Part 1 (1/2)
Recollections
by David Christie Murray
CHAPTER I
The Unlucky Day of the Fool's Month--High Street, West Brolish Bracken--The Sense of Beauty
I remember that in a fit of petulance at some childish misdemeanour, my mother once told me that I came into the world on the unlucky day of the fool'sthat I was born on the thirteenth of April I have often since had occasion to think that there was a wealth of prophetic wisdom in the phrase which neither she nor I suspected at the ti born into it in the year 1847, in a house not now to be identified in the straggling High Street of West Bromwich, which in those days was a rather doleful hybrid of a place--neither town nor country It is a co industries have defaced the lovely fringe of country which used to be around it
Its great peculiarity to a thoughtful child lay in the fact that even at his sress he could pass in an hour from the clink, clink, clink on the anvils of the poor nailmakers, orked in their own sordid back kitchens about the Ling or Virgin's End, to a rural retirement and quiet as complete as you may find to-day about Charlcote or Arden, or any other nook of the beautiful Shakespeare country Since the great South Staffordshi+re coal fault was circumvented, nearly all the wide reaches of rural land which I rerown and defaced by labour The diamond stream in which I used to bathe as a boy, where you could have counted the pebbles at the botto forth vile odours, when last I saw it But fifty years ago, or e to that fire-rotted, smoke-stained, dirty mantle of a Black Country In the extreme stillness of the summer fields, and more especially, as I seem to remember, in a certaininto evening, you could hear the clank of pig-iron which was being loaded into the boats on the canal at Bromford, quite two miles away, and the thuun many a child's ramble by a walk down Broures there sweating and toiling at the puddling furnaces, and have brought it to an end in theon Stephenson's hills, only a couple of miles away, in what felt like the very heart of nature's solitude Thus the old parish, which was not by any means an ideal place to be born and bred in, had its compensations for a holiday schoolboy who had Milton, and Klopstock, and Bunyan at his finger-ends, and had hell and the plains of heaven within an easy ramble from the paternal doorstep But the special memory about which I set out to write was the one which immediately follows on the baby experience already recorded It is almost as brief and isolated in itself; but I know by after association precisely where it took place, and I am almost persuaded that I knoas my companion
I think it is Mr Ruskin who speaks of our rural hedgerows as having been the pride and glory of our English fields, and the shalish husbandry In the days I write of, they were veritable flower-gardens in their proper season What with the great saucer-shaped elderberry blooroses, and the honeysuckle, and the white and purple foxgloves, and harebell and bluebell, and the starlike yellow-eyed daisy, there was an unending harvest for hand and eye But the observation of all these things carew, in occasional profusion, and it was a young growing spray of this plant which excited in my mind the very first sense of beauty I had ever known It was curved in a gentle suggestion of an interrogation note In colour, it was of a greenish-red and a very gentle yet luxuriant green It was covered with a harmless baby down, and it was decorated at the curved tip with a crown-shaped scroll There is really no need in the world to describe it, for one supposes that even the most inveterate cockney has, at one time or another, seen the first tender offshoot of the coland
From the time at which I achieved ht and wonder, I re A year or two had intervened, and I was able to toddle about unaided; but, for anything I can actually recall, Iin et it, and I have never experienced anything like it since Whether I could at that time think in words at all, I do not know; but the beauty, the sense of the char went intoof pleasure, andI don't re; but I recall the question, and I know that nothing has ever since moved e, I think, when I first awoke to the fact that I had been born shortsighted I bad had a year in the ar-distance drill, I are that I did not see things at all as the musketry instructor represented theht, after I had returned to civilian life, that a coe, who had alorn spectacles in an to talk about the splendid brilliance of the heavens I could discern a certain milky radiance, with here and there a dilasses, and I looked The whole thing sprang at me, but rather with a sense of awe and wonder than of beauty; and even this reater episode left the first ied
There is, or used to be, a little pleasure-steae on Lake Wakatipu in New Zealand For a while it passes along a gloomy channel which is bounded on either side by dark and lofty rocks of a forbidding aspect This passage being cleared, the steamer bears away to the left, across the lake, and, beyond the jutting proht on a fair day the first e When I first saw it, the sky at the horizon was almost white; but the peaks of the distant mountains had, as Shakespeare says, a whiter hue than white, and through field-glasses its outlines could be perfectly distinguished Then swung into sight a second ression which began to look endless There is a forht which is very painful to endure, and I do not know that I ever experienced itslowly up, ”the way of grand, dull, Odyssean ghosts,” was i I have known in a life which has been rich in travel; but if I want, at a fatigued or dispirited hour, to bathe o back, because I cannot help it, to that tender little fern-frond in a lane on the edge of the Black Country, which brought toas beauty in the world
CHAPTER II
My Father--The Murrays--The Courage of Childhood--The Girl from the Workhouse--Witchcraft--The Dudley Devil--The Deformed Methodist--A Child's idea of the Creator--The Policeh Street Pork Butcher
My father was a printer and stationer, and would have been a bookseller if there had been any book buyers in the region There was a good deal of unsaleable literary stock on the dusty shelves I remember _The Wealth of Nations_, Paley's _Evidences of Christianity, Locke on the Hu row of the dramatists of the seventeenth century I burrowed into all these with zeal, and acquired in very early childhood an omnivorous appetite for books which has never left s of which are long since drowned in mist, to the effect that our little Staffordshi+re branch of the great Murray faher, and the titular rights of the Dukedom of Athol were held by a cadet of the house My father's elder brother, Adam Goudie Murray, professed to hold this belief stoutly, and he and the reigning duke of a century ago had a humorous spar with each other about it on occasion ”I presu in my hoose,” Adam would say
