Spring in a Shropshire Abbey

I sat down that evening and asked Mrs. Stanley to send her little boy down to us. “The country just now is so sweet and fresh that it must do him good,” I wrote. “We will take the greatest care of him; and here he has all the world to play in.” The next morning I told Bess what I had done.

“Yes,” repeated Bess, gravely, “all the world to play in, and that is what a poor boy can never have in London. There is no place there, excepting for motors and policemen.”

AFTER THE RAIN

All through the night sweet summer rain fell. How delightful a morning is after such rain. How happy every plant and leaf looked, how greedily all seemed to have drunk their fill – trees, shrubs, grass, and flowers. What an aspect of deep refreshment everything had, as if an elixir of life had been poured into the veins of every tree and herb.

Speckled thrushes hopped about and caught earthworms as they peered up through the lawns. On the stone steps leading up to the red-walled garden lay the broken remains of many dusky shells of the monks’ snails, or as the children call them here, “snail housen.” Beside these lay also broken fragments of beautiful yellow, and pale pink ones. A little later I walked into the garden to look at my great bed of roses. What a wonderful change one night of rain had made! How the shoots had lengthened, how “the blows,” as Burbidge calls them, had expanded. What a difference in the fat buds! The aphides, which seemed such a pest a week before, had vanished, while the leaves were refreshed and glittered with dew-drops.

Henricus Stephanus’ old lines came back to me —

“The rose, is the care and the love of the spring,The rose is the pleasure of th’ heavenly Pow’rs;The boy of fair Venus, Cyther’s darling,Doth wrap his head round with garlands of roseWhen to the dance of the graces he goes.”

Amongst my beautiful modern roses, I noted that La France was opening two delicious buds. What a beautiful rose it is; and what an exquisite perfume it possesses! Then I found a gorgeous Fisher Holmes, a General Jacqueminot, and a Captain Christy. All these had been born, as Bess calls it, in the night. Besides these modern joys, I paused to notice my old-world friends. I could not pass by without casting a glance upon the loves of Gerard and Parkinson. The pimpernel rose, little Scotch briars of different sorts, the little single rose without thorns, the damask, the yellow cabbage, and the splendid vermilion, the musk, the single cinnamon and the great Holland, all these have their places in different parts of my garden.

Parkinson tells us how at Longleete in his time people said that a rose tree then bore white roses on one side, and red on the other; but the old writer looked upon this as a fable, and declared, “This may be as true as the old story that a white hen visited Livia Augusta with a sprig of bays, and foretold, Augusta believed, by so doing empire to Augusta’s posterity, and extinction to the race when the brood of the hen failed.” Be this as it may, I have a standard rose with a Gloire de Dijon and a General Jacqueminot budded on the same tree. Burbidge was much pleased with the combination of colours and called it Christian and Heathen – names, I fancy, first bestowed by his old wife Hester.

THE GREY MARE AND ROSEMARY

Before I left the red-walled garden, I stopped before a bush of rosemary. I pinched a leaf and picked a little spray on which were some minute blossoms just coming into flower. Farmers’ wives of Shropshire use the leaves for flavouring their lard, and a bush or two is to be found in every farmhouse border.

I remembered the great bushes of this plant that I saw in the Riviera above Mentone, and near the Italian frontier on the road to Bordighera. I recalled Evelyn’s affection for this fragrant plant, and I recollected what he tells us in his delightful diary, after a night at Loumas in 1644, about this delightful aromatic shrub.

After passing the Durance, he wrote, “We came upon a tract of country covered with rosemary, lavender, lentiscs and the like sweet shrubs, for many miles together, which to me was very pleasant.”

Yes, I said to myself, the scent is very pleasant, health and sweetness combined, in which is nothing cloying or sickly. I laughed for the old Shropshire proverb came back to me of “Where the grey mare is stalled, rosemary grows apace.” I have heard it said that in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries it was the fashion to put rosemary on and round the corpses of the old. “Vors for maids, rosemary and lavender for those as die old in God,” an old cottager once said to me; and the same old body told me that in her mother’s time “’twas thought a mark of respect to put a bunch of sweet-smelling herbs round a dear dead face, such as the sage tree, a sprig of thyme, a bunch of lavender, or a branch of rosemary.” What a pretty offering such must have been! One can imagine dim figures in the gloaming going up to the chamber of death some summer evening – old friends and gossips in smocks, or with countryside chintz bonnets, and each guest placing a spray of some sweet herb, as a tribute of affection, by the dear dead face that would never wake up, or speak to them again.

