Two Suffolk Friends | Page 4

too tore his small- clothes, but he was not sent to bed.
With his elder brother, John Hindes (afterwards Rector of Earl Soham), my father went to school at Norwich under Valpy. The first time my grandfather drove them, a forty-mile drive; and when they came in sight of the cathedral spire, he pulled up, and they all three fell a-weeping. For my grandfather was a tender-hearted man, moved to tears by the Waverley novels. Of Valpy my father would tell how once he had flogged a day-boy, whose father came the next day to complain of his severity. "Sir," said Valpy, "I flogged your son because he richly deserved it. If he again deserves it, I shall again flog him. And"--rising--"if you come here, sir, interfering with my duty, sir, I shall flog you." The parent fled.
The following story I owe to an old schoolfellow of my father's, the Rev. William Drake. "Among the lower boys," he writes, "were a brother of mine, somewhat of a pickle, and a classmate of his, who in after years blossomed into a Ritualistic clergyman, and who was the son of a gentleman, living in the Lower Close, not remarkable for personal beauty. One morning, as he was coming up the school, the sound of weeping reached old Valpy's ears: straightway he stopped to investigate whence it proceeded. 'Stand up, sir,' he cried in a voice of thunder, for he hated snivelling; 'what is the matter with you?' 'Please, sir,' came the answer, much interrupted by sobs and tears, 'Bob Drake says I'm uglier than my father, and that my father is as ugly as the Devil.'"
Another old Norwich story may come in here, of two middle-aged brothers, Jeremiah and Ozias, the sons of a dead composer, and themselves performers on the pianoforte. At a party one evening Jeremiah had just played something, when Ozias came up and asked him, "Brother Jerry, what was that beastly thing you were playing?" "Ozias, it was our father's," was the reproachful answer; and Ozias burst into tears.
{Monk Soham Rectory: p14.jpg}
When my father went up to Cambridge, his father went with him, and introduced him to divers old dons, one of whom offered him this sage advice, "Stick to your quadratics, young man. I got my fellowship through my quadratics." Another, the mathematical lecturer at Peterhouse, was a Suffolk man, and spoke broad Suffolk. One day he was lecturing on mechanics, and had arranged from the lecture-room ceiling a system of pulleys, which he proceeded to explain,--"Yeou see, I pull this string; it will turn this small wheel, and then the next wheel, and then the next, and then will raise that heavy weight at the end." He pulled--nothing happened. He pulled again--still no result. "At least ta should," he remarked.
Music engrossed, I fancy, a good deal of my father's time at Cambridge. He saw much of Mrs Frere of Downing, a pupil of a pupil of Handel's. Of her he has written in the Preface to FitzGerald's 'Letters.' He was a member of the well-known "Camus"; and it was he (so the late Sir George Paget informed my doctor-brother) who settled the dispute as to precedence between vocalists and instrumentalists with the apt quotation, "The singers go before, the minstrels follow after." He was an instrumentalist himself, his instrument the 'cello; and there was a story how he, the future Master of Trinity, and some brother musicians were proctorised one night, as they were returning from a festive meeting, each man performing on his several instrument.
He was an attendant at the debates at the Cambridge Union, e.g., at the one when the question debated was, "Will Mr Coleridge's poem of 'The Ancient Mariner' or Mr Martin's Act tend most to prevent cruelty to animals?" The voting was, for Mr Martin 5, for Mr Coleridge 47; and "only two" says a note written by my father in 1877, "of the seven who took part in the debate are now living--Lord Houghton and the Dean of Lincoln. How many still remember kind and civil Baxter, the harness-maker opposite Trinity; and how many of them ever heard him sing his famous song of 'Poor Old Horse'? Yet for pathos, and, unhappily in some cases, for truth, it may well rank even with 'The Ancient Mariner.' And Baxter used to sing it so tenderly."
Meanwhile, of the Earl Soham life--a life not unlike that of "Raveloe"--my father had much to tell. There was the Book Club, with its meetings at the "Falcon," where, in the words of a local diarist, "a dozen honest gentlemen dined merrily." There were the heavy dinner-parties at my grandfather's, the regulation allowance of port a bottle per man, but more ad libitum. And there was the yearly "Soham Fair," on July 12, when my grandfather kept open