Part 12
Here, at Stoke, Gray spent his vacations with his mother and his aunt. His mother died in 1753. She, good soul, thought this rickety son of hers—as infirm of purpose as he was of body—engaged in reading for the Law, and went to her grave unconscious of his odes. He loved his mother, and on the lichened slab that covers the unpretending red brick altar-tomb in the churchyard you may yet read the epitaph he wrote—“ ... beside her friend and sister, here sleep the remains of Dorothy Gray, widow, the careful tender mother of many children, one of whom alone had the misfortune to survive her.”
The “yew tree’s shade” is cast over the south porch from a very ancient tree of that species, and the scene generally accords well with the poem. In this connection, as an additional proof that Gray referred to Stoke Poges, it may be noted that the spire, surmounting “yonder ivy-mantled tower,” is an addition since his time, being little over a century old. This would appear to finally dispose of the claims put forward for Upton Royal by the sticklers for absolute accuracy of description, who have held that if Gray were writing of Stoke, he would have written “spire” instead of “tower.”
[Illustration: THE “BICYCLE WINDOW,” STOKE POGES.]
The church is very picturesque, and the interior worth seeing for the sake of the ancient architecture and for the curious little fragments of stained glass set in one of the windows, among them one representing a nude angel, or wingless cherub, with a monastic tonsure, blowing a trumpet and bestriding a veritable “hobby-horse,” or primitive bicycle. There is no questioning the antiquity of the fragment, for the date, 1642, appears on another portion of the glass, and so the mystery of the bicycle is unexplained. Every visitor to Stoke Poges visits Gray’s tomb, and no less a matter for pilgrimage has the so-called “Bicycle Window” become of late years. Indeed, to those who have no literary sympathies, this undoubtedly takes the first rank as an object of interest.
Having seen everything, we retrace our steps to the road, and, turning to the left, make for Farnham Royal, where there is a very beautiful modern church, and in the churchyard an extraordinary monument to a Mr. Henry Dodd, who died in 1861, “brickmaker and contractor. Began life as a ploughboy within a mile of St. Paul’s.” On the south side of the churchyard is the grave of Sarah Hart, victim of George Tawell, who administered prussic acid to her, in 1845, at Salt Hill. He had been carrying on an intrigue with the woman and made her an allowance; but fearing that his wife would hear of the connection, determined to put her out of the way. Tawell himself lived at Berkhamsted, in Hertfordshire. His was an evil career. Living in his youth a secret dissolute life, he had been sent to penal servitude in Australia for forgery. Released after a time, he amassed a fortune out there in business, and retired. Dark rumours, however, were current that he acquired a great part of his fortune by poisoning his partner.
The unhappy woman’s grave is unmarked by any stone, but is the nearest mound to the door in the churchyard wall. Tawell was the first criminal arrested through the agency of that then novelty, the electric telegraph. He rushed off to Slough Station after committing the crime, and just succeeded in catching the train to Paddington. He was clad in Quaker dress, and the telegraphist sent a message up to detain “a man in the garb of a Kwaker,” the original code not containing the letter Q. He was duly arrested and hanged.
From the church we retrace our steps to the village, and taking the middle one of three roads, past the ornamental well-house in the centre of the street, make for that famous woodland, Burnham Beeches, along a very winding lane, taking every left-hand turning. Along a strip of common land, bordered by refreshment houses, we come downhill to the first glade, where the giant beeches crowd together in a dim light. The purchase of Burnham Beeches, unquestionably the finest piece of natural woodland in England,—finer than anything in the New Forest or in Savernake Forest,—was a noble work of the City of London Corporation, which has thus preserved the spot for ever.
[Illustration: AT BURNHAM BEECHES.]
