CHAPTER XX

THREE MILE CROSS

The Mitfords had taken a cottage in Three Mile Cross—a small village about two miles from Graseley, which they supposed at first would be only a temporary abode, but which finally proved to be their home for many years. Here it was that Mary Russell Mitford, throwing herself into the life of her rustic surroundings, and recognizing its poetry and its beauty, conceived her plan of writing the tales of “Our Village.” These tales were destined to render little Three Mile Cross classic ground, and to attract pilgrims, even from the other side of the Atlantic, to visit the prototype of “Our Village.”

Mary writes to Sir William Elford early in April, 1820:—

“We have moved a mile nearer Reading—to a little village street situate on the turnpike road between Basingstoke and the aforesaid illustrious and quarrelsome borough. Our residence is a cottage—no not a cottage, it does not deserve the name—a messuage or tenement, such as a little farmer who had made twelve or fourteen hundred pounds might retire to when he left off business to live on his means. It consists of a series of closets ... which they call parlours and kitchens and pantries, some of them minus a corner which has been unnaturally filched for a chimney; others deficient in half a side which has been truncated by the shelving roof.... [But] we shall be greatly benefited by the compression—though at present the squeeze sits upon us as uneasily as tight stays, and is almost as awkward looking.

“Nevertheless we are really getting very comfortable and falling into our old habits with all imaginable ease. Papa has already amused himself by committing a disorderly person, the pest of the Cross.... Mamma has converted an old dairy into a most commodious store-house. I have stuffed the rooms with books and the garden with flowers, and lost my only key. Lucy has made a score of new acquaintances, and picked up a few lovers; and the great white cat, after appearing exceedingly disconsolate and out of his wits for a day or two, has given full proof of resuming his old warlike and predatory habits by being lost all the morning in a large rat hole and stealing the milk for our tea this afternoon.”

[Illustration: THE MITFORDS’ COTTAGE]

Ten days later Mary writes to a female friend: “We are still at this cottage, which I like very much.... Indeed I had taken root completely till yesterday, when some neighbours of ours (pigs, madam) got into my little flower court and made havoc among my pinks and sweet-peas, and a little loosened the fibres of my affection. At the very same moment the pump was announced to be dry, which, considering how much water we consume—I and my flowers—is a sad affair.” But she adds a day or two afterwards: “I am all in love with our cottage again: the cherries are ripe, and the roses bloom, the water has come, and the pigs are gone!”

The Mitfords’ cottage is still to be seen standing in the long straggling street of low cottages, divided by pretty gardens, with a wayside inn on one side, on the other side a village shop, and right opposite a cobbler’s stall. No railway has come to bring bustle and noise to that quiet spot, so that the village still retains what Miss Mitford has called its “trick of standing still, of remaining stationary, unchanged and unimproved in this most changeable and improving world.”

In the opening chapter of the first volume of _Our Village_ the writer says:—

“Will you walk with me through our village, courteous reader? The journey is not long. We will begin at the lower end, and proceed up the hill.

“The tidy square red cottage[8] on the right hand with the long well-stocked garden by the side of the road belongs to a retired publican from a neighbouring town ... one who piques himself on independence and idleness ... and cries out for reform. He introduced into our peaceful vicinage the rebellious innovation of an illumination on the Queen’s acquittal. Remonstrance and persuasion were in vain; he talked of liberty and broken windows—so we all lighted up. Oh! how he shone that night with candles and laurel and white bows and gold paper, and a transparency with a flaming portrait of Her Majesty, hatted and feathered in red ochre. He had no rival in the village that we all acknowledged; the very bonfire was less splendid....

[Footnote 8: This house, though unaltered in appearance, is now an inn called “The Fox and Horn.”]

