‘Let us take the little girls.’
She at once agreed, and came to the window to call us. Then we saw him say something else. It was this.
‘No. We can’t. They are too untidy.’
I still feel the humiliation, but I am sure he was right. We probably looked complete ragamuffins, but my mother would never have seen it. Nor did she remember the episode afterwards. It was not the kind of thing she would think of again, though I do once remember her being most indignant when Gertrude Lady Pembroke said to her with affectionate mockery.
‘Dear Mrs. O., always so nice and shabby.’
My father dressed well, and wanted his wife to do so too. He once looked at her rather critically, aware that something was wrong, and wondering what could be done about it.
‘That dress does not look right. It wants something. Perhaps a knot of cherry-coloured ribbon?’
The cherry-coloured ribbon became a family saying, but something more than that was wanted to make my mother ‘look right’.
Chapter Three
PEOPLE I HAVE FORGOTTEN
Nowadays, one meets fewer ‘Characters’ than of old, and life seems to be far more uniform. Everyone knew some oddities in their childhood, curious people who looked and behaved quite unlike, others, but such pronounced individuality is rare to-day. Forty or fifty years ago, the streets of Wilton teemed with odd personalities, but to-day they seem to have disappeared. Unfortunately, some of the most striking of these figures are so far away that they only swim faintly on the misty horizon of my memory. I wish I could remember them better.
I half recall the form of Old Stroud, the cabinet maker, who must have been as delicate a craftsman as Chippendale himself, though without the masterly invention of that great man. Stroud had a large flat gentle face, surrounded by a thin Newgate fringe of pale brown hair. He stammered badly, and his eyes looked sorrowfully out as he vainly tried to enunciate his words. I know not whether he was the founder of the firm which bears his name in Wilton, but he was bent on his sons carrying it on, so much so that his dying words were: ‘Walter to make the coffin.’ No rival undertaker should intervene upon this family prerogative.
Then there was Mr. Savage, the Prior of the little Hospital of St. John of Jerusalem at the end of the street. His voice was that of a very noisy raven; and he could also make a gigantic click with his tongue when he was encouraging the paces of the tandem donkeys which he always drove in an enormous and luxuriously padded Bath chair. This noise of his could be heard a quarter of a mile away, and it meant that the racing tandem would shortly rush round the corner, with Mr. Savage standing up in the Bath chair waving the reins and cheering on his donkeys. He taught his dog to run to the railway embankment to pick up the newspaper which the guard always threw out for him from the morning express train from London; and he always declared that when one morning the Chronicle was thrown out by mistake instead of the Standard, the dog spat it out, and refused to bring home this Liberal Rag. Mr. Savage was a bon viveur, and possessed, like other clerics of his day, a celebrated cellar. When he was at last dying from dropsy, and lay, looking very miserable, all the fun and humour gone from his face, the doctor proposed to relieve him by drawing off some of the fluid which was creeping up round his heart. He dolefully refused.
‘Nothing that’s been tapped lasts long in this house,’ he said.
In those long-ago days, I sometimes heard my father say: ‘This bread is not very good.’ To which my mother would reply: ‘We shall have the new flour in a week or two.’ Or he said: ‘What good bread!’ and then she answered: ‘ It’s the new flour.’
Those phrases marked an epoch, though my parents would have been surprised to hear it. People never do know which of their everyday habits or sayings will surprise their successors; and this one meant that the flour we used was grown and milled in the neighbourhood, and that the bread we ate was made in the house. Made, but not baked: and this brings me to another half-forgotten figure—George Street. I wish I had known him better. He was a tall yellow-haired man with a long slouching tread, and he came to the Rectory on Wednesdays and Saturdays to carry off the dough kneaded by the cook, in order to bake it in his brick oven. He plunged his arms into the great earthenware pot which, stood by the kitchen fire, and swung the ball of dough into a sack, which he then threw over his shoulder and strode away, looking like the picture in Reading without Tears of:
P is like a man with a Pack on his back.
He seldom spoke to us, but in spite of this, we were all fascinated by him, for he had a surly independent charm. Too charming, he must have been, for he got into one of those scrapes which then were not discussed before the children, and he left Wilton early, under a cloud.
A very different type was old Thresher, who had no charm at all, but was a completely farcical figure. He was a narrow old man, with a long thin straggling grey beard, and he was generally seen bustling about with a black cotton sack in his hand. His appearance was simply absurd, but really he was a most sinister person. He was a miser. He kept a tiny shop almost opposite the Rectory, and indeed it
