Country Moods and Tenses

by Edith Olivier

  “That’s the inside o’ your stomach.’’

  After a dramatic pause, while he held the exhibit on high, he continued:

  “Now, see what one of my pills will do for it.’’

  Out came a bottle of pills, and one was thrown into the disgusting concoction. As it floated down, the liquid became clear as the purest spring water. All the cloudiness vanished. It was a triumph of conjuring, and always brought a crowd of dyspeptic sufferers to exchange their shillings for a box of miraculous pills.

  Although the real market dinners are the prerogative of the farmers, many other appetising meals are eaten on a market day. The tea-shops and milk-bars do a good trade from 11 o’clock onwards, when they invite their clients to enjoy their morning coffee. The tables are soon crowded, and as the day goes on, the doors keep opening to admit stout women, strung, each hour, with more and more parcels, who scan the scene with anxious eyes. There seems no possible space for themselves and their belongings. Then the anxiety changes to a sudden gleam of pleasure as a friend is espied, who signals that she will “move up” with a hospitable re-arrangement of plates and dishes, bundles and baskets, and thus allow the newcomer to “ squeeze in”. Those who imagine that there is little social life in the country would change their opinions if they spent a whole market day in a provincial town.

  Cathedral cities and market towns came into being during the first of England’s chief town building periods. The City Fathers of the thirteenth, fourteenth and fifteenth centuries gave beauty and character to their towns because they always saw them as entities standing in a certain relation to the country around. The cathedral, which contained the bishop’s throne, would always be, in the mind of its founders, the religious centre of the surrounding diocese; and the city was planned to suit the convenience of ecclesiastics. The merchants saw a similar advantage in creating market towns for their districts, and there was great competition to secure market charters. This competition brought the mediaeval inhabitants of Wilton and Salisbury literally to blows. The Salisbury merchants secured a market charter for their town, which had already become the ecclesiastical centre of the county through the new cathedral which was being built. The Wilton man foresaw the decay of their own long-established market, and they went out into the roads where they “waylaid and hindered, beat and stopped” the merchants on their way to Salisbury. These fisticuffs were of no avail, and Salisbury market won the day.

  Fairs are a kind of holiday market.

  Their raison d’être is business—the sale of sheep, cattle, horses or cheeses, and sometimes the hiring of farm servants; but, even more than markets, they have also always been opportunities for fun and merriment. Most people only attend them for the “ fun of the fair”, and the noises of a fairground are very festive. First of all, and most pervading, there is always to be heard the unending strains of the merry-go-round’s harsh barrel-organ; but this is the background to other equally characteristic sounds. The pop of rifle shots as sportsmen fire at eggs which move miraculously up and down on jets of water. The bang and the bell of the strength-testing machine. The raucous invitation to “come and see the fat woman” or some other monstrosity. To these are sometimes added the roars of lions and tigers and the yelps of jackals, if a travelling menagerie is taking advantage of the fair to attract spectators. And then there is always the undercurrent of human voices, speaking in the dialect of the countryside, and so containing more tone and quality than can be heard in towns. Country vowel-sounds are richer and more numerous than town vowels. Consonants are stronger. Speech gains in variety and raciness.

  Stalls at fairs display an extraordinary collection of completely worthless, really ugly and exceedingly cheap little trifles; and yet these “fairings” possess an inexplicable charm. They are “fairings’’; and that is why everyone is impelled to carry home a crudely-printed handkerchief, a hideous china shepherdess or greyhound, a box with shells all over its lid, a sugar stick, and a bag of that thin, sticky, perforated gingerbread which only appears at fairs. That these things are bought, and bought by everybody, proves that the fair spirit is far more intoxicating than any party spirit in the world. When one is at the fair all these things become as seductive and desirable as a gross of spectacles seemed to be to Moses in The Vicar of Wakefield.

