Memoirs of a Surrey Labourer Part 10

"You saw some cold weather, then?"

"No mistake. Two winters and one summer." He was, in fact, before Sebastopol, and now that the secret was out, he hurried on to tell familiarly of Kertch, the Black Sea, the Dardanelles, so glibly that my memory was unable to take it all in. What was most strange was to hear these places, whose names to stay-at-home people like myself have come to have an epic sound, spoken of as the scene of merely trivial incidents. As it was only of what he observed himself that Bettesworth told, this could hardly have been otherwise; yet it is odd to think that Tolstoi, writing his marvellous descriptions of the siege, may have set eyes on him. To this harum-scarum English plough-boy, ignorant, rollicking, reckless, it was not the great events, on a large scale, that were prominent, but the queer things, the little haphazard details upon which he happened to stumble. Through the narrative his own personality was to the fore; just the same dogged personality that I was to know afterwards, but not yet chastened and made wise by experience.

It was here in the Crimea that, carrying that letter to post to his brother, as already told in "The Bettesworth Book," he met his "mate,"

and, opening the letter, took out the "dollar" it contained, and spent it on a bottle of rum, tossing the letter away. "In those days," said he, "I could drink as much rum as I can beer now. We had rum twice a day: rum and limejuice. That was to keep off the scurvy. Never had no cups nor nothing. We had knives, same as that old clasp-knife I got now, and used to knock off the necks o' the bottles with they."

He remembered well the hard times, and the privations our troops endured. "Sixteen of us in one o' they little tents. We had a blanket and a waterproof sheet--not the fust winter, though; and boots that come up to your thigh, big enough to get into with your shoes on.

There was one little chap named Tickle, he got into his boots with his shoes on, and couldn't git 'em off again. He was put under stoppages for 'em. Fifty shillin's for a pair o' they boots. You got into 'em--they was never made to fit no man--and bid in 'em for a month together--freezed on to ye."

Again, "It was starvation done for so many of our chaps out there.

Cold an' starvation. I've bin out on duty forty-eight hours at a stretch; then march back three mile to camp; and then some of us 'd have to march another seven mile to fetch biscuit from the sea. And _then_ you only got your share, same as the rest.... Sometimes the biscuit was dry; and then again you'd on'y git some as had bin trod to death by mules or camels.... That was the way to git a appet.i.te....

But there was plenty o' rum; good rum too; better 'n what you gits about here." The system of pay, or rather the want of system, appears to have made this abundance of rum a more than usually doubtful blessing. The men went sometimes "weeks together without gettin' any pay; and then when we got it, it was very soon all gone." Sixpence a day--four and twopence a week--(Bettesworth figured it out)--a very handy sum was this week's pay, I gathered, for buying rum by the bottle. The price of a bottle of stout was half a crown.

Reverting to the terrible weather, Bettesworth told how he had seen "strong men, smoking their pipe," and four hours afterwards beheld them carried by on a stretcher, to be buried. Ill-fed, I inferred, they succ.u.mbed thus suddenly to the fearful cold. Green coffee was provided, and the men had to hunt about for roots to make a fire for cooking it. And then, just as they had got their coffee into their mess-tins, they would be called out, perhaps, to stand on duty for eight hours together.

The dead were buried "in their kit," with their clothes on. Sometimes, Bettesworth hinted, money would be found on them and appropriated from their pockets, but "we wan't allowed no plunder," he added. As for the graves, "I've see 'em chucked into graves eighteen inches or two foot deep, perhaps--just a little earth put over 'em; and when you go by a fortnight or so after, you might see their toes stickin' out o' the ground. You never see no coffin." The only coffin that Bettesworth saw was Lord Raglan's. "That was a funeral! Seven miles long...."

At the close of the war Bettesworth came home "among the reductions,"

yet not for several months, during which he was employed on "fatigue parties" in collecting old metal--guns, ammunition cases, and so forth--for ballast to the ships in Balaclava Harbour. He described the Harbour: it was "like comin' in at that door; an' then, when you gets inside, it all spreads out...." Storm in the Black Sea overtook the troop-ship, where were "seventeen hunderd of us. Three hunderd was ship's company.... And some down on their knees prayin', some cursin', some laughin' an' drinkin', some dancin'.... And the troop-ship we come home in--might 's well ha' come in a hog-tub. She'd bin all through the war, and he" (the captain) "reckoned 'twas great honour to bring her home, and he wouldn't have no tugs. Forty-nine days we was, comin' home. And she leaked, an' then 'twas 'all hands to the pumps....' Great pumps...."

