CHAPTER XII

RECOLLECTIONS OF OLD READING

In the spring of the year 1802 Dr. Mitford purchased an old farm-house with its surrounding fields amounting to about seventy acres, near to the small village of Graseley, which lies about three miles to the south of Reading. The house, known as Graseley Court, had been built in the days of Queen Elizabeth, and it possessed fine rooms with ornamental panelling, oriel windows and a great oaken staircase with massive balustrades. It had fallen out of repair, and the doctor’s first plan was to carry out such restorations only as would make it a comfortable dwelling-place for himself and his family. But unfortunately he soon abandoned this plan and determined to pull down the old house and to build upon its site a new and spacious mansion. Dr. Mitford had little appreciation of the beauty he was destroying, nor did he foresee the large sums of money that would be sunk in this undertaking.

[Illustration: STRIKING LIKENESSES TAKEN IN THIS MANNER _ONE GUINEA EACH_]

Mary’s school life came to an end at the close of the year 1802, when she had just reached the age of fifteen. Her connection, however, with Hans Place was not over, for she paid happy visits from time to time to the St. Quintins and Miss Rowden, going to the London theatres, hearing concerts, and seeing interesting society under their auspices.

Her first introduction to the Reading gaieties of a grown-up order was to be at the Race Ball in August, 1803. “At these balls,” we are told, “it was the custom for the steward of the races to dance with the young ladies who then came out.” After alluding to the distress felt by one of her companions on having to dance with a stranger on such an occasion, Mary writes in 1802: “I think myself very fortunate that Mr. Shaw Lefevre will be steward next year, for by that time I shall hope to know him well enough to render the undertaking of dancing with him less disagreeable.”

“The public amusements of the town,” she writes, “as I remember them at bonny fifteen were sober enough. They were limited to an annual visit from a respectable company of actors, the theatre being very well conducted and exceedingly ill-attended; to biennial concerts ... rather better patronized, to almost weekly incursions from itinerant lecturers on all the arts and sciences, and from prodigies of every kind, whether three-year-old fiddlers or learned dogs.”

“The good town of Belford [Reading],” she tells us, “was the paradise of ill-jointured widows and portionless old-maids. They met in the tableland of gentility, passing their mornings in calls at each other’s houses and their evenings in small tea-parties, seasoned with a rubber or a pool, and garnished with a little quiet gossiping ... which their habits required. The part of the town in which they chiefly congregated, the lady’s _quarter_, was one hilly corner of the parish of St. Nicholas, a sort of highland district, all made up of short Rows and pigmy Places entirely uncontaminated by the vulgarity of shops.”

Miss Mitford has given us many a racy description of the type of small tradespeople of the period. Here is one of them:—

“The greatest man in these parts (I use the word in the sense of Louis-le-Gros, not Louis-le-Grand) is our worthy neighbour Stephen Lane, the grazier ex-butcher of Belford. Nothing so big hath been seen since Lambert the gaoler or the Durham ox.

“When he walks he overfills the pavement and is more difficult to pass than a link of full-dressed misses or a chain of becloaked dandies.... Chairs crack under him, couches rock, bolsters groan and floors tremble....

“Tailors, although he was a liberal and punctual paymaster, dreaded his custom. It was not only the quantity of material that he took, and yet that cloth universally called ‘broad’ was not broad enough for him; it was not only the stuff but the work—the sewing, stitching, plaiting and button-holing without end. The very shears grew weary of their labours.”

For a contrast to this personage we have “little Miss Philly Firkin the china woman,” whose shop stood in a narrow twisting lane called Oriel Street. This street was cribbed and confined on one side by the remains of an old monastic building, and after winding round the churchyard of St. Stephens with an awkward curve it finally abutted upon the market-place. So popular was this “incommodious avenue of shops” that nobody dreamt of visiting Belford without desiring to purchase something there, so that “horse-people and foot-people jostled upon its pavement,” whilst “coaches and phaetons ran against each other in the road.” Of all the shops the prettiest and most sought after was that of Miss Philly Firkin.

“She herself was in appearance most fit to be its inhabitant, being a trim, prim little woman, whose dress hung about her in stiff, regular folds, very like the drapery of a china shepherdess on a mantelpiece, and whose pink and white complexion ... had the same professional hue. Change her spruce cap for a wide-brimmed hat and the damask napkin which she flourished in wiping her wares for a china crook and the figure in question might have passed for a miniature of the mistress. In one respect they differed. The china shepherdess was a silent personage. Miss Philadelphia was not; on the contrary, she was reckoned to make ... as good a use of her tongue as any woman, gentle or simple, in the whole town of Belford.”

