George Borrow and His Circle | Page 5

light without much difficulty. It is a
fair-sized farm-house, with a long low frontage separated from the road
by a considerable strip of garden. It suggests a prosperous yeoman class,
and I have known farm-houses in East Anglia not one whit larger
dignified by the name of 'hall.' Nearly opposite is a pond. The trim
hedges are a delight to us to-day, but you must cast your mind back to a
century ago when they were entirely absent. The house belonged to
George Borrow's maternal grandfather, Samuel Perfrement, who
farmed the adjacent land at this time. Samuel and Mary Perfrement had
eight children, the third of whom, Ann, was born in 1772.
In February 1793 Ann Perfrement, aged twenty-one, married Thomas
Borrow, aged thirty-five, in the Parish Church of East Dereham, and of
the two children that were born to them George Henry Borrow was the
younger. Thomas Borrow was the son of one John Borrow of St. Cleer
in Cornwall, who died before this child was born, and is described by
his grandson[3] as the scion 'of an ancient but reduced Cornish family,

tracing descent from the de Burghs, and entitled to carry their arms.'
This claim, of which I am thoroughly sceptical, is endorsed by Dr.
Knapp,[4] who, however, could find no trace of the family earlier than
1678, the old parish registers having been destroyed. When Thomas
Borrow was born the family were in any case nothing more than small
farmers, and Thomas Borrow and his brothers were working on the
land in the intervals of attending the parish school. At the age of
eighteen Thomas was apprenticed to a maltster at Liskeard, and about
this time he joined the local Militia. Tradition has it that his career as a
maltster was cut short by his knocking his master down in a scrimmage.
The victor fled from the scene of his prowess, and enlisted as a private
soldier in the Coldstream Guards. This was in 1783, and in 1792 he
was transferred to the West Norfolk Militia; hence his appearance at
East Dereham, where, now a serjeant, his occupations for many a year
were recruiting and drilling.[5] It is recorded that at a theatrical
performance at East Dereham he first saw, presumably on the stage of
the county-hall, his future wife--Ann Perfrement. She was, it seems,
engaged in a minor part in a travelling company, not, we may assume,
altogether with the sanction of her father, who, in spite of his
inheritance of French blood, doubtless shared the then very strong
English prejudice against the stage. However, Ann was one of eight
children, and had, as we shall find in after years, no inconsiderable
strength of character, and so may well at twenty years of age have
decided upon a career for herself. In any case we need not press too
hard the Cornish and French origin of George Borrow to explain his
wandering tendencies, nor need we wonder at the suggestion of
Nathaniel Hawthorne, that he was 'supposed to be of gypsy descent by
the mother's side.' You have only to think of the father, whose work
carried him from time to time to every corner of England, Scotland, and
Ireland, and of the mother with her reminiscence of life in a travelling
theatrical company, to explain in no small measure the glorious
vagabondage of George Borrow.
Behold then Thomas Borrow and Ann Perfrement as man and wife, he
being thirty-five years of age, she twenty-one. A roving, restless life
was in front of the pair for many a day, the West Norfolk Militia being
stationed in some eight or nine separate towns within the interval of ten

years between Thomas Borrow's marriage and his second son's birth.
The first child, John Thomas Borrow, was born on the 15th April
1801.[6] The second son, George Henry Borrow, the subject of this
memoir, was born in his grandfather's house at Dumpling Green, East
Dereham, his mother having found a natural refuge with her father
while her husband was busily recruiting in Norfolk. The two children
passed with their parents from place to place, and in 1809 we find them
once again in East Dereham. From his son's two books, Lavengro and
Wild Wales, we can trace the father's later wanderings until his final
retirement to Norwich on a pension. In 1810 the family were at Norman
Cross in Huntingdonshire, when Captain Borrow had to assist in
guarding the French prisoners of war; for it was the stirring epoch of
the Napoleonic conflict, and within the temporary prison 'six thousand
French and other foreigners, followers of the Grand Corsican, were
now immured.'
What a strange appearance had those mighty casernes, with their blank
blind walls, without windows or grating, and their slanting roofs, out of
which, through orifices where the