[-295-]
A HOLIDAY WITH THE SEA-FISHERS.
MESSRS. TINKER, TAILOR, arid CANDLESTICK- MAKER, respected brother toilers
and gainers of bread by the sweat of your manly brow, to as many of you who, on
a fair and sunshiny Saturday afternoon, standing in the proud and enviable
position of men who have just concluded another of many satisfactory weeks'
work, and have got the wages snugly buttoned in your breeches pocket to prove
it, and who having deliberately argued the matter, have arrived at the sensible
conclusion that a bit of a holiday is now your due, and that you mean
"going in for it," this paper is in all good fellowship dedicated.
About the holiday! What is to be the extent of it, and where
are you going to enjoy it? Is it your intention to join the party that has
chartered the greengrocer s pleasure-van with the blue silk curtains and the
pair of grays and piebald leader, which starts to-morrow (Sunday) morning at
eleven o'clock precisely, from the "Three Cows," its destination being
Epping Forest? Are you for boating it on the Lea, or for steaming to Greenwich,
to disport in the park there and invest ninepence in tea with shrimps on the
summit of One-Tree Hill? Are you bent on a day's jaunt with the missus in
Wiggins' shaycart, along with Mr. and Mrs. W.? or shall Citizen Z. and a
Putney tea-gardens partake of your patronage? Maybe there are many worse ways
than either of those mentioned of spend-[-296-]ing
a holiday certainly there is at least one way that is both better and cheaper.
It must be observed, however, that this better and cheaper
way demands the sacrifice of Monday as well as Sunday. "Then that,"
I think I hear Mr. Candlestickmaker exclaim, "that settles the business. It
is pull enough out of a man's bit of savings to spend a dozen or fifteen
shillings on a Sunday, and it can't be done cheaper, if you only take the missus
and the baby, go the cheapest way to work ; but when it comes to wasting Monday,
to say nothing of the extra spending, why, it can't be done. It may be all very
well for chaps that can afford it - single chaps who carry all their cares and
responsibilities under their hat, or for snobs who never on any account work on
Monday ; but with a respectable mechanic like myself it is different. I'm a
sober man, and stick to my work, and if I for once in a while let the rope fall
slack on a Sunday, I'll bet a penny that you find me hauling at it precious soon
next morning towards fetching it all right and taut again. I'm bound to do it I
should very soon find my affairs in a tangle if I did not."
All very nice and proper, Mr. C., a very noble sentiment, and
one in which Betsy your wife coincides. But did you never find - this between
ourselves, of course - did you never find in footing it along the rigid line
which, in your bumptious self-reliance, you chalk out for yourself, that you
have obliterated the chalk mark to such an extent as to make it difficult to
recover your way, when having gone the length of your before-hand measured
tether you turn about for your starting-point? Did it never happen to you that
when Wiggins, who is a fat and good-humoured man, and never such jolly company
as when he is mellow, observed, "Come, let us have another sixpen'orth
round before the ostler puts the mare in the shay ; we don't kill a pig every
day, Mr. Candlestick- maker" - did it never happen, I ask, that you have
been led to consent solely out of your excellent opinion of yourself as a [-297-]
man utterly incapable of porcine slaughter for as many even as two days
consecutively, and who consequently for the time being can afford to act
generously towards himself, and that you have had that other glass of grog - ay,
and another after that, just to keep the cold out, for by this time it is late
in the evening, and chilly driving through the green lanes? Don't be ashamed to
own to the weakness, Mr. C. ; there is really very little sin in it. It is one
of common perpetration. I can answer for myself, at all events. I am not of your
guild, but I, as well as yourself, know a Wiggins, and have yielded to the
pleasant villain's seduction many a time, and am still on the friendliest terms
with him.
But there is this difference between us, Mr. Candlestick-
maker. After an evening with Wiggins, for the life of me I cannot rise with the
lark next morning. I am full of yawns and gapes, and have an ache in my head,
and an unpleasant sensation at the pit of my stomach, and want of all things to
lie still yet a while. But you are all right, Mr. C., or rather you would be,
only that those detestable shrimps you had yesterday at tea at Greenwich, or the
nasty smell of the river as you were coming home from Putney, or the disgusting
indisposition of Mrs. Swigger in the greengrocer's pleasure-van during the
homeward journey; or the damp grass on which you injudiciously sat down in
Epping Forest, has quite upset you and on waking at half-past five am., very
little reflection convinces you that rather than carry such a sorry-looking face
amongst your shopmates you had better lose a "quarter" and "pull
yourself together a bit." And very much refreshed are you for that extra
hour's sleep and that cup of tea of extra strength, and quite chirp and cheerful
you set out for the shop after breakfast. But as ill-luck has it, just as you
are turning the corner - thinking of nothing in the world but the day's work
before you-whom do you ran against but Mr. Tinker and Mr. Tailor, who were your
companions of yesterday, and [-298-] who strangely
enough find themselves unaccountably " upset" as you were, so much so
indeed that they began to grow alarmed, and when you encountered them they were
on the way to your house to inquire if you likewise were a sufferer. Such tender
solicitude must not pass unrecognized, especially as the "Three
Crows," the house from which the van started, is close at hand, and the
best beer in the neighbourhood is drawn at the "Three Crows," and at
the rear of that hostel there is a good dry skittle-ground. And there goes your
Monday, Mr. C., and there go several more shillings than you would care to tell
Betsy of, when, still a little unsteady from the effect of those pernicious
Greenwich shrimps, you return home at 11 pm. with a peace-offering in a little
bottle in your pocket.
