The Retrospect

The memory of those drives with my mother is amongst the sweetest of my youth. I was a very little child then, yet we were perfect companions. All the way there and back we talked and talked, and never bored each other. I never knew her to "shut me up" or put me off with evasive or impatient answers. Once when she was ill and we were all bothering her at once, she exclaimed, "Oh, who would be a mother!" The words not only cut me to the heart as I heard them, but I never forgot they had been spoken; nor did she, and I do not think she forgave herself for them. It was the only instance I remember of her complaining under her burdens, which were so heavy for her strength, and especially of the cares of motherhood. Even the youngest aunt used to liken her to the fabled pelican that fed its young with its own blood. She had no life that was not lived for others, and first of all for us.

No doubt she was over-soft of heart where her darlings were concerned. For instance when we went shopping to L – we always lunched at a certain pastrycook's, in a little alcove off the shop, and on the ground that it was a holiday outing I was given my choice from the bill of fare. Mother did earnestly advise me to begin with a savoury, as she did, but there was no compulsion in the matter, and I think I made my whole meal of sweet pastry every time. What delicious three-cornered tarts those were!

And, a year ago, I was in L – , and I looked for that pastrycook's shop – and found it!

But the intellectual pleasures of the road rivalled the material joys of the restaurant. She used to tell me stories of the places we passed, grown-up stories, and not the faked stuff that children are so commonly befooled with. I always knew at the time that I could trust every word she said, and when I grew up I never had to learn that she had deceived me. Even our frequent babies were not found under gooseberry bushes or brought in the doctor's pocket; that "God sent them," and that I should "know more about it some day" was her account of the phenomenon – puzzling, of course, but less so than the monstrous and conflicting statements of monthly nurse and servants. When the eighth (there being two more still to follow) was on the way, I was privately informed beforehand. "Our secret," mother called it; and while she made its earthly garments under my eye, we spent blissful hours building air-castles for its habitation, in the strictest confidence.

On our way to her father's house we passed a dark, still pool, sunk within precipitous walls of earth that looked as if they might have been those of an excavated quarry – a most fascinating spot. The Bride's Pool, it was called. Once upon a time, she told me, a bride and bridegroom were driving from church after their wedding and a great storm came on. The horses took fright at the thunder and lightning, and backed the carriage off the road and over the bank into the water-hole, and the bridal pair were drowned. The details of the tragedy lived in my mind for ever – how they loved each other, how their new home was waiting for them and they never entered it, how they were fished up together, clasped tight in each other's arms. Then there was the Heath (M. drove me to the edge of it, behind her own old fat pony), the furzy, lonely, wind-swept waste where the rabbits lived, a shuddery place that we liked to be well past before dark. For there was a time when a gibbet stood there, and skeleton men hung on it in an iron frame that creaked and clanked in the windy nights. She did not mind harrowing my infant soul with fore-knowledge of the world's agonies, and I do not know that she was wrong. It must have been an extreme devotion to my good that caused her to leave me behind with my grandparents and return the long way alone, as she often did.

If I was spoiled at home I was doubly spoiled with them. Even the stern grandfather gave me his gold seals and his historic snuff-box to play with. There was a wondrous scent, compounded of pot-pourri (in the room with the cabinets of china), lavender (in the linen press and drawers), heliotrope (beneath the windows), and something sweeter but indescribable (in grandmother's store-room), which differentiated that house from every other that I have known. I longed to see it again when I was actually on the road to it, but we were not out with Mr B. and his strong horse this time, and M.'s pony was too old and too petted to toddle any farther than the edge of the Heath.

To this day the smell of "cherry-pie," one element only, reminds me of the place and nothing else. It was a sweet place indeed when the youngest aunt was away from it – the eldest aunt mothered motherless cousins elsewhere – and I am happy now to have been there, if I was not quite happy at the time. I ought to have been happy, with such petting and such surroundings, but I do remember that I was homesick. The beautiful lawn, sloping from the house to the road, ended on the top of a stone wall, and I was told not to stray so far, lest I should tumble over; but secretly I strayed there often, to look along the road for a gig and a white horse. That was the great day – when mother arrived to fetch me home.

