Two Suffolk Friends | Page 8

Will many little comforts. Once when my sister took him his allowance, he told her how, when he was a young man, a Gipsy woman told him he should be better off at the end of his life than at the beginning; and "she spook truth," he said, "but how she knew it I coon't saa." Will suffered at times from rheumatism, and had great faith in some particular green herb pills, which were to be bought only at one particular shop in Ipswich. My sister was once deputed to buy him a box of these pills, and he told her afterwards, "Them there pills did me a lot of good, and that show what fooks saa about rheumatics bein' in the boones ain't trew, for how could them there pills 'a got into the boones?" He was very fond of my father, whom he liked to joke with him. "Mr Groome," he once said, "dew mob me so."
Will, like many other old people in the parish, believed in witchcraft,--was himself, indeed, a "wise man" of a kind. My father once told him about a woman who had fits. "Ah!" old Will said, "she've fallen into bad hands." "What do you mean?" asked my father; and then Will said that years before in Monk Soham there was a woman took bad just like this one, and "there wern't but me and John Abbott in the place could git her right." "What did you do?" said my father. "We two, John and I, sat by a clear fire; and we had to bile some of the clippins of the woman's nails and some of her hair; and when ta biled"--he paused. "What happened?" asked my father; "did you hear anything?" "Hear anything! I should think we did. When ta biled, we h'ard a loud shrike a-roarin' up the chimley; and yeou may depind upon it, she warn't niver bad no more."
Once my father showed Will a silhouette of his father, old Mr Groome of Earl Soham, a portly gentleman, dressed in the old-fashioned style. "Ruffles, who is this?" he asked, knowing that Will had known his father well, and thinking he would recognise it. After looking at it carefully for some time, Will said, "That's yar son, the sailor." My eldest brother at that time might be something over twenty, and bore not the faintest resemblance to our grandfather; still, Will knew that he had been much abroad, and fancied a tropical sun might have blackened him.
By his own accounts, Will's feats of strength as a younger man, in the way of reaping, mowing, &c., were remarkable; and there was one great story, with much in it about "goolden guineas," of the wonderful sale of corn that he effected for one of his masters. At the rectory gatherings on Christmas night Will was one of the principal singers, his chef-d'oeuvre "Oh! silver [query Sylvia] is a charming thing," and "The Helmingham Wolunteers." That famous corps was raised by Lord Dysart to repel "Bony's" threatened invasion; its drummer was John Noble, afterwards the wheelwright in Monk Soham. Once after drill Lord Dysart said to him: "You played that very well, John Noble;" and "I know't, my lord, I know't," was John's answer--an answer that has passed into a Suffolk proverb, "I know't, my lord, I know't, as said John Noble."
Mrs Curtis was quite a character--a little woman, with sharp brown eyes that took in everything. Her tongue was smooth, her words were soft, and yet she could say bitter things. She had had a large family, who married and settled in different parts. One son had gone to New Zealand--"a country, Dr Fletcher tell me, dear Miss, as is outside the frame of the earth, and where the sun go round t'other way." It was for one of her sons, when he was ill, that my mother sent a dose of castor-oil; and next day the boy sent to ask for "some more of Madam Groome's nice gravy." Another boy, Ephraim, once behaved so badly in church that my father had to stop in his sermon and tell Mrs Curtis to take her son out. This she did; and from the pulpit my father saw her driving the unfortunate Ephraim before her with her umbrella, banging him with it first on one side and then on the other. Mrs Curtis it was who prescribed the honey- plaster for a sore throat. "Put on a honey-plaster, neighbour dear; that will draw the misery out of you." And Mrs Curtis it was who, having quarrelled with another neighbour, came to my father to relate her wrongs: "Me a poor lone widow woman, and she ha' got a father to protect her." The said father was old James Burrows, already spoken of, who was over