Yes, of course he remembered the pumps. It was Bettesworth all over, to take a vivid and intelligent practical interest in anything of the kind that there was to be seen. He had had no observation lessons at school, and had never heard of "object studies"; he simply observed for the pleasure of observing, instinctively as a cat examines a new piece of furniture, and if not with any cultivated sense of proportion, still with a great evenness of judgment. On one other occasion, and one only in my hearing, he reverted to his Crimean experiences; and as will be seen in its proper place, the narrative again showed him observing with the same balanced mind, never enthusiastic, but also never satiated, never bored.

But what of the "trouble" into which he was alleged to have fallen? I may as well tell all I know, and have done with it. From Bettesworth himself no breath of trouble ever reached me. But his avoidance of this period as a topic of conversation often struck me as a suspicious circ.u.mstance; so that I was not quite unprepared for a statement old d.i.c.ky Martin volunteered when Bettesworth had been some three weeks dead. He had been "rackety," and had been punished: that was the substance of the tale. "He got into trouble for goin' into the French lines after some rum--him an' two or three more. They never stopped, he told me, to ask 'n no questions, but strapped 'n up and give 'n two or three dozen for 't."

XVII

I suppose that Bettesworth's Crimean reminiscences occupied in narration to me something less than fifteen minutes of his life, so that obviously the s.p.a.ce they take up in this volume is out of all proportion to their importance. For my theme is not this or that recollection of his, but the way in which the old man lived out these last of his years, while the memories pa.s.sed across his mind. It is of small consequence what he remembered. Had he recalled the Indian Mutiny instead of the Crimea, it would have been all one, by that wet afternoon of May, 1902. He would have sat on his block dandling the chopper just the same, and the raindrops from trees outside would have come slanting into the shed doorway and splashed on my hand as I listened to him.

And as they are disproportionately long, these day-dreams of Bettesworth, so also they become too solid on the printed page, side by side with the reality which encompa.s.sed them then, and is my subject now. They provoke us to forget the old man, alive and talking.

They take us back fifty years too far. From the hardships of the Crimean War it is a wrench to return to the reality--the shed in this valley, the patter of the rain, the old gossipping voice. But all this, so impossible to restore now that it too has become only a reminiscence, being then the commonplace of my life as well as of Bettesworth's, was allowed to pa.s.s by almost unnoticed. I let slip what I really liked, took for granted the strong life that alone made me care for the conversation, and saved only some dead litter of observation which was let fall by the living man and seemed to me odd.

Need I explain how of this too I was gradually saving less and less?

The oddness was wearing off; only the more exceptional things seemed now worth taking care of. Unless there was something as surprising to hear as this talk of the Crimean War--and such exceptions of course appeared with increasing rareness--I hardly took the trouble, at this period, to set down in writing any of Bettesworth's daily gossip. The naturalist, having noted in his diary the first two swallows that do not after all make a summer, has no record save in his brain of the subsequent curvings and interlacings in the summer sky; and I, similarly, find myself with little besides a vague memory of Bettesworth's doings in this summer of 1902. In fact, it is not even a memory that I have. There is only an inference that day by day he must have done his work in the warm weather, and I must have talked to him.

But I am unable to restore this for a reader's benefit. "Imagine him going on as usual," shall I say? Why, it is more than I can do myself.

A row of asterisks would serve the purpose equally well.

So there is a void for two months--nay, with one exception, for more than three, from the middle of May to the end of August; in which one surmises that the summer flies buzzed in the garden, and Bettesworth did his hoeing and gra.s.s-cutting, and was companionable. The one exception, fortunately, has the very life in it which I am regretting.

It is but a short sentence of six words, yet they are as if spoken within the hour, and are the clearer for the void around them.

On the afternoon of July 15, the grape vine on the wall near my window was being attended to by the pruner. He stood on a ladder, which was held steady by Bettesworth at the foot; and presently through the open window the old man's voice reached me, complaining of the recent blighty weather: "There en't nothin' 'ardly looks _kind_."

"No; not to say _kind_," the pruner a.s.sented.

That is all. But precisely because there is nothing in it, because it is a piece of normal instead of exceptional talk, it has the accent of the season. Bettesworth's voice reaches me; the light falls warm through the vine-leaves; the lost summer seems to come back with all the accompanying scene, almost as distinctly as if I had but just written the words down.

_August 28, 1902._--The harvest, of course, could not go by without remark from him. From the garden we could see, beyond the meadow in the bottom of the valley, a little two-acre cornfield, which had stood for several days half reaped--the upper side uncut, the lower side prosperous-looking with its rows of sheaves. Then there came a morning when it was all in sheaves, and Bettesworth said,

"Old Ben" (meaning Ben Turner) "done it for 'n" (the owner) "last night. Made a dark job of it."

I realized that in his cottage down by the lake, Bettesworth, going to bed, had been able to hear the reaping in the dark, across the meadow.

He proceeded, "Ben took his hoss and cart down into Suss.e.x a week or two ago, to see if he could get a job harvestin'. Was only gone three days, though: him an' four or five more. But I reckon they only went off for a booze--I don't believe they made e'er a try to get a job...."

