Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 819
In such a glow of feeling years ago I subscribed to the Hampshire Society (one guinea per annum), and it was certainly a delight at first to get the annual circular, with the names of the Lord Lieutenant and a lot of people as fellow members, and the receipts and disbursements, and the balance carried forward — excitements like that. So it went on that way year after year for years — a guinea and a guinea and a guinea — till one year all of a sudden I got an angry fit of economy (in the depression) and asked, What am I getting out of all this? — a guinea and a guinea — that could go on forever — and I wrote and cut out my membership. It’s nothing against Hampshire. People do that to Texas and Newfoundland. And in any case it was in the same year and about the same time that I cut out my subscriptions to the Royal Society of Canada and the Authors’ Association — even to things that I didn’t belong to. But it seemed a dirty trick to have dropped the Hampshire Society and to have fallen out of the Receipts and Disbursements and General Balance.
My family were Hampshire people on both sides — not, of course, the real thing, going back to the Conquest, but not bad. The Leacocks lived on the Isle of Wight, where my grandfather had a house called Oak Hill near Ryde, but I gather that he wanted the island for himself and didn’t want his sons to come crowding onto it. That’s why they were sent out across the world wherever it was farthest. The Leacocks had made a lot of money out of plantations in Madeira and the Madeira wine trade, so much that my great-grandfather John Leacock had retired and bought the house at Oak Hill. After that nobody in the family did any work (any real work) for three generations, after which, in my generation, we were all broke and had to start work — and work in the low-down sense, where you work by the hour, a thing that would disqualify anybody in Hampshire right off the bat. My brothers, I think, got seventeen cents an hour. I got a cent a minute, but that was as a schoolteacher. But I am anticipating and I turn back.
The Leacocks, I say, were in Madeira wine and the wine trade, and some of my cousins are still there and still in it. The senior member of the family got out a few years ago a booklet about Madeira wines and the Leacock family and he put into it the fatal sentence: “The first recorded Leacock was a London day labourer, whose son was brought up at a charity school and went out as a ship’s cabin boy to Madeira!” Think of it! What can you do after that? It’s no use going on to say what a wonderful fellow the ship’s cabin boy was and how he built up great plantations and ownerships. That’s no good. You can’t get over that day-labourer stuff. The Lord Lieutenant of Hampshire knows just where to class me.
My mother’s family, the Butlers, were much better, though you couldn’t really call them Hampshire people as they had not, at the time of which I speak, been in Hampshire for more than one hundred and fifty years. They lived, and do still, in a house called Bury Lodge, which is on a hill over-looking the immemorial village of Hambledon, Hants, a village so old that they talk there of the Great Plague of 1666, when so many people were buried in the churchyard, as an affliction of yesterday. Hambledon, Hants, is to all people who play cricket and love the game as Mecca is to a Mohammedan. Here, more than anywhere else, began the sacred game — for there is no other adjective that can convey what cricket means to Englishmen than the word “sacred.” Here, on the wind-swept open space of “Broadhalfpenny Down,” was bowled the first ball, the first rushing underhand ball where bowling began. Here men in top hats planned and named the game, designated, by a flight of daring fancy, the strip of ground between the wickets as the “pitch,” indicated the right side of the batter as the “on” side and the left as the “off” side — names taken from the English carriage driving — christened the brave man fielding thirty feet behind the batter’s bat as “square leg” (he needed to be), invented the “over” and the “wide” and the “no ball” and L.B.W. — to be carried round the world later as the abiding bond of the British Empire.
