Spring in a Shropshire Abbey

As we mounted the stairs, we saw the old gardener Burbidge waiting for us at the top. He looked like a picture of Old Time, with his grey hair, his worn brown overcoat, his long grey beard, and behind all, the background of snow.

“They are all well,” I called out to him, “in spite of the cold.”

“They was matted up yesterday,” answered the old man, pointing downwards to my pets. Then he went on to say how he and the gardeners strengthened the artificial hedge on the east side, by adding fir branches and some mats, “for it was fit to blow their feathers out, that mortal sharp was the eastwinder;” and Burbidge looked at my pets with indulgent pity, and added, “They be nesh folks, be canaries, for all they write about them.” Then he suspected Bess of giving them forbidden food. “They mustn’t have no green food. It be as bad for ’em as spring showers be for sucking gulleys” (goslings), he added, “and that be certain death.”

“But I haven’t given them anything not allowed,” stammered out Bess, indignantly; “mama and I have only given them what we always do.”

“Ah!” said Burbidge, softening, “that won’t be no hurt then; and as to potato and apple, they be the best quill revivers out, come winter. But what sort of apple was it?”

I replied that the apple was a “Blenheim Orange” and no American.

“NO NEED OF FOREIGN STUFF”

“No need of foreign stuff in Shropshire,” answered Burbidge, proudly. “Our late apples are as sound as if they were only fruited yesterday.”

Then I told him that the potato was one of the same sort that I had last night at dinner – floury, sweet and mealy.

“Then I’ll be bound,” he replied, “you had an Up-to-Dater, or may be a Sutton’s Abundance; they be both sound as a sovereign, real gold all through. No blotches or specks in they. We had four roods of both on the farm. Fresh land, no manure and a dusty summer, and tatters will take care of theirselves; but come a wet year, a field potato is worth two in a garden, although I says it as shouldn’t, but truth is truth, although you have to look up a black chimney to find it, as folks say.”

Then old Burbidge went on to tell me how “Potatoes be right house wenches in a garden, or same as clouts to floors; but don’t you go to takin’ ’em from their nature too early, for when the tops bleed the tubers will never be fit for squire’s food, only fit for a petty tradesman’s table,” and this with Burbidge is always a dark, and outer land of disgrace.

Bess, Burbidge and I paced along the neat swept paths. At last I got my word in. “No damage done by the snow?” I asked.

“I don’t allow no damage,” was our old retainer’s stern reply; “leastways, not after daylight. I and lads were out again with poles this morning.”

We wandered round the close-clipped yews, and peeped over into the borders beyond, while Burbidge talked of “how all had been put to bed” with pride. “Them as wants next year must mind this,” he exclaimed.

All my tea-roses, Chinese peonies, and tender plants had been duly covered up with fern; and branches of spruce and Austrian fir had been carefully placed in front of my clematises Flammula, Montana, and Jackmanni, and round the posts on which my Crimson Rambler, jessamine, and vine ramped in summer.

“They are just resting comfortable,” said Burbidge, complacently. “We all want sleep – plants and men – but let the plants have it suitable, same as childer in their beds.”

We had come to the end of the red-walled garden, and as he said this, Burbidge opened the wrought-iron gate, and I passed down the flight of stairs which leads to the front drive.

“To-morrow we must talk about the list of flowers,” I cried, before he was out of sight and hearing; “we must not forget the butter-beans, and the foreign golden lettuces.”

Burbidge nodded, but not enthusiastically. He doesn’t what he calls “hold to foreign things.” England is his country, and, above all, Shropshire his county, but being very faithful, he is indulgent to my foibles. As Bess and I walked along the pathway, we lingered in the cloisters, and for a moment looked away at the far distance.

We saw nothing but white fields which lay glittering in the sunshine, and the spire of the parish church to the west, which shone like a lance under the clear sky.

“Some day,” Bess said, “take me right away, mamsie, far away with the dogs,” and she pointed to the snow-clad meadows that stretched round the old Abbey precincts. “I like fields,” she added, “better than gardens to walk in, for there are no ‘don’ts’ there for the dogs.”

