________________________________________________
_ In the early years of the century five little children and a couple
of nurses began to make periodical visits to Paleham. It is
needless to say they were a rising generation of Pontifexes, towards
whom the old couple, their grandparents, were as tenderly
deferential as they would have been to the children of the Lord
Lieutenant of the County. Their names were Eliza, Maria, John,
Theobald (who like myself was born in 1802), and Alethea. Mr
Pontifex always put the prefix "master" or "miss" before the names
of his grandchildren, except in the case of Alethea, who was his
favourite. To have resisted his grandchildren would have been as
impossible for him as to have resisted his wife; even old Mrs
Pontifex yielded before her son's children, and gave them all manner
of licence which she would never have allowed even to my sisters and
myself, who stood next in her regard. Two regulations only they
must attend to; they must wipe their shoes well on coming into the
house, and they must not overfeed Mr Pontifex's organ with wind, nor
take the pipes out.
By us at the Rectory there was no time so much looked forward to as
the annual visit of the little Pontifexes to Paleham. We came in
for some of the prevailing licence; we went to tea with Mrs Pontifex
to meet her grandchildren, and then our young friends were asked to
the Rectory to have tea with us, and we had what we considered great
times. I fell desperately in love with Alethea, indeed we all fell
in love with each other, plurality and exchange whether of wives or
husbands being openly and unblushingly advocated in the very
presence of our nurses. We were very merry, but it is so long ago
that I have forgotten nearly everything save that we WERE very
merry. Almost the only thing that remains with me as a permanent
impression was the fact that Theobald one day beat his nurse and
teased her, and when she said she should go away cried out, "You
shan't go away--I'll keep you on purpose to torment you."
One winter's morning, however, in the year 1811, we heard the church
bell tolling while we were dressing in the back nursery and were
told it was for old Mrs Pontifex. Our manservant John told us and
added with grim levity that they were ringing the bell to come and
take her away. She had had a fit of paralysis which had carried her
off quite suddenly. It was very shocking, the more so because our
nurse assured us that if God chose we might all have fits of
paralysis ourselves that very day and be taken straight off to the
Day of Judgement. The Day of Judgement indeed, according to the
opinion of those who were most likely to know, would not under any
circumstances be delayed more than a few years longer, and then the
whole world would be burned, and we ourselves be consigned to an
eternity of torture, unless we mended our ways more than we at
present seemed at all likely to do. All this was so alarming that
we fell to screaming and made such a hullabaloo that the nurse was
obliged for her own peace to reassure us. Then we wept, but more
composedly, as we remembered that there would be no more tea and
cakes for us now at old Mrs Pontifex's.
On the day of the funeral, however, we had a great excitement; old
Mr Pontifex sent round a penny loaf to every inhabitant of the
village according to a custom still not uncommon at the beginning of
the century; the loaf was called a dole. We had never heard of this
custom before, besides, though we had often heard of penny loaves,
we had never before seen one; moreover, they were presents to us as
inhabitants of the village, and we were treated as grown up people,
for our father and mother and the servants had each one loaf sent
them, but only one. We had never yet suspected that we were
inhabitants at all; finally, the little loaves were new, and we were
passionately fond of new bread, which we were seldom or never
allowed to have, as it was supposed not to be good for us. Our
affection, therefore, for our old friend had to stand against the
combined attacks of archaeological interest, the rights of
citizenship and property, the pleasantness to the eye and goodness
for food of the little loaves themselves, and the sense of
importance which was given us by our having been intimate with
someone who had actually died. It seemed upon further inquiry that
there was little reason to anticipate an early death for anyone of
ourselves, and this being so, we rather liked the idea of someone
else's being put away into the churchyard; we passed, therefore, in
a short time from extreme depression to a no less extreme
exultation; a new heaven and a new earth had been revealed to us in
our perception of the possibility of benefiting by the death of our
friends, and I fear that for some time we took an interest in the
health of everyone in the village whose position rendered a
repetition of the dole in the least likely.
Those were the days in which all great things seemed far off, and we
were astonished to find that Napoleon Buonaparte was an actually
living person. We had thought such a great man could only have
lived a very long time ago, and here he was after all almost as it
were at our own doors. This lent colour to the view that the Day of
Judgement might indeed be nearer than we had thought, but nurse said
that was all right now, and she knew. In those days the snow lay
longer and drifted deeper in the lanes than it does now, and the
milk was sometimes brought in frozen in winter, and we were taken
down into the back kitchen to see it. I suppose there are rectories
up and down the country now where the milk comes in frozen sometimes
in winter, and the children go down to wonder at it, but I never see
any frozen milk in London, so I suppose the winters are warmer than
they used to be.
About one year after his wife's death Mr Pontifex also was gathered
to his fathers. My father saw him the day before he died. The old
man had a theory about sunsets, and had had two steps built up
against a wall in the kitchen garden on which he used to stand and
watch the sun go down whenever it was clear. My father came on him
in the afternoon, just as the sun was setting, and saw him with his
arms resting on the top of the wall looking towards the sun over a
field through which there was a path on which my father was. My
father heard him say "Good-bye, sun; good-bye, sun," as the sun
sank, and saw by his tone and manner that he was feeling very
feeble. Before the next sunset he was gone.
There was no dole. Some of his grandchildren were brought to the
funeral and we remonstrated with them, but did not take much by
doing so. John Pontifex, who was a year older than I was, sneered
at penny loaves, and intimated that if I wanted one it must be
because my papa and mamma could not afford to buy me one, whereon I
believe we did something like fighting, and I rather think John
Pontifex got the worst of it, but it may have been the other way. I
remember my sister's nurse, for I was just outgrowing nurses myself,
reported the matter to higher quarters, and we were all of us put to
some ignominy, but we had been thoroughly awakened from our dream,
and it was long enough before we could hear the words "penny loaf"
mentioned without our ears tingling with shame. If there had been a
dozen doles afterwards we should not have deigned to touch one of
them.
George Pontifex put up a monument to his parents, a plain slab in
Paleham church, inscribed with the following epitaph:-
SACRED TO THE MEMORY
OF
JOHN PONTIFEX
WHO WAS BORN AUGUST 16TH,
1727, AND DIED FEBRUARY 8, 1812,
IN HIS 85TH YEAR,
AND OF
RUTH PONTIFEX, HIS WIFE,
WHO WAS BORN OCTOBER 13, 1727, AND DIED JANUARY 10, 1811,
IN HER 84TH YEAR.
THEY WERE UNOSTENTATIOUS BUT EXEMPLARY
IN THE DISCHARGE OF THEIR
RELIGIOUS, MORAL, AND SOCIAL DUTIES.
THIS MONUMENT WAS PLACED
BY THEIR ONLY SON. _
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