“Next to his house, though parted from it by another long garden with a yew arbour at the end, is the pretty dwelling of the shoemaker, a pale, sickly-looking, black-haired man, the very model of sober industry. There he sits in his little shop from early morning till late at night. An earthquake would hardly stir him; the illumination did not. He stuck immovably to his last from the first lighting up through the long blaze and the slow decay till his large solitary candle was the only light in the place. One cannot conceive anything more perfect than the contempt which the man of transparencies and the man of shoes must have felt for each other on that evening. Our shoemaker is a man of substance, he employs three journeymen, two lame and one a dwarf, so that his shop looks like a hospital.... He has only one pretty daughter—a light, delicate, fair-haired girl of fourteen, the champion, protectress and playfellow of every brat under three years old.... A very attractive person is that child-loving girl....

“The first house on the opposite side of the way is the blacksmith’s, a gloomy dwelling, where the sun never seems to shine, dark and smoky within and without, like a forge. The blacksmith is a high officer in our little state, nothing less than a constable; but alas! alas! when tumults arise and the constable is called for he will commonly be found in the thickest of the fray....

“Next to this official dwelling is a spruce little tenement, red, high and narrow, boasting, one above another, three sash windows, the only sash windows in the village. That slender mansion has a fine, genteel look. The little parlour seems made for Hogarth’s old maid and her stunted foot-boy, for tea and card parties ... for the rustle of faded silks and the splendour of old china, for affected gentility and real starvation. This should have been its destiny, but fate has been unpropitious, it belongs to a plump, merry, bustling dame with four fat, rosy, noisy children, the very essence of vulgarity and plenty.

“Then comes the village shop, like other village shops, multifarious as a bazaar; a repository for bread, shoes, tea, cheese, tape, ribands and bacon, for everything, in short, except the one particular thing which you happen to want at the moment ... and which ‘they had yesterday and will have again to-morrow.’ ... The people are civil and thriving and frugal withal. They have let the upper part of their house to two young women ... who teach little children their A B C, and make caps and gowns for their mammas—parcel schoolmistress, parcel mantua maker. I believe they find adorning the body a more profitable vocation than adorning the mind.”

This little shop still exists, and it still bears above its modest window the identical name of Bromley, which it bore in Miss Mitford’s day.

[Illustration: THE VILLAGE SHOP]

“Divided from the shop by a narrow yard,” continues Miss Mitford, “and opposite the shoe-maker’s, is a habitation of whose inmates I shall say nothing. A cottage—no—a miniature house, with many additions, little odds and ends of places, pantries, and what not; all angles and of a charming in-and-outness; a little bricked court before one half, a little flower-yard before the other; the walls old and weather-stained, covered with hollyhocks, roses, honeysuckles and a great apricot tree. The casements are full of geraniums (ah, there is our superb white cat peeping out from amongst them!), the closets ... full of contrivances and corner cupboards; and the little garden behind full of common flowers, tulips, pinks, larkspurs, peonies, stocks and carnations, with an arbour of privet, not unlike a sentry-box, where one lives in a delicious green light, and looks out on the gayest of all gay flower-beds. That house was built on purpose to show in what an exceedingly small compass comfort may be packed. Well, I will loiter there no longer.

“The next tenement is a place of importance—the Rose Inn [‘The Swan’], a whitewashed building, retired from the road behind its fine swinging sign, with a little bow-window room coming out on one side and forming with our stable on the other a sort of open square, which is the constant resort of carts, waggons and return chaises. There are two carts there now, and mine host is serving them with beer in his eternal red waistcoat.... He has a stirring wife, a hopeful son and a daughter, the belle of the village, not so pretty as the fair nymph of the shoe shop, and less elegant, but ten times as fine, all curl-papers in the morning, like a porcupine, all curls in the afternoon, like a poodle, with more flowers than curl-papers and more lovers than curls....

“In a line with the bow-window room is a low garden wall belonging to a house under repair; the white house opposite the collar-maker’s shop, with four lime trees before it and a waggon load of bricks at the door. That house is the plaything of a wealthy, whimsical person who lives about a mile off. He has a passion for bricks and mortar.... Our good neighbour fancied that the limes shaded the rooms and made them dark, so he had all the leaves stripped from every tree. There they stood, poor miserable skeletons, as bare as Christmas under the glowing midsummer sun.”

