PREWD'S
PRUNINGS
Being those portions of the Mousehold Press book
'Prewd and Prejudice' deemed too long, short, irrelevant, irregular or downright
irreverent for inclusion in the original publication.
APRIL 1904
If April showers should come your way,
Wear
a hat, or indoors stay.
1
April, Good Friday
(re. the co-incidence of Good Friday
and All Idiots Day)
No-one
can remember, it seems, when these two festivals last coincided, but everyone
can remember what happened. It
appears that special candles were secretly made with wicks of hemp which, when
ignited, filled the church with a smoke which caused all present to lose their
sense of propriety and decency. This
was done as what I believe is called a 'joke'.
I cannot bring myself to write here, on so holy a day, some of the things
which Maud claims happened after this, but suffice it to say that the dowager
Lady Silver-Darling never left the Hall again, and the church had to be
reconsecrated. it is no wonder,
then, that the vicar sees fit to avoid a repetition of such disgraceful
behaviour.
(re
practical jokes)
Sid: Once
I tied the vicar's shoelaces together. That
one didn't work so well, due to the fact that he wasn't wearing the shoes at the
time.
As
you can see, these were in the main harmless pranks.
St Just-near-Trunch never saw the kind of dangerous joking that occurred
in some parts of Norfolk, where at times it got completely out of hand.
Indeed, it sometimes led to death, or even injury, which in those days
was much the more serious, as the injured person had to be fed and clothed,
whereas the dead one only had to be buried.
Some scholars believe that Kett's Rebellion of 1549 was an example of a
practical joke which got out of hand. In
that case the joke was eventually on Robert Kett, who was hanged from Norwich
Castle. His last words are reported
to have been "That's ye trouble betimes.
None hath a sense of humour".
4 April, Monday
Some people have suggested that Doyley Silver-Darling was rather a wild youth,
and he certainly joined in the activities of the village with a greater
enthusiasm than any other member of his family.
He played cricket for the village, raced horses locally, and took a
special interest in the well being of the members of the Mothers Union.
Later, when he came into his title, he was more restrained in his
behaviour, though his two sons, Gilbert and Sullivan, are reputed to have taken
over where he left off.
6
April, Wednesday
In 1583, according to the parish
registers of Wells-next-the-Sea in North Norfolk, fourteen men were drowned:
"by the detestable working of an execrable witche of Kings Lynn,
whose name was Mother Gabley ........... by the boiling or rather labouring of
certayn Eggs in a payle full of colde water, afterward proved sufficiently at ye
arraignment of ye said Witche"*.
In
the parish of Gimingham there are proven records of egg worship as recently as
the 1840s, and rumours persist of a current resurgence of 'fowl practice'.
Sid The
symbolics are different, so it's no good expecting them to be the same, is it?
They go sort of slow, if at all. They're
very important to old people, like my old mother, who goes much the same way.
They used to say "Take your time and you'll be alright.
Take someone else's and so much the better.
* Christina Hole; 'Superstitions of Death and the Supernatural'.
14
April, Thursday
Prior to Miss Pickerel's arrival St Just Bored School was run - or, as some
would have it, ruled - by the redoubtable Mrs Ironsides.
She was especially fond of using 'tactile aids', reckoning that she liked
her children to get a feel of things, in particular the birch.
Sid Kipper doesn't remember her.
Sid: My
old grandfather Billy reckoned she was a real tartan.
Her motto was always 'Spare the rod and spoil the child'.
Well, none of the children was ever spoiled, I can tell you, though they
do say that some of them were ruined. She
was known as 'Mrs Ironsides, strict but dark'.
She was known as a lot of other things as well, but I can't tell you them
with a gentleman like yourself present.
Mrs
Ironsides seems to have left the village is something of a hurry, though I have
been unable to find out what happened to her.
As, indeed, were the police at the time, since it was his night off.
15 April, Friday
Sid: Life
was hard when I was a boy. I used
to have to walk all the way to school, and then all the way back again.
I always used to forget my lunch, you see.
And that weren't just a question of going round the corner to school in
them days. It was a question of
turning right at the Giblet's Crossroads, across Farmer Trout's top field,
over the dike, down the footpath to the road, turn left, then right through
the duck pond, second left after the farm, and past the old oak tree.
Mind you, if I'd gone left at the Giblets Crossroads in the first place
I wouldn't have had to go all that long way round.
I was alright on my way home, though, 'cos Mrs Fry used to walk me
home. As soon as I got there, as a
matter of fact. She used to say
"I am not having this child in my class".
She was wrong, of course, 'cos there was only her class in the whole
school. That was class 3D.
My uncle George was responsible for the slates when he was at school.
He had to make sure they were clean every morning, and also if it
rained he had to get them back up on the roof double quick.
I never had any responsibility. Nor
did George, come to that.
I quite liked Mrs Fry. Course,
we didn't call her that behind her back. We
used her nickname, which was 'Mrs'. Once
I took her an apple, only I forgot and ate it myself.
All I had left was the core, so I gave her that.
She said "Sidney, it is the thought that counts, and I think I
will give you six of the best. She
thought right as well. She was a
great one for thinking. I never
had much time for it myself.
Cyril Cockle and I used to share a desk.
He'd have it one day and I'd have it the next.
