the railway. Close to the railway bank some gypsies had pitched a tent, betrayed by the scarlet frock of one of the children. But in a moment scarlet abounded. The hounds crossing road and railway in front of me were lost to sight for several minutes before they reappeared on the rising fields towards Binsted Wyck. The riders, nearly all in scarlet, kept coming in for ten minutes or so from all hands, down lanes, over sodden arable land, between hop gardens, past folded sheep. Backwards and forwards galloped the scarlet before the right crossing of the railway was taken. The fox died in obscurity two miles away.

How warm and sweet the sun was can be imagined when I say that it made one music of the horn-blowing, the lambs’ bleating, the larks’ singing, as I sat looking at Bonham’s Farm. This plain old brick house, with fourteen windows--two dormers--symmetrically placed, fronted the road down two or three hundred yards of straight, hedged cart track. It had spruce firs on the left, on the right some beeches and a long barn roof stained ochre by lichens.

Then I came to Holybourne. It is a village built in a parallelogram formed by a short section of the main road, two greater lengths of parallel by-roads, and a cross road connecting these two. Froyle was of an equally distinct type, lying entirely on a by-road parallel to the main road, near the church and great house, as Bentley lay entirely on one side of the main road, half a mile from its church. Holybourne Church--Holy Rood--stands at the corner where the short cross road joins one of the side roads; where it joins the other is the Manor Farm. I turned up by the “White Hart” and the smithy and chestnut with which the village begins, and found the church. It is a flint and stone one, with a moderately sharp shingled spire that spreads out at the base. On the side away from the main road, that is northward, lies ploughland mixed with copse rising to the horizon, but, near by, a hop garden, an oast-house, a respectable, square, ivy-mantled farm-house possessing a fruit wall, a farmyard occupied by black pigs, and a long expanse of corrugated iron, roofing old whitestone sheds and outbuildings. Southward is a chalk-bottomed pond of clear water, containing two sallow islets, and bordered, where it touches the road, by chestnuts, a lime, and an ivy-strangled spruce fir. This pond is not cut off in any way from the churchyard and all its tombstones of Lillywhites, Warners, Mays, Fidlers, Knights, Inwoods, and Burninghams. In the church I saw chiefly two things: the wall tablet to “George Penton, Brassfounder, Member of the Worshipful Company of Drapers, who resided in New Street Square, and whose remains were deposited in St. Bride’s parish church, London,” and a slender window decorated with tiny flowered discs of alternating blue and orange.

Holybourne’s shrubberies, and the beeches and elms of an overhanging rookery, shadowed and quieted the main road as if it had been private. Moreover, there was still some sun to help dapple the dust with light as well as leaf shadow. Nor was the wind strong, and what there was helped me.

Before the village had certainly ended, Alton had begun. Its grandest building was its first--the workhouse. It is an oblong brick building lying back behind its gardens, with a flat ivied front which is pierced by thirty-three windows, including dormers, placed symmetrically about a central door, and an oval stone tablet bearing the figures “1795.” It smacked of 1795 pure and simple; of the England which all the great men of the nineteenth century were born in and nearly all hated. Its ivy, its plain, honest face, and substantial body of mellow red brick, and that date, 1795, gave the workhouse a genial tranquillity which no doubt was illusory. From there to the end of Alton is one not quite straight or quite level street--Normandy Street and High Street--altogether a mile of houses and of shops (including the “Hop Poles,” the “Barley Mow,” and the “French Horn”) that supply everything a man needs, with the further advantage that if a man wants his hair cut he can have it done by Julius Cæsar: the town brews beer, and even makes paper. It is a long and a low town, and the main street has no church in it until it begins to emerge on to the concluding green, called Robin Hood Butts.

I could have gone as well through Medstead as through Ropley to Alresford, but I went by the Ropley way, and first of all through Chawton. Here the road forks at a smithy, among uncrowded thatched cottages and chestnuts and beeches. The village is well aware of the fact that Jane Austen once dwelt in a house at the fork there, opposite the “Grey Friar.” I took the right hand road and had a climb of two miles, from 368 feet above sea level to 642 feet. This road ascended, parallel to the railway, in a straight, narrow groove, and was fringed on both sides for some distance, up to and past the highest point, by hedgeless copses of oak and beech, hazel, thorn, and ivy. An old chalk pit among the trees had been used for depositing pots and pans, but otherwise the copses might never have been entered except by the chiffchaff that sang there, and seemed to own them. Once out in the open at Four Marks, I had spread out around me a high but not hilly desolation of gray grass, corrugated iron bungalows, and chicken-runs. I glided as fast as possible away from this towards the Winchester Downs beyond, not pausing even at the tenth milestone from Winchester to enjoy again that brief broadening on either hand of the rough wayside turf, sufficient to make a fair ground. Past the “Chequers” at Ropley Dean, and again past the “Anchor” towards Bishop’s Sutton, there are similar and longer broadenings; and on one of these two tramps were lying asleep, the one hid by hat and clothes, the other with clear outstanding pale profile, hands clasped over the fifth rib, and feet stuck up, like a carved effigy. I was as glad to see them sleeping in the sun as to hear the larks singing. I would have done the same if I had been somebody else.