A RUINED HEDGE

This remark from Bess alluded to my dislike of broken hedges, for, as Burbidge says, “A yew hedge broken, is a kingdom ruined.” I remember this scathing remark was made on a terrible occasion when the great Mouse dashed through a yew hedge in hot pursuit of a very young rabbit, and indeed training down and replacing the broken limb of the yew was no slight matter. It was, in Burbidge’s phraseology, “a long and break-back job, bad as sorting sheep on the Long-Mynd in a snow-storm;” for, as our old gardener expressed it, “Nature be often full of quirks, and sometimes disobliging as a maiden aunt that’s got long in the tooth, and that walks snip-snappy, with an empty purse.”

Ever since this mishap my great hound’s sporting habits have been, therefore, somewhat restricted in the Pleasaunce. But if things have gone wrong by evil chance, and large, very large, paw-marks can be detected on the beds, Burbidge is not without his passing sarcasm. “I prefer a bullock,” or “Big dogs be made for kennels,” he will say. I recalled these reminiscences of spring and summer days, but felt sure, for all he said, that Burbidge would never hurt a hair of my dog’s tail. Gradually the sunlight failed, and Bess and I went indoors. I found my friend Constance, of the Red House, awaiting my return.

Her eye fell on my garden catalogues. “One wants in life many good ways of using common things,” she said; “a variety in fact, without the expense of change.” And then Constance agreed with me that vegetables in England were often only a waste material. “Many of us,” I held, “only know sodden potatoes and cabbage, or salad with an abominable, heavy cream sauce that reminds one of a furniture polish.”

“Vegetables our side of the Channel,” laughed Constance, “are a serious difficulty, partly on account of the cook, and partly on account of the gardener.”

We agreed that the gardener would hardly ever pick them young or tender enough, and that this applies to beans, carrots, peas and artichokes. This set me thinking, and I mentioned a visit I once paid to Chartres some years ago. It was in early June, and I saw several waiters all shelling peas in the courtyard of the principal hotel. I was surprised to note that each man had three little baskets in front of him into which he threw his peas. I was astonished to see so many little baskets, and asked why all the peas could not be put into one basket. “Oh, madame,” said the man in authority, “at Chartres we acknowledge three qualities of peas, and then there are the pods, for the pea-soup.” In what English household would it be possible to get the same amount of trouble taken?

“The methods adopted in England are different,” said Constance dryly. “As regards peas – generally the gardener leaves them till they have attained the hardness of bullets, and then the cook cooks them solely with water, and so a very good vegetable is made as nasty as it is possible to make it.”

Then we both came to the conclusion that peas, “as a fine art,” should be picked very young, or else they were very unwholesome, and that they should have mixed with them a little gravy, cream, or fresh butter. After this Constance asked me about my butter-beans, which, she told me, she thought excellent one day when she lunched with us last September. I told her that the variety that I grew chiefly was Wax Flageolet, and that my seed came from the foreign seedsman, Oskar Knopff, but that now all sorts of butter-beans can be got from English nurserymen, and that Messrs. Barr and Veitch have those and many other excellent sorts.

“They are also as easy to grow, Burbidge says, as the old-fashioned French kinds,” I remarked, “but more juicy and mellow, although they do not look quite so nice on the table. Auguste likes to give them a few minutes longer in boiling, and invariably adds, as is the French and Italian habit, some haricot beans of last year of the old scarlet runner sort boiled quite soft.” Then I praised the foreign habit of serving all vegetables in cream, oil, or a little gravy, and added it is setting the vegetable picture in a good frame. Then from beans we turned to potatoes, and we discussed the best kinds to grow in a moderate-sized garden.

From vegetables we wandered off to embroidery.

A “WROUGHT SHEET” PLANNED

“I want,” Constance told me, “to design a quilt for a big ‘four-poster.’ What they would in the seventeenth century have called a ‘great wrought sheet.’ I am thinking of doing,” she said, “a great border of old-world flowers all round my ‘bed-spread,’ as it is now called in the art shops.”

