Part 9 (1/2)

Here is the very striking and characteristic exordiuraphy:

I have not had an unpleasant life, although I was an old maid, and was a servant for fifty years I was a nurse and no mother could have loved her children ood ainst their will

The third and last was my mother, whom the old nurse outlived for many years

Here is her account of the miseries endured by the poor after Waterloo-- miseries which I often think of in these days, when I note the foolish, the de our econo of the ti at Dart was very dear We lived mostly on barley bread We children were so used to it that we did not nance, and ays tried tothat she could not properly afford it Many a time (so she told me in after-years) she o hungry to bed The cheapest sugar was then tenpence a pound, and the very cheapest tea quite as et for my mother was in very small quantities We children never had it, nor, as far as I reet h their poverty was so dire it did not kill the girl's joy in life or, wonderful to say, in literature:

Though ere very poor, my childhood seems pleasant to me as I look back, for myvery often, and ere glad she should go, for she got better food than she could get at hoood to her, she soot food for her le with her conscience, and her love of what is called light reading, as being a Methodist she thought it wrong to read such books She told iven a new edition of all the Elizabethan plays, twenty-five volumes, beautifully bound (I heard afterwards that a new edition was published at that tiht to burn the at ith her she would tell me tales out of the plays How vexed I used to be with her for burning theht e old Bible, and the Apocrypha was a book of wonder to hts_ Milton she read often; ht it would please her He was a sweet-tempered man, easy and kindhearted, but not clever like hed at him for some blunders, ”Well, my dear, what can the woman with five talents expect from the man with one?”

Leaker had plenty of stories of the press-gang Though she never herself saw it in operation, people not very ht by people crying out that they had been taken”

Herstories about these times

”I can hardly even now bear to think of the dreadful things done by the press-gang in the name of the law I never hated the French as I hated them”

Needless to say, I inherited her hatred of the press-gang, and have maintained it all my life It was the very worst and most oppressive form of national service ever invented, and I think with pride that e St Loe (_teed in his writings that the only fair way ofthe nation secure was compulsory universal service

Leaker's mother was early in her married life converted to Methodis that went on in and around the little Devonshi+re port give the lie to those foolish, ignorant, and shae that because people are poor they cannot be expected to have any idea of what is called conventional ard to ”mine and thine” They will naturally and excusably, it is asserted, break any law, moral or divine

That is not how it struck Leaker'son in the tohen I was a girl, and one day a s for her to buy Oh, how I did long for her to get me a pretty neckerchief, but she said, ”No, my dear, I cannot buy it for you, as I do not see any difference in cheating a single ht of God both are equally sinful”

Leaker says of her e share of romance, and loved a tale of witches, or a love-story”--and so did her daughter The supernatural gained fresh interest fro, and the art of the _raconteur_ still lives in her pages Here is one of the best of her stories Even now it gives a delightful sense of fear:

This story was told me by the mother of a friend of mine--Mrs Jackson was her name, a ladylike woirl Her husband was sailing master on board a man-of-war, and this is what took place once when she was on board with hie party of friends and officers spending the evening on the shi+p, when a sudden stor to aht, but a string broke before the instrument had been touched ”Never mind,” said the captain, ”I have a ht” Everyone was pleased at the idea of conjuring, and the man was sent for, and asked to show soht, as it is not a good time” Said the captain, ”What is to hinder you?” ”Well, sir, I do not like doing it this stormy weather” ”That is all stuff and nonsense,”

replied the captain; ”youdish, which was brought to him There was a fire of charcoal in it He said and did so (Mrs Jackson did not tell us what), and after a while there appeared in the dish, co a hatchet The tree seerow from the bottom, and the little reatly agitated, and asked one of the ladies to lend him her apron (ladies wore them in those days) Mrs Jackson took off hers and handed it to hi-dish stood, catching the chips, and apparently in great alarround She used to say it was painful to see the poor rew much worse, so that the people on board were afraid that the shi+p would be driven froe At last the tree fell under the tinywas left on the table but the chafing-dish The conjuror gave back the apron, and then, turning to the captain, said, ”Never froht You may believe round, nothing could have saved the shi+p, and everyone on board would have gone doith her”

When the old lady told this story she would say that she had distinctly seen the chips fly, and heard the noise of the chopping She used to show the apron, which she never wore again, but kept, carefully put away, to be shown to anyone who liked to see it

Can one wonder that the little man with his little axe and the little tree, and the unknown peril of death that cah not in any sense a haunting or unpleasant one? I longed to see the chips fly and the tiny tree bow to the sturdy strokes of the weird woodman

Leaker's stories of ordinary witchcraft were h they cannot be set out here I ard to them:

I do not think there was a place in the land so full of witches, white and black, as Dartmouth My mother was, for her time and station, pretty fairly educated, yet she seeraphy shows that when she was sitting alone, thinking and writing, the old nurse felt acutely the solitude and weariness of an old age that had outlived contemporaries as well as bodily faculties When, however, the friends of another generation ith her, she never seemed too tired or too sad to enter keenly into all the interests of their lives After a hopeful consultation with an oculist she writes:

Is it not strange, that when the ht in coht comes back as heavily as ever? Hoish I could befor the unattainable

Everyone who has lived through a great crisis has probably shared the old nurse's surprise at finding that sness, soon revive with our own return to ordinary life

However [as she says] I will not go into reflections, but write of s cos for, and yet is afraid of death If I could only be sure, be sure!

Is it possible there is no other state of being? Oh, God, it is too dreadful to think of