I won't inquire the number of shillings invested at the
"Crows" or the gross amount of them and the twelve or fifteen
shillings spent on Sunday. I will guarantee that together they will make a sum
sufficient, or very nearly, to defray the expenses of the holiday that I
recommend. So put the money in your pocket and follow me, and I will show you
such value for it as shall satisfy you, or you are indeed hard to please.
You shall start from London Bridge, Betsy, and the baby, and
yourself, while it is yet early in the fair and sunny Saturday afternoon - (you
knock off at two o'clock, please to recollect) and taking train, shall enjoy,
through two hours and a quarter, a swift and healthful journey through a lovely
country of pasture, and hops, and growing grain, finally alighting in one of the
prettiest and quaintest, and cleanest sea towns in the kingdom. Whilst yet in
the railway carriage, and distant a mile of your destination, you shall know
that you are approaching the sea by reason of its soft breezes coming out to
welcome you, and leaving the flavour of their kisses on your lips; and stepping
out at the station you will be at once for rushing down to the beach. This,
however, would not be fair towards Betsy, who finds baby a tremendous drag at
ordinary times, and now that its infantine [-299-] appetite
has been invigorated by the keen country air, its mother's distress must be
something considerable. Besides, you have a lodging as well as a tea to seek.
And with little or no trouble you shall find both - a tea ten times nicer and
quite as cheap as can be procured at a close unclean London coffee- shop, and a
bed the hangings and sheeting of which, on account of their snowiness, make
Betsy hold her breath in awe and admiration.
After tea there yet remain to Saturday three fair hours of
daylight. Then you shall fill your pipe and accompanied by your wife, go down to
one of the most wonderful beaches to be found round the British coasts. This if
the tide is out. If it is not you shall find delightful seats so close to the
ocean that you may kick a stone into it, and there you may sit with the evening
sun sparkling on the watery wilderness before you and on the few-and-far-between
white sails of the yachts and black sails of the fishing-boats, and on the waves
looking like white sea horses with their ample snowy manes all blown a-tangle
racing for the shore; meanwhile you calmly smoke your pipe, and discourse to
Betsy of the azure main and as many of its wonders as you are cognizant of.
Let us hope that the tide is out, however - far out, for then
you shall see something that shall astonish you. You shall see protruding
through the brown, fast-set sand, gnarled roots and mighty boles of trees
snapped off short as you could snap a tobacco-pipe, and when you see this you
see all that remains of what was once a great green forest skirting the sea; but
one night, three hundred years ago and more, there arose a mighty tempest, and
the sea put out its giant arms, and bursting its old boundary, captured the land
on which the forest stood, and dredged it of its trees and shaped it to suit its
will, and from that time to this would never let it go.
And you shall walk a little farther along the brown sands
soft as any carpet, and presently you shall come on a broad space of [-300-]
heaped-up stones, each of a ton weight at least, and skirting the stones
short butts of timber worn sharp as needles through constant wave-washing. And
when you see this you see all that remains of a magnificent pier (the second or
third) constructed at a vast expense by good Queen Elizabeth, and great was the
pride and rejoicing of the townsmen. "But behold when men were most secure,
and thought the worke to be perpetual, on All Saints' Day, in 1597, appeared the
mighty force of God, who with the finger of His hand, at one great and exceeding
high spring tyde, with a south-east wind, overthrew the huge worke in less than
an hower to the great terror and abasement of all beholders."
Walk still farther along this wonderful beach for the
distance of about a mile, and you shall come on another marvel. Bedded in the
brown sand there is a ship that foundered there a hundred years ago. You may
count her ribs jutting out here and there like old teeth, and thereby tell her
shape and length. It is only her upper works that have gone to decay; locked in
the sea bed her under decks and her hold are sound enough, as was proved scarce
forty years since, when a party of adventurers, taking advantage of an
uncommonly low tide, set manfully to work to dig the sand out of her. They dug
down as far as the old ship's bows and fished out a barrel of knives and some
other trifles, but the sea would stand no further trifling with her lawful
treasure, and rising up with a will drove the daring landsmen off, and somehow
since that time the experiment has not been renewed. There is a fortune for you,
Mr. C., if you can hit on a means of raising that old Dutch ship; her hold is
known to be full of sheet copper!