”Ay, I'm still there, Adam,” the duke would answer, and the jest was kept up until the old nobleman died Sir Bernard Burke knew of the story, but when as a matter of curiosity I broached the question to him, he said there were too many broken links in the chain of evidence to ation My father had, or humorously affected, a sort of faith in it, and used to say that ere princes in disguise
The disguise was certainly cole for life was severe and constant, but there was enough in the vague ruination of a child, and I know that I built a thousand airy day-dreams on it
To me the most momentous episodes of life appear to resolve themselves naturally into first occasions Those tiiven way, for-stones of life Memory is one of the most capricious of the faculties There is a well-known philosophical theory to the effect that nothing is actually forgotten or forgetable which has once imprinted itself upon the mind But, bar myself, I do not remember to have encountered anybody who professed to recall his very earliest triuer on his feet
When I have sometimes claimed that memory carries me back so far, I have been told that the iination, or a reer child I know better
It is an actual little frag which ever befell me in my whole lifetime is more precise or definite I do not knoho held my petticoats bunched up behind to steady er to entice er when I reached it, as well as I re And what makes the small experience so very definite is, that after all this lapse of time I can still feel the sense of peril and adventure, and the ringing self-applause which filled me when the task was successfully accoht hand side, and beneath h loops of parti-coloured cloth; and it was the idea of getting over those loops which frightened ht its proper spice of adventure into the business There is nothing before this, and for two or three years, as I should guess, there is nothing after it That little firelit episode of infancy is isolated in the midst of an impenetrable dark
Where a child is not beaten, or bullied, or cautioned overin with Where it survives the innumerable mishaps incident to the career of what Tennyson calls ”dauntless infancy,” it learns reat faculty of cowardice, which rown men have developed in a hundred forinal stock in trade Even cowardice, in its own degree, is a wholeso, because it is a part and portion of that self-protective instinct which helps towards the preservation of the individual of the race But it would be a good thing to place, if such a thing were possible, a codos to very few people There are enius, and it is very likely, I believe, that the genius for a true cowardice is as rare as the genius for writing great verse, or constructing a great story, or guiding the shi+p of state through the crises of tempest to a safe harbour But every human faculty may be cultivated, and this is a field in which, with least effort, and with least expenditure of seed, you may reap the fullest crop
Whilst I was yet a very little fellow, a certain big-boned, well-fleshed, waddling wench from the local workhouse became a unit in my mother's household Her chief occupation seemed to be to instruct my brothers and sisters andterrified Three score years ago there was, in that part of the country, a fascinating belief in witchcraft There was in our near neighbourhood, for example, a person known as the Dudley Devil, who could bewitch cattle, and cause milch kine to yield blood He had philtres of all sorts--noxious and innocuous--and it was currently believed that he went la-fox, he had been shot by an irate farmer whose hen-roost he had robbed beyond the bounds of patience He used to discover places where objects were hidden which had been stolen from local farmhouses, and he was reckoned to do this by certain forical incantation In my maturer mind, I am disposed to believe that he was a professional receiver of stolen goods, and I am pretty sure that the modern police would have made short work of him
But from the time that foolish, fat scullion came into the household service, ere all ientlees about the house, into which we had hitherto ventured without any hint of fear, were suddenly and horribly alive with this ht to do, I know that he haunted every place of darkness He positively peopled the back kitchen to which ent for coals He haunted a little larder on the left, and stood on each of the three steps which led down to its red brick floor, whilst at the same instant he was horribly ready to pounce upon one fro in the doorway just in front; was crouching in each corner of the darkened chamber, and hidden in the chimney That fat, foolish scullion slept in the same room with my brother and myself He, as I find by reference to contemporary annals, was seven at this tiot to know afterwards that the sprawling wench grew hungry in the night-time, and went downstairs to filch heels of loaves and cheese, or anything our rather spare household economy left open to her petty larcenies And in order that these shost upon us, and I suppose it to be a literal fact that many and many a time when she stole back to our roo, she must have driven us into a clean swoon of terror by the very sihtdress, and hostly head-dress of it about her face That I fainted many a time out of sheer horror at this apparition, I am quite certain; but the sense of real fear was, after all, left in reserve I had rah Street on a lovely suht, and scent, and sound of which comes to me at this moment with a curious distinctness, and I had turned at the corner; had wandered along New Street, which by that tied, even to ed into Walsall Street, which was then the shortest way to the real country, and on to the Ten Score; past the Pearl Well, where Croh Church Vale, and on to Perry Bar, and even past the Horns of Queeslett, beyond which lay a plain road to Sutton Coldfield, a place full of wonder and h its association with one Shakespeare, and a Sir John Falstaff, who afterwards became more intimate companions
I had never been so far fro upon me By-and-bye, I found myself in what I still reh a broad country lane was cut between the ueous shade on either side I saw a rabbit cross the road, and I saw a sloeasel track him, and heard the squeak of despair which bunny uttered when the fascinating pursuer, as I now iine, first fixed upon him what Mr Swinburne calls ”the bitter blossom of a kiss” I very clearly re in the sunlight; but there was nothing to alar to char the route Birds were singing, and butterflies were fanning their feathery, irresponsible way froonfly that day, and tried to catch him in my cap, but he evaded ed A cloud floated over the sun, and a sort of preli horror took possession of the harmless woods on either side Just there the road swerved, and I could hear a halting footstep co Somehow, the Dudley Devil was associated instep, and there was I, in the middle of a waste universe, in which all the bird voices had suddenly grown silent, and the companionable insects had ceased to hu of this awful creature The sta step came round the bend of the lane, and I saw for the first tirew to respect and pity later on, but who struck me then with such an abject sense of terror as I have soht have travelled far beforea more harmless creature