"Our Will" (his brother-in-law) "says down there at Cowhatch they had a wonderful crop of oats. But he reckons they've wasted enough with the machine to ha' paid for reapin' it by hand. Stands to reason--where them great things comes whoppin' into it over and over, it shatters out a lot. Will says where they've took up the sheaves you can see the ground half covered with what they've wasted."

Not knowing what to say, I hesitated, and at last muttered simultaneously with Bettesworth, "'T seems a pity."

"It's what I calls 'pound wise,'" added he, misquoting a proverb which possibly was not invented by his cla.s.s, and was foreign to him.

_September 20, 1902._--I turn over the page in my note-book, but come to a new date three weeks later. Quiet autumn sunshine, the entry says, had marked the last few days, breaking through with a limpid splash in the mornings, after the mist had gone. Amidst this, under the softened tree-shadows, Bettesworth was cutting gra.s.s with his f.a.g-hook.

And "Ah," he said, "it's purty near all up with charcoal-burnin' now."

This was in allusion to the indifferent crop of hops just being picked and the consequently small demand for charcoal; but it was a digression too. We had begun talking of a wasp sting. From that to gnats, and from gnats to a certain tank where they bred, was an obvious transition.

And now the tank suggested charcoal. For, according to Bettesworth, a little k.n.o.b of charcoal put into a tank is better than an equal quant.i.ty of lime, for keeping the water sweet. Further, "If you got a bit o' meat that's goin' anyways wrong, you put a little bit o'

charcoal on to that, and you won't taste anything bad. I've heared ever so many charcoal-burners say that. And meat is a thing as won't keep--not butcher's meat; partic'lar in the summer when you sims to want it most--something with a little taste to 't." So, charcoal is useful; but "Ah! it's purty near all up with charcoal-burnin' now."

A good deal that followed, about the technicalities of charcoal-burning, has been printed in another place, and is omitted here. One point, however, may now be taken up. It is the curious fact that all the charcoal-burners of the neighbourhood are congregated in one district, and the numerous families of them rejoice in one name--that of Parratt.

"I never knowed anybody but Parratts do it about here," Bettesworth said; and the name reminded him of a story, as follows:

"My old brother-in-law Snip was down at Devizes one time--him what used to travel with a van--_Snip_ they always called 'n. And there was a feller come into the fair with one of these vans all hung round with bird-cages, ye know--poll-parrots and all kinds o' birds. So old Snip says to 'n, 'Parrots?' he says, 'what's the use o' you talkin' about parrots? Why, where I come from,' he says, 'we got Parratts as 'll burn charcoal, let alone talk. Talk better 'n any o' yourn,' he says.

'You give 'em some beer and _they'll_ talk--or dig hop-ground, or anything.' Lor'! how that feller did go on at 'n, old Snip said!"

Bettesworth knew something of charcoal-burning by experience, but he owned himself ignorant of its inner technical niceties. Moreover, he felt it right to respect a trade "mystery," explaining, "'Tis no use to be a trade, if everybody can do it. 'Relse we should have poor livin' then."

_October_ 31, 1902.--A memorandum of October 31 gives just a foretaste of the approaching winter, and just a momentary searching back into the experience gained when Bettesworth worked at a farm. For there must have been h.o.a.r-frost lingering on the lawn that last morning in October, to evoke the old man's opinion, "the less you goes about on gra.s.s while there's a frost on it the better" for the gra.s.s. "If anybody goes over a bit o' clover-lay with the white frost on it you can tell for a month after what course they took."

_November 11._--Amid some personalities which it would be difficult to disguise and which had better be omitted, I find in November another reference to the harsh social life of the village, and it is in connexion with that same bully whom Bettesworth had previously chastised. As before, details must be suppressed; I only suggest that in these dark November nights the labourers in want of company of course sought it at the public-house. There, I surmise, the bully was boasting, until Bettesworth shut him up with a retort brutally direct.

Even as it was repeated to me his expression is not printable.

Bettesworth was no angel. He seemed rather, at times, a hard-grained old sinner; but he always took the manly side, whether with fists or coa.r.s.e tongue. In this instance his fitting rebuke won a laugh of approval from the company, and even "a pint" for himself from one who was a relative, but no friend, of the offender.

_December 16._--One dry, cloudy day in December Bettesworth used his tongue forcibly again, but in how much pleasanter a connexion! A little tree in the garden had to be transplanted to a new position, on the edge of a bed occupied by old sprouting stumps of kale. One of these stumps was exactly in the place destined for the tree, and Bettesworth ruthlessly pulled it up, talking to it:

"You come out of it. There's plenty more like you. If you complains, we'll chuck ye in the bottom o' the hole for the tree to feed on!"