Cottage Ideas

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Title:     Cottage Ideas
Author: Richard Jefferies [More Titles by Jefferies]

Passing by the kitchen door, I heard Louisa, the maid, chanting to a child on her knee:

Feyther stole th' Paason's sheep;
A merry Christmas we shall keep;
We shall have both mutton and beef--
_But we won't say nothing about it_.

To rightly understand this rhyme you must sing it with long-drawn emphasis on each word, lengthening it into at least two syllables; the first a sort of hexameter, the second a pentameter of sound:

Fey-ther sto-ole th' Paa-son's sheep.

The last line is to come off more trippingly, like an 'aside.' This old sing-song had doubtless been handed down from the times when the labourers really did steal sheep, a crime happily extinct with cheap bread. Louisa was one of the rare old sort--hard-working, and always ready; never complaining, but satisfied with any food there chanced to be; sensible and sturdy; a woman who could be thoroughly depended on. Her boxes were full of good dresses, of a solid, unassuming kind, such as would wear well--a perfect wardrobe. Her purse was always well supplied with money; she had money saved up, and she sent money to her parents: yet her wages, until late years, had been small. In doing her duty to others she did good to herself. A duchess would have been glad to have her in her household. She had been in farmhouse service from girlhood, and had doubtless learned much from good housewives; farmers' wives are the best of all teachers: and the girls, for their own sakes, had much better be under them than wasting so much time learning useless knowledge at compulsory schools.

Freckles said, when he came in,
He never would enter a tawny skin,

was another of her rhymes. Freckles come in with summer, but never appear on a dark skin, so that the freckled should rejoice in these signs of fairness.

Your father, the elderberry,
Was not such a gooseberry
As to send in his bilberry
Before it was dewberry.

Some children are liable to an unpleasant complaint at night; for this there is a certain remedy. A mouse is baked in the oven to a 'scrump,' then pounded to powder, and this powder administered. Many ladies still have faith in this curious medicine; it reminds one of the powdered mummy, once the great cure of human ills. Country places have not always got romantic names--Wapse's Farm, for instance, and Hog's Pudding Farm. Wapse is the provincial for wasp.

Country girls are not all so shrewd as Louisa: we heard of two--this was some time since--who, being in service in London, paid ten shillings each to Madame Rachel for a bath to be made beautiful for ever. Half a sovereign out of their few coins! On the other hand, town servants are well dressed and have plenty of finery, but seldom have any reserve of good clothing, such as Louisa possessed. All who know the country regret the change that has been gradually coming over the servants and the class from which they are supplied. 'Gawd help the pore missis as gets hold of _you_!' exclaimed a cottage woman to her daughter, whose goings on had not been as they should be: 'God help the poor mistress who has to put up with you!' A remark that would be most emphatically echoed by many a farmer's wife and country resident. 'Doan't you stop if her hollers at 'ee,' said another cottage mother to her girl, just departing for service--that is, don't stop if you don't like it; don't stop if your mistress finds the least fault. 'Come along home if you don't like it.' Home to what? In this instance it was a most wretched hovel, literally built in a ditch; no convenience, no sanitation; and the father a drunkard, who scarcely brought enough money indoors to supply bread.

You would imagine that a mother in such a position would impress upon her children the necessity of endeavouring to do something. For the sake of that spirit of independence in which they seem to take so much pride, one would suppose they would desire to see their children able to support themselves. But it is just the reverse; the poorer folk are, the less they seem to care to try to do something. 'You come home if you don't like it;' and stay about the hovel in slatternly idleness, tails bedraggled and torn, thin boots out at the toes and down at the heels, half starved on potatoes and weak tea--stay till you fall into disgrace, and lose the only thing you possess in the world--your birthright, your character. Strange advice it was for a mother to give.

Nor is the feeling confined to the slatternly section, but often exhibited by very respectable cottagers indeed.

'My mother never would go out to service--she _wouldn't_ go,' said a servant to her mistress, one day talking confidentially.

'Then what did she do?' asked the mistress, knowing they were very poor people.

'Oh, she stopped at home.'

'But how did she live?'

'Oh, her father had to keep her. If she wouldn't go out, of course he had to somehow.'

This mother would not let her daughter go to one place because there was a draw-well on the premises; and her father objected to her going to another because the way to the house lay down a long and lonely lane. The girl herself, however, had sense enough to keep in a situation; but it was distinctly against the feeling at her home; yet they were almost the poorest family in the place. They were very respectable, and thought well of in every way, belonging to the best class of cottagers.

Unprofitable sentiments! injurious sentiments--self-destroying; but I always maintain that sentiment is stronger than fact, and even than self-interest. I see clearly how foolish these feelings are, and how they operate to the disadvantage of those whom they influence. Yet I confess that were I in the same position I should be just as foolish. If I lived in a cottage of three rooms, and earned my bread by dint of arm and hand under the sun of summer and the frost of winter; if I lived on hard fare, and, most powerful of all, if I had no hope for the future, no improvement to look forward to, I should feel just the same. I would rather my children shared my crust than fed on roast beef in a stranger's hall. Perhaps the sentiment in my case might have a different origin, but in effect it would be similar. I should prefer to see my family about me--the one only pleasure I should have--the poorer and the more unhappy, the less I should care to part with them. This may be foolish, but I expect it is human nature.