  In spite of the country genius for making festivals out of buying and selling, nothing can prevent a Sale of Work from being a terribly dreary affair; yet every village must have at least one every summer. For weeks beforehand the whole parish is busy with preparations. A garden is lent; the morning arrives; the stalls are prettily arranged; and then, a few hours before the time fixed for the opening ceremony, the goods have to be hurriedly scrambled into the schoolroom to escape a deluge of rain. Everyone agrees to make the best of it. A leading lady of the neighbourhood declares the sale open. The clergyman makes a tactful speech. The members of the audience look feverishly round. There is nothing at all to buy, and no one at all to buy it. Yet the goods in view have a far better value than the “fairings” described above; but the sale of work has never succeeded in evoking that rollicking recklessness which takes possession of everyone who enters a fairground.

  And yet, when all is over, the takings nearly always “beat last year’s record’’; and the sale is pronounced a business success.

  On the other hand, a jumble sale is a wildly popular function. Scouts and guides traverse the village beforehand, collecting from every house of any size anything which is completely past using by its owner. On to the tables is piled a horrible conglomeration of old clothes, hats, boots, threadbare bits of carpet, pots and pans, kettles without bottoms, cracked plates and cups, burst travelling-bags, broken-down wheelbarrows, and whatnot. Directly the doors are open the mob bursts in. No need of any formal opening ceremony: the buyers could not wait for that. In they rush with their shopping bags, to fight over the best things, to turn them over, tumble and handle, to slip them surreptitiously into their bags if they can, and, if not, to pay the ridiculous price which is asked. To the looker-on the whole thing seems to be a nightmare, but to the buyers it is a ravishing dream. Like a sale of work, a jumble sale is a very paying thing.

  2 Public Work

  ONE REASON WHY PEOPLE IN THE COUNTRY ARE SO BUSY is that all classes take their share in public work. This greatly adds to the interest of country life. Of course there is even more public work to be done in towns; but then there are so many more people to do it that the community as a whole doesn’t feel it at all. Important as is the work of the London County Council, for instance, most of the millions who live in the metropolis have no idea what it is doing. Whereas in the country nearly everybody plays a part.

  County Councils and their committees give a great deal of hard work to those country gentlemen and large farmers who are public-spirited enough to abandon their daily avocations altogether for several days in each month. District Councils occupy men and women who cannot get so far afield. The Parish Councils are largely composed of working men and women, and so they meet in the evenings, after work is over. Then there are the Magistrates’ Benches, and the Public Assistance Committees which have taken the place of the old Boards of Guardians. There are Diocesan Conferences, Ruri-decanal Meetings, Parochial Church Councils, and Free Church Councils. Each political party has its own organisation in every constituency. In most villages the men are busy with their committees of the British Legion, the Foresters, the Oddfellows and other clubs; and the women bustle to and from the Women’s Institutes. Even the children are given a sense of responsibility as Scouts and Guides.

  The country population is small, so all this means that most people have to pull their weight in one thing or another. These organisations bring people together, and greatly add to the interest of living in the country.

  The Motoring Acts have much increased the labours of magistrates all over the country, but they have proportionately decreased the interest of their work. It has been calculated that 60 per cent. of the cases
which come before magistrates nowadays are traffic cases; and throughout the country, indictable offences are only 10 per cent. of the whole. In 1888, 164 cases came before the County Bench on which I now sit: in 1940 there were close on 2,500. Yet crime has immensely decreased; and far the greater part of these cases dealt with motor lights, speed limits, “halt” signs or lack of driving licences. These cases are often extremely dull, but in spite of that we do see some curious little bits of human life. We see one isolated section of a personality. People appear before us, answer a few searching questions, listen to our sentence, pay their fines and go away. Vignettes of village life are set before us. A curious feature of a police court is that one’s acquaintance with those who appear in it is so close and yet so transitory.

