Memoirs of a Surrey Labourer Part 13

drink...."

Well, Bettesworth did not go to the dinner, and I never quite understood why. Possibly he really felt too old for dissipation, even of a decorous kind: still more likely, he dreaded being at once under-valued and patronized, among the "kiddies" from Aldershot. He certainly did well to avoid their company. Long afterwards, when for other reasons I was making inquiries about this dinner, I learnt that the behaviour of some of the guests had been scandalous. Some had been carried away, drunk. Others had taken with them, hidden in their pockets, the means of getting drunk at home. So I was told; but not by the promoters, who had shortly afterwards left the neighbourhood.

On this same date (4th November, 1903) Bettesworth informed me of another circ.u.mstance which affected him seriously. It was that he had lately been superannuated from his club, which he had joined in July, 1866. At that distant time, when he was still a young man, and a strong one, how should he look forward to the year 1903? By what then seemed a profitable arrangement, he paid his subscription on a lower scale, on the understanding that he would receive no financial help in time of sickness after he was sixty-five years old. He had now pa.s.sed that age. Henceforth, for a payment of threepence a month, he was to have medical attendance free, and on his death the club would pay for his funeral.

He was mighty philosophical over this. For my part, it was impossible to look forward without apprehension to the position he would be in during the approaching winter. A year previously he had shown symptoms of bronchitis. But what was to become of him now, if he should be ill, and have no "sick-pay" upon which to fall back?

XXII

I think it must have been during the winter we have reached that the village policeman stopped me in the road one night to talk about old Mrs. Bettesworth. He told me, what I vaguely knew, that she was increasingly ill. Once, if not oftener (I write from memory), he had helped get her home out of the road, where she had fallen in a fit; and a fear was upon him that she would come to some tragical end. Then there would be an inquest; Bettesworth might be blamed for omitting necessary precautions; at any rate, trouble and scandal must ensue.

The policeman proposed that it would be well if a doctor could see the old woman occasionally, and suggested that through my influence with Bettesworth it might be arranged.

Although I promised to see what could be done to carry out so thoughtful a suggestion, and meant to keep my promise, as a matter of fact no steps towards its performance were ever taken; and the thing is mentioned here only as a piece of evidence as to the conditions in which Bettesworth pa.s.sed the winter. In the background of his mind, there stood always the circ.u.mstances which had inspired apprehension in the policeman. I never noted down his dread, because it was too constant a thing; and for a like reason, he seldom spoke of it; but there it always was, immovable. The policeman's talk merely shows that the reasons for it were gathering in force.

Save for one or two other equally vague memories, that winter is lost, so far as Bettesworth is concerned. We had some cold though not really severe weather--nothing so terrible as an odd calculation of his would have made it out to be. "For," said he, "we _be_ gettin' it! The Vicar's gardener says there was six degrees o' frost this mornin'....

And five yesterday; an' seven the mornin' before. That makes eighteen degrees!" So he added up the thermometer readings; and, a.s.sociated with his words, there comes back to me a winter afternoon in which the air had grown tense and still. Under an apple-tree, where the ground, covered with thin snow, was too hard frozen for a tool to penetrate, the emptyings of an ash-bin from the kitchen lay in a little heap; and a dozen or so of starlings were quarrelling over this refuse, flying up to spar at one another, and uttering sharp querulous cries. A white fog hung in the trees. It was real winter, and I laughed to myself, to think what a record Bettesworth might make of it by the following morning.

Seeing that every winter now he was troubled with a cough, I may as well give here some undated sentences I have preserved, in which he described how he caught cold on one occasion. "If I'd ha' put on my wrop as soon 's I left off work," he said, "I should ha' bin aw-right.

'Stead o' that, I went scrawneckin' off 'ome jest's I was, an' that's how I copt it." The word scrawnecking, whatever he meant by it, conjures up a picture of him boring blindly ahead with skinny throat uncovered. He took little care of himself; and considering how ill-fed he went now that his wife was so helpless, it was small wonder that he suffered from colds. They did not improve his appet.i.te. They spoilt many a night's rest for him, too. At such times, the account he used to give of his coughing was imitative. "Cough cough cough, all night long." A strong accent on the first and fourth syllables, and a "dying fall" for the others, gives the cadence.

Beyond these memories nothing else is left of Bettesworth's experiences during those three months--December, 1903, and January and February, 1904. Coming to March, I might repeat some interesting remarks of his upon an affair then agitating the village; but after all they do not much concern his history, and there are strong reasons for withholding them. And suppressing these, I find no further account of him until the middle of May.