Dear old home, that to all appearances had not changed a bit! Dear old barn, with its warm, mealy, delicious odours, and its statuesque owl on the dark rafter overhead – outwardly the same as ever. Why, here again we had no end of invigorating sport and active exercise. Hard work was done there and few amusements were more amusing than to watch it a-doing, sitting well out of the way on an upturned "skep" or a pile of empty sacks. I have seen men using the flail on wheat and barley like bush fire-fighters beating out flames; and I have seen a sort of windlass thing with horses turning spokes and a man and whip in the middle, operating outside the barn a simple mechanism within, the first improvement upon the flail; but I also remember, even at T – , the hum of the tall-chimneyed travelling engine that performed all its duty in the fields, herald of the modern method, so wonderful and admirable, yet apparently so devoid of attraction for a child. There was rat-catching in that barn – the most fascinating of amusements. Little girls managed to slip in with little boys when friendly servants summoned them to the fray. A professional rat-catcher attended. Oh, the thrilling moment when he unslung the box from his back and allowed us to look at his ferrets, writhing together in the straw like eels. And when his assistants, with their sticks and dogs, were marshalled at their posts, and the sinuous, sleek bodies were sent down the holes, the breathless waiting for smothered squeaks below, for the dramatic bolt of rats into the open – poor things whose point of view was no more considered than was that of table fowls and calves (the former used to be killed horribly by having knives thrust down their throats, being then left to hang head downwards and bleed until life was drained out of them; and the latter were bled to death also, although not with such monstrous cruelty, the object in both cases being to have flesh white for table; and we, so tender-hearted for our pets, could watch the callous executioner and the long agony he inflicted) – I do not know a more enjoyable sport for those who have not developed the idea that dumb things feel as we do. At other times the owls in the barn roof hunted the rats and mice. I have seen their eyes in the dark, and the ghostly passing of their uncanny wings that make no sound. When the barn was empty what a place for games and romps!

Then we had the great Fair of the county, an event to which we looked forward, as we also looked back, for the whole year. The "Mart," with its entrancing canvas galleries full of tops, work-boxes, every beautiful thing that heart of childhood could desire, its peepshows and merry-go-rounds, its Richardson's marionettes, its Wombwell's menagerie – the thought of it must bring a glow to the heart of any Norfolk native who knew it when I did. All right-minded parents took their offspring to the Mart, if it was physically possible to take them, and I am clear in my mind (though I was afraid to inquire when I was there) that nothing to compare with it exists in England to-day. The fair itself may exist, for what I know (its charter was granted by Henry the Eighth), but if it does it will be but the gibbering shade of its former self, lagging superfluous; for its human complement has for ever passed away. I have heard my parents say that their parents went to it to buy those silk dresses and those china tea-services which were family treasures and heirlooms from generation to generation. We went to it for dolls and Noah's Arks and tin trumpets and wooden tea-things, driving home with armfuls of delight through many miles of snow or biting wind, cuddled down in our wraps within the hood of the "sociable." The Mart was "proclaimed" on the Tuesday following St Valentine's Day, and continued for, I think, three weeks afterwards.

Well, then came May Day and the garlands; Easter celebrated by the wearing for the first time of our new spring Sunday clothes – white bonnets to be quite correct; the "haysel" which meant warm days for romps in the fragrant cocks; the seaside – greatest bliss of all.

Summer, with its long light, its apparently few resources for killing time, did not weary us, that I remember. In the summer holidays, when we lived at D – , my brothers used to sit on a river bank and watch the floats of their fishing lines from dawn to dusk, often without getting a bite, and did not consider the day wasted. Little females had their dolls to take a-walking, their hoops and skipping-ropes, and battledore and shuttlecock, their dumb pets to rear, their little garden plots to weed and till. Their elders were satisfied to sit under trees when work was done, with needle or pipe or book – for we did have books. A little amusement seemed to go such a long, long way.