[Illustration: THE SWAN INN]

Here we would remark that when paying our first visit to Three Mile Cross many years ago that house was unchanged, and the row of old pollarded limes still stood as sentinels before it; but since then the house has been altered and the trees have disappeared. We would also mention that the real name of the inn is the “Swan,” but in all her village tales Miss Mitford calls it the “Rose.” The “collar-maker’s shop,” on the opposite side of the road, a quaint little edifice, is just as it was in appearance in the writer’s day.

“Next door [to the house under repair],” continues Miss Mitford, “lives a carpenter, famed ten miles round, and worthy all his fame, with his excellent wife and their little daughter Lizzie, the plaything and queen of the village, a child of three years old, according to the register, but six in size and strength and intellect, in power and in self-will. She manages everybody in the place, her schoolmistress included ... makes the lazy carry her, the silent talk to her, the grave romp with her; does anything she pleases; is absolutely irresistible.... Together with a good deal of the character of Napoleon she has something of his square, sturdy, upright form ... she has the imperial attitudes too, and loves to stand with her hands behind her, or folded over her breast, and sometimes when she has a little touch of shyness she clasps them together on the top of her head, pressing down her shining curls, and looking so exquisitely pretty! Yes, Lizzie is the queen of the village! She has but one rival in her dominions, a certain white greyhound called Mayflower, much her friend, who resembles her in beauty and strength, in playfulness and almost in sagacity, and reigns over the animal world as she over the human. They are both coming with me, Lizzie and Lizzie’s ‘pretty May.’

“We are now at the end of the street; a cross lane, a rope walk, shaded with limes and oaks, and a cool, clear pond, overhung with elms, lead us to the bottom of the hill. There is still an house round the corner, ending in a picturesque wheeler’s shop. The dwelling-house is more ambitious. Look at the fine flowered window-blinds, the green door with the brass knocker.... These are the curate’s lodgings—apartments his landlady would call them. He lives with his own family four miles off, but once or twice a week he comes to his neat little parlour to write sermons, to marry or to bury as the case may require. Never were better people than his host and hostess, and there is a reflection of clerical importance about them, since their connection with the Church, which is quite edifying—a decorum, a gravity, a solemn politeness. Oh, to see the worthy wheeler carry the gown after his lodger on a Sunday, nicely pinned up in his wife’s best handkerchief; or to hear him rebuke a squalling child or a squabbling woman! The curate is nothing to him. He is fit to be perpetual churchwarden.”

We would remark here that the wheeler’s workshop is one of the most striking objects in the village. Its great hatch doors are always thrown wide open, revealing a dark interior in vivid contrast with the sunshine overhead. Its old thatched roof is illuminated by the golden light, as are also the spreading branches of a huge wistaria that cover its main wall as well as the whole front of the adjoining dwelling-house. The present wheelwright is the successor of the very man whom Miss Mitford has just described. It is pleasant to have a chat with him about the village, as he has known every corner of it ... also its inhabitants for many a year. He showed us the curate’s little parlour, into which the front door opens, admitting a pretty view of the “cool clear pond” on the further side of the lane with its overhanging trees.

Little Three Mile Cross does not boast a church of its own, but it is in the parish of Shinfield, and it was to Shinfield Church, distant about two miles and a half, that the curate repaired, accompanied by the “wheeler” carrying his gown.

On quitting the village Miss Mitford exclaims: “How pleasantly the road winds up the hill between its broad green borders and hedgerows, so thickly timbered!... We are now on the eminence close to the Hill-house and its beautiful garden.” And looking back, she describes “the view; the road winding down the hill with a slight bend ... a waggon slowly ascending, and a horseman passing it at full trot, [while] further down are seen the limes and the rope-walk, then the village, peeping through the trees, whose clustering tops hide all but the chimneys and various roofs of the houses ... [and in the distance] the elegant town of B——, with its fine old church towers and spires, the whole view shut in by a range of chalky hills; and over every part of the picture trees so profusely scattered that it appears like a woodland scene, with glades and villages intermixed.”

[Illustration]