Our Family Affairs, 1867-1896. E. F. Benson

his poor aunt went raving mad, and I got a general distrust of phosphorus. … Willie Burton was dressed in sailor clothes, and I in a short jacket and knickerbockers, and one day with a sense of almost excessive adventure, we undressed in the tool-house and each put on the other’s clothes. We then opened the door in order to let daylight behold this transformation, and swiftly changed back again. That was a wonderful thing to have done, and when we met next day at the gymnasium we looked at each other’s clothes with glances of secret knowledge.

      My final remembrance at Lincoln is perhaps the most vivid of all, for the sense of it was not that of a momentary impression, but of a growing reality. Every evening now we came down to my mother’s room and for half an hour before bedtime she read Dickens aloud to us, sitting in front of the fire. She liked to have her hair stroked, so I used to stand behind her chair, passing my fingers over the smooth brown hair above her forehead, and listening to the story of the Kenwigses. Her voice and the contact of my fingers on her hair wakened in me the knowledge of how I loved her.

CHAPTER IV

       THE NEW HOME AT TRURO

       Table of Contents

ONE morning a most exciting bomb-shell exploded in the Chancery and blew Lincoln into fragments. It came in the shape of two letters, one from the Prime Minister, Lord Beaconsfield, offering my father the Bishopric of the newly created see of Truro in Cornwall, the other from Queen Victoria, saying that she personally hoped that he would accept it. These letters must have arrived a few days before we knew of them, for that day my father told us that he had thought it over and had settled to go. I felt nothing whatever except wild delight and excitement, unmingled as far as I am aware, with any regret for leaving Lincoln, and all the time that we were out for our walk that morning Maggie and I, instead of telling each other stories, whispered with secret smiles, “The Lord Bishop of Truro! The Lord Bishop of Truro!” We were vastly proud of my father, and thought it most sensible of Lord Beaconsfield and the Queen to have selected him.[A]

[A] Lord Beaconsfield seems to have been as pleased as we were at my father’s accepting the bishopric, for he wrote exultantly to a friend, saying, “Well, we have got a Bishop.”

      The fresh move came in the spring of 1877, and in that loveliest of all seasons the train slid one evening across the tall wooden viaducts with the lights of Truro pricking the dusk, where the town lay below, and the enchantment of Cornwall instantly began to weave its spell. The new home was the Vicarage of Kenwyn, a small village high on the western hills and perhaps a mile from the centre of the town. As a house it was not comparable for amenities and mysteries with the Chancery of Lincoln, but what was the garden at Lincoln, for all its towers and rolling banks, in comparison to the garden here and the fields and water-haunted valleys which encompassed it? The garden at Lincoln, confined within its brick walls and planted down in the middle of a town, was like some caged animal that here roamed wild and untamed.

      Oh, unforgettable morning when for the first time I awoke in the new house, and saw on the ceiling the light of the early sun that shone in through the copse outside, making a green and yellow dapple on the whitewash! The house was still silent; opposite me was Hugh’s bed with his head half-hidden in the sheet, and I dressed stealthily and went downstairs and out. From the lawn I could see the viaduct over which we had come, and below it the misty roofs of the town, with one steeple piercing the vapour into sunlight. Then the mist faded like a frosty breath and beyond the town there stretched broad and shining the estuary of the Fal. Instead of the sorry serge of ivy, the house was clad with tree-fuchsias, and magnolia, and climbing roses and japonica: never was there such a bower of a habitation. On that April morning no doubt the fuchsia and the roses were not in flower, but looking back now, that moment seems to have sucked into itself the decorations of all the months, making in my mind a composite picture, from which I cannot now disentangle the true component parts. But surely there was a gorse bush at the corner of the house, on the edge of the copse through which the sun had shone, and surely it was on that morning that I found a mossy feathery little football of a tit’s nest, woven inextricably among the spines of the gorse, and a virago of an infinitesimal bird peeped out of the circular door, when I drew too near, and scolded me well for my intrusion. I passed up the winding path that led through the shrubbery, and found a circular pleasance with a summer-house. I went cautiously past a row of beehives; I came through a door into a lane below the churchyard, where ferns (the sort of things not known before to exist in other localities than greenhouses and tables laid for dinner-parties) grew quite carelessly in the crevices, and so back, now breathlessly scampering and surfeited with impressions past woodshed and haystack and stable, and upstairs again with heart and shoes alike drenched with the spring-dew.

      All that ensuing summer, lessons I fancy were considerably relaxed, and the lovely months passed like some fugue built on the subjects of that early walk, coloured, amplified and decorated. My father gave us a prize for botany (all specimens to be personally gathered, personally pressed, and mounted on sheets of cartridge paper with the English, and, if possible, the Latin name written below), and we scoured the hedges and liquid water-sides and the edges of the growing hay meadows, with a definite object in view. Study was necessitated by the addition of those names (Latin if possible), but this, like some homœopathic dose conveyed in honey, was drowned in the delight of rambling explorations. The appetite of the collector was whetted; there was a certain craving created for exact knowledge, but far above that was the interest in the loveliness that we should not otherwise have noticed, and the admiration which the interest engendered. Definitely also I think I trace a love of words in themselves which this studied collecting gave us, for what child could write “centaury” or “meadow-sweet,” “bee-orchis,” “comfrey,” “loosestrife,” or in more exalted spheres, “Osmunda regalis” on the virgin sheet of cartridge paper without tasting something of the flavour of these blossom-like syllables? Or what child could fail to whoop with gladness when one of us brought an unknown bloom to a certain botanist friend of my father’s, and was apologetically told that its name was “Stinking Archangel”? For in the lives of all of us, words and due discrimination in their use came to play a considerable part, and somewhere we hoarded these rich additions to our vocabulary. My sister Nellie won the prize, and I remember that she afterwards confessed to me that she had stolen some of my pressed specimens and added them to her own. I never was more astonished, and class this lapse of hers with instances already given of my own demoniacal possession in the matter of the Easter egg and the sheepskin hearthrug. We both agreed that she could not possibly resign the prize, for that would lead to investigation, and she gave me a shilling by way of compensation.

      Birds’ eggs as a collection had hitherto been represented in the Museum by one addled swan’s egg, but now they took rank among the objects of existence. Here my father dictated the conditions under which they might be acquired, namely, that no egg was to be taken from any nest unless that nest contained four, and under no circumstances was more than one to be taken. There was of course no questioning his decision, but it seemed a pity to leave the great tit in the gorse bush to bring up a family of fifteen after our levy had been made, and never to be able to get a wood-pigeon’s egg at all, since those prudent birds refused to lay more than two. But here Charles the groom shone forth gilded with the glory of celestial charity, for he came to me one morning with his entire collection of eggs and “would I accept of them?” Was there ever such a groom? And among these was a pair of wood-pigeon’s eggs, so those parsimonious parents were thwarted.

      For a while games were quite in abeyance, romantic natural history held the field. For consider: my sister Maggie and I had heard that otters were found in Cornwall, and on that simple fact we built up the following fairy-like adventure. There was a round copse, rather lonely, on the edge of our fields; from it the ground declined in a steep down to the bottom of a valley, through which ran a stream so small that by wetting only one foot you could get across it at its widest part. But it ran below bushes and under steep banks, and it seemed highly probable that some of these Cornish otters lived there. Well,