Visits to Grandmother in Norfolk
It was a great treat for us to visit our Grandmother at Horbling, with whom May was a great favourite. It was a long journey by train, through several dark tunnels and with several changes; but we would be greeted with such warmth of love and affection by Grandma who waited for us on the platform at Billingborough. Then we would drive in the fly (as the cab was called) to the old country cottage which lay in a secluded nook just below the Church at Horbling. There was a white gate, and a drive wound up through the slope of the garden to the house, which was so comfortable and homely within and without.
Opposite the gate was the high wall of the Hall, where Squire Smith lived: and below the wall, a beautiful spring which welled up bubbling from mysterious depths into a stone-walled trough, and overflowed into a smaller trough and then into a stream. It was scarcely a village - just a few cottages - and a stream ran along the middle of the lane, and the cottagers used to get their water from it. In later years the County Council decided to abolish the stream, as it was supposed to be insanitary as sheep and cattle were often driven along the lane. After the change, disease attacked the little community which up to that time had been unusually healthy!
Horbling days were very happy ones. Grandma was such a kind and gentle old lady. Like Grandfather Jäger, she was devoted to her Bible, and lived a very human and very saintly life. She rejoiced in our joys and cheered our sorrows - the same virtue and quality which was to distinguish May during the whole of her life. It was a purely country life. We went for long field walks, finding birds nests and gathering mushrooms and wild flowers. Never did stewed mushrooms or jacket potatoes taste so good as when cooked by Grandma. She was a wonderful maker of pastry - she taught Mother, who also excelled - her pork pies and cheese cakes (she called it 'Chis' "Chis, my dear, is right") were extraordinarily toothsome and palatable and we could say rightly: "It is only Grandma who can make them properly." Then she was expert at all sorts of home-made drinks and cordials. There were so many of them - Ginger Wine, very heady and strong: Nettle beer, slightly sweet: horehound beer, very bitter: dandelion tea; and, best of all to my way of thinking, raspberry vinegar.
In the evenings, sitting in the little parlour by the light of oil lamps, we played very old games which I think Grandma must have kept from her early childhood, when she was little Martha Richardson, daughter of Fryer Richardson of Ramsey and Warboys in Huntingdonshire. One was a sort of Rake's Progress, where you had a coloured board with numbered spaces and pictures. The picture I remember was The Bridewell, for if you got into it you had to go back to the beginning. You span a teetotum, a little top with numbers marked on its nonagon, and according to the number on which the top rested you moved your piece along the board. Another game was called Squails, with flat discs on a smooth table, in fact a kind of table bowls. Among the fascinating old toys was 'cup and ball'. Then candles would be lit and away to bed.
The Vicar or Rector of Horbling was Mr Wilson, who was very bald and wore a long silvery white beard. In a gun accident he had lost a hand, and a steel hook fixed to the stump of his forearm took its place. It was odd to see him use the hook to turn over the leaves when he was reading the lessons. He had a large family - several boys and perhaps as many girls, and with them we used to play and go for country walks. We used to go up to the top of the square Church Tower and swing on the bell ropes in the belfry. One day, someone heavier than most of us swung across the belfry, and there was a big boom of the great bell, which echoed and reverberated and sounded all over the parish. Much consternation among the young, you may be sure.
We talked with the old sexton and gravedigger on the tower. He told us with great pride how he had tolled the passing bell for the Bishop of Lincoln, allowing exactly 59 seconds between each toll. But of course they rang a merry peal at Christmas time, and on Sunday mornings it made fine music over the countryside.
At that time our cousins the Sinclairs lived at the old Hall in Billingboro which was about a mile and a half away from Horbling. Miriam Sinclair (Aunt Minnie) had married John Sinclair, a widower with four children (Herbert, Kate, Edith and William) and Aunt Minnie had four daughters, Florence (Flo), Drusilla (Drue) and the twins Gertrude and Emily: so here was another large family as playmates. They used to make frequent visits to us at Nassau House.
And now as I write of those days I think what a gracious memory it is to look back upon an unspoilt countryside, an old English home in an old fashioned village on the edge of the fens, with Grandma, Auntie Emily and May each so gentle, so thoughtful for others, and so alike in disposition.
Bertram Maurice, Arthur Noel Richardson and Mary were born at Nassau House, and it was a full and lively nursery which Dr Braidwood used to visit to cure us of our childish complaints. He was a homeopath, and his medecines were tiny little sugar coated pills of aconite or belladonna or a tincture of the same drugs which flavoured the glass of water in which they were taken most pleasantly. You may be sure no-one except mother minded our being ill at all, especially when he always brought a supply of peppermints and fruit drops along with him. But both the small boys suffered badly from croup, and I remember the croup kettle with its long spout pouring out steam as it stood on a roaring fire.
May too when she was very young sustained some injury to her spine. She had to lie down on a special curved chair for fixed periods every day, and all through her life her back was a source of great pain and trouble to her, which she bore with infinite patience and with never a word of complaint. I think the only time I heard her protesting was on the occasions of those early dinner parties when she was made to play the piano in front of guests. This literally caused her agonies of trepidation and nervousness: but, after all, it was I suppose one of the fixed ideas in those days that children should be encouraged to show their accomplishments. It was a theory of education and upbringing on which Mother always held very strong views. However, no harm was done, except to her feelings, and it did not discourage her love of music. She became proficient at the piano; and, when she went to Dresden with Frieda they both studied under a very celebrated musician, Egon Petri, and both carried the love of music with them as a definite and permanent feature in their lives.
But that is going a little too fast, as we are still in the eighties, and 1 still have to record the last important event which occured at Nassau House, the birth of Gwendolen Frieda Martha in November 1886.