Sinca’s history was mysterious and romantic. A day or two before the bombardment of Sebastopol, two little Russian boys, aged about four or five, strayed out of the town into the English lines. The soldiers made friends with them, and the General decreed that they should be detained in camp till after the bombardment, as they would be safer behind, than in front of, the British guns. The children were brought into the town with the army, and criers were sent out, asking for their parents. No one claimed them. Their relations were either dead, or had left the town. What was to be done with the little Russian waifs? Two English officers adopted them, brought them home, and had them educated and taught trades. The children could never tell their surnames, and the soldiers named them Alma and Inkerman. Simeon Sinca was the little boy’s way of pronouncing his name of Simeon Inkerman, and so he was called to the end of his life. Thus the Russian sailor came to port at Wilton, where he married the nurse of my elder brothers, and between them they produced a family extremely unlike the Wiltshire children among whom they played.
Albert Musselwhite was the grave-digger, and with his mixture of fun and sentiment, he would have been in his element in the graveyard of Elsinore. Children loved him. He rollicked with them, and had them always under control. I have seen three hundred children screaming with laughter at his jokes at a Band of Hope meeting; and when the noise went beyond bearing, he said: ‘See my ’and. When it goes up—SILENCE.’ Up went his hand, and you could hear a pin drop.
Generations of children learnt from Albert to be useful, for he knew that no game is so delightful to a child as is being given something real to do. Under his guidance we first learnt to decorate the church, and to arrange the books in the pews, while his own children were adept dusters from the age of three. He was our chief friend from his middle age, when I first remember him, till he had become a very old man with thick white hair and beard.
The church tower was Albert’s kingdom. He sat in the belfry, chiming three bells at once, one with each hand and one with his foot, and he taught us to chime them too. On great days, when bonfires were lit on the hills, Albert led us up the long difficult dusty ladders to the top of the tower, whence we looked triumphantly over miles of the country round. My younger sister Mildred was afraid to climb those ladders, but her faith in Albert was so complete that she fearlessly made the perilous journey up and down, perched on his shoulders.
If the church tower was Albert’s domain, there were days in the year which were his days. Boat-race day was one. We were hotly on the side of Oxford, so he always teased us by wearing a piece of pale-blue ribbon, and by sending us envelopes addressed in a feigned writing, and containing pale-blue bows inscribed: ‘Sure to win.’ But Christmas Day was his chief day in the year, and Albert’s Christmas began at least six weeks before December 25th.
About the middle of November, we could never meet Albert without his rummaging in his pocket for a bit of mistletoe, and then began a frantic chase, over house and garden, till the only safety was to lock one’s self into the smallest room to be found. There was no sentiment about this. It was a pitched battle, and I have never since experienced so utter a sense of defeat as on those occasions when Albert did catch me and kiss me under the mistletoe. Once he even approached my very dignified mother with two little leaves and a white berry, and we marvelled as we saw that she did not run away, but remained gravely sitting in her chair, and said: ‘ALBERT.’ This did intimidate him, and he withdrew to chase the boys.
Wilton then had its poet, Edward Slow, the carriage-builder, a man of rugged face and figure, and with a loud resonant voice which sounded all down the street when he met a friend for a quiet talk. He was a master of the old Wiltshire speech, and his rhymes were not merely written in the dialect, but they came up directly from the dialect mind. He was an entirely descriptive writer, and he described what fell under his own eyes. Slow was no visionary. He was a racy and realistic observer, and his subjects were those things which outstand in the memory of the untravelled countrymen—public dinners, foxhunting, or a visit to London. When country fairs are things of the past, Slow’s Our girt Zeptember Vair will bring before the mind of future generations, exact and living pictures of the events of every hour in the day of the chief West of England sheep fair in the nineteenth century. But by then, the poem will be written in a dead language, for Slow’s was the true Wiltshire dialect, unspoilt by any school-board varnish. He was the last of the old minstrels, for his rhymes really came to life when he read or recited them himself, giving immense delight both to himself and his hearers.
Slow had the countryman’s distrust of the foreigner, and some few years before the Great War, he received a letter from a German Philological Society, inviting him to go to London to have gramophone records made from his reading of some of his poems, in order to help these scholars to learn the true pronunciation. Slow was
