Chapter 11

_Sit down_, _and hear the last of our sea-sorrow_.

"THE TEMPEST."

_They said_, "_and why should this thing be_? _What danger lowers by land or sea_? _They ring the tune of Enderby_."

JEAN INGELOW.

"England, when she goes to war," said a Prime Minister not long ago, "has not to consider whether she will be able to fight a second or a third campaign." We remembered that we were Englishmen; and on January 19th, 1877, went down again with a good courage for our third campaign on the Welsh coast. A furious gale was howling that day among the hills of Cardiganshire, recalling to the memory of some of us the stormy Ides of March, when the pioneers of our little army first set foot in Borth. _Omina principiis inesse solent_. This gale was sounding the key-note of the term's adventures.

The cause of our return to Borth for a third term is briefly told. We had gone home at Christmas, uncertain whether we should meet again there or at Uppingham. Dr. Acland, of Oxford, to whose active sympathy with the school in its perplexities we must at least gratefully allude, had undertaken on our behalf to inspect the sanitary condition of Uppingham, and give us his judgment on the expediency of reassembling there. His judgment was submitted to the attention of the Trustees at their meeting, on December 22nd, when it was resolved that, "In the face of Dr. Acland's report, the Trustees deeply regret they cannot at present recall the school to Uppingham." So we went back to the sea.

Our numbers this term just missed by one the normal total of three hundred. In the two preceding terms they had been smaller by some five or six. The camp at Borth, therefore, had not suffered from want of recruits. Indeed, it was now foreseen that the return to Uppingham would be for about one-third of the school a first arrival there.

The beginning of the end of our exile seemed to be marked by the reduced number of masters' families in camp. Some had gone into winter quarters at Aberystwith; some had already resettled at Uppingham. Our connection with home began to be retightened also by parochial and other common transactions, in which we took our share from a distance. Not, indeed, that the connection had ever been discontinued. We had left too precious pledges behind us. The deserted gardens did not waste all their sweetness on the air which we had exchanged for a "fresher clime." A thin intermittent stream of their products found its way along the nine hours of railway through most of the year. Flowers, fruit, and vegetables might raise tantalising memories of the pleasant places where they grew, but were not the less welcome to dwellers in this somewhat austere tract where they did not grow or grew very niggardly. The traffic in these delicacies drew the attention of the London and North- Western Railway Company, whose officials called to account one of our servants for travelling with an excess of personal luggage. The artless contrabandist, besides his own modest pack, had fourteen several hampers and boxes under his charge. This was checked. But who was the miscreant who systematically staved in and pounded into such odd shapes the little tin boxes in which our rose-fanciers had their choice blooms sent them by post? Post Office authorities thought the damage was caused by "the pressure of the letters." We did not, and remonstrated, till the practice, whoever was the criminal, was stopped. Besides these gracious souvenirs of home, there were from time to time business matters which we had to transact as parishioners and ratepayers. One was sensible of an almost humorous contrast, when we discussed our interests in the Midlands in a room overlooking the coast and hills of Cardiganshire, where one turned from watching the waves breaking crisply on the beach, to study a map of some property in Rutland pastures. It has been accounted a signal proof of Roman self-confidence, that bidders could be found for a piece of land on which Hannibal was encamped at the moment of sale. The situations are not quite parallel. But people who could seriously debate, as we did, on the purchase of a freehold at a time when not even their Rome was their own, clearly had not despaired of their country.

With the exception of the moving incidents to be immediately narrated, the tale of this term's life differs little from that of the preceding. The round of work and play was much the same; the harriers were out again, football went on as before, till superseded by the "athletics," and a match was played on March 7th against Shrewsbury School on their ground, of which the result was a drawn battle.

Our difficulties this term were with the elements. In novels of school life, where the scene is laid on the coast, the hero always imperils his bones in an escapade upon the cliffs. The heroes of our romance knew what was expected of them. Accordingly, two new boys of a week's standing start one afternoon for a ramble on Borth Head and are missing at tea-time. Search parties are organised at once (it was not the first occasion, for the writer remembers sharing in a wild-goose chase which lasted four hours of the night, along and under the same cliffs); while one skirted the marsh to Taliesin, another explored the coast. The latter party at nine o'clock in the evening discovered the involuntary tenants perched upon a rock a little way up the cliff. They had climbed to it to escape the tide which had cut them off, and here they sat, telling stones in turn, they said, to while away the time till the tide should retire. Before the waters went, however, darkness came; and either from fear of breaking bones in the descent or suspicion of some fresh treachery in the mysterious sea, they clung to their perch, blessing the mildness of a January night without wind or frost, but blessing with still more fervency the lanterns of their rescuers. They had passed five hours in this anxious situation.