English folk don't 'cotton' to their poverty at all; they don't cat humble-pie with a relish; they resent being poor and despised. Foreign folk seem to take to it quite naturally; an Englishman, somehow or other, always feels that he is wronged. He is injured; he has not got his rights. To me it seems the most curious thing possible that well-to-do people should expect the poor to be delighted with their condition. I hope they never will be; an evil day that--if it ever came--for the Anglo-Saxon race.

One girl prided herself very much upon belonging to a sort of club or insurance-if she died, her mother would receive ten pounds. Ten pounds, ten golden sovereigns was to her such a magnificent sum, that she really appeared to wish herself dead, in order that it might be received. She harped and talked and brooded on it constantly. If she caught cold it didn't matter, she would say, her mother would have ten pounds. It seemed a curious reversal of ideas, but it is a fact that poor folk in course of time come to think less of death than money. Another girl was describing to her mistress how she met the carter's ghost in the rickyard; the waggon-wheel went over him; but he continued to haunt the old scene, and they met him as commonly as the sparrows.

'Did you ever speak to him?'

'Oh no. You mustn't speak to them; if you speak to them they'll fly at you.'

In winter the men were allowed to grub up the roots of timber that had been thrown, and take the wood home for their own use; this kept them in fuel the winter through without buying any. 'But they don't get _paid_ for that work.' She considered it quite a hardship that they were not paid for taking a present. Cottage people do look at things in such a curious crooked light! A mother grumbled because the vicar had not been to see her child, who was ill. Now, she was not a church-goer, and cared nothing for the Church or its doctrines--that was not it; she grumbled so terribly because 'it was his place to come.'

A lady went to live in a village for health's sake, and having heard so much of the poverty of the farmer's man, and how badly his family were off, thought that she should find plenty who would be glad to pick up extra shillings by doing little things for her. First she wanted a stout boy to help to draw her Bath chair, while the footman pushed behind, it being a hilly country. Instead of having to choose between half a dozen applicants, as she expected, the difficulty was to discover anybody who would even take such a job into consideration. The lads did not care about it; their fathers did not care about it; and their mothers did not want them to do it. At one cottage there were three lads at home doing nothing; but the mother thought they were too delicate for such work. In the end a boy was found, but not for some time. Nobody was eager for any extra shilling to be earned in that way. The next thing was somebody to fetch a yoke or two of spring water daily. This man did not care for it, and the other did not care for it; and even one who had a small piece of ground, and kept a donkey and water-butt on wheels for the very purpose, shook his head. He always fetched water for folk in the summer when it was dry, never fetched none at that time of year--he could not do it. After a time a small shopkeeper managed the yoke of water from the spring for her--_his_ boy could carry it; the labourer's could not. He was comparatively well-to-do, yet he was not above an extra shilling.

This is one of the most curious traits in the character of cottage folk--they do not care for small sums; they do not care to pick up sixpences. They seem to be _afraid of obliging people_--as if to do so, even to their own advantage, would be against their personal honour and dignity. In London the least trifle is snapped up immediately, and there is a great crush and press for permission to earn a penny, and that not in very dignified ways. In the country it is quite different. Large fortunes have been made out of matches; now your true country cottager would despise such a miserable fraction of a penny as is represented by a match. I heard a little girl singing--

Little drops of water, little grains of sand.

It is these that make oceans and mountains; it is pennies that make millionaires. But this the countryman cannot see. Not him alone either; the dislike to little profits is a national characteristic, well marked in the farmer, and indeed in all classes. I, too, must be humble, and acknowledge that I have frequently detected the same folly in myself, so let it not be supposed for an instant that I set up as a censor; I do but delineate. Work for the cottager must be work to please him; and to please him it must be the regular sort to which he is accustomed, which he did beside his father as a boy, which _his_ father did, and _his_ father before him; the same old plough or grub-axe, the same milking, the same identical mowing, if possible in the same field. He does not care for any new-fangled jobs: he does not recognise them, they have no _locus standi_--they are not established. Yet he is most anxious for work, and works well, and is indeed the best labourer in the world. But it is the national character. To understand a nation you must go to the cottager.

The well-to-do are educated, they have travelled, if not in their ideas, they are more or less cosmopolitan. In the cottager the character stands out in the coarsest relief; in the cottager you get to 'bed-rock,' as the Americans say; there's the foundation. Character runs upwards, not downwards. It is not the nature of the aristocrat that permeates the cottager, but the nature of the cottager that permeates the aristocrat. The best of us are polished cottagers. Scratch deep enough, and you come to that; so that to know a people, go to the cottage, and not to the mansion. The labouring man cannot quickly alter his ways. Can the manufacturer? All alike try to go in the same old groove, till disaster visits their persistence. It is English human nature.

[The end]
Richard Jefferies's essay: Cottage Ideas

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