Then autumn – harvesting, blackberrying…

I do not know how I acquired the idea that I should find the old blackberry hedges, the sweet masses of hawthorn and dog-rose and bindweed and nightshade and all those old hedgy things, swept away by the hand of the progressive agriculturist, but such had been my belief long before my return home. In the second chapter of my book of Australian reminiscences I now read with a blush my ignorant lament over "beauty vanishing from the world" in the shape of sailing ships, the Pink Terraces of New Zealand, and the big bird-thronged hedges of rural England. I suppose I reckoned on the methods of high farming being much the same in all countries, without allowing for the good taste and reverent conservatism of English landlords. The hedges were all there still, more beautiful to me than ever, and I went blackberrying with a basket, just as I had done as a child.

Harvesting – I saw it again on the old lands. I was in the midst of it, reminded at every turn of the old times. But there were no children playing amongst the shocks and stacks, no reapers with sickles, or gleaners filling their turned-up skirts with the scatterings left behind; the mechanical reaper gathered every straw. And there was no Harvest Home. The village churches all had their Harvest Festivals, exactly like ours in Australia; but the procession of the Last Waggon through the golden fields, the Harvest Supper – they are gone with the piquant Valentine and the jovial Waits, to return no more.

I looked at the barn, where we used to celebrate the arrival of the Last Load. I looked at the coach-house – neither of them altered in the least, that I could see – where the memorable banquets had taken place. I used to go to them, under my father's wing; at any rate, I must have gone to one, for nothing is clearer to the eye of memory than the picture of the rustic faces around the festive table. Husbands in clean smock-frocks and wives in their Sunday best, no sociological knowledge in their heads, no divine discontent in their souls, to impair their enjoyment of "the master's" hospitality. Unlimited home-brewed was dispensed to them with the roast beef and plum pudding, but I remember no rowdiness in consequence; only clouds of smoke, a succession of highly proper songs, and vociferous applause of the performers. It was etiquette for all to "favour the company" who could, and each singer seemed to have his own one song, listened to by his fellows with unwearied interest and appreciation year after year. As regularly as harvest and harvest supper came round, we had "the highten days o' June" from the oldest throat that could pipe a quavering note:

"In the highten days o' June

Napoleon did advance – "

That is all I remember of his song, the first line of which originally ran: "On the eighteenth day of June." My father had his "Simon the Cellarer," or what not, to contribute to the programme, and smoked his pipe and drank his beer with his men, and appeared to enjoy himself as much as they did.

Now, in the interest of good-fellowship and good cheer, we have the Harvest Festival, from which the agricultural labourer is conspicuously absent, as a rule.

However, the inevitable is the inevitable. The past is past. As all the conditions of that old time hung together, together they had to go. And there is still a Future for the unborn to experiment in.

Harvest Home having been celebrated, the "master" was free to make holiday with horse and gun, and my father was ever eager – too eager – to do so. Weather that was right for hunting was a matter of more joyful satisfaction to him than weather that was right for crops. All thought of crops was thrown to the autumn winds as soon as "the season" opened.

Those old roads of Norfolk were to me haunted with hounds and red coats, echoing with the music of the pack and the horn. I asked Mr B., as he was driving me from D – to my cousin's house, how hunting stood in the old hunting county now. He shook his head mournfully. According to him, although he was still a young man, the heydey again was gone, never to return.

He had it in his blood, like me, from the dead and gone, and so we were more or less prejudiced. But it would seem clear to the understanding of the most unbiassed person that the sport must have been more interesting in the old times, if only for the reason that hunting men did not wedge in hunting with a dozen other diversions, often in half-a-dozen different places; they gave their hearts and the season to it, falling back upon a little placid subsidiary shooting (over dogs) on off days. There were fewer railways and miscellaneous lions in the path of the straight run; there were more foxes, "stout" in proportion to the healthy peacefulness of their bringing up. Townsfolk did not "run down" in crowds to a country meet – they could not; the uninitiated outsider who did intrude where he was not wanted accepted the stern discipline of the field as part of the natural order. Farmers were similarly old-fashioned, and in easier circumstances; they were insiders moreover, although few of them aspired to the red coat – as fine riders and steady-going sportsmen as their landlords. They bred hunters and took puppies to walk, and farmed land so that it was not too fine to be galloped over. And barbed wire had not been invented.

