The Early Life of Mark Rutherford | Page 8

Would it not
be more sincere if a saucepan took part in it than it is now, when, in
evening clothes, tea-cup in hand, we discuss the show at the Royal
Academy, while a lady at the piano sings a song from Aida?
As to the food at Oakley, it was certainly rough, and included dishes
not often seen at home, but I liked it all the better. My mother was by
no means democratic. In fact she had a slight weakness in favour of
rank. Somehow or other she had managed to know some people who
lived in a "park" about five or six miles from Bedford. It was called a
"park", but in reality it was a big garden, with a meadow beyond.
However, and this was the great point, none of my mother's town
friends were callers at the Park. But, notwithstanding her little
affectations, she was always glad to let us go to Oakley with Jane, not
that she wanted to get rid of us, but because she loved her. Nothing but
good did I get from my wholly unlearned nurse and Oakley. Never a

coarse word, unbounded generosity, and an unreasoning spontaneity,
which I do think one of the most blessed of virtues, suddenly making us
glad when nothing is expected. A child knows, no one so well,
whereabouts in the scale of goodness to place generosity. Nobody can
estimate its true value so accurately. Keeping the Sabbath, no swearing,
very right and proper, but generosity is first, although it is not in the
Decalogue. There was not much in my nurse's cottage with which to
prove her liberality, but a quart of damsons for my mother was enough.
Going home from Oakley one summer's night I saw some magnificent
apples in a window; I had a penny in my pocket, and I asked how many
I could have for that sum. "Twenty." How we got them home I do not
know. The price I dare say has gone up since that evening. Talking
about damsons and apples, I call to mind a friend in Potter Street,
whose name I am sorry to say I have forgotten. He was a miller, tall,
thin, slightly stooping, wore a pepper-and-salt suit of clothes, and
might have been about sixty years old when I was ten or twelve. He
lived in an ancient house, the first floor of which overhung the street;
the rooms were low- pitched and dark. How Bedford folk managed to
sleep in them, windows all shut, is incomprehensible. At the back of
the house was a royal garden stretching down to the lane which led to
the mill. My memory especially dwells on the currants, strawberries,
and gooseberries. When we went to "uncle's", as we called him, we
were turned out unattended into the middle of the fruit beds if the fruit
was ripe, and we could gather and eat what we liked. I am proud to say
that this Potter Street gentleman, a nobleman if ever there was one,
although not really an uncle, was in some way related to my father.
The recollections of boyhood, so far as week-days go, are very happy.
Sunday, however, was not happy. I was taken to a religious service,
morning and evening, and understood nothing. The evening was
particularly trying. The windows of the meeting-house streamed inside
with condensed breath, and the air we took into our lungs was
poisonous. Almost every Sunday some woman was carried out fainting.
Do what I could it was impossible to keep awake. When I was quite
little I was made to stand on the seat, a spectacle, with other children in
the like case, to the whole congregation, and I often nearly fell down,
overcome with drowsiness. My weakness much troubled me, because,
although it might not be a heinous sin, such as bathing on Sunday, it

showed that I was not one of God's children, like Samuel, who
ministered before the Lord girded with a linen ephod. Bathing on
Sunday, as the river was always before me, was particularly prominent
as a type of wickedness, and I read in some book for children, by a
certain divine named Todd, how a wicked boy, bathing on the Sabbath,
was drawn under a mill-wheel, was drowned, and went to hell. I wish I
could find that book, for there was also in it a most conclusive
argument intended for a child's mind against the doctrine, propounded
by people called philosophers, that the world was created by chance.
The refutation was in the shape of a dream by a certain sage
representing a world made by Chance and not by God. Unhappily all
that I recollect of the remarkable universe thus produced is that the
geese had hoofs, and "clamped about like horses".