The peculiarly sturdy, stunted, and fantastically gnarled character of Burnham Beeches is due to their having been pollarded at some unknown period. Legends have it that this was done by Cromwell’s soldiers. The inner recesses are weird enough to suggest warlocks and wizards, or Puck at the very least, and Queen Mab herself could find no fitter place wherein to hold her Court than in the crepuscular glades where, amid that purple shade which is the especial glory of Burnham Beeches, a chance patch of sunlight falls, more golden by contrast, on the more than emerald green of the moss, or where the moonbeams filter through on cloudless nights to light Her Majesty’s midnight masques. I would not, being no courtier and unequipped with fairy passwords, adventure alone in the depths of these woodlands at midnight for anything you could promise me. At midday it is another matter.
It is difficult to decide at what period of the year this spot is most beautiful. It has one peculiar glory of the summer and another of the winter, when in the short November and December days the brown leaves that carpet these alleys give out a mist that mingles strangely with the coppery glow of the sinking sun. Amid this impressive coloration the contorted ashen-coloured trunks stand forth strangely ghostlike.
Gray, of course, knew Burnham Beeches very thoroughly. His uncle lived at Burnham when the poet was a youth, and we find Gray writing to Walpole in 1737, in a lively manner quite unexpected of him who was already, in his twenty-first year, the affected prey of melancholy.
But the prig in this precocious young gentleman is distastefully evident in this otherwise very excellent description. The description is in fact delightful; only one could wish the writer of it forty-one, instead of twenty years younger: “My uncle is a great hunter in imagination; his dogs take up every chair in the house, so I am forced to stand at the present writing; and though the gout forbids him galloping after them in the field, yet he continues still to regale his ears and nose with their comfortable noise and stink. He holds me mighty cheap, I perceive, for walking when I should ride, and reading when I should hunt. My comfort amidst all this is, that I have, at the distance of half a mile through a green lane, a forest (the vulgar call it a common) all my own, at least as good as so, for I spy no human thing in it but myself. It is a little chaos of mountains and precipices; mountains, it is true, that do not ascend much above the clouds, nor are the declivities so amazing as Dover Cliff; but just such hills as people who love their necks as well as I do may venture to climb, and crags that give the eye as much pleasure as if they were more dangerous. Both vale and hill are covered with most venerable beeches, and other very reverend vegetables, that, like most other ancient people, are always dreaming out their old stories to the winds. At the foot of one of these squats ME (_il penseroso_), and there I grow to the trunk for a whole morning. The timorous hare and sportive squirrel gambol around me like Adam in Paradise before he had an Eve; but I think he did not use to read Virgil, as I commonly do.”
The “reverend vegetables” phrase has a strangely modern flavour, and so indeed has this appreciation of the picturesque. Before Gray’s time scenery was not only unappreciated; it was detested. Dr. Johnson, who hated hills, was at one with his generation in this respect. Even Horace Walpole, who ought surely to have known better, calls hills “mountains,” and shudders at the sight of them. Gray has this additional title to fame, that he was the first to tour in search of the picturesque, and, in a sense, invented the taste for it. Wordsworth, who was but little later than Gray, says, “When I was young, there were no lakes or mountains.”
But it is quite impossible within these limits to fully describe the Beeches, or to indicate the route through them. The Corporation has made a magnificent series of broad drives in every direction, with splendid surface for cycling; and if the gradients are severe, there is nothing that cannot, with due care, be coasted. Many picnic parties come to the Beeches, but they rarely penetrate far into these lovely woodland glades; leaving the solitudes to the painters, who are always at work here, producing Academy pictures. Find the Plain, the Ponds, and Hardicanute’s Moat, away in the recesses of the woods. See “Beauty and the Beast”; the one being a graceful silver birch, with a gaunt, knotty, blasted oak standing beside it. For the rest, given a fine day, be content to lose yourself here, amid the fairyland of immemorial moss and lusty bracken, and then, when you are tired of it (or, more likely, when evening is drawing on), inquire of one of the artists who are painting the sunset the way for Farnham Common and Slough. This is a fine down-grade road of three and a half miles leading through Farnham Royal down to Salt Hill, where, turning sharply to the left, we are on the Bath road, twelve miles from Hounslow. Slough adjoins Salt Hill. A mile beyond it, up a lane to the left, is Langley. Langley is a wayside station on the Great Western Railway, set down in a beautiful and secluded neighbourhood, the name clipped and mutilated in modern railway fashion, for its full style is “Langley Marish”—“Marshy Langley,”—or, as some would have it, “Langley Maries,” the church being dedicated to the Virgin Mary. Near the station notice the old-fashioned inn, the “North Star,” nestling under the embankment; a house which obtained its present sign from the first locomotive ever used on the Great Western. The engine of that name was originally built for a Russian broad-gauge railway, but never delivered.
