’In the loom of life-cloth pleasure,
Ere our childish days be told,
With the warp and woof enwoven,
Glitters like a thread of gold.’
Jean INGELOW.
Looking back, I think my mother was the leading spirit
in our household, though she never for a moment suspected
it. Indeed, the chess queen must be the most
active on the home board, and one of the objects
of her life was to give her husband a restful evening
when he came home to the six o’clock dinner.
She also had to make both ends meet on an income
which would seem starvation at the present day; but
she was strong, spirited, and managing, and equal
to all her tasks till the long attendance upon me,
and the consequent illness, forced her to spare herself—a
little—a very little.
Previously she had been our only teacher, except that
my father read a chapter of the Bible with us every
morning before breakfast, and heard the Catechism
on a Sunday. For we could all read long before
young gentlefolks nowadays can say their letters.
It was well for me, since books with a small quantity
of type, and a good deal of frightful illustration,
beguiled many of my weary moments. You may
see my special favourites, bound up, on the shelf in
my bedroom. Crabbe’s Tales, Frank, the
Parent’s Assistant, and later, Croker’s
Tales from English History, Lamb’s Tales from
Shakespeare, Tales of a Grandfather, and the Rival
Crusoes stand pre-eminent—also Mrs. Leicester’s
School, with the ghost story cut out.
Fairies and ghosts were prohibited as unwholesome,
and not unwisely. The one would have been enervating
to me, and the other would have been a definite addition
to Clarence’s stock of horrors. Indeed,
one story had been cut out of Crabbe’s Tales,
and another out of an Annual presented to Emily,
but not before Griff had read the latter, and the
version he related to us probably lost nothing in the
telling; indeed, to this day I recollect the man,
wont to slay the harmless cricket on the hearth,
and in a storm at sea pursued by a gigantic cockroach
and thrown overboard. The night after hearing
this choice legend Clarence was found crouching beside
me in bed for fear of the cockroach. I am afraid
the vengeance was more than proportioned to the offence!
Even during my illness that brave mother struggled
to teach my brothers’ daily lessons, and my
father heard them a short bit of Latin grammar at
his breakfast (five was thought in those days to be
the fit age to begin it, and fathers the fit teachers
thereof). And he continued to give this morning
lesson when, on our return from airing at Ramsgate
after our recovery from the measles, my mother found
she must submit to transfer us to a daily governess.
