The Adventure of Living : a Subjective Autobiography. John St. Loe Strachey
Advice oft asked, but never taken.
She had a couplet which she often produced when the newspapers came out with some big social scandal or the coming to financial grief of some great family name. On such occasions she would mutter to herself:
Debts and duns
And nothing for my younger sons.
Another verse, though I quote it not the least to show her literary taste but because it was exceedingly characteristic of her, was in the spring-time always on her lips:
The broom, the broom, the yellow broom,
The ancient poets sung it,
And sweet it is on summer days
To lie at ease among it.
I could fill a book, and perhaps some day I will do so, with Leaker's reflections on men and things, and her epigrammatic sayings, and still more with her wonderful old sea-stories, especially of the press-gang, which she could almost remember in operation. Her father was, as she always put it, "in the King's Navy," and he had been "bosun" to a ship's "cap'n." He was at the Mutiny of the Nore, but was not a mutineer.
She was, however, full of stories about the Mutiny, which we found extremely exciting. She used to sing, or rather "croon" to us some of the mutineers' songs. One that I specially remember began with this verse:
Parker was a gay young sailor,
Fortune to him did not prove kind;
He was hung for mutiny at the Nore,
Worse than him were left behind.
After declaiming that verse to us, she would add in low tones that made one's blood run cold, "Men have been hung at the yardarm for singing that song. It was condemned throughout the Fleet."
That in itself seems a link with the past, but through Leaker I had a much more remarkable example of what, in spite of the smiles of the statistician, fascinated us all. Leaker, when about the age of sixty, brought her old mother, who was then ninety-four or ninety-five, to whom she was devoted, to live in one of the cottages at Sutton, the year being, as far as I can recollect, 1868 or 1869. I can distinctly recall the old lady. She was very thin and faded, but with all her wits about her, though weak and shy.
Leaker told us, with pride, that her mother, when she was a little girl, had sat upon the knee of an old soldier who had fought at Blenheim. This is quite possible. If old Mrs. Leaker was, as I think, only five years short of a hundred in 1869, she could easily have been in the world at the same time as a lad who had been at Blenheim in his eighteenth year. Old Mrs. Leaker was, I calculated, born about 1774. She would therefore have been six years old in 1780. But a man who was ninety-five in 1780 would have been born in 1685, and so twenty-nine in 1714, the year of Blenheim. Possibly some historical calculator will despoil me of this story. Meantime, I am always thrilled to think that I have seen a woman who had seen a man who had been in action with the great Marlborough at his greatest victory.
Before I leave my old nurse I must say something about a very curious and interesting attempt which, at my request, she made at the end of her life. It was to put down her recollections and reflections. Unfortunately, I made this request rather too late, and so the result, as a whole, was confused and often unintelligible. Still, the two little MS. books which she wrote contain some very remarkable and characteristic pieces of writing, and show the woman as she was. Although in her day she had read plenty of autobiographies, she makes no attempt to imitate them, or to write in a pedantic or literary style. As far as she can, she shows us what she really was. Leaker's heart beats against the sides of the little books just as I used to hear it when I was a child in her arms, either in need of consolation, with toothache or growing-pains, or else trying to give consolation, for she was often, like all fierce people, melancholy and depressed after her own fierce outbursts of anger.
Here is the very striking and characteristic exordium to her autobiography:
I have not had an unpleasant life, although I was an old maid, and was a servant for fifty years. I was a nurse and no mother could have loved her children more than I loved those I nursed. I had three dear, good mistresses, two of whom I left against their will.
The third and last was my mother, whom the old nurse outlived for many years.
Here is her account of the miseries endured by the poor after Waterloo—miseries which I often think of in these days, when I note the foolish, the demented way in which we are approaching our economic difficulties and dangers:
I am writing of the time a little after Waterloo. We were living at Dartmouth. Everything was very dear. We lived mostly on barley bread. We children were so used to it that we did not mind it, but my poor mother could never eat it without repugnance, and we always tried to make her get white bread, not knowing that she could not properly afford it. Many a time (so she told me in after-years) she made her supper off a turnip rather than let her children go hungry to bed. The cheapest sugar was then tenpence a pound, and the very cheapest tea quite as much as five shillings, but what I had to get for my mother was in very small quantities. We children never had it, nor, as far as I remember, cared for it. It was a treat when we could get milk to dip our bread in.
But though their poverty was so dire it did not kill the girl's joy in life or, wonderful to say, in literature:
Though we were very poor, my childhood seems pleasant to me as I look back, for my mother did all she could to make us happy. She went out sewing very often, and we were glad she should go, for she got better food than she could get at home, and what was, I believe, as much good to her, she sometimes got food for her mind. But, poor dear, she was always having a struggle with her conscience, and her love of what is called light reading, as being a Methodist she thought it wrong to read such books. She told me that when she was married she was given a new edition of all the Elizabethan plays, twenty-five volumes, beautifully bound. (I heard afterwards that a new edition was published at that time.) However, about the year 1818 she thought it right to burn them, although she was so fond of them. Yet when I was sitting at work with her she would tell me tales out of the plays. How vexed I used to be with her for burning them, poor dear loving mother! She taught me to read out of my father's large old Bible, and the Apocrypha was a book of wonder to me. She was fond of Young's Night Thoughts. Milton she read often; my father gave it to her; poor man, he thought it would please her. He was a sweet-tempered man, easy and kindhearted, but not clever like my mother. He once said to her when she laughed at him for some blunders, "Well, my dear, what can the woman with five talents expect from the man with one?"
Leaker had plenty of stories of the press-gang. Though she never herself saw it in operation, people not very much older told her of how they were "awakened in the night by people crying out that they had been taken."
Her mother, too, used to tell her heartrending stories about these times.
"I can hardly even now bear to think of the dreadful things done by the press-gang in the name of the law. I never hated the French as I hated them."
Needless to say, I inherited her hatred of the press-gang, and have maintained it all my life. It was the very worst and most oppressive form of national service ever invented, and I think with pride that my collateral ancestor, Captain George St. Loe (temp. William & Mary) was the first man in England who urged in his writings that the only fair way of making the nation secure was compulsory universal service.
Leaker's mother was early in her married life converted to Methodism. Some of her reflections on the smuggling that went on in and around the little Devonshire port give the lie to those foolish, ignorant, and shameless people who allege that because people are poor they cannot be expected to have any idea of what is called conventional morality in regard to "mine and thine." They will naturally and excusably, it is asserted, break any law, moral or divine.
That is not how it struck Leaker's mother:
There was a good deal of smuggling going on in the town when I was a girl, and one day a member of my mother's chapel brought some gay things for her to buy. Oh, how I did long for her to get me a pretty neckerchief, but she said, "No, my dear, I cannot