Let me hasten to say, however, that I, personally, do not regret the inevitable change. In spite of my feelings on those haunted Norfolk roads, and my talk with Mr B., my heart does not sympathise with mourners over the decadence of the old sport. The beginnings of the heresy that the morals of "sport" in this form are open to doubt – that animals, after all, have some poor rights – seem to be welcome signs of progress on the true line of civilisation. Heresies of to-day have a fashion of changing into orthodox beliefs to-morrow, and this heresy is bound to follow the rule. Hunting that is not for food or in self-defence is like war – a relic of the savage state, surviving only because its nobler attendant features, its refined conventions, traditions and associations disguise the savagery.

I have seen an exhausted fox making a last spurt for his life, brush down, tongue out, coat wet, eyes wild with despair; and I am glad to think that, after all these years, it is possible for the human heart to feel a stir of pity for him. It felt none then. My gentle mother, who had followed the hounds herself in days of better health and fewer babies, loved to pack her little brood into a phaeton and drive them to some likely spot for seeing something of that brutally unfair contest between an army of giants and one little scrap of heroic life. I vividly remember an occasion when the horse in the shafts happened to be an old hunter of her own, supposed to have outlived his enthusiasm. At the first sound of the distant chase he propped as if shot, with pricked ears and snorting nostrils, and then bounded at a closed gate, with the intent to go over it, phaeton and children and all. It took a good horsewoman to deal with that situation, and she managed to prevent trouble by hastily detaching him from the carriage and hanging on to him until the hunt had passed.

After that Taffy took us on these expeditions. How perfectly I recall a still, soft day, a quiet road intersecting deep woods – a road dark in summer with the leafage of overarching trees – the phaeton with the white pony drawn up under the hedge, the mellow hunting cry of the pack sounding nearer and nearer, the speckle of red coats appearing and disappearing through the skeleton copse, the excitement, the rapture, the triumph – and a poor little drabbled fox struggling to evade his fate. He broke from the further hedge, crossed the road, and entered the hedge beside us almost under Taffy's nose – one of the most sensational incidents of a hunting season that I can remember falling to the lot of us non-combatants. Dead beat he was, his heart bursting, his limbs scarce able to carry him; yet even tender-hearted women and children had no feeling for him in his lonely fight against the forces of the universe, no chivalrous impulse to befriend him in his extremity. A pair of horsemen crashed through the opposite hedge into the road – Lord S. had lost his cap, and his hair was wild about his head – and they reined up to speak to us. To their excited "Where? Where?" we shouted "There! There!" and pointed them after the fugitive. And if he fell into the jaws of the hounds at last I am sure we congratulated ourselves on having helped to put him there.

I passed the very spot that afternoon, and it was just the same; only now it rained, and the trees were in full leaf, and there was no fox, nor hound, nor horse.

The dignified figure in the Hunt is, of course, the last-named animal. He never sees the quarry, probably, or knows there is one, or cares. It is not the lust of chasing and killing that inspires him to his gallant deeds – neither in fox-hunting nor in war. Watch a soldier's horse in the evolutions of a review. A colonel of my acquaintance has told me that the moment the band of the regiment begins to play he feels his charger's heart bound against his boot; so it is the music of the pack, telling of glorious effort and exercise, which fires the blood of the hunting horse that only hunts by proxy. The "scent of battle" is the scent of the old primitive life in free air and space, the "Call of the Wild" to the still half-tamed.

Horses were a passion in my family on both sides of the house. As a girl I have had my maternal grandfather named to me by strangers as "the doctor who drove the beautiful horses." His were not the requirements of the hunting man; he demanded the perfect form and action, the satin coat, the faultless turn-out. He was a very tall, high-nosed, stern-looking man, strikingly resembling the Iron Duke, and I used to see him come out to inspect the work of his groom before starting to ride or drive. He would not say a word, but would take his handkerchief to wipe some infinitesimal speck, visible to his eagle eye alone, and show the resultant stain to the guilty man; it covered him with confusion and dismay.

