Two Suffolk Friends Part 1

Two Suffolk Friends.

by Francis Hindes Groome.

PREFACE.

Published originally in 'Blackwood's Magazine' four and six years ago, and now a good deal extended, these two papers, I think, will be welcome to many in East Anglia who knew my father, and to more, the world over, who know FitzGerald's letters and translations. I may say this with the better grace and greater confidence, as in both there is so much that is not mine, and both have already brought me so many kindly letters--from Freshwater, Putney Hill, Liverpool, Cambridge, Aldeburgh, Italy, the United States, India, and "other nations too tedious to mention." All the ill.u.s.trations have been made in Bohemia from photographs taken by my elder sister, except Nos. 6, 8, and 9, the first of which is from the well-known photograph of FitzGerald by Cade of Ipswich, whilst the other two I owe to my friend, Mr Edward Clodd.

F. H. G.

A SUFFOLK PARSON.

The chief aim of this essay is to present to a larger public than the readers of a country newspaper my father's Suffolk stories; but those stories may well be prefaced by a sketch of my father's life. Such a sketch I wrote shortly after his death, for the great 'Dictionary of National Biography.' It runs thus:--

"Robert Hindes Groome, Archdeacon of Suffolk, was born at Framlingham in 1810. Of Aldeburgh ancestry, he was the second son of the Rev.

John Hindes Groome, ex-fellow of Pembroke College, Cambridge, and rector for twenty-six years of Earl Soham and Monk Soham in Suffolk.

From Norwich school he pa.s.sed to Caius College, Cambridge, where he graduated B.A. in 1832, M.A. in 1836. In 1833 he was ordained to the Suffolk curacy of Tannington-with-Brandish; in 1835 travelled through Germany as tutor to Rafael Mendizabal, the son of the Spanish amba.s.sador; in 1839 became curate of Corfe Castle, Dorsets.h.i.+re; and in 1845 succeeded his father as rector of Monk Soham. Here in the course of forty-four years he built the rectory-house and school, restored the fine old church, erected an organ, and re-hung the bells. He was Archdeacon of Suffolk from 1869 till 1887, when failing eyesight forced him to resign, and when the clergy of the diocese presented him with his portrait. He died at Monk Soham, 19th March 1889. Archdeacon Groome was a man of wide culture--a man, too, of many friends. Chief among these were Edward FitzGerald, William Bodham Donne, Dr Thompson of Trinity, and Henry Bradshaw, the Cambridge librarian, who said of him, 'I never see Groome but what I learn something new.' He read much, but published little--a couple of charges, a sermon and lecture or two, some hymns and hymn-tunes, and a good many articles in the 'Christian Advocate and Review,' of which he was editor from 1861 to 1866. His best productions are his Suffolk stories: for humour and tenderness these come near to 'Rab and his Friends.'"

An uneventful life, like that of most country clergymen. But as Gainsborough and Constable took their subjects from level East Anglia, as Gilbert White's Selborne has little to distinguish it above other parishes in Hamps.h.i.+re, {5} so I believe that the story of that quiet life might, if rightly told, possess no common charm. I have listened to my father's talks with Edward FitzGerald, with William Bodham Donne, and with two or three others of his oldest friends; such talks were like chapters out of George Eliot's novels. His memory was marvellous. It seems but the other day I told him I had been writing about Clarendon; and "Clarendon," he said, "was born, I know, in 1608, but I forget the name of the Wilts.h.i.+re parish his birthplace. Look it up." I looked it up, and the date _was_ 1608; the parish (Dinton) was, sure enough, in Wilts.h.i.+re. Myself I have had again to consult an encyclopaedia for both date and place-name, but he remembered the one distinctly and the other vaguely after possibly thirty years. In the same way he could recall the whole plot of a play which he had not seen for half a century. Holcroft's 'Road to Ruin,' thus, was one that he once described to me. He was a master of the art, now wellnigh lost, of "capping verses"; and he had a rare knowledge of the less-known Elizabethan dramatists. In his first Charge occurs a quotation from an "old play"; and one of his hearers, Canon "Grundy," inquired what play it might be. "Ford's," said my father, "''Tis pity she's no better than she should be.'" And the good man was perfectly satisfied. But stronger than his love of Wordsworth and music, of the cla.s.sics and foreign theology, was his love of Suffolk--its lore, its dialect, its people. As a young man he had driven through it with Mr D. E. Davy, the antiquary; and as archdeacon he visited and revisited its three hundred churches in the Norwich diocese during close on a score of years. I drove with him twice on his rounds, and there was not a place that did not evoke some memory. If he could himself have written those memories down! He did make the attempt, but too late. This was all the result:--

"_Oct._ 23, 1886.