“What more enchanting,” I cried enthusiastically, and recalled to her mind the beautiful woodcuts that illustrate “Gerard’s Herbal.” “There are there, all the flowers and herbs,” I said, “that you could possibly wish for, and they are all exquisitely drawn and well adapted for such a purpose. The Great Holland, the single Velvet, the Cinnamon, the Provence and the Damask roses, the very names are full of poetry; then of wild flowers, you must think of the Wolfe’s Bane, the Mede Safron, Ladies’ Smock, and Golden Mousear. In the garden, there is the Guinny Hen, and, above all, the gilly-flowers of sorts, and May pinks; and round you might work scrolls of words from poets and philosophers about the joys of sleep.” Then we talked the matter over, and I got quite keen about the colour of the background, and suggested a particular tint of jonquil canary. But Constance would not hear of this, declared she preferred white, and meant to use the hand-made “homespun,” as Shropshire folks call the sheets of the country that were made formerly at Westwood and round Wenlock up to the second half of the last century. “I bought,” she told me, “several old pairs of large hand-made linen sheets at a sale two years ago, and I feel sure they will be delightful to work on. They are not unlike the Langdale linen, only not so fine.” Then Constance went on to say how, in the eighteenth century, every farmhouse in Shropshire had its spinning wheels, and every cottager her love spinning, when her neighbours would come and spin with her out of love and good-fellowship. Besides the good wife’s spinning, many a maiden’s wedding garments were thus made for her by her own playmates, while it was with her own hands that the lass’s wedding sheets were always spun.

Was it a better world, I have often asked myself, when women loved their spinning-wheels and tambour-frames?

Anyway it was a simpler world we both agreed, and probably a more contented one, for all ladies then took delight in superintending, and in the perfection of household work; and the world, high and low, did not commonly feel wasted as it so often does now; and our tongues ran on, on the servant problem.

THE SERVANT PROBLEM DISCUSSED

“A little more education,” argued Constance, “and perhaps the world will move more smoothly. If all the girls could play a tune or two and knew a little more French, the world would not be so proud of one-finger melodies, or isolated syllables of Gallic, that we can vouch are incomprehensible to the native understanding. ’Tis not to be expected, as old Betty in the Dingle says, ‘as the sun can find all the crannies at once.’ Education is slow because gentility is great, and real love or desire for knowledge rare. What we want is not, as Montaigne said, ‘more education, but better education.’”

Then we wandered on to what is knowledge and what are the things worth knowing, and no doubt the hour till tea would have passed all too quickly, if we had not been interrupted by Bess, who dashed downstairs breathless, and bubbling over with excitement.

“A letter,” she cried, “and a letter all for me. Nana,” she explained, “said I must not say ‘yes’ without your leave. But why should papa only have dogs as a matter of course? Here is the note.”

I took the little crumpled paper from Bess’s hands. It was from Maimie Armstrong and written to Bess by a friend’s little girl. I read that “there are several little pups. Mamma,” continued Maimie, “says you are to have one when it is old enough to leave old Nick-nack. They are all blind now and cannot see, but suck all day. One shall be sent in a basket.

“P.S. – I didn’t write all this myself, because ink often goes wrong with me and I can’t spell, but James, the footman, has done it for me.” And then in a very large round child’s hand. “Your loving friend, Maimie Armstrong.”

I straightened out the little sheet and then looked round at Bess. She was literally trembling with excitement and she could hardly speak, but somehow she managed to gasp out, “Mama, I cannot live without a pug-pup.” For the moment I believed she was speaking the truth, so I answered, “Yes, dear, we must have even a pug-pup if it is a necessity.”

“Yes, yes,” cried Bess, with rapture; “and then I shall be quite, quite happy ever afterwards.”

“What a good thing it is to be a child,” said Constance, softly. “One wants everything so badly.”

At my acceding to Bess’s request, Bess ran to me and hugged me rapturously, and called out to old Nana, who had just appeared at the head of the stairs, “I told you so; and the pug-pup is to live in the nursery.”

Nana did not greet this news with the pleasure expected of her, and as the two mounted the stairs, I heard my old female retainer grumble something to herself. But give her time, as Bess always says, “and Nana will always come round, and find you a sweet out of some cupboard before she’s done.”

My old Nana keeps her chamber spotless, tells my little maid long old stories of Shropshire, and wages ceaseless war against fringes and furbelows in her nursery maid. “God made me a good servant,” she always says, with austere pride. And I add reverently, “The Lord only knows the extent of her long devotion.” It has weathered many storms, and has bid defiance to the blasts of misfortune, and to the frosts of adversity. Like the gnarled oak of one of her native forests, Nan has sheltered many young generations of saplings, and in her master’s family have centred her interests, her pleasures: to their well-being she has given her life.

In the evening, after dinner, I went up the old stone staircase that leads to the nursery. Bess was sleeping peacefully, but she was not hugging, as is her wont, her favourite old doll “Sambo.”

THE PUG PRINCE