A few steps from the rosemary bush is my plant of fraxinella. Its stalk glistened with sweet stickiness. It was of the white variety, far more beautiful than the one generally known as the pink.

Years ago in an old Hampshire garden I loved as a child, I was taken out by my father’s old gardener with my sister to see his “Burning Bush.” I recollected, as if it had been only yesterday, that as little girls we had been allowed to sit up once till nine, to see the bush set on fire. I thought then this harmless bonfire the most wonderful and mystic thing that I had ever seen. We went out with our old nurse and saw it lighted at a distance, our old nurse holding both our hands. How wonderful it seemed in the stillness of the summer’s evening, with no sound but the distant singing of the birds. I remember how the old gardener, who had lived with father, grandfather and great-uncle, told us the story of the burning bush and bade us read our Bibles, and how we believed for years afterwards that we two had seen a miracle and had stood on holy ground that summer night.

For many years I lost sight of the fraxinella as a border plant. The good old gardener of my old home died, and the burning bush was dug up, I heard, under an evil successor, and thrown on the midgeon heap, and alone the memory of the mystic plant and the still summer’s evening remained with me.

But after my marriage, I remembered spending a June in France, and one day in the first week in June I saw the altar of the cathedral at Laon decked with great sprays of lovely white fraxinella. The scent was intense – heavier than the heaviest incense. I am sensitive to the perfume of flowers, and therefore could not remain long in the edifice, but the odour brought back the memory of the burning bush of my childhood, and I went off to a florist in the market-place and bought two packets of seeds for my Shropshire home. One was a packet of the pink variety, and the other was of the white. When I returned to the Abbey the seeds were sown by Burbidge, but, to quote the old man, “they was as shy of coming up as blows be in snow.” We waited and we waited for any sign of life.

All through the late summer and autumn there was no symptom of vegetation. The seeds, which were like little black shot, remained dormant. For many months there was no change.

“THE FOREIGNERS” CONDEMNED

At last Burbidge lost all patience. “Put they,” and he pointed to the boxes in which the fraxinella seeds were sown, “put they on the midgeon heap, and let the foreigners get their deserts.”

Happily I stood by when this order was given, and pleaded that they should be left a little longer. One chilly day in February, when the only sign of the return of life seemed the gilding of the willows, I peered into the frame, and I saw, as gardeners say, “my seeds on the move,” and in due time my old gardener reared me some half-dozen plants. After some abuse, Burbidge has taken kindly to the “foreigners,” and now graciously allows “that yer might do worse than grow fraxinella in a garden.”

I leant over and smelt the long white spikes, and thought of the old plant in the Hampshire garden. I noticed that the sticky stem was a perfect fly-trap, and that hundreds of little insects were caught and drowned in it like in the leaves of the sun-dew on Scotch moors. It is this sticky fluid, I am told, that burns without injuring the plant, when set on fire on a summer’s night. Every part of the fraxinella is redolent of fragrance – leaf, stalk, and petals – later, even the husk of the seed pod. All are exquisitely perfumed; and the husks, if gathered, will retain their sweetness for long months together.

A little further off, I stood before my clumps of pinks. I have a great many sorts, and all are deliciously sweet – the sweetest of all flowers I have heard them called.

In Chaucer’s time it was the fashion, it seems, to talk of the “parwenke of prowesse;” in Sir Philip Sidney’s age, writers spoke of “the pink of courtesy.” We no longer compare a high and noble spirit to a flower. Do we love flowers less?

I walked up and down before my lines of pinks and wondered. I have the lovely Amoor pink, the pretty Maiden, the chocolate brown and white, the delicate little Cheddar, peeping up between stones and rocks, and a lovely little Norwegian variety that a friend brought me back from a fishing-lodge. My little Scandinavian friend has a low habit of growth, in fact, only rears its pink head a few inches from the soil, but its blossoms are of a radiant rose, and deliciously sweet.

Later in the day I went down a quiet path in the kitchen garden, that faces east. There were no bright colours there, only sober-tinted old-world herbs. Every monastic garden in the days of the Plantagenets had its herbularis, or physic garden.

THE HERB GARDEN

Here there were little square beds of rosemary, of rue, fennel, linseed, rye, hemp, thyme, woodruff, camomile, mallow, clove, and basil. Of the clove basil Parkinson wrote, that “it was a restorative for a weak heart, and was known to cast out melancholy and sadness.”