"I cannot see to read, but as yet I can see to write. That is, I can see the continuous grey line of writing, and can mechanically write one word after another. But if I leave off abruptly, I cannot always remember what was the last word that I wrote, and read it generally I cannot.

{Monk Soham Church: p6.jpg}

"I should be thankful for being able to write at all, and I hope I am; but I am not enough thankful. The failure of my sight has been very gradual, but of late it has been more sudden. Three months ago I could employ myself in reading; now I cannot, save with a book, such as the Prayer-book, with which I am well acquainted, and which is of clear large type. So that as yet I can take my duty.

"I was born at Framlingham on January 18, 1810, so that I am now nearly seventy-seven years old. The house still stands where I was born, little if at all changed. It is the first house on the left-hand side of the Market Hill, after ascending a short flight of steps. My father, at the time of my birth, was curate to his brother-in-law, Mr Wyatt, who was then rector of Framlingham. I was the younger of two sons, my brother Hindes being thirteen months older than I was.

"As we left Framlingham in 1813, my recollections of it are very indistinct. I have an impression of being taken out to see a fire; but as I have since been told that the fire happened a year before I was born, I suppose that I have heard it so often spoken of that in the end I came to believe that I myself had seen it. Yet one thing I can surely remember, that, being sent to a dame's school to keep me out of mischief, I used to stand by her side p.r.i.c.king holes in some picture or pattern which had been drawn upon a piece of paper.

"In 1813, after the death of Mr Wyatt, my father took the curacy of Rendlesham, where we lived till the year 1815. The rector of Rendlesham at that time was Dr Henley, {8} who was also princ.i.p.al of the East India College of Haileybury, so that we lived in the rectory, Dr Henley rarely coming to the parish. That house remains unchanged, as I shall have occasion to tell. Lois Dowsing was our cook, and lived nearly forty years in my father's service--one of those faithful servants who said little, but cared dearly for us all.

"Of Rendlesham I have clear recollection, and things that happened in it.

It was there I first learnt to read. My mother has told me that I could not be taught to know the letter H, take all the pains she could. My father, thinking that the fault lay in the teacher, undertook to accomplish the task. Accordingly he drew, as he thought, the picture of a hog, and wrote a capital H under it. But whether it was the fault of the drawing--I am inclined to think that it was--or whether it was my obstinacy, but when it was shown me, I persisted in calling it 'papa's grey mare.'

"There was a high sandbank not far from the house, through which the small roots of the bushes growing protruded. My brother and I never touched these. We believed that if we pulled one of them, a bell would ring and the devil would appear. So we never pulled them. In a ploughed field near by was a large piece of ground at one end, with a pond in the middle of it, and with many wild cherry-trees near it. I can remember now how pretty they were with their covering of white blossoms, and the gra.s.s below full of flowers--primroses, cowslips, and, above all, orchises. But the pond was no ordinary one. It was always called the 'S pond,' being shaped like that letter. I suspect, too, that it was a pond of ill repute--perhaps connected with heathen wors.h.i.+p--for we were warned never to go near its edge, lest the Mermaid should come and _crome_ us in. _Crome_, as all East Anglians know, means 'crook'; and in later years I remember a Suffolk boy at Norwich school translated a pa.s.sage from the 'Hecuba' of Euripides, in which the aged queen is described as 'leaning upon a crooked staff,' by 'leaning upon a _crome_ stick,' which I still think was a very happy rendering.

"Not far also from the rectory was a cottage, in which lived a family by the name of Catton. Close to the cottage was a well, worked by buckets.