The Butler family were intimately concerned with the beginnings of cricket, and in the drawing room of Bury Lodge are preserved (on blue foolscap paper, gummed onto the fire screens) some of the earliest scores at Broadhalfpenny Down. When I was lecturing in London in 1921 I mentioned to E. V. Lucas, the famous humorist (also one of the great authorities on cricket) this family connection and the old score sheets at Bury Lodge. I found that he at once regarded me with a sort of reverence. Nothing would do him but we must drive down to Hampshire to look at them. This we did, Lucas supplying the car, while I felt that my presence with him was compensation enough. The house was shut up, as the Butlers were in London, but a housekeeper showed us the scores, and then we drove up to Broadhalfpenny Down and stood there in the wind — well, just as people stand on the ruins of Carthage. After that we went down into Hambledon village and to the “pub,” where I had all that peculiar gratification that goes with “the return of the native.” There were several old men around, and it was astonishing what they could remember over a pint of beer, and still more over a quart. I had been away from Hambledon for nearly fifty years, so it enabled one to play the part of Rip van Winkle. I didn’t mention that I had been there only once before, for ten minutes, as a child of six.
Generally the return of the native to his native town (for its old home week or for what not) is apt to be spoiled by the fact that after all he hasn’t been away long enough, only ten or a dozen years at most. So when he says, “What’s become of the queer old cuss who used to keep the drugstore? When did he die?” they answer in chorus, “He’s not dead. He’s right there still.” In such circumstances never say that you’d give ten dollars to see so-and-so again, or they’ll go and bring him.
As I say, my grandfather needed all the Isle of Wight to himself, and so when my father married my mother, whose name was Agnes Butler, daughter of the Reverend Stephen Butler, they were promptly sent out to South Africa. That was in 1866-67, long before the days of diamonds and gold created the South Africa of sorrows that came later. Those were the days of sailing ships, of infinite distances and of long farewells. They went “upcountry” to Maritzburg in oxcarts and then out beyond it to settle. It was all as primitive then as we see it in the movies that deal with Dr. Livingstone and darkest Africa. I saw Maritzburg forty years later, when its people seemed a mass of Asiatics, the immigrant wave from India that first awoke South Africa to the “Asiatic peril.”
Maritzburg in 1867 no doubt appeared singularly quiet, but to those who lived there the whole place, as my mother has told me, was “seething with the Colenso controversy.” I imagine few people of today remember the name of Colenso, the Bishop of Natal, the mathematician over whose Arithmetic and Algebra a generation of English schoolboys groaned and whose mild aspersions on the Pentateuch — I think it means the first five books of the Old Testament — opened the way, like a water leak in a dam, to heresies that swept away the literal interpretation of Scripture. Colenso became a sort of test case, in orthodoxy, and in the law as to the government of the Church of England in the colonies, and locally a test case in the fidelity of the congregation. Some people in Natal would allow their children to be baptised by the bishop and some wouldn’t and held them over for the dean any time the bishop was away. My eldest brother, who was born in Natal, got caught up in this controversy and was torn backward and forward before he could be christened. But the South African climate proved impossible for my mother and the locusts ate up their farm, and so the family came home again to Hampshire.
My grandfather then took another big think as to where he would send them to, and it was in this interregnum of thinking that my father was supposed to be “learning farming” to fit him to be sent to America. There was at that time in England a prevalent myth that farming could be “learned,” especially by young men who couldn’t learn anything else. So my father seems to have been moved round from one centre to another, drinking beer under the tutelage of Hampshire farmers — who, of course, could drink more than he could — an agreeable life in which a young man was supposed to remain a gentleman even if he acted like a farmer. As those of us who have been brought up on farms know, you can’t “learn farming,” at least not that way. We could, in fact, whisper to one another the way you learn it. First of all, as Course No. 1, First Year Agronomics, you get onto a wagonload of manure at six in the morning and drive up and down a seven-acre field throwing it in all directions, in fact seeing how far you can throw it. Then you go back for another load. Course No. 2, or Cultivation, involves driving two horses hitched to what is called a set of field harrow up and down a dry ploughed field so as to turn it into a cloud of dust and thistledown. During the driving you shout Gee and Haw at the horses. They don’t know what it means, but they are used to hearing it and they know where to go anyway. Courses like that, carried on systematically over a period of years, make a man a farmer.
