So shalt thou stand when life’s worst ills arise,
Nor be ‘found sleeping’ at the Great Surprise.
By this time, the piety of the earlier epitaphs was turning to didacticism, but in the eighteenth century, when the writers dwelt unflinchingly on the dust to which all men were doomed to return and when the sculptors depicted urns, hour-glasses, skeletons, and other emblems now sometimes considered ‘pagan’—the message of the epitaphs was unshakenly Christian. They taught a tender calm.
The tablet I looked at most often was to the memory of ‘Caroline Letitia Hetley, wife of Richard Hetley, Esq., who died universally loved and lamented on the 25th of November 1829, aged twenty-nine years.’
Thirty years later, another epitaph had been added, that of Richard Hetley himself, of whom it was only said that he died in his seventy-fourth year, ‘ the widower of the above Caroline Letitia’.
Lent ended at last, even at Wilton Rectory. In the two months from mid-April to midsummer, the beauty of nature is intoxicating. Each day seems to be the loveliest of all. But however much one revels simply in the flowery glory of those weeks, they must always for me fall into their place in the Christian year. A radiance falls upon the earth from the celestial festivals of Easter, Ascension Day, and Whit-Sunday, as light drips from the stars upon the quiet fields. Snow may fall on Easter Sunday, and indeed it often does, yet the Easter hymns do not fail to awake the very soul of spring. When Ascension Day comes, the thin young green on the trees carries the heart upward through it to the sky; and Whit-Sunday always seems to be the most beautiful day in the year. As a child I was taught that the Day of Pentecost was the Birthday of the Church: it is also the birthday of millions of flowers.
Undeniably there were times when the discipline of the Christian year, as administered by my father, did chafe on the young. These things were for him not only the chief things in the world—they were the only things. And he demanded that they should be this for everyone else. That complete singleness of mind was the secret of his influence. After a vain protest against a Field Day for Volunteers which was held on Good Friday, he resigned his Commission as Chaplain to the Fourth Wilts; and for years he fought a losing battle with the Jockey Club in the endeavour to change the date of Salisbury Races, held on Ascension Day. On such points he would not compromise.
Equally, he would never allow his daughters to be away from home on any of the great Church festivals. It was our duty to keep them in our own parish church. This cut out many pleasures, and we often rebelled inwardly. But my father’s system was like Mr. Street’s. It ‘swept you round and round with it’; and as it did so, it left with you something greater than yourself which was to remain through life.
Chapter Nine
POOR PEOPLE
Poor people were terribly poor when I was a child. Mrs. Jeffery was one of the poorest. She ‘lived on’ the parish, or rather, she received from the Guardians a weekly allowance of half a crown and a loaf of bread, the under part of which she sold, every week, for two-pence, to a neighbour who had a large family of children. She paid a rent of two shillings a week for her house in Fancy Row, an L-shaped group of quite well built houses dating from early in the last century. They stood off the street, round a piece of garden land. Her sitting-room was of a good size, and was well-proportioned, as rooms in the smallest houses still were at that date. Here she sat, facing life on eightpence a week and the top of a loaf. Her case was not exceptional. Hers was the usual allowance given to a solitary woman; and probably the Guardians hoped, by means of this economic pressure, to induce the poor lonely old things to go into the Workhouse. There, even in those days, they would have been cared for as they never could be in their own homes, but they one and all dreaded the prospect. However few and valueless one’s personal belongings may be, they make the familiar setting of one’s life; and it is hard that the world should prematurely bring home to one that ‘we brought nothing into this world, neither may we carry anything out’, especially when it invites us to leave this world, not for a Heavenly Mansion, but for an ‘Institution’. It must seem like a first and agonizing death thus to be torn from all one’s little treasures; and everyone collects a few of these in the course of a long life, even though it may be a long life of unbroken poverty.
Mrs. Jeffery’s neighbour, for instance, Mrs. Wilkins, lived in equal penury, and apparently had always done so, yet both her dress and her cottage indicated that, if she had been born in another sphere, she would have been a dilettante collector of objets d’art. Her thin bony form was clothed in the most poverty-stricken garments, but she draped them about her person in the arty manner of the ’eighties, fastening them here and there with baroque brooches and buckles, while her meagre arms tinkled with bracelets. Round the bent and broken brim of her dilapidated hat, she tossed a fluttering blue veil, through which she peered at her visitors with bleary, half-blind eyes. Her dirty little room was a museum. Its walls were covered with her collection of jugs. She possessed hundreds of these—a mixed and motley jumble, none of them of much beauty or value; yet they ensured for their owner a happy variety of colours, shapes, and memories, upon which to rest her worn-out eyes. This storehouse of rather dirty antiques was no doubt