The interval, however, between the 3rd of March and the 16th of May, was sadly eventful for Bettesworth. I cannot say much about it. As once before when his circ.u.mstances grew too tragical, so on this occasion a vague sense of decency forbade me to sit down and record in cold blood his sufferings, perhaps for future publication.

What happened was briefly this: that some time in March one of the colds which had distressed him all the winter settled upon his chest and rapidly turned to bronchitis. If his wife's condition is taken into account, the seriousness of the situation will be appreciated. At his time of life bronchitis would have been bad enough, even with good nursing; but poor old Lucy Bettesworth was far past devoting to her husband any attention of that sort. Even in her best state she was past it, and she was by no means at her best just now. She needed care herself; had a heavy cold; was at times beyond question slightly crazy; and, to aggravate the trouble, she was insulting even to the two or three neighbours who might have conquered their reluctance to enter the filthy cottage and help the old man. For perhaps a week, therefore, he lay uncared for, and none realized how ill he was. Only the next-door neighbour spoke of hearing him coughing all night long.

The old woman received me downstairs when I went to make inquiries.

She sat with her hand at her chest, dishevelled and unspeakably dirty.

And she coughed; tried to attract my sympathy to herself; a.s.sured me "I be as bad as he is"; looked indeed ill, and half-witted. "You can go up and see 'n," she said. I stumbled up the stairs and found Bettesworth in bed, with burning cheeks and eyes feverishly bright.

The bedding was disgusting; so were the remains of a bloater left on the table beside him, so much as to give me a feeling of nausea. As for nursing, he had had none. He had got out of bed the previous night and found a packet of mustard, of which he had shaken some into his hand, and rubbed that into his chest, dry; and that was the only remedy that had been used for his bronchitis, unless--yes, I think there was a bottle of medicine on the mantelpiece; for he was still ent.i.tled to the services of the club doctor, who had been sent for.

But in such a case, what could a doctor do?

The next day the old man was worse, at times wandering in his mind.

And, as there was no one else to take the initiative, and as he looked like dying and involving us all in disgrace, I interviewed the doctor and--but the story grows wearisome.

To finish, then: the workhouse infirmary was decided upon, as the only place where Bettesworth could get the nursing without which he would probably die. Fortunately, he received the proposal reasonably; he was ready to go anywhere to get well, as he felt that he never would at home. He merely stipulated that his wife must not be left. A walk to find the relieving officer and get the necessary orders from him was to me the only pleasant part of the episode. It took me, on a brilliant spring evening, some three miles farther into the country, where I saw the first primroses I had seen outside my garden that year. It also enabled me to see how parish relief looks from the side of the poor who have to ask for it, but that was not so pleasant.

However, the officer was civil enough; he gave me the necessary orders; we made all the arrangements, and on the following day the two old Bettesworths were driven off miserably in a cab to the workhouse.

How fervently everybody hoped, then, that Bettesworth would leave his wife behind, if he ever came out of the inst.i.tution himself alive! And yet, though it's true he was dependent on me for the wherewithal to keep his home together, how much n.o.bler was his own behaviour than that we would have commended! Once in the infirmary, he recovered quickly; and in ten days, to my amazement (and annoyance at the time), word came that the old couple were out again. They had toddled feebly home--a two-mile journey; they two together, not to be separated; each of them the sole person in the world left to the other. The old woman, people told me, was amazingly clean. Her hair, which had been cut, proved white beyond expectation; her face was almost comely now that it was washed. Had I not seen her? What a pity it was, wasn't it, the old man wouldn't leave her up there to be took care of, and after all the trouble it had been, too, to get 'em there!

I believe it was on the day before Good Friday (1904) that they returned home. When Bettesworth got to work again is more than my memory tells me. I suppose, though, that I must have paid him a visit first--probably during the following week; for I remember hoping to see the old woman's white hair and clean face, and being disappointed to find her as grimy as ever--her visage almost as black as her hands, and her hair an ashy grey.

XXIII

_May 16, 1904._--"It is long," says a note of the 16th of May, "since I wrote down any of Bettesworth's talk; but it flows on constantly--less vivacious than of old, perhaps, for he is visibly breaking since his illness in the spring, and is a stiff, shiftless, rather weary, rather sad old man; but his garrulity has not lost its flavour of the country-side; and many of his sayings sound to me like the traditional quips and phrases of earlier generations."

This was apropos of a remark he had let fall about a certain Mr.