While yet some way from the village, the mellowed red brick tower of Langley Church is seen across the flat meadows. The church owns the very singular feature of an old parish library, contained in a room within the building; not a library consisting merely of a few chained books, but a collection of some five or six hundred volumes, given by Sir John Kederminster, under his will of 1631, to “the town” of Langley Marish. No one ever borrows any of these mighty tomes for home reading, for they are chiefly black-letter works of the Greek and Latin fathers, and dry-as-dust treatises on the Reformation controversy. The room containing all this bygone learning is curiously painted with Renaissance designs, and very interesting.
The Kederminsters, of whom this bookworm Sir John was one, were the old lords of the manor. They built the beautiful almshouses looking upon the churchyard. It may be noted that the grouping of church and almshouses is strikingly picturesque, and that the low-toned brick is eminently paintable. Langley, in short, is one of the very few really beautiful and retired villages so near town.
The curious, who roam the churchyard and read the epitaphs on the simple memorials of the villagers, will notice on one of the many wood-rail tomb-“stones” an inscription to a certain “Mrs. Sarah Wall, the old and faithful, but ill-requited Servant of Lord Carrington, who departed this life June 1832, aged 70 years.”
The story goes that she was grievously affronted by being consigned by Lord Carrington to one of the neighbouring almshouses in her old age, when she had expected more consideration at his hands. She it was who directed the expression “ill-requited” to be painted on the board. A former vicar, disapproving of it, had the words painted out, but in the lapse of years the paint of the rest of the lettering decaying, the offending words have been preserved and stand out with an extraordinary prominence, attracting immediate attention.
Pretty hamlets, still wonderfully rural, considering the short distance from London, line the way home, along the old Bath road, or lie a little way from it. Among them is Cranford; but it is probably too late now to see that pretty place, and so we will continue, through the gathering darkness, along the high road home. Every cyclist knows this road, but it is not everyone who knows it when night has fallen; when the little inns and cottages take on a romantic interest they do not possess by daylight; when red blinds in villagers’ windows shed a comfortable ray, and wayside trees and fields wear an unaccustomed and portentous significance. In short, it is a delightful lamp-lit journey along these closing miles, and a pleasantly cool conclusion to the heat of the day.
DARTFORD TO ROCHESTER, AYLESFORD, AND BOROUGH GREEN
[Illustration: Map—DARTFORD to Borough Green Statn.]
There is an excellent route from Dartford to Rochester, avoiding the Dover road, known to comparatively few cyclists other than local—a road that, instead of passing through places so busy and populous as Northfleet and Gravesend, is rural through the whole of its course, from Dartford Brent to where it joins the better-known way at the top of Strood Hill. The Dover road between these two points is, as just remarked, the “better-known” route, but it is by no means the oldest. That distinction can be claimed most emphatically by this, for it follows the course of that old Roman military way, the Watling Street, and was a portion of the route along which went the pilgrims to the shrine of Thomas à Becket at Canterbury.
[Illustration: STONE.]
Coming uphill from where Dartford is seated in its deep hollow beside the Darenth, a high tableland is reached, and with it a parting of the ways. Our own route is plain to see—straight ahead—and is made additionally clear by the aid of a specially informative sign-post. For those, however, who would take the opportunity, when so near, of seeing one of the most interesting parish churches in the country, it may be hinted that two miles down the Dover road—the left-hand turning—is Stone. Let the stranger be careful when inquiring for Stone, and ask specifically for the church. Otherwise the gaping rustic is apt to smile significantly, Stone being famed for its lunatic asylums.