Burbidge still cuts and dries these herbs, and village folks and cottagers from the neighbourhood come for others.

“Fennel tea,” he tells me, “is good to purify the blood, mallow is excellent for rheumatism, whilst thyme, pounded fine, serves in cases of colic.” Boiled lily bulbs for healing wounds, I am told, are also good. Then, in the corner against the wall, there is a patch of the old single violet, which I have heard is very soothing for inflammation, and now often advocated for curing cancer. Also a clump of borage, which Gerard declares, “comforteth the heart, purgeth melancholy, and quieteth the phrantick.” A few steps away I saw a patch of crane’s-bill, the old geranium of the Middle Ages, which the same writer recommended to be prepared with red snails and to be taken internally.

Besides these, nestling against the wall, I noted a plant of golden mouse-ear just coming into blossom. Here they call it “grin the collar.” It is a wild plant which the Elizabethan herbalist speaks of with affection, and which he says he found growing in dame Bridget Kingsmill’s ground, on distant downs, “not far from Newberry.”

I saw also bursting into blossom roots of the old single peony. It was of the sort that I have been told must be gathered in the night, or else the ill-fated gatherer may be struck blind.

Some years ago, I remembered once asking for a blossom of this sort in a cottage garden to copy in my embroidery. But the old woman to whom the plant belonged would not hear of picking a flower.

“Best leave it – best leave it,” she had said. I thought her churlish for the moment, and then thought no more about it; but the same evening, whilst we were at dinner, a blossom of the single peony was brought in to me on a salver, and I was told that little Betty, old widow Hodgkis’s granddaughter, had run up from below the Edge “to pleasure me.”

Granny, said the child, had told her that “you’re welcome to it, and that, bein’ as it is there, was no ill-luck.”

On being pressed to explain, the child had answered, “Us dursn’t pick that blow early, but granny says, picked at night, peonies be as safe as Job Orton in his shop, but in noontime ’tis only suckin’ gulleys as wud pick ’em.” For some moments I could not get the reason out of the little maid, but at last, when we were alone, she whispered to me. “’Tis along of the ecalls. If one war to see yer in the day, madder yer’d be than a tup at Bridgenorth fair, and blind, behappen.”

There is also in Shropshire a lingering belief that the seed of the single peony has magic powers to soothe and quiet women. A young widow, who had lost her husband in an accident connected with the blasting of the lime rock, obtained sleep by drinking a tea made from the seeds, I was assured.

THE PHYSICIAN OF THE GODS

“My Jane,” her mother said, “couldn’t sleep nohow before. It was rocks, and falls in darkness, and screams all the time with her, let her do what she would. Her got fair tired of physic, nothing the doctor gave her seemed to bring peace, or to padlock her tongue. Then came Jill Shore,” I was told, “as lives halfway up the heights of Tickwood. A witch some counted her, and her made my Jane lie down, and her charmed her with verses and made her drink a draught of peonina seed. And Jane her fell asleep, like a lamb beside its dam, and her slept, and slept, and woke up reasonable and quiet, and for all she was mortal sad, she was a decent soul again, and gave up screeching and tearing out her hair, and screaming out things not fit for a decent body to say.”

Then there was, at the end of the garden, a plant of goat’s rue, and a patch of mustard seed. An old writer declared that mustard would take away the black and blue marks that come from bruises. How that may be, I know not, but later on we shall take up the crop, root and blossom, and dig in the plants as manure into the fresh ground where we hope to grow our tulips for next year. It is the best manure that can be given to tulips, and an old secret amongst the tulip growers of past centuries. Just beyond the crop of mustard I saw a root of wild clary. In some of the old herbals this plant was accounted an excellent remedy for weak eyes, and Gerard tells us that it was a common practice in his day to put the seeds into poor folks’ eyes, to cure disease.

Just by the door that led into the paddock, there was a plant of woodruff. Very delicate and sweet is the scent of this little flower. It grows in great patches under the hazel trees of the Edge Wood. Formerly woodruff was used in church decoration, and was deftly woven into many garlands. In the north of Europe woodruff is still used as a herb to flavour drinks. I never heard of this being done in England, but in Shropshire it is often culled in the farmhouses to put in muslin bags, in the place of lavender. It has a sweet scent, which remains with letters and kerchiefs like a memory of the past.

