Two Suffolk Friends | Page 9

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 ninety, and had long been
bedridden.

Mrs Mullinger was a strange old woman. People said she had an evil
eye; and if she took a dislike to any one and looked evilly at their pigs,
then the pigs would fall ill and die. Also, when she lived next door to
another cottage, with only a wall dividing the two chimneys, if old Mrs
Mullinger sat by her chimney in a bad temper, no one on the other side
could light a fire, try as they might.
{Monk Soham Schoolhouse and Guildhall: p30.jpg}
Phoebe Smith and her husband Sam lived in one of the downstair
rooms. At one time of her life Phoebe kept a little dame's school on the
Green. One class of her children, who were reading the Miracles, were
called "Little Miracles"; and whenever my father went in, "Little
Miracles" were called up by that name to read to him. Old Phoebe had
intelligence above the common; she read her Bible much, and thought
over it. She was fond, too, of having my sister read hymns to her, and
would often lift her hands in admiration at any passage she particularly
liked. She commended a cotton dress my sister had on one day when
she went to see her--a blue Oxford shirting, trimmed with a darker
shade. "It is a nice solemn dress," she said, as she lifted a piece to
examine it more closely; "there's nothing flummocky about it."
Among the other Guildhall people were old Mrs "Ratty" Kemp, widow
of the Rat-catcher; {31} old one-eyed Mrs Bond, and her deaf son John;
old Mrs Wright, a great smoker; and Mrs Burrows, a soldier's widow,
our only Irishwoman, from whom Monk Soham conceived no
favourable opinion of the Sister Isle. Of people outside the Guildhall I
will mention but one, James Wilding, a splendid type of the Suffolk
labourer. He was a big strong man, whose strength served him one very
ill turn. He was out one day after a hare, and a farm-bailiff, meeting
him, tried to take his gun; James resisted, and snapped the man's arm.
For this he got a year in Ipswich jail, where, however, he learnt to read,
and formed a strong attachment for the chaplain, Mr Daniel.
Afterwards, whenever any of us were driving over to Ipswich, and
James met us, he would always say, "If yeou see Mr Daniel, dew yeou
give him my love." Finally, an emigration agent got hold of James, and
induced him to emigrate, with his wife, his large family, and his old

one-legged mother, to somewhere near New Orleans. "How are you
going, Wilding?" asked my father a few days before they started. "I
don't fare to know rightly," was the answer; "but we're goin' to sleep the
fust night at Debenham" (a village four miles off), "and that'll kinder
break the jarney." They went, but the Southern States and the negroes
were not at all to their liking, and the last thing heard of them was they
had moved to Canada.
So James Wilding is gone, and the others are all of them dead; but
some stories still remain to be cleared off. There was the old farmer at
the tithe dinner, who, on having some bread-sauce handed to him,
extracted a great "dollop" on the top of his knife, tasted it, and said,
"Don't chuse none." There was the other who remarked of a particular
pudding, that he "could rise in the night-time and eat it"; and there was
the third, who, supposing he should get but one plate, shovelled his
fish-bones under the table. There was the boy in Monk Soham school
who, asked to define an earthquake, said, "It is when the 'arth shug
itself, and swallow up the 'arth"; and there was his schoolmate, who
said that "America was discovered by British Columbia." There was
old Mullinger of Earl Soham, who thought it "wrong of fooks to go up
in a ballune, as that fare {33} so bumptious to the Almighty." There
was the actual balloon, which had gone up somewhere in the West of
England, and which came down in (I think) the neighbouring parish of
Bedfield. As it floated over Monk Soham, the aeronaut shouted,
"Where am I?" to some harvesters, who, standing in a row, their
forefingers pointed at him, shouted back, "Yeou're in a ballune, bor."
There was old X., who, whenever my father visited him, would
grumble, talk scandal, and abuse all his neighbours,