Cromer is complaining of the excursion system. Every Sunday some two thousand excursionists are brought in at a shilling a head, and they make things lively, as the place is small.
l am an earnest advocate for the working class getting as much fresh air and change of scene as they can on the day of rest from toil, but I can quite understand that such an essentially quiet place as Cromer finds its limited supply of space severely tested by such a tremendous incursion of trippers.
One man's poison is another man's meat, and the overcrowding of Cromer on Sunday is benefiting a number of quiet villages in the neighbourhood. Sidestrand is full, and Overstrand is bursting out into new villas. Mr. Cyril Flower has built himself a pretty seaside house here, and his arrival is being eagerly looked forward to.
Overstrand is a charming combination of green fields, blue seas, and rugged cliffs, and has a great future before it. I strongly recommend anyone who wants perfect rest and glorious air amid beautiful scenery to try Overstrand. But they must secure their lodgings before they arrive, as the accommodation is limited.
We have bidden farewell to Poppy Land, and I am not at all sure that Poppy Land is sorry. l am afraid that our conduct latterly has hardly been in accordance with the peaceful conditions of this sweet Sleepy Hollow. The miller's good wife¹ will probably sleep more peacefully now she knows that she will not come down in the morning and find her front door wide open, and hear from the neighbours that wild authors have been careering about the lanes till the small hours, plotting murders, and yelling at each other, driving the chained watchdogs mad with impotent rage, and bringing startled faces to lonely farmhouse windows in the yellow moonlight.
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| "the white gate of the mill-house" Restored and colourised using Google Gemini |
No more will the good lady start from her sleep and tremble as in the dead of night she hears two furious men battling below as to whether a woman's throat is to be cut or her brains to be beaten out, and no more will the innocent children of Sidestrand pause in terror before the white gate of the mill-house and watch the middle-aged lunatics from London executing wild can-cans of delight in "the fair green close that lies below the mill."²
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| "the fair green close that lies below the mill" Restored and colourised using Google Gemini |
Our best thanks are due to the good Norfolk folk of Sidestrand and Overstrand, who have let us run wild right through their farmyards and make ourselves at home in their sweet cottage gardens, who have spared no effort to make us happy and comfortable, and have loaded us with favours.
The postmaster of Overstrand has kept the wire open for us at all manner of unreasonable hours, and his kind little wife has flashed our messages to the four corners of the earth with marvellous skill and accuracy.
Our return messages from the four corners of the earth have been brought to us in hot haste by rosy-cheeked special messengers as though the fate of empires depended upon them, and even distant Cromer has laid itself out to supply our modest wants with celerity and dispatch, sending such supplies as we requisitioned in the town back to us by mounted messengers or behind the fastest trotting ponies to be had for love or money.
Gratefully do we acknowledge the kindnesses that have been showered on us along this glorious stretch of Norfolk coast—a kindness that was continued to the last, when all Sidestrand turned out to bid us farewell, and to wave hats and handkerchiefs and cheer until our two flys and our big farm-cart full of luggage became almost a royal procession, and completed when the cheery station-master at Cromer reserved a special carriage for us, and showed us the diamond pin presented to him by the Empress of Austria.
Poppy Land will miss us, and we shall miss Poppy Land. Our idyllic life is over; the simple pleasures of shuttlecock and a shilling set of cricket in the green fields will be ours no more.
We are back again in cruel London, and the blacks are settling once more on the shirts and collars that were so spotless at Sidestrand.
Farewell, Poppy Land, where all was rest and peace and gentle beauty, and where our nerves grew strong and our hearts beat again with the exuberance of childhood.
But not farewell for ever. We are going to buy two little bits of land there, we are going to build two nice little cottages, and we are going to grow our own cabbages, dig our own potatoes, and milk our own cows, and to end our days as the oldest inhabitants of the quiet Norfolk village; and some day, say in fifty or sixty years, the traveller wending his way through the little churchyard by the sea will come upon the graves of two Sidestrand centenarians laid side by side, and he will pause and shed a tear of sympathy when he reads the inscription and learns that the two aged Poppylanders who have gone to collaborate in the undiscovered bourne are the A.O.A.H.M.³ and DAGONET.
¹ Alfred Jermy's third and last wife, Mary Ann (née Woodhouse) had died on 5 November 1887.
² A quotation from Swinburne's The Mill Garden, the fourth poem of A Midsummer Holiday (1884):
"Fair befall the fair green close that lies below the mill!" is the refrain to each verse.
³ A.O.A.H.M. = Author of A Hundred Melodramas, possibly Sims's friend and fellow writer Henry Alfred Pettitt (7 April 1848 – 24 December 1893)
Source: The Referee - Sunday 28 July 1889
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