A DAY IN POPPY-LAND.
[BY A HOLIDAY-MAKER.]
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Alfred Jermy, miller, at the gate of his home., c.1910
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The honest miller who lived in the farm by the sea was as good as his word. The wind was slack, and the corn around his little homestead scarcely cut, so he duly presented himself with the basket-carriage and the fast-trotting pony to fetch me away from the monotonous existence of a seaside resort to the more simple pleasures of a sunny country life.
We can do original things in these primitive parts, and so it did not seem at all odd to the inhabitants of the seaside village pretending to be fashionable to see a dusty miller conveying his guest to his distant home. It was just the evening for a drive in the country; the sun had set, the bright clear flame of the lighthouse flashed now to sea and now across the the peaceful country, the yellow evening primrose was closed in the cottage gardens, and the last wagons laden with sheaves were coming home to the barns from the fields.
I left my seaside friends as I had found them, doing precisely the same thing with monotonous regularity. There was a moon in the heavens, across acres and acres of woodland within an easy walk of the hotels and lodging-houses, cliffs to climb although the day was done, and yet no one ventured to depart from the monotony of the orthodox seaside programme, They had done their sands, done their cliff, called for their letters, read their newspaper, eaten their accustomed meals, and now there was nothing to be accomplished except to walk on a wooden pier and to listen to the music of an active but not very distinguished band.
"If you are not in a hurry for time, I can take you a pretty drive to the mill," observed my host, as he allowed the old pony clearly to see that he was on his way homeward; and the worthy miller was right. We took a road that led through a wood, not quite deserted yet by the light, and passed one of the show cottages of the district, a gabled pleasaunce with a rustic porch, built in a hollowed clearance of some noble trees, and now showing an added charm owing to the lights in the latticed windows.
If the old mill farm looked homely enough in the full glare of the midday sun, with a bright light upon the flower beds, and the business of the day, such as it was, in full swing, you can imagine the hospitable look of it as we drove up to the white rustic gate and saw through an open window a supper table spread with a fair white linen cloth, candles lighted, and vases of wild flowers for simple decoration.
It was just the room in which such a table should have been arranged. The furniture was of old solid oak of antique pattern; a combined chest of drawers and escritoire contained the odd books that seemed to have been left by successive reading parties; religion and classics hopelessly mixed, Ovid side by side with Baxter's sermons and theological dissertations in friendly companionship with Todhunter's Algebra.
For pictures there were the coloured illustrations from many a Christmas number of the Illustrated London News and the Graphic, framed by the miller during his winter evenings, some German reproductions of Raffaelle's cartoons, and a wonderful series of coloured plates representing the virtues of a temperate man contrasted with the wretched career of a drunkard, on the true Hogarthian model,
The little drawing-room on the other side of the entrance-door was an apartment evidently held in greater respect and even reverence. It smelt of lavender, and was spotlessly clean; the horsehair sofa was an imposing piece of furniture, the carpet had evidently been a study in green and gold, flowers had been placed in every corner of the room, photographs of the miller's family and ancestors hung upon the walls with more religious prints, coloured and plain; and on a special table in the corner of the room lay in state the huge family Bible.
The miller's house, though compact and regular in front, was roomy at the rear, and capable of holding a decent-sized family of children and nurses, if their parents were sensible enough to bring them here instead of into stuffy, unwholesome lodgings. As for my bedroom it was almost wholly occupied by a comfortable old-fashioned tent bedstead, but it looked to the front—a south-west aspect—and the road was lost in the interval between the miller's and the acres of ripe corn on the slope of the mill-hill.
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Sidestrand Mill with cornfield and Alfred Jermy's home
Google Gemini recreation of an original photograph |
"Could I eat eggs and bacon," was the modest request, as the miller’s daughter uncovered a smoking dish, and pointed to the farmhouse bread and fresh butter. What could I not have eaten here, so admirably contrasted as it all was in its homeliness and comfort with the very undesirable food, the secondhand table d'hôte, the inevitable discomfort of crowded hotels and waiters, which I had exchanged for this elysium.
And, maybe, I could enjoy also, after this frugal and wholesome supper leaning over the white garden gate and up to the sails of the silent mill, that last evening pipe that always seems sweeter in the country air, and prepares the holiday-maker for a good seven hours of unbroken rest, So grateful was the rest, indeed, that it was soon evident that further sleep was impossible after seven o'clock in the morning.
The prospect of a good breeze had stirred the miller early to set the sails going and begin on the new corn which had already come up from the fields, The first farm wagons were soon passing the miller's gate, and the pigeons were calling under the eaves of the country cottage.
But the chance of a bathe in the sea was the first consideration. Two fields led on to the edge of the cliff, and a circuitous path down the sandy face of it took me to the utterly deserted beach. Here there was a chance of a swim such as bathers seldom find. Three miles along the coast it would have been necessary to wait in turn for a bathing machine, to bribe the proprietor for preference, and to be strictly confined to the very proper regulations made at such places.
But what a change here. Had I been cast on a desert island could not have been more alone. Not a human being on the cliff, not a house or cottage to be seen, not a footfall on the beach, a cave to use as a dressing-room, and mile after mile of virgin sand, unsoiled by stone or pebble, to run upon in the in the sun and in the breeze after coming out of the water.
At ordinary seaside places a sea-bath cannot be followed by an air-bath, which is just as valuable to the health and constitution; but here, in this deserted nook, I can honestly say that I have never seen a human creature since I changed my quarters. A bath of this pattern naturally leads to a breakfast with an appetite to which most Londoners are strangers, and after breakfast, at the request of miller, I go up to the old mill to be to see a splendid view of sea and cornfield from one of the upper storeys, and to be initiated in the art of making flour under the process that has existed for some hundreds of years, and is now only gradually dying out.
