“It is a pleasant lively scene this May morning, with the sun shining so gaily on the irregular rustic dwellings, intermixed with their pretty gardens; a cart and a wagon watering (it would be more correct, perhaps, to say beering) at the Rose; Dame Wheeler, with her basket and her brown loaf, just coming from the bake-house; the nymph of the shoe shop feeding a large family of goslings at the open door – they are very late this year, those noisy little geese; two or three women in high gossip dawdling up the street; Charles North the gardener, with his blue apron and a ladder on his shoulder, walking rapidly by; a cow and a donkey browsing the grass by the wayside; my white greyhound, Mayflower, sitting majestically in front of her own stable; and ducks, chickens, pigs, and children, scattered over all.” So Mary Mitford paints the scene as she tours the village after a gap of two years, in search of changes of buildings and personages at the beginning of volume 2 in her ‘Our Village’ series.
As well as people and buildings, Miss Mitford describes animals on her way to ‘The Copse’, such as “This Mayflower of mine is a strange animal. Instinct and imitation make in her an approach to reason which is sometimes almost startling. She mimics all that she sees us do, with the dexterity of a monkey, and far more of gravity and apparent purpose; cracks nuts and eats them; gathers currants and severs them from the stalk with the most delicate nicety; filches and munches apples and pears; is as dangerous in an orchard as a schoolboy; smiles at meeting; answers in a pretty lively voice when spoken to (sad pity that the language should be unknown), and has greatly the advantage of us in a conversation, inasmuch as our meaning is certainly clear to her….”.
The floor of the copse is “sprinkled here and there with tufts of reddish purple, and others of the purest white, as some accident of soil affects that strange and inscrutable operation of nature, the colouring of flowers.” Think of the difference between pink and blue hydrangeas.
Similarly “How lively this green nook is today, half covered with cows and horses and sheep!”, bridging the 200 years separating her from our New Forest national park today.
As will be seen in the above extracts from the text her poetic descriptions are littered with alliteration, as subtly in “The wind whistles through the brown bows”; similes like “…. a sad purple, frost-bitten, like a dairy-maid’s elbows on a snowy morning and metaphors like “…this square bundle of petticoat and cloak, this road-wagon of a woman!”
‘Jack Hatch’ is apparently one of the male offspring of the villagers not known to Mitford. Indeed we are not certain that he existed at all. According to her the boys journey from birth to adulthood with fundamentally unchanging characteristics. That of girls, on the other hand, reminiscent of Shakespeare’s Seven Ages of Man, she sees as changing from babyhood according to their development into woman hood. “The first appearance of the little lass is something after the manner of a caterpillar, drawing and creeping upon the grass…” “In the next stage, dirt-encrusted enough to pass for the chrysalis, if it were not so very unquiet, the gender remains equally uncertain. It is a fine, stout, curly-pated creature of three or four, playing and rolling about amongst grass or mud all day long….” “Then comes a sunburnt gipsy of six…” “So the world wags till ten…then charity school….looking as demure as a nun, and as tidy….despising dirt and baseball, and all their joys.” “Then at twelve the little lass comes home again…….merry and pretty and good with all her little faults…”
“It would be as well if a country girl could stand at thirteen. Then she is charming. But the clock will move forward, and at fourteen she gets a service in a neighbouring town; and her next appearance is in the perfection of the butterfly state, fluttering, inconstant, vain – …….And this is the true progress of rustic beauty; the average lot of our country girls – so they spring up, flourish, change, and disappear. Some indeed marry and fix amongst us, and then ensues another set of changes, rather more gradual perhaps, but quite as sure, till grey hairs, wrinkles, and linsey-woolsey [a strong, coarse fabric] wind up the picture.”
Maybe this extended metaphor could be entitled ‘The Many Ages of Woman’
This evening we dined at Rokali’s. My main course was Jaipur special prawns with which I drank Kingfisher; and Jackie’s Poneer Shashlik with which she drank Diet Coke.
