: Two Suffolk Friends by Groome Francis Hindes - FitzGerald Edward 1809-1883; Groome Robert Hindes 1810-1889

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id my grandfather; "why, I could get through there myself." He tried, and he too tore his small- clothes, but he was not sent to bed.

With his elder brother, John Hindes , my father went to school at Norwich under Valpy. The first time my grandfather drove them, a forty-mile drive; and when they came in sight of the cathedral spire, he pulled up, and they all three fell a-weeping. For my grandfather was a tender-hearted man, moved to tears by the Waverley novels. Of Valpy my father would tell how once he had flogged a day-boy, whose father came the next day to complain of his severity. "Sir," said Valpy, "I flogged your son because he richly deserved it. If he again deserves it, I shall again flog him. And"--rising--"if you come here, sir, interfering with my duty, sir, I shall flog you." The parent fled.

The following story I owe to an old schoolfellow of my father's, the Rev. William Drake. "Among the lower boys," he writes, "were a brother of mine, somewhat of a pickle, and a classmate of his, who in after years blossomed into a Ritualistic clergyman, and who was the son of a gentleman, living in the Lower Close, not remarkable for personal beauty. One morning, as he was coming up the school, the sound of weeping reached old Valpy's ears: straightway he stopped to investigate whence it proceeded. 'Stand up, sir,' he cried in a voice of thunder, for he hated snivelling; 'what is the matter with you?' 'Please, sir,' came the answer, much interrupted by sobs and tears, 'Bob Drake says I'm uglier than my father, and that my father is as ugly as the Devil.'"

Music engrossed, I fancy, a good deal of my father's time at Cambridge. He saw much of Mrs Frere of Downing, a pupil of a pupil of Handel's. Of her he has written in the Preface to FitzGerald's 'Letters.' He was a member of the well-known "Camus"; and it was he who settled the dispute as to precedence between vocalists and instrumentalists with the apt quotation, "The singers go before, the minstrels follow after." He was an instrumentalist himself, his instrument the 'cello; and there was a story how he, the future Master of Trinity, and some brother musicians were proctorised one night, as they were returning from a festive meeting, each man performing on his several instrument.

To the days of my father's first curacy belongs the story of the old woman at Tannington, who fell ill one winter when the snow was on the ground. She got worse and worse, and sent for Dr Mayhew, who questioned her as to the cause of her illness. Something she said made him think that the fault must lie with either her kettle or her tea-pot, as she seemed, by her account, to get worse every time she drank any tea. So he examined the kettle, turned it upside down, and then, in old Betty's own words, "Out drop a big toad. He tarned the kittle up, and out ta fell flop." Some days before she had "deeved" her kettle into the snow instead of filling it at the pump, and had then got the toad in it, which had thus been slowly simmering into toad-broth. At Tannington also they came to my father to ask him to let them have the church Bible and the church key. The key was to be spun round on the Bible, and if it had pointed at a certain old woman who was suspected of being a witch, they would have certainly ducked her.

A score of old faded letters, close-written and crossed, are lying before me: my father wrote them in 1835 to his father, mother, and brother from Brussels, Mainz, Leipzig, Dresden, Prague, Munich, &c. At Frankfurt he dined with the Rothschilds, and sat next the baroness, "who in face and figure was very like Mrs Cook, and who spoke little English, but that little much to the purpose. For one dish I must eat because 'dis is Germany,' and another because 'dis is England,' placing at the word a large slice of roast-beef on my plate. The dinner began at half-past two, and lasted three mortal hours, during the first of which I ate because I was hungry, during the second out of politeness, and during the third out of sheer desperation." Then there is a descent into a silver- mine with the present Lord Wemyss , a gruesome execution of three murderers, and a good deal besides of some interest,--but the interest is not of Suffolk.

During his six years' Dorset curacy my father was elected mayor of the little borough of Corfe Castle; and it was in Dorset, on 1st February 1843, that he married my mother, Mary Jackson , the youngest daughter of the Rev. James Leonard Jackson, rector of Swanage, and of Louisa Decima Hyde Wollaston. Her father, my grandfather, was a great taker of snuff; and one blustery day he was walking upon the cliffs when his hat blew off. He chased it and chased it over two or three fields until at last he got it in the angle of two stone walls. "Aha! my friend, I think I have you now," said my grandfather, and proceeded to take a leisurely pinch of snuff, when a puff of wind came and blew the hat far out to sea. There are many more Dorsetshire stories that recur to my memory; but neither here is the interest of Suffolk. So to Suffolk we will come back, like my father in 1845, in which year he succeeded his father as rector of Monk Soham.