When the bucket was not being let down, the well was protected by a cover made of two hurdles, which fell down and met in the middle. These hurdles, be it noted, were old and apparently rotten. One day I was playing near the well, and nothing would, I suppose, satisfy me but I must climb up and creep over the well. In the act of doing this I was seen by Mrs Catton, who saved me, perhaps, from falling down the well, and carried me home, detailing the great escape. Well do I remember, not so much the whipping, as the being shut up in a dark closet behind the study. So strong was and is the impression, that, on visiting Rendlesham as archdeacon, when I was sixty years old, on going up to the rectory- house I asked especially to see this dark closet. There it was, dark and unchanged since fifty-six years ago; and at the sight of it I had no comfortable recollection, nor have I now.

"In the year 1814 was a great feast on the Green--a rejoicing for the peace. One thing still sticks to my memory, and that is the figure of Mrs Sheming, a farmer's wife. She was a very large woman, and wore a tight-fitting white dress, with a blue ribbon round her waist, on which was printed 'Peace and Plenty.'

"In the year 1815 we spent the summer in London, in a house in Brunswick Square, which overlooked the grounds of the Foundling Hospital. Three events of that year have always remained impressed on my memory. The first was the death of little Mary, our only sister. She must have been a strangely precocious child, since at barely three years old she could wellnigh read. My mother, who died fifty-two years after in her eighty- third year, on each year when Mary's death came round took out her clothes, kept so long, and, after airing them, put them away in their own drawer. The second event, which I well remember, was being taken out to see the illuminations for the battle of Waterloo. I can perfectly remember the face of Somerset House, all ablaze with coloured lamps. The third event was the funeral of a poor girl named Elizabeth Fenning." {11}

And there those childish reminiscences broke off--never to be resumed.

But from recollections of my father's talk--and he loved to talk of the past--I will attempt to write what he himself might have written; no set biography, but just the old household tales.

After the visit to London the family lived a while at Wickham Market, where my father saw the long strings of tumbrils, laden with Waterloo wounded, on their way from Yarmouth to London. Then in 1818 they settled at Earl Soham, my grandfather having become rector of that parish and Monk Soham. His father, Robinson Groome, the sea-captain, had purchased the advowson of Earl Soham from the Rev. Francis Capper (1735-1818), whose long tenure {12} of his two conjoint livings was celebrated by the local epigrammatist:--

"Capper, they say, has bought a horse-- The pleasure of it bating-- That man may surely keep a horse Who keeps a Groome in waiting."

It was in the summer-house at Earl Soham that my father, a very small boy, read 'Gil Blas' to the cook, Lois Dowsing, and the sweetheart she never married, a strapping sergeant of the Guards, who had fought at Waterloo. And it was climbing through the window of this summer-house that he tore a big rent in his breeches (he had just been promoted to them), so was packed off to bed. That afternoon my grandfather and grandmother were sitting in the summer-house, and she told him of the mishap and its punishment. "Stupid child!" said my grandfather; "why, I could get through there myself." He tried, and he too tore his small- clothes, but he was not sent to bed.

With his elder brother, John Hindes (afterwards Rector of Earl Soham), my father went to school at Norwich under Valpy. The first time my grandfather drove them, a forty-mile drive; and when they came in sight of the cathedral spire, he pulled up, and they all three fell a-weeping.

For my grandfather was a tender-hearted man, moved to tears by the Waverley novels. Of Valpy my father would tell how once he had flogged a day-boy, whose father came the next day to complain of his severity.

"Sir," said Valpy, "I flogged your son because he richly deserved it. If he again deserves it, I shall again flog him. And"--rising--"if you come here, sir, interfering with my duty, sir, I shall flog you." The parent fled.

The following story I owe to an old schoolfellow of my father's, the Rev.

William Drake. "Among the lower boys," he writes, "were a brother of mine, somewhat of a pickle, and a cla.s.smate of his, who in after years blossomed into a Ritualistic clergyman, and who was the son of a gentleman, living in the Lower Close, not remarkable for personal beauty.

One morning, as he was coming up the school, the sound of weeping reached old Valpy's ears: straightway he stopped to investigate whence it proceeded. 'Stand up, sir,' he cried in a voice of thunder, for he hated snivelling; 'what is the matter with you?' 'Please, sir,' came the answer, much interrupted by sobs and tears, 'Bob Drake says I'm uglier than my father, and that my father is as ugly as the Devil.'"