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Sidestrand Mill
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For the first time for many weeks the old mill was going, the new corn was pouring in, and my host was anticipating a brisk sale for his flour, his bran, and his pollard, which he sold retail to his country neighbours. Here the good fellow had worked contentedly for many a year, attending to the entire mill himself, and often in the winter-time working morning and night in these whitened chambers and preparing for that rainy day, to him a windless week, when trade must necessarily stop.
Standing, that sunny summer morning, with the blue sea before me and the smiling landscape round about, with the whirling sails rushing through the air, I wondered if these old-fashioned windmills, dotted all over England, could ever be utilised for the collection and storage of one of the forces that are in time to supersede steam. It would be decidedly an original idea to collect force at a country windmill, to pack it up on the spot, and to deliver it, carriage paid, by the parcels post.
The next visit was, of course, to the harvest field, where on all sides they were gathering in the grain with extraordinary rapidity owing to the general use of machinery for cutting and storing. During my visit to these districts I did not see a single farm on which labour was employed for mowing and reaping, and nowadays every farmer with a fair acreage uses his own machinery, and does not share it with his neighbours according to the old plans. I passed an old man, a man of some seventy summers, sitting on a stile as he surveyed the operations, and he was fairly astonished at the rapidity with which the land was cleared as contrasted with his own recollections, but none the less inclined to favour what seemed to him the "new-fangled method".
I have spoken elsewhere of the courtesy and I might add the reverence of the Norfolk labourer, who seldom announces his determination of visiting any place on the morrow or going anywhere without the addition of "If God spares me, sir."
And I might here note one of the curious harvest customs that must have come down direct from Norman times, When the reapers are in the field they are allowed, or rather it is the custom, the demand largesse from the passer. Indeed, the very same old French word is used. The phrase goes, "Please da me a largess, sir!" which I made a brown-cheeked labourer translate - "Please give me something to drink your jolly good health with."
Not only the labourers in the field, but the children in the lanes, for ask for largesse at harvest time. The girls and boys with eyes as black as aloes follow the visitor with no cringing importunity, but a laughing downright request, such as "Please da me a copper, sir." The perpetuation to this very day of the Latin da for give me, is as curious as the retention of the largesse.
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Sidestrand Mill and the road from Cromer, c.1916
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It would be possible to walk for miles around this healthy and hospitable country, without the slightest fatigue, amongst the crops and the corn fields, for here, as in Switzerland, the vigorous and bracing air relieves all sense of weariness.
All the harvesting I have seen is done in full view of the sea; the crops grow to the very edge of the cliffs which so exercise the inhabitants by crumbling away, making huge gaps and ravines of sandy soil that are soon grown over by the poppy, the thistle, and the sea daisy. And then the landscape is so delightfully varied. Now you come across an old church tower, ivy grown and picturesque, surrounded by forgotten grave stones, and the matrices of old brasses,the last relic of the parish church, removed, like the lighthouse, further back upon the cliff for fear its foundations shall totter and fall.
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The ruined tower and graves of old Sidestrand church, 1901
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Now you enter a village, and, desperately thirsty after those breakfast shrimps or Yarmouth bloater, beg for a drink of water, not lighting on any inn in this most temperate county, but finding a curious old cottage, with an old lady presiding over it who has passed the last fifty-seven years of her life under the same roof, never stirring far from the village, and living now in simple content on half a crown given her by the parish supplemented by a share of the earnings of her grandson, a farm labourer, who has sworn never to marry whist his old grandmother is alive.
Of the temperance of these Norfolk labourers I can speak with experience. They do no apparently need blue ribbons or pledges to keep them sober. For the most part they drink water, because they like it and thrive upon it, and their potations even in the harvest field are very moderate. I have not seen a drunken man since I have been in the place, and have never yet passed a labourer at any tune of the day without being saluted by him in a friendly fashion, and as if I a stranger was made welcome the inhabitants.
And so slip along with pleasant ease the wheels of a country day at harvest time. There is always something to see, ever something to be done. If tired of the farms and the cliffs, you can stroll down to the deserted beach, and obtain the freedom and space necessarily denied elsewhere. If the day is too hot for exercise the nights are at least supremely beautiful, whether viewed from the old mill mound, watching the fields illumined by the lighthouse tower, or from the cliff's edge with what they call here the "fisherman's moon" making a pathway of gold across the waveless sea.
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View from Cromer Lighthouse towards Overstrand, c.1928
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Such is but a brief outline of existence at a place where there are fields to wander in all untenanted, woods full of wild flowers that bloom unseen by human eye, cliffs that have no wayfarers but the sand marten and the swallow—a sea that I have made my own, and a sand that no one else cares to use as a playground.
There are no children here, though there are farms in plenty to take them in, milk and butter and eggs to feed them with, gardens full of vegetables and flowers—no, the children are all away in lodgings, that are unwholesome, and are swarming upon sands that are crowded; there are no "sympathies" here, though there are cliffs on which they could rest all day without an interloper near them—no, indeed, the "sympathies" are proclaiming their affection publicly on the pier or esplanade, and dressing for their mutual satisfaction; there are no hard-worked fathers or harassed mothers here—no, they are wheeling perambulators on popular spas, and exposing to an astonished world the pranks of their unruly children.
Youth and age, married and unmarried, take their holidays elsewhere, and have not yet discovered this Poppyland, which, to state it practically, can be in five hours from Liverpool-street Station. Any one putting himself into a train at 3.30, might be opening the gate of the Old Mill Farm by eight o'clock, and midnight reposing in lavender.
First published in the Daily Telegraph on Monday 3 September 1883
