Two Suffolk Friends | Page 7

suddenly emerged. "Cat, you bitch!" said old Mrs Wilding, and my father could read no more. Nay, his father (then in his last illness) laughed too when he heard the story.
The average age of those old Guildhall people must have been much over sixty, and some of them were nearly centenarians--Charity Herring, who was always setting fire to her bed with a worn-out warming-pan, and James Burrows, of whom my father made this jotting in one of his note-books: "In the year 1853 I buried James Burrows of this parish at the reputed age of one hundred years. Probably he was nearly, if not altogether that age. Talking with him a few years before his death, I asked if his father had lived to be an old man, and he said that he had. I asked him then about his grandfather, and his answer was that he had lived to be a 'wonnerful owd man.' 'Do you remember your grandfather?' 'Right well: I was a big bor when he died.' 'Did he use to tell you of things which he remembered?' 'Yes, he was wery fond of talking about 'em: he used to say he could remember the Dutch king coming over.' James Burrows could not read or write, nor his father probably before him: so that this statement must have been based on purely traditional grounds. Assume he was born in 1755 he would have been a 'big bor,' fifteen years old, in 1770; and assume that his grandfather died in 1770 aged ninety-six, this would make him to have been born in 1675, fourteen or fifteen years before William of Orange landed."
Then there were Tom and Susan Kemp. He came from somewhere in Norfolk, the scene, I remember, of the 'Babes in the Wood,' and he wore the only smock-frock in the parish, where the ruling fashion was "thunder-and-lightning" sleeve-waistcoats. Susan's Sunday dress was a clean lilac print gown, made very short, so as to show white stockings and boots with cloth tops. Over the dress was pinned a little black shawl, and her bonnet was unusually large, of black velvet or silk, with a great white frill inside it. She was troubled at times with a mysterious complaint called "the wind," which she thus described, her finger tracing the course it followed within her: "That fare to go round and round, and then out ta come a-raspin' and a-roarin'." Another of her ailments was swelled ankles. "Oh, Mr Groome!" she would say, "if yeou could but see my poare legs, yeou'd niver forget 'em;" and then, if not stopped, she would proceed to pull up her short gown and show them. If my father had been out visiting more than to her seemed wise, she would, when he told her where he had been to, say: "Ah! there yeou go a-rattakin' about, and when yeou dew come home yeou've a cowd, I'll be bound," which often enough was the case. Susan's contempt was great for poor folks dressing up their children smartly; and she would say with withering scorn, "What do har child want with all them wandykes?"--vandykes being lace trimmings of any sort. Was it of spoilt children that she spoke as "hectorin' and bullockin' about"?--certainly it was of one of us, a late riser, that she said, "I'd soon out-of-bed har if I lived there."
Susan's treatment of Harry Collins, a crazy man subject to fits, was wise and kind. Till Harry came to live with the Kemps, he had been kept in bed to save trouble. Susan would have no more of bed for him than for ordinary folks, but sent him on many errands and kept him in excellent order. Her commands to him usually began with, "Co', Henry, be stirrin';" and he stood in wholesome awe of her, and obeyed her like a child. His fits were curious, for "one minute he'd be cussin' and swearin', and the next fall a-prayin'." Once, too, he "leapt out of the winder like a roebuck." Blind James Seaman, the other occupant of Susan's back-room, came of good old yeoman ancestry. He wore a long blue coat with brass buttons; and his favourite seat was the sunny bank near our front gate.
In the room over Susan Kemp's lived Will Ruffles and his wife, a very faithful old couple. The wife failed first. She had hurt herself a good deal with a fall down the rickety stairs. Will saw to her to the last, and watched carefully over her. The schoolmistress then, a Miss Hindmarsh, took a great liking for the old man; and a friend of hers, a widow lady in London, though she had never seen him, made him a regular weekly allowance to the end of his life--two shillings, half-a-crown, and sometimes more. This gave