SMALL TALK AT WREYLAND II (continued 4)

Innovations have seldom been improvements here. There are very many new things that are better than the old; but here one chiefly sees the new things that are cheaper than the old, and these are not always better. Many of them are not really cheaper. I have just given the roof of this house a new coat of thatch that ought to last for twenty years or more. The thatching here is done with wheat straw; so I grew a crop close by, and sold the grain and kept the straw. Slate or tile costs more; and with such roofing I should have to spend a great deal more on fuel, to keep the house as warm in winter time.

In some ways a thatched roof is better than a cellar as a place for storing wine: the temperature just suits the wine, and there is not any damp. My grandfather tried keeping some above his bedroom ceiling; but it was an inconvenient place for fetching bottles down, and accidents may happen when thatchers are about.

After looking at my vases here, a foreigner made me a little speech. “Oh, your country, how wonderful it is. Who should think to find choice works of ancient Greece with a roof of what you call the Thetch. In another house I find antiquities of Egypt, in another the Oriental porcelain and the lacquer, in another I find pictures most superb. Where originals do not exist, I find reproductions of the greatest works. Surely your England is the most artistic country in the world.”—I fear that England is Artistic in another sense. One day a shopman was showing me things all covered with clumsy ornament, and I asked if there was nothing of good design, without all these excrescences. He seemed puzzled at this, and then it dawned upon him, “Oh, I see, sir. You want something less Artistic.”

This was a secluded place until the railway came. My grandfather writes on 23 September 1849, “I find most people like Wreyland, that is, those advancing in years: so quiet and so sheltered.” And then on 3 January 1864, “I cannot fancy that any railway improves scenery, but this will not so disturb it as one might imagine.... They fancy it is cutting up the country and letting in more people, which will destroy the scenery and the quiet of the neighbourhood; but they think more of its introducing new society than destroying the scenery.”

People who live amidst fine scenery are apt to treat it with contempt, partly from familiarity and partly (I think) because they do not see the scenery as other people see it. You form a higher opinion of a man if you have only seen him at his best, than if you have also seen him at his worst and in all intermediate states. It is the same with scenery. Most strangers see this district in the height of summer, whereas the natives see it in the winter time as well, and have both aspects of it in their mind when they are looking at it; and they sometimes show impatience when strangers praise it overmuch. A farmer here was leaning over a gate from which there is a glorious view. Seeing the view, a passer-by remarked to him how glorious it was. The farmer answered, “Durn the view. I bain’t lookin’ at no view. I be lookin’ how they dratted rabbits ’as ated up my tunnips.”

When the railway came, a plan was drawn up showing how the hillsides were to be laid out with winding roads and villas in the accepted Torquay style; and two such villas were built, but happily no further harm was done.—Torquay had spread out with its winding roads all over the unsheltered hills, and was trading on the reputation it had gained when it was all in shelter. After wintering there, a lady told me it was the first time she had wintered in a place where the ink froze on her writing table.

The old houses here are generally down in hollows, as the old people thought more of shelter than of anything else: they never dreamt of building houses in unsheltered places for the sake of views. In 1849-50 a house was built on the hill behind Lustleigh, facing Lustleigh Cleave. My grandfather writes, 5 January 1851, “I told them last summer, when they were talking of their view, that they had not yet experienced a South Wester. Now they have experienced one, they have packed off, bag and baggage: one window blown in and smashed to pieces, wood and all, and others damaged.”

Since then that house has been much altered and enlarged, and now has a set of turrets. Turrets were a novelty here; and, looking at it, someone said to me, “Bain’t shaped proper, like a house: more like a cruet, I call’n.” Architects so often spoil their work by thinking only of design, without considering whether it will suit the district and the site. Two great houses have been built within ten miles of here in recent years. One is by an Oxford architect—now dead—and would look very well in Oxford, in the Broad, or even in the country, if it stood on level ground and had big trees behind. Half-way up a steep hill-side, it is hardly a success. The other is by Lutyens. It stands on a hill-top that was better without it; but, if there had to be a house there, this was the very thing.

Another edifice is by a man I cannot call an Architect: a simple Tect, and nothing more. There happened to be a corrugated iron shed close by; and a man remarked to me, “That is one of the few buildings of which I can conscientiously say that its appearance is improved by having a corrugated iron shed in front of it.”

All over Devon our A1 villages are being converted into C3 towns; but this is being done by people who have only C3 minds and little experience of anything above C3. I hate their works, but resent their want of culture far less than I resent the want of breeding in the people who appreciate a view and build a house where they can see it, well knowing that their house will spoil the view for everybody else.

There was a copse of nut-bushes growing wild amongst the rocks on the way to Lustleigh Cleave. In early years I felt quite sure that Providence had put it there to give us a supply of nuts to take to the Nut Cracker—a logan-stone at the top of the Cleave, so delicately poised that it just cracked the nuts and did not crush them. And now the bushes are cut down and the rocks rolled over, and in their place there is a cluster of corrugated iron huts.

