These memories seem far from clocks and calendars, yet they lead back towards them. Years before my whooping-cough visit, my brother Frank had also been sent in quarantine to the Race Plain, where he lodged with the caretaker. These cottagers told the time by the smoke of the trains which passed in the valley. They got up by the milk train between four and five: they had breakfast by the paper train at half-past seven: the London express at half-past twelve was their dinner bell. If they had a clock, they did not use it or even wind it up.
More surprising than this, however, was the fact that many people living in the Square at Wilton, within sight of the town clock, preferred to tell the time by my father. He was the most punctual of men, and every morning in the week, he read Matins in the church at eight, and prayers at Wilton House at nine. He always walked through the Square at ten minutes to nine, and then the people set their watches, left to catch their trains, or started their day’s work.
My brother Harold was for five years in a fort in Central Africa with a detachment of the King’s African Rifles. In his district of twenty-thousand natives, no one possessed any means of measuring time. Harold was in fact their King Alfred, for he first taught them that it was possible to divide a day into hours. His watch became the town clock of the district, regulating the routine of his command. At last it went wrong, and then he made a sundial, and taught his soldiers to tell the time by it. Two buglers were always stationed beside it, bugling the hours as the shadow moved round. This gave immense delight to the people in the district, and all went well till the rainy season began. Then one morning two scared soldiers rushed in saying that ‘the spirit was dead’. So indeed it was, till the sun shone again. Afterwards Harold gave his sergeants Waterbury watches, which made them very proud.
These natives loved my brother, and when he came home they wrote him many letters in their pictorial language which contains few words for abstract ideas like joy and sorrow.
‘When we think of you, we laugh,’ one of them wrote. ‘And when we think that you have gone away, we cry.’
Those words said what we all felt after Harold had been killed in France.
I hope that Easter will not become a fixed date as long as I live, for when this is done, it will mean another long step taken towards the mechanization of life. The changing date of Easter is in harmony with our variable spring.
For people who live in towns, the calendars and timetables which can be bought in shops must be useful and even indispensable, but primitive people, countrymen, and creative workers will continue to make their own. What poet ever produced his poem on the date scheduled by the publisher for its appearance? Probably other painters are like Rex Whistler, who never buys an engagement book, but scribbles his dates on to a long narrow strip of paper, always decorated with absurd or graceful drawings. No one ever understood better the convenience of his agricultural parishioners than did Archdeacon Lear when he announced from the pulpit that the next evening service would be on the night of the full moon.
In his book Farmer’s Glory, my friend and neighbour Mr. Street writes of the farmers’ year, as it unrolled itself before the eyes of a little boy between thirty and forty years ago. Ploughing in the autumn; lambing and sowing wheat after Christmas; putting in barley and oats in February and March; turnips in April; swedes and kale in May. Then followed the hay harvest, the corn harvest, and the root harvest. As he says: ‘The system swept you with it, round and round, year after year, like a cog in a machine.’ In truth, the system made the year. It was the year; and if ever Mr. Street found himself imprisoned for life in a sausage factory at Chicago, he would never get out of his bones, that sense of the pattern made for him by the months as they swung their unchanging round on Ditchampton Farm.
Half a mile away, we lived at the Rectory, in the orbit too of those agricultural seasons, and yet our year was not the farmer’s year. We had our own. Ours was the Christian year.
Our year, like Mr. Street’s, did not begin on January the first. Ann Thorp, my grandmother’s old maid who lived with us, remarked each year on the ‘dull, dark days before Christmas’, and it was in these dull, dark days that our year began, with Advent Sunday. My father’s preaching turn as a Prebendary of Salisbury often fell on the Sunday before Advent, and we generally went with him to the Cathedral Service that afternoon. So the approach of the new year was heralded for us by the anthem from Mendelssohn’s ‘Lobgesang’.
Watchman, will the night soon pass?
The night is departing, depar … ting. The day is approaching,
approa … ching.
The incredible high note was flung unto the arches in the pure fearless tones of the chorister. Each year I still hear in my mind those soaring notes of confidence in the ‘ dull, dark days before Christmas’.
Dull and dark they may have been, but they were busy days for us. We were counting the Sunday School marks, and buying the prizes, and then visiting old people to ask what they wanted as Christmas presents. They were always ready for our tap on the