Then there was, I saw, a plant of wormwood, the plant from which absinthe is distilled. In the sixteenth and seventeenth century the leaves of this plant were chopped up for flavouring, and it was thought an excellent seasoning to venison. By the wormwood there was a line of camomile. A little later in the summer the plants will be covered with little white star-like blossoms. Burbidge will cut stalks and flowers and his wife will dry them in the sun, and give them away to the parents of sick children. “My missus,” the old man once said to me, “mostly does her kindnesses by nastiness. Her will,” he added, “fair poison a body to keep her alive.”

But though Burbidge allows himself the privilege of a free tongue as regards his wife’s remedies, he permits no criticism elsewhere. On one occasion one of “his boys” objected to a gigantic draught of ales-hoof and mallow, flavoured with camomile. “What dost thee stand there for, loselling?” was the vigorous rebuke I heard addressed by my old friend, as the victim hesitated to drink down at a gulp, a bumper of a frothy brown fluid. “I tell thee, Roderick, if it fair blows off thy stomach, it will make a new man of thee.” “I canna,” feebly protested Burbidge’s man. But he had to; for as my old gardener said, with a purple face of wrath, “I and my missus don’t make physic for folks to chuck abroad, and a man that works under, needs must drink under.” Whatever the immediate effect of the awful beverage was, I cannot say, but this I do know, Roderick did not die; he even looked as usual a week later.

Few gardeners now have their herb plots, but through the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries ladies and their waiting-women made household medicines, and administered these themselves to the villagers, and to the members of their households.

Suddenly, whilst I was looking at my herbs and thinking of how they were used in earlier days, the garden door was thrown abruptly open and Bess danced in before me.

“What a time you have been away!” she cried. “I can’t run about, and only look at flowers or watch idle birds. Hals is coming, that is what I have to think of.”

I went into the house after luncheon, my chair and table were carried out, and I sat and embroidered. This time I worked a cherubim’s face, who possessed long locks and had dark-blue eyes.

“I am going to give him chestnut hair,” I said; and I looked out six different shades of reddish-brown to produce the desired effect.

BESS TALKS OF HEAVEN

“He ought to be pretty,” said Bess, who had seated herself by me. “Good children should be beautiful.”

“Why?” I asked.

“Why?” repeated Bess. “Why, because God could never do with ugly little squinting things up there. He wouldn’t want boys that had crooked noses and red warty hands, and ugly eyes that didn’t look straight.”

“But suppose, Bess, the good children,” I urged, to see what Bess would say, “had crooked noses, red warty hands, and squinting eyes, what must be done then?”

“Oh, mamsie, you don’t understand heaven,” said Bess, loftily, “but I and Prince Charming do,” and she hugged her puppy. “We do. We know that God can’t have ugly boys in His garden, or what would the poor girl angels do? I know what heaven is like – beautiful, beautiful,” and my little maid stood panting with excitement before me. “All the flowers all out, and all the fruit quite ripe, and you may pick what you like, and no cross Nanas ever make you wash, or go to bed until you’re quite, quite tired.”

“Have you ever been there?” I asked, smiling at my little girl’s enthusiasm.

“Once,” said Bess. “Nana said I was asleep, but I know better. The snow was on the ground, deep, deep, but I wasn’t frightened, for when I looked out – and I got out of bed all myself, when Nana was at supper – I saw the stars, and I knew the angels were close to me; and when I crept back to bed I said, ‘God make me good,’ and I didn’t sleep, but I went to heaven, and that’s better than a picnic on the Edge, or making toffee with Mrs. Langdale. So you see I know there are no ugly people in heaven, because, mamsie, I’ve been there.”

“But in your philosophy, Bess,” I answered, “what happens to poor people, sick people, old people, all the people who have worked for God and done the work of His kingdom here?”

“Oh, God,” said Bess, softly, “God gives them all prizes. When you give children prizes at the school, they don’t get nothing more, but when God gives one prize they get everything.”

“Everything?” I asked.

“Yes,” said Bess, “dolls, cakes, pups. And then they play, and are always young, and they never have rheumatics, not even colds or coughs.”

I kissed my little girl and told her to dream of heaven again.

A minute or two later, and Bess was off chasing a butterfly.