Of course I don’t deny that over this and above it are the real courses in agriculture such as they teach at Ste. Anne’s, P.Q., out near Montreal, and at the Ontario Agricultural College at Guelph, both splendid places. Here a student goes at it all scientifically, learning the chemistry of the thing and the composition of soils and all that. Hence when he goes back onto the farm he sees it all with a new eye. He still spends his days driving the manure wagon round a seven-acre field and driving harrows in a cloud of dust. But it is all different. He now knows what manure is. Before that he thought it was just manure. And he now understands why dust floats and he knows what he is doing when he pulverizes the soil, instead of merely thinking that he is “breaking it up good.”
During this period of interregnum my father and mother lived at different places — Swanmore and Shoreham (in Sussex) and then Porchester. Their large family (which ultimately reached eleven in England and Canada) were born round in this way, only two in the same place of the six born in England. It was from Porchester that my father was sent out ahead of us by my grandfather to Kansas, a place of which my grandfather must have heard great things in the early seventies, though its first charm of the John Brown days was fading.
Porchester is the only place of my childhood days in England that I really remember. I lived there for two years (age four and a half to six and a half), and in a sense it still means the England that is England to me. At the opening of the present war, when the inspiring song “There’ll Always Be an England” burst upon the world, I set forth this theme, as centred for me round Porchester in a magazine publication, which I reproduce here.
THE ENGLAND I REMEMBER
There’ll Always Be an England
I imagine that somebody first said that away back in Anglo-Saxon times. The people who heard him say it most likely remarked, “Well, naturally!” and, “Poetic chap, eh?”
Yet when I first heard those words sung they brought back to me a sudden remembrance of the England of my childhood and a poignant affection for it, more than I knew I had. This, I am sure, happened to many people. . . .
ALWAYS BE AN ENGLAND
This, most certainly, is true of the immemorial village of Porchester in which I was brought up, for which the flight of time was meaningless. But my father’s farm in South Africa, as I have said before, was eaten out by locusts, and so he and my mother came home, where I and other brothers were born. Meantime my grandfather was consulting the map and picked on Kansas because at that time the railways only got that far. My father went first, and we were placed in Porchester so that we couldn’t get to the Isle of Wight too often. We were ready to go to America when word came that my father’s farm in Kansas had been eaten by grasshoppers (they are the same as locusts). This meant delay while my grandfather looked for something farther still. So we waited on in Porchester, and I had altogether six years of an English childhood that I had no right to have under the rules.
Porchester? Where is it? Right across the water from Portsmouth. What water? Ah, now, that I never knew — it’s the water between Portsmouth and Porchester. You can tell it by the tall masts and yards of the men-of-war and of the Victory swinging there at anchor. . . . Up at the end of it was Paul’s Grove, where St. Paul preached to the ancient — ah, there you have me — but to a congregation probably very like my uncle Charles’s congregation in the little Porchester church. . . . The church stood — or it did in 1876, and things can hardly have changed in so short a time — inside the precincts of Porchester Castle. You’ve seen the castle, perhaps — a vast quadrangle of towers and battlements, and a great space inside for cattle during sieges. The newer parts were built by the Normans but the original part by the Romans. The Normans built the church, but Good Queen Anne “restored” it, with a lot of others, and so, on the wall, there was a great painted lettering in gilt and faded colours: BY THE BOUNTY OF QUEEN ANNE. You could spell it out from your tall pew by the sunlight falling on the wall through the dancing leaves, while Uncle Charles preached, quietly so as not to wake the Normans, and the people gently dozed.
. . . ALWAYS, AN ENGLAND . . .
Why, of course, to the people of Porchester. Time left no trace there; all the centuries were yesterday, St. Paul, and the castle, and Queen Elizabeth’s bedroom, and Uncle Charles and Queen Anne.
. . . WHEREVER THERE’S A BUSY STREET . . .
Busy? Well, I suppose you would call it busy, the village street with the little “common” breaking it in the middle. There was only one of everything: one public house, one grocery, one rectory (Uncle Charles’s), one windmill (Pyecroft’s), one fly (Peacock’s), and so on. There’d been no competition for years. The public house, the Crown and Anchor, stood where it should, where the streets came together at the “common,” and looked as it should in Father, Dear Father, Come Home with Me Now . . . with red curtains in the windows.