When a War Memorial was projected here, I thought that the names of the dead might be carved on one of the great rocks on Lustleigh Cleave, with the date and nothing more. As it is, they have been carved on a neat little wooden tablet with an inscription of the usual kind, and put up in the church. I fancy our memorial might have been more worthy of them, had their names been on the granite in the solitude up there with that wild ravine below.

We have another memorial here, of which we all are proud. It is at the railway station. “Beneath this slab, and stretched out flat, lies Jumbo, once our station cat.” That cat had many lives: jumped in and out between the wheels of trains, and yet died in its bed.

A tombstone is primarily a label for identifying what is down below; but survivors will not always face that brutal fact. They merely give the name and age; and in after years this may not be enough. I had to find the next-of-kin to an old servant of ours who was over ninety when she died. (She had always kept them at a distance, as they often wished to borrow money that she did not wish to lend.) There was an entry in a Family Bible, say, A.B. born 1 January 1820; and there were tombstones of three persons named A.B. who died at ages answering to that.—They ought to give the birthday and the parents’ Christian names, to show exactly who is there. Instead of that, they usually give texts and verses out of hymns.

This has always been a healthy district, and so very quiet that people had no worries; and they usually lived on till a great age. I have heard it said regretfully, “Ah, her died young,” and then heard it explained, “Her ne’er saw sixty.” Times are changing now. Looking at the tombstones of some kindred of my own, I was observing how the ages fell from nineties and eighties to seventies and sixties. I said nothing aloud, but the sexton read my thoughts and put them into words, “Aye, zir, they do say as each generation be weaker and wiser than the last.”

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

SMALL TALK AT WREYLAND

FIRST SERIES

Demy 8vo. Illustrated. 8s. net.

“Mr Torr chats to us. We feel that we have been invited to Wreyland and are sitting with him over the fire while he turns through his grandfather’s and his father’s letters and reads us little extracts, and lets his talk wander as it will from suggestion to suggestion.... A quaint ingenuity and originality of idea plays about it all: a sly wit flashes here and there. But always, behind everything, we feel Wreyland, the Devon home, the rooted life. We should like to give some examples; but choosing them is as difficult as choosing raspberries when all are ripe; for, in the classic phrase of the reviewer, there is not a dull page in Mr Torr’s book. We confess to skipping a single paragraph. On turning back to read it we found that we had missed a fragrant bit of social history.... As to good stories, open any page that you will and you will find one.... The only point of capping a good talker’s stories is to egg him on to tell more. We hope that Mr Torr will take the hint.”—Times Literary Supplement.

“He has travelled far afield in Europe, and he comes back to Wreyland and dips into his grandfather’s and his father’s letters, and his own memory as well, and tells us what he thinks of things that were and are. And what we like is the easy balance of his mind. The old times were not always the good times, and modern days are not altogether bad; so Mr Torr has taken each as it has come, and has been content therewith.”—Morning Post.

“Wreyland is Mr Torr’s home near Dartmoor, and his book gives us a sort of comic mirror of life at Wreyland during his own life and the life of his grandfather. For Mr Torr sees life comically as surely as Jane Austen herself.... It would be difficult, indeed, to define the reasons of its astonishing attractiveness. Probably one of them is that Mr Torr was born with a genius for enjoyment, and that he somehow infects us with his happiness in his most trivial pages.”—Daily News.

“This short book is worth a dozen of the silly volumes that now flood the book-market. It preserves country lore of the sort that is fast decaying, mingled with travel notes, a few details of scholarship and family history. The ordinary local historian is industrious, but wanting in other ways. Mr Torr is a scholar: he has, too, an excellent sense of humour, an inquiring mind and an observant eye.”—Saturday Review.

“A man who takes a keen interest in his ancestral place and in his humble neighbours, and who at the same time is in touch with the world of scholarship through his special studies, may be said to make the most of life.... Mr Torr, like a true scholar, wastes no words. The essence of the ordinary book of memoirs, as he knows, is in the anecdotes. He therefore gives the anecdotes without the usual framework, telling them neatly and briefly, and passing from one subject to another without even a chapter-heading to break the flow of good talk.”—Spectator.

“Mr Torr’s book is as typically English as a Christmas pudding.... His book is far more than a local history, however; it should be read as a complementary volume to Mansfield Park and Pendennis, to Life’s Little Ironies and The Way of all Flesh.... From Mr Torr we learn just how good life could be for a wealthy, self-contained, enterprising Englishman in the last hundred years or so. It was all more or less comic relief to him. Old walls are almost serious, and old roofs, and the beauty of fine days and fine landscape; the rest is good fun.”—Athenæum.

“He has travelled and written books, he is a depository of odd lore, sometimes local, sometimes classical, sometimes smacking of the great world. Intermixed with his own chatty reminiscences he gives us extracts from old family letters and other glimpses of days which the war has caused to seem further off than they are. Reading this charming little book is very much like listening to the squire gossiping by his own fireside.”—Guardian.

