Two Suffolk Friends | Page 7

black cat once which would jump on to his knees, so at last it
was shut up in a cupboard. The top of this cupboard, however, above
the door, was separated from the room only by a piece of pasted paper;
and through this paper the cat's head 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