One particular day we couldn't remember whose turn it was, so neither
of us sat at it. The desk was
right at the front of the class, so you couldn't behave yourself.
You had to behave the sort of person Mrs fry wanted, and that was a
sort of person I never had much time for.
That sort of person worked hard, listened carefully, and volunteered to
help out after school. Well, I
never met no bugger like that in our class.
On a Tuesday all of us boys used to go over to Southrepps to do Woodwork
with Mr Dack. Mind you, we weren't
supposed to. We were supposed to
do it with wood. The girls used to
stay in St Just and do Needlework and Domestic Crisis, so they could become
good wives. That didn't seem fair
to me. I mean, we didn't get no
lessons to make us good husbands, did we?
Cyril was always chasing the girls at school, but I never did.
Well, I didn't know what to do with them when you'd caught one.
Cyril tried to tell me, but I didn't believe him.
Not until Raquel Whelk caught me one day and showed me.
Who'd have thought it? And
to think Cyril used to do all that at the back of the bike sheds.
Still, it might explain why he used to go round covered in tyre tracks
all the time.
All in all I didn't get a lot from school.
Apart from a few pencils, some rubbers and a football.
I suppose that's why they go on nowadays about how the schools haven't
got no equipment. I was going to
take the football back, but I found out mother had cooked it.
Times were hard in those days, but we were too stupid to worry about it.
18
April, Monday
A
very excited Miss Pickerel called briefly this evening and interrupted my game
of patience. She wished to thank me
for my help the other day, and tell me what has happened since.
It seems that on Saturday she took the train to Norwich, where she went
to the educational suppliers and purchased a pair of Flogger's 'Lifetime
Guaranteed' Teachers Friends. All
yesterday, apart from attending church, she spent practising her technique and
in preparing new lessons, which would occupy the children's grubby little hands
without overstraining their grubby little minds.
She is delighted with the results. Not
only did they behave in a much more docile manner, but they also failed to
produce any schoolwork for her to mark.
As a token of her gratitude she
also purchased a particularly vulgar piece of pottery, which she proceeded to
present to me. I shall give it pride
of place in Maud's room.
************************
Miss
Pickerel stayed at the School House until 1935, when she left to take up the
position of Governess to an Austrian nobleman, Baron von Krapp.
Her adventures in teaching her charges art, helping the family escape the
invading Nazis, and setting up a home in America, where they became famous, have
been chronicled in the film 'The Sight of Painting'.
On
her departure the then vicar, Rev Aubrey Gudgeon, wrote in the parish
newsletter:
Sid:
Miss Pickerel, who has been our mistress since 1904, is leaving us to
go and work for a Hun. Her efforts
have helped the school grow from a small Elementary establishment into a
slightly larger Elementary establishment, and I have been asked by many of her
past pupils to wish her all she deserves.
I myself shall miss her neat little figures in the cricket scorebook,
and we will all remember her for her exhibitions of atonal violoncello playing
which, if a trifle modern for my taste were, I feel sure, quite excellent in
parts.
Mrs
Prewd continued to give advice to her protege throughout her stay, and Miss
Pickerel timidly brought her posies of wild flowers and jars of japonica jelly.
25
April, Monday
(re.
the habit of papering cottage walls with old newspapers)
This
also accounts for the strange seating arrangements in the old cottages.
The chairs would be arranged around the sides of the rooms, facing
outwards. Thus the family could look
at the pictures in the papers, and would not have to speak to each other.
Occasionally a semi-literate resident or visitor would scrawl a footnote
to a story, especially if the paper had been stuck the right way up.
This practice is still carried on by semi-literate visitors to the
lavatories of the Old Goat Inn to this day.
Indeed, that is where I found these lines, perhaps penned in a moment of
desperate inspiration by Augustus Swineherd, the Trunch Lareate, himself:
Randy is the parson, Clerky is the clerk,
Knickers to Her Ladyship, Lupins for a Lark.
If we haven't got it we can get it by and by,
So watch the wall, my booties, as the Gentlemen go by.
26
April, Tuesday
(regarding
Sherlock Holmes)
I
have not only read of Mr Holmes, but actually him met on one occasion, shortly
after my late husband's demise. Mr
Holmes called at the house and asked a number of questions about my husband's
business. Naturally he got no
answers from me, as I refuse to answer questions from anyone dressed as an
ostler as a matter of principle. I
left him to stick that in his pipe and smoke it.
************************
Perhaps Mrs Prewd knew
more about Sherlock Holmes than she cares to tell us.
In 'The Case Book Of Sherlock Holmes', while revealing the truth about
The Problems of Thor Bridge, Doctor Watson refers to one of Holmes' few
failures. In it a man "was
found stark staring mad with a match box in front of him which contained a
remarkable worm said to be unknown to science".
There is every reason to believe that the case had something to do with
the death of Mrs Prewd's husband, since the worm sounds very like something
which her uncle Wesley describes in his memoirs.
(Wesley Wilcox, discussing foreigners
and their need to change)
These things cannot be done overnight, however.
Some of these foreigners have been doing things wrong for thousands of
years. It might be some weeks, for
instance, before they grow forelocks suitable for proper tugging.
But do not be put off. Remember
that you are British, and remember the old saying from the East;' A leopard
cannot change its stripes'. How
wrong that has proved to be.