Sparrow in an adjacent village, for whom Bettesworth's next-door neighbour Kiddy Norris had been labouring, until Kiddy could no longer endure the man's grasping ways. Stooping over his wooden gra.s.s-rake, Bettesworth murmured, as if to the gra.s.s, "Old Jones used to say Sparrows pecks." Then he told how Sparrow, deprived of the services not only of Kiddy, but of Kiddy's mate Alf, was at a loss for men to replace them; and, "Ah," Bettesworth commented, "he can't have 'em on a peg, to take down jest when he mind to." The saying had a suggestive old-world sound: I could imagine it handed about, on the Surrey hill-sides, and in cottage gardens, and at public-houses, over and over again through many years.

Presently Bettesworth said casually, "I hear they're goin' to open that new church over here in Moorway's Bottom to-morrer. Some of 'em was terrifyin' little Alf Cook about it last night" (Sunday night; probably at the public-house), "tellin' him he was goin' to be made clerk, and he wouldn't be tall enough to reach to ring the bell."

"Little Alf," I asked, "who used to work for So-and-so?"

"Worked for 'n for years. The boys do terrify 'n. Tells 'n he won't be able to reach to ring the bell. They keeps on. Why, he en't tall enough to pick strawberries, they says."

"He's got a family, hasn't he?"

"Yes--but they be all doin' for theirselves. Two or three of 'em be married. _He_ might ha' bin doin' very well. His old father left 'n the house he lives in, and a smart bit o' ground: but I dunno--some of 'em reckons 'tis purty near all gone."

"Down his neck?"

"Ah. They was talkin' about 'n last night, and they seemed to reckon there wa'n't much left. But he's a handy little feller. Bin over there at Cashford this six weeks, so he told me, pointin' hop-poles for they Fowlers. He said he'd had purty near enough of it. But he poled, I thinks he said, nine acres o' hop-ground for 'em last year. He bin pointin' this year. He says he might do better if 'twas nearer home--he can't git rid o' the chips over there; people won't have 'em.

If he'd got 'em here, they'd be worth sixpence a sack--that always was the price. He gits so much a hunderd for pointin'; and he told me it was as much as he could do to earn two-and-nine or three shillin's" (a day). "Then o' course there's the chips, only he can't sell 'em.

Cert'nly they'd serve he for firin'; but that en't what he wants."

_May 20._--"There's a dandy. You lay there." Bettesworth chose out and put on one side a dandelion from the gra.s.s he was chopping off a green path. "I'll take he home for my rabbits," he said.

A sow-thistle in the near bank caught my eye. "Your rabbits will eat sow-thistles too, won't they?" I asked.

"Yes, they likes 'em very well. They'll eat 'em--an' then presently I shall eat they."

I pulled up the thistle, and another dandelion, while Bettesworth discoursed of the economics of rabbit-keeping. "'Ten't no good keepin'

'em for the pleasure.... But give me a wild rabbit to eat afore a tame one, any day. My neighbour Kid kills one purty near every week. He had one last Sunday must ha' wanted some boilin', or bakin', or somethin'."

"What, an old one?"

"Old buck. I ast 'n, 'What, have ye had yer teeth ground, then?' I says. He's purty much of a one for rabbits."

I was not so wonderfully fond of them, I said.

"No? I en't had e'er a one--I dunno _when_. Well--a rabbit, you come to put one down afore a hungry man, what is it? He's mother have gone an' bought one for 'n at a shop, when he en't happened to have one hisself--give as much as a shillin' or fifteenpence. 'Ten't worth it.

Or else I've many a time bought 'em for sixpence--sixpence, or sixpence-ha'penny, or sevenpence. And they en't worth no more."

During all this he was sweeping up his gra.s.s cuttings. The children came out of school for afternoon recess, and their shoutings sounded across the valley. "There's the rebels let loose again," said Bettesworth. From where we stood, high on one of the upper terraces of the garden, we could see far. The sky was grey and melancholy. A wind blew up gustily out of the south-east, and I foreboded rain. "We don't want it from that quarter," Bettesworth replied. "That's such a _cold_ rain. And I've knowed it keep on forty-eight hours, out o' the east.... I felt a lot better" (of the recent bronchitis) "when she"

(the wind) "shifted out o' there before."

Meanwhile I had pulled up one or two more dandelions, to add to Bettesworth's heap; and now I espied a small seedling of bryony, which also I was careful to pull out. The root, already as big as a man's thumb, came up easily, and I pa.s.sed it to Bettesworth, asking, "Isn't that what they give to horses sometimes?"

He handled it. "I never _heared_ of anybody," he answered, perhaps not recognizing it at this small stage of growth. "Now, ground _ivy_!