“And when we close his book and try to recollect what it was in it that made it so hard to lay down, we begin to be aware that his converse with us has flowed on in just that artless inevitable way: one thing, as the saying goes, leads to another.... He has charm; and the charm of this extraordinary book we despair of conveying by any quotation or any description; we can only say it is there.”—Field.

“He goes from story to story, from oddment to oddment, wasting no time in generalisations or connecting platitudes. The result is an extraordinary medley that might almost (save only for a few dates) have been written fifty years ago, or fifty years hence, by a man of Mr Torr’s knowledge, habits, and temperament, and that could have been read with as much pleasure by a man of George I’s reign as it probably will be by people who accidentally run across it in the reign of George XII.”—Land and Water.

“If by ‘small talk’ is meant gossip, Mr Torr will not be offended if we say that this is one of the pleasantest books of gossip which we ever came across.... The district is a little out of the world, and it is no wonder that some of the pleasant superstitions of rural England have not died out there.... The family were great travellers, and many parallel examples from other countries are adduced to illustrate the superstitions of Devonshire.”—Country Life.

“Mr Torr was well advised by his friends to publish these jottings, originally intended for private circulation. They will specially interest Devonians, as they are mostly about the manners and customs, superstitions and traditions of that fascinating county in the days before railways, but they give you glimpses also of later days and of places of more general interest, of Italy, for example, when under the intolerable tyranny of Austria, and of France when in the throes of the Franco-Prussian War, and even a glimpse of Napoleon the First.”—Truth.

“We are grateful that in days like these he has drawn from his store of reminiscences such a delightful and varied assortment of small talk. He brings to his aid, too, diaries and letters of relatives as keenly observant and as alert and shrewd as himself.”—Queen.

“My first thought was, ‘What on earth is the University Press doing with small talk in an obscure village?’ My second was, ‘How enterprising they were to get hold of such an odd and excellent book!’... I do not know any book in which so many characteristic and uniformly good stories of Devonshire people are to be found.... But he has gone far beyond the locality. He is liable to touch on anything in the world except his inner self. That is a pity. A little more egoism would have made his book even better.”—The New Statesman.

“‘I meant,’ writes the author of this attractive miscellany, ‘to keep to local matters, but it has gone much further than that.’ It has. Small Talk at Wreyland travels over half the world and many centuries of history.... The ordinary reader who merely wishes to roam the world without leaving his own fireside will find Mr Torr a delightful companion.”—Outlook.

“It is seldom that one comes on so good a volume of gossip as Small Talk at Wreyland.... Emma itself hardly throws more light on the comic side of human nature than do some of these old letters.... But it is for its glimpses of life in Wreyland, not of the larger world, that one will return again and again to Mr Torr’s most entertaining book.”—Everyman.

“So we look for the kind of book an accomplished scholar produces, and we are not disappointed, though Mr Torr has left his materials in ‘most admired disorder.’... With Mr Torr some new theme is always turning up—we never know quite how or when.... We are obliged to him for some capital gossip, and we shall be glad to have more.”—Notes and Queries.

“Mr Torr, of Wreyland (a Devonshire hamlet), has a super-excellent memory, a pleasant sense of humour, and a useful aptitude for keeping old diaries and letters. Not only does Mr Torr keep these, but he actually reads them, and extracts from them the juiciest morsels for our delectation.... Perhaps, after all, it is manner even more than matter which makes the charm of this book.”—Literary World.

“Wreyland is a hamlet in Devonshire; and Mr Torr’s book of gossip gives us the life at Wreyland in his own, his father’s, and his grandfather’s days. The concrete pleasure and happiness of it, the deep association between man and man, and between man and nature, bring one back to reality and life. There is a richness in country life, whether of peasant or squire, which makes the epigram of the pulpit and the philosophy of the school seem thin and foolish. The unconscious wisdom of life radiates through Mr Torr’s pages, and it is a bigger thing and a better than any despair or mockery, than any explanations or excuse.”—Bookman.

“The book is exceedingly interesting, diverting, and informing. To me it has been better than many discourses of the learned, and some exhortations of the pious.”—Methodist Recorder.

“A book, if it is a good book, must be natural, unforced, something that has ‘grow’d’ as Topsy herself grow’d in Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Well, Small Talk at Wreyland has grow’d, as a regard for it grows as one turns its pages and reads of peaceful days and pleasant journeys, and, sometimes, of notable people. It has all the qualities of good talk by a good host who has gathered a few friends about him in his home in some interesting part of the country.”—Church Family Newspaper.

“I wish we could fence off a district of Mr Torr’s Devonshire, and preserve it and its population as an exhibit.... I wish quite passionately that the inhabitants of Wreyland as a type could be preserved. It is a rest to pause and contemplate them. They are so mellow.”—Saturday Westminster Gazette.

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS

LONDON: FETTER LANE, E.C. 4

C. F. CLAY, Manager