Lean as she was, Mrs. Wilkins looked less starved than Mrs. Jeffery, so that possibly at some time in her life she had been better nourished. She had perhaps been in service in some house where she acquired her artistic tastes. Mrs. Jeffery, on the other hand, had always eked out a poor living by part-time labour on a farm. She had often slung across her shoulders the baby she was nursing at the time, while she ran up to the fields for a few hours’ weeding or hoeing; or she had gleaned a few ears of corn to be ground into flour by the miller. At eighty years of age, she frequently told us of a red-letter day in her life when, as a little girl, she had gone to tea at the farmhouse, and had been given ‘real butter’.
Mrs. Jeffery once came to see me in great distress.
‘I’ve ’ad a misfartune,’ she said. ‘I’ve a-broke me po, and ’e was such a beautiful po. ’E ’adn’t got ne’er an ’andle, but ’e ’ad a very nice rim. ’E wer old Mr. Rawlence’s po, and when I did use to go up there to mend the carpet, I did see this po, and I allers liked un. And then, when I ’ad me fire and all me things was burnt, Master Freddy Rawlence brought un down to me, and I’ve a ’ad un ever since.’
We both felt very shy at the idea of going into a shop, to replace this indispensable piece of property, but at last I faced a lady shopkeeper who promised to ‘pack it invisibly’, as they say.
Yet, in spite of Mrs. Jeffery and Mrs. Wilkins, we often remarked in those old days that there was little acute poverty in Wilton. This sounds incredible in face of the actual incomes of these old women, but although I have told the truth about their allowances, that is not the whole truth. Wilton was and is a small place, and in those days at least, we made a family party. Nobody sat down to a hot joint for dinner, without making sure that at least one of their poorer neighbours was doing the same. Every day, in the streets of Wilton, we saw, between twelve and one, three or four of the pony carriages in which old ladies were then in the habit of taking the air. These were low basket-shaped vehicles containing two seats which faced each other. The owner of the carriage usually held the reins, with another lady seated at her side. If there was a third member of the party, this rather unlucky person was perched on the opposite seat, ducking her head and trying to avoid the reins which were passed over her shoulder. The pony-carriages I speak of contained Mrs. Rawlence, Mrs. Naish, and Miss Nightingale, and during those pre-luncheon drives, the front seats were usually stacked with baskets containing basins. In these were slices of meat cut off the steaming joints, and surrounded by vegetables and gravy. But people without pony-carriages were about the same business at the same time; and my early memories of the Wilton streets about the hour of noon, show them peopled with women running into each other’s houses, carrying steaming basins covered with cloths.
In those days there was a good deal of drunkenness in the country, and this was a distress to old Mrs. Rawlence. Still, she was well aware that on Sundays, when the public houses were shut, the men would miss their pint of beer, and might feel depressed. Mrs. Rawlence remembered the Children of Israel who picked up a double portion of manna before the Sabbath Day, and so Saturday was her greatest day for driving about. She went to the drunkards’ houses bringing them jugs of strong coffee and of delicious and very concentrated consommè. Thus she hoped, not only to minister to the thirst of the coming day, but also to suggest that other drinks might always take the place of beer.
When Mrs. Rawlence died, her husband endowed a Wilton Parish Nurse, thinking mainly of the old people who would miss the kind friend visiting them in their poverty. Nurse Turner filled this post to perfection. Hers is one of the unforgettable Wilton figures. She was a tall woman, with an affectionate rolling gait, and an expression of calm beneficence. She always carried a round basket in her hand, and in summer she wore, instead of her nurse’s bonnet, a very wide white straw hat. She was a liaison officer between those people in Wilton who had enough and to spare, and those who didn’t know how to make ends meet. She was equally at home in the houses of both sorts, and she knew people’s possessions better than they knew them themselves. She came into a house, with her quiet deaf smile, to ask for the loan of ‘the drinking-cup on the top shelf of your china cupboard’, for ‘those warm woollen slippers that your dear mother found such a comfort when she was ill’, or for ‘the hatbox that came with your hat from Style and Gerrish, which I could use to make a cradle over a little boy’s broken leg’. People were delighted to know that their treasures had been observed by Nurse Turner, and also that they could so easily do something to give comfort to a sick neighbour.
This ‘Lady Bountiful’ system is discountenanced today, and of course it could never have touched the fringe of the poverty in large industrial towns; but in Wilton we all knew each other well and were naturally neighbourly without any touch of patronage or of pauperizing.
Past generations of Wilton people took their part in supplementing the inadequate Poor Relief of those days. Wilton is rich in