  Surprising contrasts show themselves. Two motor vehicles collided at a cross-roads. One contained a professor of psychology who was driving two octogenarian ladies (his mother and his aunt) along a main road, when from a side road a motor coach ran into him. It contained eighteen fried-fish men proceeding from Blackpool to Bournemouth. The result of this disastrous collision was that one of the octogenarians was killed. Little did she think that morning, when she left home in the quiet company of a psychological professor, that, before night fell, eighteen fried-fish men would be responsible for her sudden death.

  Another remarkable case occurred when a very poor looking woman appeared before us, charged with stealing a piece of tarpaulin, the property of a neighbouring farmer. The defendant was very out-at-elbows, and looked as if she had not got sixpence in the world. Her son, apparently about nineteen years of age, was charged with her. He looked weak in mind and body. We learnt that the woman had not attempted to conceal what she had done; and that, some months after the theft, the police discovered the tarpaulin, its owner’s name still clearly painted upon it, placed over her aeroplane in one of her fields. We could hardly believe our ears on hearing that this dilapidated-looking woman was the owner of an aeroplane; and our astonishment was increased when we heard that she possessed not one but two.

  “The second one is not a very good one, your Worships”, said the sergeant who was giving evidence. “ It was made by her son.’’

  The defendant went into the witness-box, and said she was very sorry she had given way to this sudden and irresistible temptation which had overcome her as she caught sight of the tarpaulin when she drove past in her motor car.

  “The defendant has a car, then?’’

  “Oh, yes, your Worships. The defendant has two cars. One is a Rolls-Royce.’’

  This allegation roused the defendant to wrath.

  “I wasn’t driving my Rolls that morning. I never do drive it now. I only keep it for sentimental reasons, because it once belonged to Mr. William Whiteley, of Westbourne Grove.’’

  That was the end. The poverty-stricken owner of two aeroplanes and two motor cars paid her fine and left the court, and we heard no more of her previous history. Nor did we know what happened to her afterwards. She was a ship that passed in the night.

  A romantic and picturesque piece of Sherlock Holmes work was carried out one day by our local police inspector. We had before us a woman on a charge of dangerous driving. She had swung off the road at a bend, and ran for some distance along the grass verge till she collided with a telegraph post and came to grief. The police arrived, examined the damage, measured the road, and took all the other ordinary particulars. This occupied some time, after which the constable walked back a a few yards and saw a hole in the hedge which seemed to have been caused by the motor as it careered along on the green verge. He looked through this hole, and saw, in the cottage garden behind the hedge, an old woman lying dead. She had been knocked down by the motor and sent flying through the hedge, and the driver had declared that she had been quite unaware that there was anybody in her way. The police case was that this car had been driven recklessly for some miles, and two witnesses asserted that they saw this same car leave the road at a previous bend, where it ran along a high bank at an acute angle and seemed to be on the brink of overturning. The driver said this was not her car. It was quite untrue to say that she had left the road before. Then the police called a witness from fairyland. They handed us half of a green leaf which had grown on a poplar called by the exquisite name of the Wayfarer’s tree. This leaf had evidently been torn from its stem by the car at some point very near the place of the accident, for it was found un-faded between the wing and the bonnet when the car crashed. The constable who found it showed it to his superior officer, and the two men searched the hedgerow for a specimen of the Wayfarer’s tree. There was none to be found. But two miles back, at the point where wheel-marks indicated that the car had left the road and run along the bank, there stood the tree in question, and on it a broken twig. The torn green leaf was set before us, with beside it other leaves taken from the same tree. The little voiceless witnesses could not be gainsaid. They proved that the car had twice left the road.

  The meetings of local committees of the Public Assistance Board are very long and very depressing, as these committees have no power at all, and are merely advisory. At the last Poor Law revision the old title of “Guardian to the Poor” was abolished. The Guardians became members of committees, and the Workhouses became “Institutions”. These changes in nomenclature are supposed to be more considerate of the feelings of the applicants for relief: I know not why. In old days, all “ indoor” cases were housed in workhouses as near as possible to their own homes; whereas now the different classes of cases are segregated and each Institution only deals with one class. This is doubtless more efficient than the old method, but it seems less humane, for sometimes the people have to be sent a long way from their homes, so that their friends can very seldom visit them.