The interior of the Early English church at Stone is a Westminster Abbey in little, designed probably by the same architect, the stones from the same quarries, and carved by the same masons. It stands on a hilltop overlooking the busy estuary of the Thames, near Greenhithe, and its immediate neighbourhood is made sordid with cement works and chalk pits. A huge factory chimney, some six times the height of church and tower, immediately adjoins the churchyard. When in the fulness of time it falls, there will probably be little left of the church, even as a picturesque ruin.
[Illustration: EARLY ENGLISH DOORWAY, STONE CHURCH.]
It is not possible to ride round Stone Church to Greenhithe. The lane leading to it must be retraced, and the Dover road followed until turnings right and left appear. To the left lies the little port of Greenhithe, and on the right the road leads up again to our route for Rochester.
[Illustration: INTERIOR, STONE CHURCH.]
Hasting from the scarred, chalky hillsides and the industries of Stone and Greenhithe, one appreciates more fully the quiet of this fine road; and coming in two miles to Springhead, the Saturday or Sunday cyclist will find that there are others equally appreciative, for the watercress beds and the picnic inns and tea-gardens of Springhead have been famous in all Cockaigne during at least the last seventy years, and the watercresses have by no means lost their freshness nor the place its charm in that space of time. This week-end Arcadia, where the succulent prawn, the cooling cress, and the poetic periwinkle are partaken of in vast quantities, is still in great esteem. The manners and customs of its clients are frank, if unrefined, and their appetites robust, even though their methods be not particularly nice. To see ’Arriet extracting periwinkles from their shells with a hairpin is a lesson in resourcefulness not a little trying.
It is a long climb up to the village of Shinglewell, which rejoices in having an alias; for on all maps you will find the incertitude of cartographers as to what it really should be called proved by the legend “Shinglewell, or Ifield.” Still uphill, we come to a turning that will take us off to the right into Cobham village; the retreat of Tracy Tupman and his wounded love, where, in the “clean and commodious alehouse,” he was discovered by Mr. Pickwick, discussing with a great appetite and a mournful air a not very sentimental meal composed of “roast fowl, bacon, ale, and _et ceteras_.”
The Leather Bottle is the sign of the inn, and it is to-day, perhaps, the best known among Dickens landmarks. It is still the old-fashioned country inn it was when the great novelist knew and described it, but filled now with Dickens’ relics of every kind. A painted sign hangs out from the front proclaiming this to be “Dickens’ Old Pickwick Leather Bottle,” with a picture of that eminent personage in his “shorts” and gaiters in the inevitable attitude of declamation. In the low-ceiled parlour are many prints and portraits having reference to Dickens and his works. An old “grandfather” clock stands in one corner and a stuffed trout in his glass case (an object without which no country inn is completely furnished) occupies a place of honour.
It is worth while leaving the cycle at the inn and to explore the neighbourhood of Cobham village and park. The village church is well known to antiquaries as containing the largest collection of brasses in England. There are no fewer than twenty-four fine examples, principally to members of the ancient and knightly family of the Cobhams, who once were lords of this and many another manor in Kent, and lived at the Cobham Hall which preceded the Elizabethan and Jacobean building now standing, the seat of the Earl of Darnley. The Cobhams have been extinct for centuries, and Lennoxes, Cliftons, and Darnleys have owned the place since, but none of them have left anything like the impress upon it that the old family achieved. Here, in the village, is that now old almshouse, the New College, founded by a Cobham in place of the Old College, the dissolved religious house founded many years before by an ancestor; and there, on the floor of the chancel in the parish church, are their memorials.
