Through East Anglia in a Motor CarVincent, James Edmund
General
Through East Anglia in a Motor Car
Vincent, James Edmund
Norfolk (England) -- Description and travel; Suffolk (England) -- Description and travel
family of three generations ago. But the pleasantest room at Earlham is
'Mrs. Catherine's Chamber,' always occupied by the eldest daughter, mother
and sister in one, and in which in her old age, with her beautiful
intonation and delicate sense of fitting emphasis, she would assemble the
young Norwich clergy to teach them how the Scriptures should be read in
church."
Surely Mr. Hare, who wrote many a vivid description, was often
entertaining, and sometimes a little spiteful, never penned a passage
better calculated than this to bring home the characters of a home and of
the dwellers in it. The single trace of the old Adam, or the old Augustus,
is the gently sarcastic antithesis of Richmond's "portrait" and the
"likenesses." Earlham's peace and goodwill bewitched Augustus Hare, and
those who had been entertained by his bitterness, no less than those who
have writhed under it, will recognize the strength of Earlham's tranquil
witchery. Somewhere I have read of late that the Gurneys are of Earlham no
more. That is sad indeed.
"Ask for the Arlham Road when you are near the Guildhall," was what John
Ostler said, and we, full of map and guide-book pride, translated it into
Earlham; but we were reduced to Arlham at last. Even in England it is wise
to adopt local pronunciations of place-names when you know them, unless you
have plenty of leisure; and it is easy to do so. (In Wales it is equally
wise, indeed wiser, for collocations of apparently English characters have
totally distinct values in Welsh words, but English lips have, I am given
to understand, some difficulty in expressing those values.) Apart from
place-names it seemed to me, talking often and freely with the natives,
that the spread of education has banished not a little of the Norfolk
dialect, and that the country folk of Norfolk pronounce in a more
clean-cut fashion, use more ordinary English words, and are easier to
understand, than their contemporaries in Berks, Sussex, Devon, Cornwall,
or, infinitely most difficult of all, Durham. Among sundry quaint books
lent to me by way of preparation for this are several containing terrific
examples of Norfolk dialect, which it would be a real pleasure to
transcribe, but it must be confessed frankly that, at the moment of
writing, I have no more excuse in experience for copying them out than for
introducing a sentence or two of Welsh, Gaelic, or Erse. Yet I am, in the
matter of tours to be described, many hundreds of miles ahead of the point
which my lagging pen has reached. Suffice it to say that the Norfolk
dialect may survive, that I have heard it from the lips of cultivated folk
of Norfolk, whose normal talk is the same as that of any educated English
folk, but that it has not come my way as an every day phenomenon. Is that
matter for regret? Sentimentally, perhaps, it is; but practically it is a
decided convenience and, combined with the exceptional intelligence of the
East Anglian people, it seems to argue that the schoolmaster has been
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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