Chapter XXXVII: Appendix: VII

MISS FRANCES JENNINGS TO MISS ELIZABETH LAWRENCE

Your long letter did put some spirit into me. So few say to me “_go on_” to St. Winefreds Well;—they all say “stay,” “stop,” “you can’t.” I am feeling my way in that direction, but just now I am not moving fast. I’ve discovered a splendid way of getting through the mid-winter, I am travelling from farm to farm, making my houses of great barns. Outside I hear the storms raving, but my great beams don’t even creak. They are such beautiful houses, great oak beams, with the scales of the bark in their hollows, and with beautiful curves in their bodies, and I see the barn-cats run and sit along the beams; and spots of sun, and often in the same house with me are milky calves and wooden chests of meal and gold straw and cider casks that bubble like a spring, or as if a mouse jumped under the water. And heaps of red apple must, which they use to bank up their fires with, the same as with peat. Then in the same house are many little mice, and big rats; and in the Spring they say they are full of singing wild birds making their nests above. I am in the cider country now (Herefordshire). As soon as I crossed the border I heard the talk of cider, and beautiful apple dumplings and apple cake. They say the farm hands here know of nothing but cider; it is their whole world. They rise to drink it, and they would not work without the cider. They think of cider alone! What a simplicity of thought! They are cider, body and soul, so they are a queer people. I drank mulled cider (warmed in a copper cup like a dunce’s cap, to push deep inside the fire) with spoons of honey in it and a lump of butter out of a lustre basin.

The man here tells me: “Apples for sleeplessness—apples clear the brain, apples for the brain—juice of apple dabbed in the eye makes you see beautiful—apples give you appetite. Cider makes you eat—cider makes you hearty,” etc.

My small cart is put inside the barns, they usually have three bays, and I have a cask (an “apple-pot” they call it here) turned up for a table, and a bundle of straw for a seat—most often I am on the stone threshing floor of the barns or on an earthern floor.

I am not feeling the cold at all and now have friends by the hundreds in the country I have passed across; but few as yet in front.

I have stayed with shepherds, cowmen, blacksmiths, bakers, a poet, a barber, a cobbler, at the village shop, applemen, nurses, basket makers, waggoners.

I am going to move now from Hereford to Aberystwith, then around the coast to Holywell, and to see a certain mountain they tell me is shaped like a pyramid; and is not a mountain but is a God!

I want to reach the sea and hear talk of the sea. The man here (above Stoke Edith) tells me that the hawkers and gypsies many of them used to make turf huts on the common above. They dug a hollow in the ground and piled a wall around of turf, and gradually made it round, and had a little hole in the top for their smoke to escape, and the grass grew all over the top and cast off the rain, and they had a little fire in a corner inside. Now they are driven away. I want to try and sleep a night in a manger and put up in a kiln some days and nights. I find it is a long way I have set out into.

My journey so far has been alongside the wall of the Sussex Hills. The northern border of the New Forest, across Salisbury Plain, into the Cotswold and now into what might be called Apple-land; of what is coming I am in ignorance. Lately I’ve slept some nights on people’s hearths and nursed the fire asleep (_i.e._, into darkness). In one village they called me, “Princess,” but usually I am “The Tramp-woman,” “The poor woman.”

I hear some queer tales of men whose loud singing can be heard miles, of a shepherd called Basil, more than six feet tall, who, going down a steep hill, fell, standing on his head—of people so fat that they are mountains—and so old that they never die, and so strong. And at each farm I am told their milk is the richest and sweetest, and that their clay makes the best apples, and each woman tells me how she is beautiful more than all the rest; and it’s all truth.

The woman I am staying with at present wears a strange sea-green glass snake at her neck, it is black and white, and sea-green, and seems Egyptian in a way. Another one I stayed with, dressed in black, wore at her neck a great silver Bee, with wings as beaten petals and scales.

This farm is called “Hazel,” and many springs of water burst out about it, and the master of it has the blackest brows above his eyes, and a grand lot of words. I feel you are my friends and remember the smallest details of your kindness to me. I hope I shall see you again and hear of you.

FRANCES JENNINGS.

Received _February 13_, 1913.