By the time you have explored this last wonder, and smoked
out a pipe sitting on one of the buried ship's ribs, the tide will be rising,
and you had better turn your face lodging-ward, or you will find no time to play
"ducks and drakes," to which sport of your boyhood you will be
irresistibly enticed by the [-301-] thousands of
handy little flat stones lying about the shore. The windows of the house where
you are to lodge shall overlook the sea, and until deep dusk, in happier chat
with Betsy than you recollect for many a day, and with a brown jug of simple
ale, you shall there sit. Now you shall discover another odd fact in connection
with this holiday. Dusk shall find you sleepy and inclined for bed. It is
Saturday night, and were you in London bed would be out of the question for two
hours to come at least, but here you shall have retired and be soundly and
healthily asleep long before half-past ten of the clock. Your artificial
Cockneyfied habits will not avail you in these parts. Nature has the great sea
to look after, and cannot waste time pottering over you, and making as regards
roosting, one law for you and another for cocks and hens.
You shall rise early next morning, which is Sunday morning,
and while Betsy is busy over her own and baby's toilet, if you take my advice
you will stroll down to the beach, and at the price of a couple of pots of beer
avail yourself of one of the greatest luxuries in life - a sea bath. Then back
to the enjoyment of a jolly country breakfast. Then for as delightful a walk as
can be imagined - field, forest, flowers, fruit, and sea all combining to make
the scenery perfect. Then, if you have a mind to church; to a lovely old church,
tiny as a barn, and shapeless under its ivy mantle. Or if you choose you shall
instead climb a huge cliff 400 feet high, and ramble over the ruins of one of
the very oldest of English castles, so old that nobody knows who built it. It is
a poor old tottering wreck now, and looks as though it was under considerable
obligation to the green climbers whose tough limbs bind about its gray stones;
but once, a thousand years ago about, it was a tremendous place, with a great
army within its walls to resist the landing of any of Britain's foes that might
design to attack us by way of the sea. Times are altered since then. Admission
to the castle cost William Rufus the flower of his army; now you may get in for [-302-]
3d., and in place of the whiz of cross-bolts the invader hears
nothing more harmful than the popping of the corks of ginger-beer, which potent
beverage is retailed by the old lady who keeps the gate at the rate of 2d. per
bottle. Home to dinner, afterwards sauntering on the beach. Home to tea,
afterwards sauntering on the beach, sitting about, lying about, picking up
shells, hunting for star fish, for mussels, for whelks-anything till bed-time.
"And up in the morning, once more to walk, sit, and
lounge upon the beach, I suppose," says Mr. Candlestickmaker, with the
least bit of a sneer disfiguring his manly countenance. Not exactly, Mr. C. If
that were all I had to offer you I should not have been so pressing in my
invitation for you to prolong your holiday till Monday. No ; the best part of
all is in store for you. Be up betimes, and you shall see the fishermen come
home in their black boats and be witness to the sale of their night's catch. It
is a strange sight for a Cockney who never saw fish except in a dish at home, or
at the fishmonger's, or any other sort of fisherman but he of the rod and line
at the New River's brink expending fourpen'orth of bait for a ha'porth of
gudgeon.
Our fisherman himself is a being worth the journey to behold.
He is a brown being-rusty, ruddy brown. His smock is of that colour, as are his
heavy, baggy blanket trousers, and his great hairy hands and his long,
odd-looking, weather-beaten face his very hair is rusty, and his brown tarpaulin
sou'-wester seems to have ripened in the sun like a pear. He is a slow man -
slow of gait, slow of speech and deliberate, and meditative in his puffing out
of tobacco smoke. His eyes have a solemn look about them as those of a man grown
used to constantly impending peril and past fear of it.
But he can be brisk enough when briskness is required, as you
shall witness, if you rise betimes and watch him manoeuvring his boat to the
beach to get the first of the market. By his [-303-] boat
I mean the row boat that attends his smack. There are twenty such smacks
standing off the shore, and the business of each is to land its catch with all
speed, so as to secure a good sale. From the smacks the fish is brought to the
beach in baskets in the row boats, and then turned out in heaps-plaice,
flounders, mackerel, eels, anything the sea may have yielded. The buyers for the
town and for the London markets gather round the heaps, and the auctioneer is
present. He is not a spruce, black-coated auctioneer like his brother of London,
but a brown man like a fisherman, and dressed as such. He does not go about his
business like a London auctioneer, but backwards. There are no biddings.
Standing by a heap of fish on the shingle, cries the auctioneer, "Who'll
give ten shillin' for this lot of plaice? Who'll give nine shillin'? Eight and
six? Eight? Seven and six ?" "Snaps!" somebody shouts, and that
somebody is the buyer. ("Snaps" is the magic word that clinches every
bargain.) And so with all the heaps, one after another, and in an hour's time
you may meet the fishwives, and even the fishers themselves, in all parts of the
town bawling their dabs, and their soles and their mackerel; which they carry in
tubs or baskets, slung to a yoke, after the fashion of London milkmen.
You, however, must not go home empty handed to breakfast, Mr.
C- you must buy of the catchers a brace of fine mackerel bright from the briny,
and have them instantly split and grilled with a little butter and pepper and
salt. The worst of the treat is that your appetite for London mackerel is spoilt
for ever afterwards.
After breakfast- But exigency and space forbid. After
breakfast you must find your way about without my guidance, Mr. Candlestickmaker.
I am allowed but one more line, and that I will devote to giving you the name of
the wonderful place in question - it is Hastings.