CHAPTER II

HAPPY MEMORIES

The market of old days used to be held in an open space where East Street and West Street meet, near to the Bell Inn, whose gilded sign, in the form of a bas-relief, is displayed over its entrance.

Here we can fancy the little Mary being taken to see the gay booths with their display of toys or of ginger-bread, and the sheep or pigs in pens.

Miss Mitford was warmly attached to the place of her birth, and often alludes to it, but usually under the pseudonym of “Cranley.”

“One of the noisiest inhabitants,” she writes, “of the small, irregular town of Cranley, in which I had the honour to be born, was a certain cobbler by name Jacob Giles. He lived exactly over-right our house in a little appendage to the baker’s shop.... At his half-hatch might he be seen stitching and stitching, with the peculiar, regular two-handed jerk proper to the art of cobbling, from six in the morning to six at night.... There he sat with a dirty red night-cap over his grizzled hair, a dingy waistcoat and old blue coat, darned, patched and ragged, and a greasy leathern apron....

“The face belonging to this costume was rough and weather-beaten, deeply lined and deeply tinted of a right copper colour, with a nose that would have done honour to Bardolph, and a certain indescribable half-tipsy look, even when sober. Nevertheless the face, ugly and tipsy as it was, had its merits.... There was good humour in the half-shut eye, the pursed-up mouth and the whole jolly visage.... There he sat in that small den, looking something like a thrush in a goldfinch’s cage, and singing with as much power and far wider range—albeit his notes were hardly as melodious—Jobson’s songs in the ‘Devil to Pay’ and ‘A cobbler there was, and he lived in a stall, which served him for parlour, for kitchen and hall’ being his favourites.

“... Poor as he was Jacob Giles had always something for those poorer than himself; would share his scanty dinner with a starving beggar, and his last quid of tobacco with a crippled sailor. The children came to him for nuts and apples, for comical stories and droll songs; the very curs of the street knew that they had a friend in the poor cobbler.

[Illustration: MARY RUSSELL MITFORD’S BIRTHPLACE.]

“For my own part I can recollect Jacob Giles as long as I can recollect anything. He made the shoes for my first doll (pink I remember they were)—a doll called Sophie, who had the misfortune to break her neck by a fall from the nursery window. Jacob Giles mended all the shoes of the family, with whom he was a universal favourite.... He used to mimic Punch for my amusement, and I once greatly offended the real Punch by preferring the cobbler’s performance of the closing scene.”

Writing in after years, Miss Mitford remarks: “Where my passion for plays began it is difficult to say. Perhaps at the little town of Alresford, when I was somewhat short of four years old, and was taken by my dear father to see one of the greatest tragedies of the world set forth in a barn. Even now I have a dim recollection of a glimmering row of candles dividing the end which was called the stage from the part which did duty as pit and boxes, of the black face and the spangled turban, of my wondering admiration, and the breathless interest of the rustic audience.”

Among some of her happiest recollections of early childhood were her rides on horseback with her father. “This dear papa of mine,” she writes, “whose gay and careless temper all the professional etiquette of the world could never tame into the staid gravity proper to a doctor of medicine, happened to be a capital horseman, and abandoning the close carriage almost wholly to my mother used to pay his country visits on a favourite blood mare, whose extreme docility and gentleness tempted him into having a pad constructed, perched upon which I might occasionally accompany him, when the weather was favourable and the distance not too great.

“A groom, who had been bred up in my grandfather’s family, always attended us, and I do think that both Brown Bess and George liked to have me with them almost as well as my father did. The old servant, proud, as grooms always are, of a fleet and beautiful horse, was almost as proud of my horsemanship, for I, cowardly enough, Heaven knows, in after years, was then too young and too ignorant for fear—if it could have been possible to have any sense of danger when strapped so tightly to my father’s saddle, and enclosed so fondly by his strong and loving arm. Very delightful were those rides across the breezy Hampshire downs on a sunny summer morning!”