The parish has no history, unless that a former rector, Thomas Rogerson, was sequestrated as a royalist in 1642, and next year his wife and children were turned out of doors by the Puritans. "After which," Walker tells us, "Mr Rogerson lived with a Country-man in a very mean Cottage upon a Heath, for some years, and in a very low and miserable Condition." But if Monk Soham has no history, its church, St Peter's, is striking even among Suffolk churches, for the size of the chancel, the great traceried east window, and the font sculptured with the Seven Sacraments. The churchyard is pretty with trees and shrubs--those four yews by the gates a present from FitzGerald; and the rectory, half a mile off, is almost hidden by oaks, elms, beeches, and limes, all of my father's and grandfather's planting. Else the parish soon will be treeless. It was not so when my father first came to it. Where now there is one huge field, there then would be five or six, not a few of them meadows, and each with pleasant hedgerows. There were two "Greens" then--one has many years since been enclosed; and there was not a "made" road in the entire parish--only grassy lanes, with gates at intervals. "High farming" has wrought great changes, not always to the profit of our farmers, whose moated homesteads hereabouts bear old-world names--Woodcroft Hall, Blood Hall, Flemings Hall, Crows Hall, Windwhistle Hall, and suchlike. "High farming," moreover, has swallowed up most of the smaller holdings. Fifty years ago there were ten or a dozen farms in Monk Soham, each farm with its resident tenant; now the number is reduced to less than half. It seems a pity, for a twofold reason: first, because the farm-labourer thus loses all chance of advancement; and secondly, because the English yeoman will be soon as extinct as the bustard.

Midway between the rectory and Tom Pepper's is the "Guildhall," an ancient house, though probably far less ancient than its name. It is parish property, and for years has served as an almshouse for ten or a dozen old people. My father used to read the Bible to them, and there was a black cat once which would jump on to his knees, so at last it was shut up in a cupboard. The top of this cupboard, however, above the door, was separated from the room only by a piece of pasted paper; and through this paper the cat's head suddenly emerged. "Cat, you bitch!" said old Mrs Wilding, and my father could read no more. Nay, his father laughed too when he heard the story.

The average age of those old Guildhall people must have been much over sixty, and some of them were nearly centenarians--Charity Herring, who was always setting fire to her bed with a worn-out warming-pan, and James Burrows, of whom my father made this jotting in one of his note-books: "In the year 1853 I buried James Burrows of this parish at the reputed age of one hundred years. Probably he was nearly, if not altogether that age. Talking with him a few years before his death, I asked if his father had lived to be an old man, and he said that he had. I asked him then about his grandfather, and his answer was that he had lived to be a 'wonnerful owd man.' 'Do you remember your grandfather?' 'Right well: I was a big bor when he died.' 'Did he use to tell you of things which he remembered?' 'Yes, he was wery fond of talking about 'em: he used to say he could remember the Dutch king coming over.' James Burrows could not read or write, nor his father probably before him: so that this statement must have been based on purely traditional grounds. Assume he was born in 1755 he would have been a 'big bor,' fifteen years old, in 1770; and assume that his grandfather died in 1770 aged ninety-six, this would make him to have been born in 1675, fourteen or fifteen years before William of Orange landed."

Susan's treatment of Harry Collins, a crazy man subject to fits, was wise and kind. Till Harry came to live with the Kemps, he had been kept in bed to save trouble. Susan would have no more of bed for him than for ordinary folks, but sent him on many errands and kept him in excellent order. Her commands to him usually began with, "Co', Henry, be stirrin';" and he stood in wholesome awe of her, and obeyed her like a child. His fits were curious, for "one minute he'd be cussin' and swearin', and the next fall a-prayin'." Once, too, he "leapt out of the winder like a roebuck." Blind James Seaman, the other occupant of Susan's back-room, came of good old yeoman ancestry. He wore a long blue coat with brass buttons; and his favourite seat was the sunny bank near our front gate.

In the room over Susan Kemp's lived Will Ruffles and his wife, a very faithful old couple. The wife failed first. She had hurt herself a good deal with a fall down the rickety stairs. Will saw to her to the last, and watched carefully over her. The schoolmistress then, a Miss Hindmarsh, took a great liking for the old man; and a friend of hers, a widow lady in London, though she had never seen him, made him a regular weekly allowance to the end of his life--two shillings, half-a-crown, and sometimes more. This gave Will many little comforts. Once when my sister took him his allowance, he told her how, when he was a young man, a Gipsy woman told him he should be better off at the end of his life than at the beginning; and "she spook truth," he said, "but how she knew it I coon't saa." Will suffered at times from rheumatism, and had great faith in some particular green herb pills, which were to be bought only at one particular shop in Ipswich. My sister was once deputed to buy him a box of these pills, and he told her afterwards, "Them there pills did me a lot of good, and that show what fooks saa about rheumatics bein' in the boones ain't trew, for how could them there pills 'a got into the boones?" He was very fond of my father, whom he liked to joke with him. "Mr Groome," he once said, "dew mob me so."

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