Then there was the Church. The Wilton Almshouses are mostly the modern forms of medieval priories and hospitals, of which there were many in the town, and the spirit of their founders has lived on. Out-relief was at first only an allowance supplementary to the charity of Christian people, and certainly Wilton congregations never thought their responsibilities over when they had paid their rates. My father, as Rector, made it his personal care that no one in his parish should be without a fire; and every month the Church people subscribed largely for the ‘Sick and Poor’. This money was chiefly distributed by District Visitors in the form of food tickets.
So no one was quite forgotten in Wilton when they were in difficulties; yet, however well these funds were spent, life must have been a precarious affair for Mrs. Jeffery and her friends. To-day, old age pensions are paid on a more adequate scale than the Poor Relief of my youth, and the Guardians augment them too with grants towards the rent. The recipients are ‘independent’. The ‘half-crown and a loaf’ have gone for ever. There are few things which I did at Wilton which gave me more pleasure at the time than the immense task of copying Baptismal Registers, which was handed over to me by my father in 1908. In that year, old people of seventy received their first Old Age Pensions of five shillings a week. But they were first called upon to prove their ages, and for years after 1838, birth certificates did not exist. You could only prove that you had been born by proving that you had been baptized, and the unfortunate thing was that some of these old people found that they had not been christened till they were four or five years old. Their parents sometimes took them to church in batches. Though some of them could remember scampering round the Font on the day of the baptism, that did not count as evidence. Documentary proof was essential, and documentary proof meant the Parish Registers. This experience shook my faith in the relative value of written and of traditional evidence in all matters of history. Still, the Pensions authorities demanded copies of the Register; and if some early nineteenth-century parents had been dilatory over the admission of their children to the Church, the Sins of the Fathers were now visited on the septuagenarian children, who were not seventy in the eyes of the law till seventy years after their belated entry into the Church.
For many years, the Relieving Officer at Wilton was Mr. Wiles, a bustling little man with a kind heart and a sense of justice. He achieved the difficult combination of kindness to the poor with fairness to the ratepayers. He was entirely familiar with the resources of the families under his care, and he always knew when people could not live on the allowance granted them. Then he got more for them, either from the Guardians or from the Church. On the other hand, he was most severe on people who tried to throw dust in his eyes by making false statements, and he once said to me, about a very eccentric old woman:
‘Have you ever noticed anything peculiar about the shape of Patty’s chest?’
I modestly denied it.
‘I have then,’ said Mr. Wiles. ‘ It’s my belief that she’s got a silver teapot in there. I know she had one once, and I don’t know what has become of it. Some day, I shall take hold of it and give it a shake.’
I don’t know whether he ever took this desperate step; but if Patty really had a teapot in her bust, its shape must have been ‘peculiar’ enough to give her away without any shaking.
Mr. Wiles could always be relied on to turn a blind eye if he chanced to pass the cottage of one of his old women at the moment when one of the ladies of the town was carrying in a chicken to be plucked, or a piece of needlework to be done. Anyone who thus earned a few pence to augment her weekly allowance of two shillings and elevenpence (without the loaf) was liable to have it withdrawn altogether; but if Mr. Wiles knew nothing about it, of course he couldn’t report it to the Guardians. These august personages themselves would look over the head of Mrs. Jeffery when she happened to be mending a carpet in a house belonging to one of them; for Guardians and Relieving Officers alike knew the difference made by the earning of those few forbidden pence.
The lovely word Charity is out of favour to-day; and the personal gifts which brightened the days I write of, are now looked back on as ugly symptoms of a state of society in which the rich alternately trampled upon, and patronized, the poor. Yet the unhappy people in those days were those who lived in big towns out of reach of this simple and friendly giving and receiving. In little country places, these presents often passed between people whose circumstances were not actually very far apart; and they carried with them a personal friendship which an Income-Tax return cannot convey. The columns of figures which fill our Rates and Taxes Demand Notes have taken the place of the basins which used to bring dinners from one house to another, and a great deal of flavour is lost in this exchange.
Chapter Ten
SCENES AND SAYINGS
‘Talking about talking’—with this arresting phrase, I once heard old Mr. Rawlence cut his way into a conversation which was not about talking at all. I had certainly been chattering more than was seemly on the part of a young girl in the presence of her elders,