Cobham Park is a lovely expanse of lawns and woods and grand avenues, open to the wayfarer freely to come and go. Deer roam about in great herds, and wild life abounds in the tangled glades. The Hall is shown only on Fridays. Tickets are to be purchased at Rochester and Gravesend. To see the Hall and its great collection of pictures is a quite separate undertaking from touring on a cycle, and so we will journey on towards Rochester, regaining the road and making for a landmark known in all this countryside as the “Three Crouches.” When we arrive at the place, we discover it to be an inn called the “Three Crutches,” displaying a shield of arms bearing a chevron between three aces of clubs. The three aces, distinctly resembling crosses, are the so-called “Three Crutches.” Compare with this the name of “Crutched Friars,” who were originally the “crossed friars,” from the cross they wore on their habits; and with that of the “Crouch Oak” at Addlestone in Surrey, an ancient boundary tree standing at the “cross” roads. The motto, _Sub umbra alarum Tuarum_—“under the shadow of thy wings”—is seen below.
From this point it is chiefly downhill into Strood and Rochester; very steeply downhill at Strood, too. Through its mile-long street and on to Rochester Bridge, the rude ribs of the ancient castle rise boldly up from the other side of the Medway, with the Cathedral beside it, looking quite humble. Very maritime looks Rochester’s High Street, with the great gilded model of a line-of-battle ship, fully rigged and armed, that serves for vane, twirling over its Guildhall. Over all is the bustle, roar, and rattle of the trains, rolling in thunder over the railway bridge that cuts off the view downstream.
[Illustration: HIGH STREET, ROCHESTER.]
Rochester, adjoining as it does the busy dockyard town and seaport of Chatham, is not one of the slumberous examples among cathedral cities, for its narrow and, if truth be told, dirty streets are crowded with the waggons and carts going to and from railways and wharves. The “Bull Inn” still remains very much what it was when Jingle recommended it to the Pickwickians.
The “Bull” itself is exactly hit off in Dickens’ description of it, and in the hall the “illustrious larder with glass door, developing cold fowls and noble joints, and tarts wherein the raspberry jam coyly withdraws itself, as such a precious creature should, behind a lattice-wall of pastry,” still develops good things for a later generation. A latter-day stupidity had changed the name to the “Victoria and Bull,” but this has been remedied recently, and it is the “Bull” once more.
Other things noticed by Dickens in Rochester are much the same. He calls the projecting clock of the Corn Exchange the “moon-faced” clock. It still impends over the pavement, and its white dial does indeed suggest the moon. But exquisitely exact is that other description in the “Seven Poor Travellers,” where he speaks of the High Street “oddly garnished with a queer old clock that projects over the pavement out of a grave red building, as if Time carried on business there and hung out his sign.” Also, although restorations have since taken place in the darkling cathedral, no description of it, even now, matches that concise and breathless commentary the novelist puts into Jingle’s mouth: “Old Cathedral, too—earthy smell—pilgrims’ feet worn away the old steps—little Saxon doors—Confessionals like money-takers’ boxes at theatres—queer customers, those monks—Popes and Lord Treasurers, and all sorts of old fellows with great red faces and broken noses, turning up every day.”
You enter the Close directly from the High Street, beside or through what all readers of _Edwin Drood_ know as “Jasper’s Gatehouse,” although the real name of it is “Chertsey’s.” The old church of St. Nicholas, patron saint of fishermen and thieves, who (the thieves, not the fishermen) were from that circumstance known as “St Nicholas’ Clerks,” stands side by side with the cathedral, and opposite is the churchyard. It is well known that Dickens’ own wish was to be buried here, but a national desire that he should rest in Westminster Abbey prevailed. This was recalled to the present writer’s recollection by a stranger when recently at Rochester. “He wanted to be buried there,” said the stranger, pointing with his walking-stick. “’Twould have done Rochester a lot of good,” he added regretfully. “You see, he’s wasted where he is; but if he was here, thousands more visitors would come,” and he went away grumbling.
One of the chief Dickens landmarks here is, of course, the place he calls the “Seven Poor Travellers.” This is the charity founded by Richard Watts, in 1579, for the entertaining of “Six Poor Travellers, who, not being Rogues or Proctors, may receive, gratis, for one night, Lodging, Entertainment, and Fourpence each.”