. . . WHEREVER THERE ARE TURNING WHEELS . . .
Pyecroft’s mill looked just right, standing down on the water a little way from the castle. The sails of Pyecroft’s mill moved so slowly they seemed to soar and hover. Tennyson speaks of a “tall mill that whistled on the waste.” He fell down there, eh, Pyecroft? Pyecroft looked the part admirably, all dust . . . and Peacock who had the fly matched it. All the people in Porchester looked like that; each fitted the part . . . Old General Hurdle coming down the street, a frail, old, soldierly figure, so upright that he quivered on his stick. Take old Grubb, who had been in the Navy in the Great War (what we called the Great War then); he sat catching periwinkles, or whatever they caught, where the castle moat drained into the sea. He looked it exactly, all tar. . . .
All the people, as I say, looked the part — the kind of things despaired of by the movies. I never knew whether Gilbert and Sullivan copied England or England copied Gilbert and Sullivan.
. . . A MILLION MARCHING FEET . . .
I am afraid that would be a large order for Porchester in 1876 . . . a million — well, perhaps it seemed so to us children when swarms of people used to come to the castle on holidays — I only half recall them, Whitmonday, something Wednesday, Coronation Day — with Aunt Sally’s ginger beer and swings and drunken sailors.
. . . RED, WHITE, AND BLUE . . .
The blue, of course, was the sea. As for the “drunken sailors,” why indeed shouldn’t they be drunk? They were “ashore,” weren’t they? Those sailors were better drunk than sober . . . scattering pennies and full of fun. Now a soldier was different . . . a low sort of fellow, hanging around public houses and getting poor girls into trouble . . . Why isn’t he off in Ashantee or someplace like that where soldiers belong?
. . . BRITONS, AWAKE . . .
Awake? Well, not too completely. I think of Uncle Charles preaching decorously, quietly, the congregation nodding. I wouldn’t disturb that; it has been undisturbed too long. Uncle Charles — I have heard him say it — was singularly fortunate. In Porchester there was no outbreak of “religion.” There was no chapel, no open-air preaching, no vulgar confession of sin. No people got sudden “salvation”; they got it gradually, through eighty years of drowsy Sundays. When I was six it all came to an end. My grandfather found a place called Upper Canada, clean out of reach of a railway. . . .
. . . WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO YOU? . . .
Then came the most vivid memory, saying good-bye to England as a child. . . . We went on board a great ship at Liverpool, a ship with the towering masts and rigging of the grand old days . . . went on board from a hole in the side, it seemed. It was all very wonderful to us, though lots of people, like my mother, cried, because going to America in 1876 meant good-bye.
But for us, the children, it was different; it was all wonderful . . . the crew and all the passengers joined to haul up the anchor . . . And they sang the song of the departing English, “Cheer, boys, cheer, no more of idle sorrow,” that echoed down the decades. As the words died away on the ear— “Farewell, England, much as we have loved thee, courage, true hearts, will bear us on our way!” — the great ship was surging into the darkness under press of sail heading to what we call “America.”
. . . SHOUT IT LOUD: THE EMPIRE TOO . . .
It was all fun for us . . . the wind, the waves, the magnificence of the “saloon” . . . And then the great sheets of ice until the ship stopped. On Sunday the clergyman prayed to have it taken away and it went.
Then came a morning when someone called down the companionway, “Come and see America” . . . And there it was, a tall, hard coast of trees and rock, clear and bright in the sunshine, not a bit soft, like England.
. . . IF ENGLAND MEANS AS MUCH TO YOU . . .
It was the Gaspé coast, and we were entering the St. Lawrence. I understand that one of the members who represents this section in a legislature proposes to break away from England the three million people of English race and birth, to say nothing of the other three million British, who live in Canada. It would be to blot out, for some, the memories of childhood and, for all, the remembered talk of parents and old people . . . tear up the books that hold the elegies in country churchyards, and hush the sea songs of England on which Tom Bowling’s name floats to us down the wind.