This was the sportive prelude of more serious trouble. _Nunquam imprudentibus imber incidit_: as the servant perhaps reflected, who, on Monday, January 29th, was conveying the dinner of his master's family from the Hotel kitchen to Cambrian Terrace. As he crossed the gusty street between them, the harpies of the storm swept the dinner from dish, and rolled a prime joint over and over in the dust. A leg of mutton was following, but he caught it dexterously by the knuckle-end as it fell, and rescued so much from the wreck. Such incidents are significant: trifles light as air, no doubt, but at least they showed which way the wind blew. And did it not blow? for three days the sou'-wester had been heaping up the sea-water against the shores of Cardigan Bay. People remembered with misgivings that an expected high tide coincided in time with the gale, and shook their heads significantly as they went to bed on the eve of January 30th.

In the half light before sunrise, the classes, emerging from the school- room after morning prayers, found the street between them and the Terrace threaded by a stream of salt water, which was pouring over the sea-wall in momently increasing volume. Skirting or jumping the obstruction they reached the class-rooms, and work began. But before morning school was over the stream had become a river, and thrifty housewives were keeping out the flood from their ground-floors by impromptu dams. Those who were well placed saw a memorable sight that morn, as the terrible white rollers came remorselessly in, sheeting the black cliff sides in the distance with columns of spouted foam, then thundering on the low sea- wall, licking up or battening down the stakes of its palisades, and scattering apart and volleying before it the pebbles built in between them, till the village street was heaped with the ruins of the barrier over which the waters swept victoriously into the level plain beyond:

The feet had hardly time to flee Before it brake against the knee, And all the world was in the sea.

Those who were looking inland saw how

Along the river's bed A mighty eygre reared its head And up the Lery raging sped.

And though they could not see how the tenants of the low-lying hamlet of Ynislas fled to their upper storey as the tide plunged them into twelve feet of water; how it breached the railway beyond, sapping four miles of embankment, and sweeping the bodies of a drowned flock of sheep far inland to the very foot of the hills; yet they saw enough to make them recall the grim memories of the historic shore, and doubt if our fortunes were not about to add a chapter to the legend of the Lost Lowland Hundred.

For an hour the narrow ridge on which the village stands was swept by a storm of foam, while, from moment to moment, a wave exploding against the crest of the ridge, would leap in through the intervals between the houses, and carrying along a drift of sea-weed and shingle, splintered timber, and wrecked peat-stacks, go eddying down into the drowned pastures beyond. Yet when the ebb came, and men began to count their losses, there were but few to record. The embankment at the south end of the village had been beaten flat, and the road behind it buried under a silt of shingle; the nearest houses to it had been flooded and threatened with collapse, so that the owners were offering them next day on easy terms; from our hospital, which stood in this quarter, the one patient and his nurse were rescued on the backs of waders; the foundations of a chapel, which was building on lower ground, were reported sapped, and a staunch Churchman of our Welsh acquaintance stood rapturously contrasting the fate of the conventicle with the security of his own place of worship on the neighbouring knoll. "If Borth goes, the church won't, anyhow!" he cried, in self-forgetting fervour. No lives were lost, though several were barely saved. One of our party rescued his dog, already straining at his chain to escape a watery grave; another saved (dearer than life itself) his favourite violin. A fisherman, surprised in his kitchen, was flung down and nearly strangled between door and doorpost by the rush of a wave through the window. A neighbour was drifted out of his house on the top of one wave, and scrambled back to find the door slammed and held against him by another. Rueful groups of women stood in the street, sobbing over armfuls of what one feared might be drowned infants, but were, in fact, the little pigs which they had plucked alive and remonstrant from the flooded styes. In short, if many were frightened, few could plead to being hurt.