This martinet handled the reins himself, except at night, when other and less valuable animals were used – "Nightmare" was the name of one of them – until the state of his health obliged him to go abroad in a closed carriage. He hated this, and the necessity for giving his horses over to a hired coachman; and he was always putting his head out of window into the cold winds and fogs, that were so bad for him, forcibly to reprimand that much-to-be-pitied man. One raw winter day the grandfather's short patience gave out; he mounted the box himself and drove the empty brougham home, regardless of consequences, which proved fatal to him. He caught pneumonia or something of that sort, and died in a few days.

As I may not be speaking of him again, I should like to say that, haughty old man as he was, taking the high hand with patients of all grades, he was most attentive to the poor, and never took a fee from them. The tradition is that he never sent an account for attendance to anyone – would not condescend to it (having traditions of his own behind him, along with a pedigree stretching back to the mists of prehistoric time) – but that's as may be; he certainly left a very comfortable fortune, which, like that of the other grandfather, never reached the legatees. A son with whom he had been over-strict had run away from home many years before, and never afterwards been heard of. It was deemed impossible to fulfil the direction of the will to divide the property between the testator's children until the missing one was produced, or irrefragable proof of his death. Through all the period between my childhood and womanhood the newspapers of the world were calling through their agony columns for one or the other, and in vain. It was reported at intervals that his grave had been found, in New Zealand or Kamstchatka, or some equally remote corner of the earth; or that someone had met somebody who knew him or where he was; at which times the lawyers were put upon the trail to hunt the matter down. Each of the producible children had her separate batch of lawyers, and Chancery took charge of the steadily dwindling estate. Many years elapsed before the missing one was officially assumed to be dead, and the dregs of their patrimony allotted to his sisters; and then the portion that would have been ours was gone. How well I understand now little incidents that were devoid of meaning to me when they occurred: mother, in tears, confiding to a bosom friend: "'Do you sign this of your own free will?' he asked me before us both, and what could I say?" Poor mother; who struggled for us so hard! And the Married Woman's Property Act is of very little use to wives like her, who still cling to the old ideals of family life.

So we were always tantalised with "expectations" that never materialised in cash. We children, as we developed the faculty for romancing, beguiled ourselves with a special one of our own. Some day, in some dramatic manner, the vanished uncle – lost long, long before we were born – was to reappear, with his pockets full of gold, to play godfather to his impoverished relatives. We were always looking out for him. A strange step on the gravel, an unexpected knock at the door would instantly suggest to us that the psychological moment had arrived. But no one could ever have been lost more thoroughly than that poor boy, who ran away at night because his father had been too hard on him. From that day to this; – covering something like three-quarters of a century – he has made no sign.

If my grandfather's love of horses caused his death, the working of the same passion in my father's weaker nature was rather more unfortunate. He sacrificed to it and its kindred fascinations the important interests of his life, including those he held in trust for his wife and children. I do not say it to blame him, who was so kind-hearted and well-meaning; he was as he was made – happy-go-lucky, careless, thoughtless, sanguine, a boy to the last – and it was bad for such an one to have the illusion of "money coming to him" to encourage and excuse folly. In the fifties he was not a poor man, but he was too poor for the company he kept, too poor to afford to neglect business and indulge in the expensive pastimes of those who had none. But if he could be at M – with the beloved "Harry" V., who was so generous with mounts, he would not be at home with uninteresting ploughmen. Norfolk folk who are my contemporaries will not need to have that "Harry" more fully named to them, especially when I add that I heard him spoken of as "The Old Squire" all over the western part of the country, although he had been dead so long. M – House, his once hospitable home, was quite close to my cousin's Abbey, and, although my father had been there so much, it was the first time I had seen it. I walked around the walls and grounds that were so familiar to him, but did not attempt to enter, the family being in residence. Since my return to Australia I have learned from a mutual friend that they remember his name and the old companionship; so I might have been, and regret that I was not, less modest. The old squire and the golden age of fox-hunting in Norfolk, it seems, passed together, and the one is said to be as likely to return as the other.