Two Suffolk Friends | Page 3

I can remember now how pretty they were with their covering of white blossoms, and the grass below full of flowers--primroses, cowslips, and, above all, orchises. But the pond was no ordinary one. It was always called the 'S pond,' being shaped like that letter. I suspect, too, that it was a pond of ill repute--perhaps connected with heathen worship--for we were warned never to go near its edge, lest the Mermaid should come and crome us in. Crome, as all East Anglians know, means 'crook'; and in later years I remember a Suffolk boy at Norwich school translated a passage from the 'Hecuba' of Euripides, in which the aged queen is described as 'leaning upon a crooked staff,' by 'leaning upon a crome stick,' which I still think was a very happy rendering.
"Not far also from the rectory was a cottage, in which lived a family by the name of Catton. Close to the cottage was a well, worked by buckets. When the bucket was not being let down, the well was protected by a cover made of two hurdles, which fell down and met in the middle. These hurdles, be it noted, were old and apparently rotten. One day I was playing near the well, and nothing would, I suppose, satisfy me but I must climb up and creep over the well. In the act of doing this I was seen by Mrs Catton, who saved me, perhaps, from falling down the well, and carried me home, detailing the great escape. Well do I remember, not so much the whipping, as the being shut up in a dark closet behind the study. So strong was and is the impression, that, on visiting Rendlesham as archdeacon, when I was sixty years old, on going up to the rectory- house I asked especially to see this dark closet. There it was, dark and unchanged since fifty-six years ago; and at the sight of it I had no comfortable recollection, nor have I now.
"In the year 1814 was a great feast on the Green--a rejoicing for the peace. One thing still sticks to my memory, and that is the figure of Mrs Sheming, a farmer's wife. She was a very large woman, and wore a tight-fitting white dress, with a blue ribbon round her waist, on which was printed 'Peace and Plenty.'
"In the year 1815 we spent the summer in London, in a house in Brunswick Square, which overlooked the grounds of the Foundling Hospital. Three events of that year have always remained impressed on my memory. The first was the death of little Mary, our only sister. She must have been a strangely precocious child, since at barely three years old she could wellnigh read. My mother, who died fifty-two years after in her eighty- third year, on each year when Mary's death came round took out her clothes, kept so long, and, after airing them, put them away in their own drawer. The second event, which I well remember, was being taken out to see the illuminations for the battle of Waterloo. I can perfectly remember the face of Somerset House, all ablaze with coloured lamps. The third event was the funeral of a poor girl named Elizabeth Fenning." {11}
And there those childish reminiscences broke off--never to be resumed. But from recollections of my father's talk--and he loved to talk of the past--I will attempt to write what he himself might have written; no set biography, but just the old household tales.
After the visit to London the family lived a while at Wickham Market, where my father saw the long strings of tumbrils, laden with Waterloo wounded, on their way from Yarmouth to London. Then in 1818 they settled at Earl Soham, my grandfather having become rector of that parish and Monk Soham. His father, Robinson Groome, the sea-captain, had purchased the advowson of Earl Soham from the Rev. Francis Capper (1735-1818), whose long tenure {12} of his two conjoint livings was celebrated by the local epigrammatist:--
"Capper, they say, has bought a horse-- The pleasure of it bating-- That man may surely keep a horse Who keeps a Groome in waiting."
It was in the summer-house at Earl Soham that my father, a very small boy, read 'Gil Blas' to the cook, Lois Dowsing, and the sweetheart she never married, a strapping sergeant of the Guards, who had fought at Waterloo. And it was climbing through the window of this summer-house that he tore a big rent in his breeches (he had just been promoted to them), so was packed off to bed. That afternoon my grandfather and grandmother were sitting in the summer-house, and she told him of the mishap and its punishment. "Stupid child!" said my grandfather; "why, I could get through there myself." He tried, and he