“Mama,” she said after a long chase, when she returned to me with a scarlet face and dripping temples, “do you know that Mrs. Burbidge’s nephew, Frank Crossley, has brought her back a beautiful glass case, and it’s full of butterflies – real butterflies. There’s a beautiful blue one – all blue, and a red one, and a yellow one, like the gorse you told me not to pick because it was so prickly, and one green, like the Edge Wood when you look below and can’t see a cornfield, and can only hear flies buzzing. And do you know Frank caught them all himself, and he stuck a pin into each to keep them tight, and spread their wings as if they were flying; but they can’t really fly for they’ve always got to stay in his box.” Then, after a gasp, my little maid put her hand in mine, “Mama, may I have a net and a box, and some pins, for I should like to have what Burbidge calls a ‘collection’?”

“But you won’t like to hurt butterflies, Bess?” I said. “Just think how horrid it would be to run pins through them and to pin down their beautiful wings in boxes.”

“STUPID LITTLE INSECTS CANNOT FEEL”

“Well,” said Bess, “I suppose I shouldn’t like that at first, but Frank doesn’t mind. I’m not an ignorant little insect,” said Bess, loftily, “and you won’t make me believe, mamsie, that stupid little insects can feel like girls or boys.”

I did not argue, for I am aware that the best wisdom of the child comes sometimes from the silence of the parent, rather than from the speech; but I felt sure my words would come back later to Bess, and that when she had had time for reflection, her better nature would make her give up the wish to have a collection of butterflies. Whilst we thus sat on, Nana swooped down and captured Bess.

“I must wash your face and hands, miss, before going to the station,” she said tartly, and at the same time informed me that a poor woman was waiting outside in the monk’s passage, who wished to speak to me. “I can’t make head nor tail of what she wants,” said Nana, sourly.

“A pack of rubbish and not a grain of sense, that’s what we often feel about our neighbours’ sayings and doings,” I answered. “But ask her to come and see me.”

Mrs. Milner disappeared, and in a few moments reappeared, followed by a little brown, undersized woman, with a mahogany skin, and wrinkled like a walnut. Mrs. Eccles was a little hunchback, and had come from the Dingle to see me. She walked a bit lamely, and carried a stick. Mouse gave a growl, and Prince Charming, who had rolled himself up on the edge of my skirt, tumbled up with a snort, and a gruffle. I begged the poor woman not to be afraid, told her to sit on a bench close by, and asked her mission.

“’Tisn’t no flannel, no, nor no dinners neither, not even a packet of tea,” she answered. For a moment Nana returned to fetch a ribbon or a tie – some lost possession of Bess’s. On seeing her Mrs. Eccles remained silent, for, as she whispered, “’twas a private matter.” Then when Nana had disappeared, her courage returned, and she blurted out, “I knows as yer have one, for all Mr. Burbidge says. There always was one – one out alongside of the walled garden.”

I felt puzzled, but nodded and begged my old friend to tell me what it was she had come for. But a direct answer is not often to be got from the poor, you must wait for an answer, as a dear old clergyman once said to me, “as you must wait for flowers in an English spring.” So I threaded my needle with a brilliant brown, and Mrs. Eccles’s speech bubbled on, like a brook in February.

MRS. ECCLES’S MISSION

“It be in this way, for I know this place, same as the inside of my own kitchen,” she said. “Didn’t I work here fifty years agone, in the old days? I knowed this place,” she said, looking round, “afore it war a haunt of the gentry, when it was farmer folk as lived here, and when I war a servin’ wench, when I scrubbed, and cleaned, plucked geese at Yule-tide, and helped the missus in making mince-meat, and in making butter for the market. I know’d it then, and I knows it now.”

I tried to stem the old dame’s eloquence, for the time I had at her disposal was limited; but my little old guest was voluble, and I had to sit quiet to learn her mission. At last light pierced through her discourse, and I discovered that she had come down for a leaf, or a sprig, of some plant.

“You must come round and show me what it is you want,” I said at last; and I covered up my embroidery and prepared to take her to the herb plots in the kitchen garden, as the most likely spot to find out what she was in need of.

But halfway, Mrs. Eccles stopped dead, shook her head, and called out, “It never grow’d there, I be sure it never did. I know it does there,” and she pointed back to the Abbey, “for I have a-know it afore yer was born, and, my dear, it war along top-side of the mound, at back of the red wall, where the missus used to grow her fever drinks, and where they put in cabbages for Christians and cows alike.” As she spoke my funny old friend turned her back on the kitchen garden, and made for the quadrangle as hard as her old legs would take her. Mouse and I followed hot-foot behind. Suddenly Mrs. Eccles came to a dead stop at the foot of a green slope, on which the red wall was built, and pointed with her black stick, at a green shrub above her.