  Although the purpose of all the recent changes of nomenclature was to take away the sting from poor relief by setting it free from painful old associations, yet the new committees retain a dreary, Dickensian character. There had been a complaint about the bread supplied in an Institution which was under our care, and I cannot forget some words in the report which we asked for on the subject. “The bread is up to the standard for an Institution.” This was after a dead mouse had been found in one of the loaves.

  An even more macabre thing happened at another meeting, though this had its funny side. The business before us was selecting an undertaker for the coming year. The official rule is that, except in special cases, public authorities should take the lowest tender, and we opened the tenders from several firms. It was difficult to decide which was the lowest, for the charges for funerals were divided into several groups. “Still-borns.” “ Children under five.” “Adults.” The tenderer who charged least for “still-borns” charged most for “adults’’; and for some time the members of the committee, armed with pencils and paper, tried to work out the average numbers of deaths at the different ages, in order to discover the lowest rate for the whole. While this was “ being discussed, the Master of the Institution stood by, with an ironic smile on his face; and after we had been at it for some time, he interposed with:

  “I don’t expect we shall have many ‘still-borns’ this year. The maternity ward is closed. It is taken over by the military.’’

  We agreed to cut out the “ still-borns” altogether.

  It may be said that in a book about the country there can surely be no mention of an office so urban as that of a Mayor; but I can’t leave out the Mayor of Wilton, for of all the public work that I have done, nothing has meant so much to me as being the first woman mayor of my native town. Most boroughs are large and important. They are areas which are “ built-up” or even overbuilt, where “ life” cannot be called “country life”. Yet, scattered about the country, there are a few very small, and also very ancient, towns whose pride it is to possess Mayors and Corporations. Of these the oldest is Wilton in Wiltshire.

  I believe there is nothing in this country to-day more fundamentally “English” than these rural mayors, wit
h their offices, their powers, their duties and their customs. They continue to function in the same manner and in the same happy and intimate relation to their boroughs, as did all mayors in the old days, before large cities, in the modern sense of the word “large”, had begun to exist.

  In the seventeenth century, the Mayor of Wilton was fined if he appeared outside his door without his red official robe, but nowadays this is kept for ceremonial occasions. It is a glorious pure red colour, very brilliant, and hanging in heavy folds which throw deep shadows. The mayor’s chain, of silver gilt, is immensely heavy, and from it hangs a jewel, upon which is emblazoned in blue enamel and gold the ancient seal of the mayor. It is doubtful what this seal represents. At the Herald’s Visitation of Wilts in 1623 it was described as “two Saxon Kings sejant in Gothic niches, crowned, with sceptres in their hands”. Alternatively it has been interpreted as the “Coronation of the Virgin’’; but whatever its subject it is a beautiful jewel. Wilton also possesses some very fine silver-gilt maces, one of which is a very delicate piece of work of the time of Charles I, and another an enormous and elaborate specimen of the goldsmith’s art of the period of Charles II. The mayor’s personal mace is a small, silver, Queen Anne one, which I suspect was also the American Ambassador, discovered that in 1229 an ancestor of his had been consecrated Bishop of Salisbury. The cathedral was actually in process of building, and the ceremony took place in Wilton church. This church by 1930 had fallen into ruins; and the ambassador restored a little chapel in the middle of the arcading, so that whole site became a centre of peace and of prayer. The ambassador died while the re-building was in progress, and the work was completed in his memory. The chapel was re-consecrated with truly mediaeval ceremonial. The Bishop in cope and mitre, choir and clergy in surplices, the Mayors and Corporations of Wilton and Salisbury in their robes, the Brethren and Sisters of Bishop Bingham’s Hospital on Harnham Bridge, twenty-five members of English, American and Irish branches of the Bingham family, marched in procession to the church, to the music of English and American hymns. It was truly an historic day.