Another old Norwich story may come in here, of two middle-aged brothers, Jeremiah and Ozias, the sons of a dead composer, and themselves performers on the pianoforte. At a party one evening Jeremiah had just played something, when Ozias came up and asked him, "Brother Jerry, what was that _beastly_ thing you were playing?" "Ozias, it was our father's," was the reproachful answer; and Ozias burst into tears.

{Monk Soham Rectory: p14.jpg}

When my father went up to Cambridge, his father went with him, and introduced him to divers old dons, one of whom offered him this sage advice, "Stick to your quadratics, young man. _I_ got my fellows.h.i.+p through my quadratics." Another, the mathematical lecturer at Peterhouse, was a Suffolk man, and spoke broad Suffolk. One day he was lecturing on mechanics, and had arranged from the lecture-room ceiling a system of pulleys, which he proceeded to explain,--"Yeou see, I pull this string; it will turn this small wheel, and then the next wheel, and then the next, and then will raise that heavy weight at the end." He pulled--nothing happened. He pulled again--still no result. "At least ta should," he remarked.

Music engrossed, I fancy, a good deal of my father's time at Cambridge.

He saw much of Mrs Frere of Downing, a pupil of a pupil of Handel's. Of her he has written in the Preface to FitzGerald's 'Letters.' He was a member of the well-known "Camus"; and it was he (so the late Sir George Paget informed my doctor-brother) who settled the dispute as to precedence between vocalists and instrumentalists with the apt quotation, "The singers go before, the minstrels follow after." He was an instrumentalist himself, his instrument the 'cello; and there was a story how he, the future Master of Trinity, and some brother musicians were proctorised one night, as they were returning from a festive meeting, each man performing on his several instrument.

He was an attendant at the debates at the Cambridge Union, _e.g._, at the one when the question debated was, "Will Mr Coleridge's poem of 'The Ancient Mariner' or Mr Martin's Act tend most to prevent cruelty to animals?" The voting was, for Mr Martin 5, for Mr Coleridge 47; and "only two" says a note written by my father in 1877, "of the seven who took part in the debate are now living--Lord Houghton and the Dean of Lincoln. How many still remember kind and civil Baxter, the harness-maker opposite Trinity; and how many of them ever heard him sing his famous song of 'Poor Old Horse'? Yet for pathos, and, unhappily in some cases, for truth, it may well rank even with 'The Ancient Mariner.'

And Baxter used to sing it so tenderly."

Meanwhile, of the Earl Soham life--a life not unlike that of "Raveloe"--my father had much to tell. There was the Book Club, with its meetings at the "Falcon," where, in the words of a local diarist, "a dozen honest gentlemen dined merrily." There were the heavy dinner-parties at my grandfather's, the regulation allowance of port a bottle per man, but more _ad libitum_. And there was the yearly "Soham Fair," on July 12, when my grandfather kept open house for the parsons or other gentry and their womankind, who flocked in from miles around. On one such occasion my father had to squire a new-comer about the fair. The wife of a retired City alderman, she was enormously stout, and had chosen to appear in a low dress. ("Hillo, bor! what are yeou a-dewin' with the Fat Woman?"--one can imagine the delicate raillery.)

A well-known Earl-Sohamite was old Mr P---, who stuttered and was certainly eccentric. In summer-time he loved to catch small "freshers"

(young frogs), and let them hop down his throat, when he would stroke his stomach, observing, "B-b-b-b-eautifully cool." He was a staunch believer in the claims of the "Princess Olive." She used to stay with him, and he always addressed her as "Your Royal Highness." Then, there was Dr Belman. He was playing whist one evening with a maiden lady for partner.

She trumped his best card, and, at the end of the hand, he asked her the reason why. "Oh, Dr Belman" (smilingly), "I judged it judicious."