Miss Mitford describes another female shop-keeper of those days, “a reduced gentlewoman by name Mrs. Martin, who endeavoured to eke out a small annuity by letting lodgings at eight shillings a week, and by keeping a toyshop. The whole stock (of the little shop)—fiddles, drums, balls, dolls and shuttle-cocks—might be easily appraised at under eight pounds, including a stately rocking-horse, the poor widow’s _cheval de bataille_, which had occupied one side of Mrs. Martin’s shop from the time of her setting up in business, and still continued to keep his station, uncheapened by her thrifty customers.”

When a certain Mr. Singleton, we are told, was ordained curate of St. Nicholas after taking his degrees at college with “respectable mediocrity” he was attracted by the appearance of the rooms above the toyshop, “and there by the advice of Dr. Grampound (the Rector) did he place himself on his arrival at Belford. He occupied the first floor, consisting of the sitting-room—a pleasant apartment with one window abutting on the High Bridge and the other on the market-place, also a small chamber behind with its tent-bed and dimity furniture.” And there the curate continued “to live for full thirty years with the selfsame spare, quiet, decent landlady and her small serving maiden Patty, a demure, civil damsel dwarfed as it should seem by constant curtseying.... Except for the clock of time, which, however imperceptibly, does still keep moving, everything about the little toyshop was at a standstill. The very tabby cat, which lay basking on the hearth, might have passed for his progenitor of happy memory, who took his station there the night of Mr. Singleton’s arrival; and the self-same hobby-horse still stood rocking opposite the counter, the admiration of every urchin who passed the door.

“There the rocking-horse remained, and there remained Mr. Singleton, gradually advancing from a personable youth to a portly middle-aged man.”

We have already mentioned the frequent small fairs that were held in the market-place from time to time, but the chief event of the year in such matters was the Reading Great Fair, which took place regularly upon May Day. “It was a scene of business as well as of pleasure,” writes Mary Mitford, “being not only a great market for horses and cattle, but one of the principal marts for the celebrated cheese of the great dairy counties.... Before the actual fair day waggon after waggon, laden with the round, hard, heavy merchandise, rumbled slowly into the Forbury, where the great space before the school-house was fairly covered with stacks of Cheddar and North Wilts.

“Fancy the singular effect of piles of cheeses several feet high extending over a whole large cricket ground, and divided only by narrow paths littered with straw, amongst which wandered chapmen offering a taste of their wares to their cautious customers, the country shop-keepers (who poured in from every village within twenty miles), and to the thrifty house-wives of the town.... Fancy the effect of this remarkable scene, surrounded by the usual moving picture of a fair, the fine Gothic church of St. Nicholas on one side, the old arch of the Abbey and the abrupt eminence called Forbury Hill, crowned with a grand clump of trees, on the other.... When lighted up at night it was, perhaps, still more fantastic and attractive, when the roars and howlings of the travelling wild beasts used to mingle so grotesquely with the drums, trumpets and fiddles of the dramatic and equestrian exhibitions, and the laugh and shout and song of the merry visitors.”

[Illustration: THE OLD MARKET PLACE, READING]

In the year 1804 the building of the large new house at Graseley was completed, and it received the name of Bertram House, so called in honour of the Mitfords’ Norman ancestor, Sir Robert Bertram. The doctor’s usual extravagance was shown in the style of its decorations and furniture, which were little suited to his small and modest family.

We have visited Bertram House. It is a large square white building of little architectural beauty, but there is beauty in a wide verandah standing at the summit of a broad flight of stone steps leading up to the entrance, which is completely festooned by roses and honeysuckles. The house faces spreading lawns and gay flower-beds, whilst its approach from the lane hard by is beneath an avenue of tall limes. Fields stretch far away behind the building, their “richly timbered hedgerows edging into wild, rude and solemn fir plantations.”

Here Mary Mitford passed sixteen years of her life, and here she got to know and love not only their own beautiful grounds but also every turn of the surrounding shady lanes, where the first violets and primroses were to be found, and delighted in the wide expanse of its neighbouring common gay with gorse and broom. Many of her pastoral stories are connected with this smiling country.

[Illustration]