Bishop’s Sutton, the next village, resembles Holybourne in the shrubberies with which it hushes the road. Passing the “Plough” and the “Ship” (kept by a man with the great Hampshire name of Port), I went into the church, which was decorated by the memorial tablets of people named Wright and an eighteenth century physician named William Cowper, and by daffodils and primroses arranged in moss and jam jars. Many dead flowers were littered about the floor. The churchyard was better, for it had a tree taller than the tower, and another lying prone alongside the road for children to play on, and very few tombstones. Of these few, one recorded the deaths of three children in 1827-1831, and furthermore thus boldly baffled the infidel,--

“Bold infidelity, turn pale and die. Beneath this sod three infants’ ashes lie. Say, are they lost or sav’d? If Death’s by sin, they sinn’d, for they lie here: If Heaven’s by works, in Heaven they can’t appear. Ah, reason, how depraved! Revere the Bible’s sacred page, for there the knot’s untied.”

The children were Oakshotts, a Hampshire name borne by a brook and a hanger near Hawkley.

The telegraph wires were whining as if for rain as I neared Alresford, having on my right hand the willowy course of the young Alre, and before me its sedgy, wide waters, Old Alresford pond. The road became Alresford by being lined for a third of a mile downhill by cottages, inns, and shops. This is the whole town, except for one short, very broad turning half way along at the highest point, and opposite where the church stands bathed in cottages.

Alresford is an excellent little town, sad-coloured but not cold, and very airy. For not only does the main street descend from this point steeply west towards Winchester, but the broad street also descends northward, so that over the tops of the houses crossing the bottom of it and over the hidden Alre, are seen the airy highlands of Abbotsstone, Swarraton, and Godsfield. The towered flint church and the churchyard make almost as much of a town as Alresford itself, so numerous are the tombs of all the Wools, Keanes, Corderoys, Privetts, Cameses, Whitears, Norgetts, Dykeses, scattered among many small yew trees. At one side stand many headstones of French officers who had served Napoleon, but died in England about the time of Waterloo--Lhuille, Lavan, Garnier, Riouffe, and Fournier. Inside the church one of the most noticeable things is a tablet to one John Lake, who was born in 1691, died in 1759, and lies near that spot, waiting for the day of judgment. “_Qualis erat_,” says the inscription, “_dies iste indicabit_:” (“What manner of man he was that day will make known.”) The writer of these words saved himself from lies and from trouble.

I looked in vain for any one bearing the name of the poet who praised Alresford pond--George Wither. Or, rather, he praised it as it was in the days when Thetis resorted thither and played there with her attendant fishes, and received crowns of flowers and beech leaves from the land nymphs at eve:--

“For pleasant was that pool, and near it then Was neither rotten marsh nor boggy fen. It was not overgrown with boist’rous sedge, Nor grew there rudely then along the edge A bending willow nor a prickly bush, Nor broad-leaf’d flag, nor reed, nor knotty rush; But here, well order’d, was a grove with bowers: There grassy plots set round about with flowers. Here you might through the water see the land Appear, strow’d o’er with white or yellow sand. Yon, deeper was it; and the wind by whiffs Would make it rise and wash the little cliffs, On which oft pluming sat, unfrightened than, The gaggling wildgoose and the snow-white swan: With all those flocks of fowls that to this day Upon those quiet waters breed and play. For though those excellences wanting be Which once it had, it is the same that we By transposition name the Ford of Arle; And out of which along a chalky marl That river trills, whose waters wash the fort In which brave Arthur kept his royal court.”

--Which, being interpreted, means Camelot, or Winchester.

Yet Wither is one of the poets whom we can connect with a district of England and often cannot sunder from it without harm. Many other poets are known to have resided for a long or a short time in certain places; but of these a great many did not obviously owe much to their surroundings, and some of those that did, like Wordsworth, possessed a creative power which made it unnecessary that the reader should see the places, whatever the railway companies may say. Wordsworth at his best is rarely a local poet, and his earth is an “insubstantial fairy place.” But if you know the pond at Alresford before this poem, you add a secondary but very real charm to Wither; while, if you read the poem first, you are charmed, if at all, partly because you see that the pond exists, and you taste something of the human experience and affection which must precede the mention. To have met the poet’s name here would have been to furbish the charm a little.