Meanwhile, the boys had found their way from the class-rooms upon bridges of railway-sleepers requisitioned from the station-yard. We could not but enjoy that "something not altogether unpleasing to us in the calamities of our neighbours," but the "humorous ruth," with which we contemplated the comical incidents of the disaster was exchanged in good time for practical pity. There was to be another high tide that evening, and how would the village stand this second storm of its broken defences? So the order was given to assemble in the street after dinner, and work at the repair of the breaches. The street looked like an ant-hill, as the workers, divided into gangs by houses, with the housemaster at the head of his gang, swarmed on the roadway, clearing it from the _debris_ with pickaxe, spade, and a multitude of hands; re-stacking the cottagers' store of peat-sods, which the waves had sown broadcast; forming chains across the beach to pass up from hand to hand the large pebbles at low- water mark, to build in between the palisades; or cutting down the old stakes and driving in new ones. This last was the most attractive branch of the service. How enviable was he whom a reputation as a woodman secured the enjoyment of an axe, and the genial employ of hewing and hammering! This was much to be preferred to cutting your hands in moving rubbish or standing still to hand wet stones in a freezing wind. However, the pleasure of helping other people was common to all; and many of the young hearts, which tasted that pleasure in this rough day's labour, will have gained an impulse of prompt helpfulness that may serve them in other and ruder storms than that which shook the frail homes of these friendly villagers.

We do not know how our defences would have stood the test of battle. They were not put to the proof, for the wind, veering to the north that morning, and blowing strongly all day, reduced again the volume of the water in the bay, and the following tides came and went harmlessly. But had the morrow repeated the terrors of this day, we should hardly have been up to witness them, for (_proh pudor_!) we rewarded ourselves for our exertions by a lie-a-bed next morning in place of early school.

Elsewhere the storm-wave had worked more havoc. At Ynyslas, a flock of one hundred and fifteen sheep were caught in their pastures, and drowned, the farmer rescuing only eleven. The cottagers were driven to their lofts, while the tide snatched away their furniture, doors, window-frames, and tables, and strewed them along the railway banks. There was flotsam and jetsam on what was now once more the coast-line at the village of Taliesin, where in old days the bard's cradle had been washed ashore; here one poor woman recovered her parlour-table of heavy oak; her chairs had travelled farther yet to the door of a farmhouse in the extreme corner of the marsh. These people were greater sufferers than our villagers, but we could only help them by a subscription to replace their losses.

For ourselves, we suffered nothing except a temporary scarcity of coals and oil from the interruption of the railway traffic. It was a fortnight before the next train ran on the stretch between us and Machynlleth, and in the meanwhile the gap was bridged by a coach service. From four miles of embankment the ballast had been sapped away, and the sleepers and rails collapsing into the void presented a dismal picture of wreck.

Yes, we suffered one other privation. It was long before our football- field rose again from the deeps, and was dry enough for play. Its goalposts pricking up mournfully through the floods were a landmark which the boys recognised with rueful eyes in the midst of the drowned and deformed landscape.

More substantial measures than the patching up of the barricades in which we assisted must be taken if Borth is to remain permanently in the roll of Welsh villages. Our storm-wave was but part of a system of aggression which the sea is carrying out upon these coasts. Older residents remember a coach-road under the promontory, where now there is nothing but rock and seaweed, and look forward gloomily to a day when Borth will be "disturbed;" for so they euphemistically describe the catastrophe which is finally to wash it away. But an acquaintance of ours, who claims one of the longest memories in the place, is more confident. He has known Borth seventy years and as he has never seen it destroyed during all that time, does not think it will be now. His own house is safe on the hill of Old Borth, so he judges with all the calm of conscious security. His conviction, however, is not shared by his townsfolk, who were soon busy holding meetings, and considering schemes for the provision of something better than these moral guarantees. Heartily do we hope that funds and measures will be found to save our friends from another and more calamitous "disturbance." But a letter from Borth, a year later, speaks of the sea as again threatening their security. "We are not afraid of him, though," the correspondent, one of our landladies, devoutly adds, "for he is under a Master." All the same, we should like to hear of a stout sea-wall as well.

Once again the elements caused us alarm. A heavy gale got up in the evening of February 19th, and roared all night upon the roof of the hotel, tearing up the fluttering tiles in patches, and sending them adrift through the air, till the master who slept under the leads, in charge of the top storey, began to doubt whether the straining roof would last overhead till morning. It was small consolation that this time he and his neighbours should at least "die a dry death," so the inmates of the floor were summoned from their beds in the small hours to spend the rest of the night in a bivouack on the ground-floor. One or another of those luckless youngsters will, in after days, remember, as a cheerful incident, the arrival on the scene of the Headmaster, with a store of biscuits and such supplies as could be requisitioned at the moment, to provision the watch. Your schoolboy, he reflected, is hungry at all times; what must he be at night when dragged from bed to save his life, and forced to sit up, rather cold and very empty, for several hours before daybreak. Solaced, however, by these beguilements, the hours passed cheerfully away.