"_Judicious_! JUDICIOUS!! JUDICIOUS!!! _You old fool_!" She never again touched a card. Was it the same maiden lady who was the strong believer in h.o.m.oeopathy, and who one day took five globules of aconite in mistake for three? Frightened, she sent off for her h.o.m.oeopathic adviser--he was from home. So, for want of a better, she called in old Dr Belman. He came, looked grave, shook his head, said if people would meddle with dangerous drugs they must take the consequences. "But, madam," he added, "I will die with you;" and, lifting the bottle of the fatal globules, swallowed its whole contents. {17}

To the days of my father's first curacy belongs the story of the old woman at Tannington, who fell ill one winter when the snow was on the ground. She got worse and worse, and sent for Dr Mayhew, who questioned her as to the cause of her illness. Something she said made him think that the fault must lie with either her kettle or her tea-pot, as she seemed, by her account, to get worse every time she drank any tea. So he examined the kettle, turned it upside down, and then, in old Betty's own words, "Out drop a big toad. He tarned the kittle up, and out ta fell flop." Some days before she had "deeved" her kettle into the snow instead of filling it at the pump, and had then got the toad in it, which had thus been slowly simmering into toad-broth. At Tannington also they came to my father to ask him to let them have the church Bible and the church key. The key was to be spun round on the Bible, and if it had pointed at a certain old woman who was suspected of being a witch, they would have certainly ducked her.

A score of old faded letters, close-written and crossed, are lying before me: my father wrote them in 1835 to his father, mother, and brother from Brussels, Mainz, Leipzig, Dresden, Prague, Munich, &c. At Frankfurt he dined with the Rothschilds, and sat next the baroness, "who in face and figure was very like Mrs Cook, and who spoke little English, but that little much to the purpose. For one dish I must eat because 'dis is Germany,' and another because 'dis is England,' placing at the word a large slice of roast-beef on my plate. The dinner began at half-past two, and lasted three mortal hours, during the first of which I ate because I was hungry, during the second out of politeness, and during the third out of sheer desperation." Then there is a descent into a silver- mine with the present Lord Wemyss (better known as Lord Elcho), a gruesome execution of three murderers, and a good deal besides of some interest,--but the interest is not of Suffolk.

During his six years' Dorset curacy my father was elected mayor of the little borough of Corfe Castle; and it was in Dorset, on 1st February 1843, that he married my mother, Mary Jackson (1815-93), the youngest daughter of the Rev. James Leonard Jackson, rector of Swanage, and of Louisa Decima Hyde Wollaston. Her father, my grandfather, was a great taker of snuff; and one bl.u.s.tery day he was walking upon the cliffs when his hat blew off. He chased it and chased it over two or three fields until at last he got it in the angle of two stone walls. "Aha! my friend, I think I have you now," said my grandfather, and proceeded to take a leisurely pinch of snuff, when a puff of wind came and blew the hat far out to sea. There are many more Dorsets.h.i.+re stories that recur to my memory; but neither here is the interest of Suffolk. So to Suffolk we will come back, like my father in 1845, in which year he succeeded his father as rector of Monk Soham.

Monk Soham is a straggling parish of 1600 acres and 400 inhabitants. {20} It lies remote to-day, as it lay remote in pre-Reformation times, when it was a cell of St Edmundsbury, whither refractory monks were sent for rustication. Hence its name (the "south village of the monks"); and hence, too, the fish-ponds for Lenten fare, in the rectory gardens. Three of them enclose the orchard, which is planted quincunx-wise, with yew hedge and gra.s.s-walk all round it. The "Archdeacon's Walk" that gra.s.s- walk should be named, for my father paced it morning after morning. The pike and roach would plash among the reeds and water-lilies; and "Fish, fish, do your duty," my father would say to them. Whereupon, he maintained, the fish always put out their noses and answered, "If _you_ do your duty, _we_ do our duty,"--words fully as applicable to parson as to sultan.

{"Fish, fish, do your duty.": p20.jpg}

The parish has no history, unless that a former rector, Thomas Rogerson, was sequestrated as a royalist in 1642, and next year his wife and children were turned out of doors by the Puritans. "After which," Walker tells us, "Mr Rogerson lived with a Country-man in a very mean Cottage upon a Heath, for some years, and in a very low and miserable Condition."

But if Monk Soham has no history, its church, St Peter's, is striking even among Suffolk churches, for the size of the chancel, the great traceried east window, and the font sculptured with the Seven Sacraments.