Chapter XXXIII

LEAVING Ipswich and passing through the dusty roadside fringe of Whitton village, known as Whitton Street, Claydon, nondescript, and neither very beautiful nor quite commonplace, is reached in two and a half miles. Just before entering the village, an old mansion is glimpsed from the road, embowered in trees, a mansion which, on inquiry, the ingenuous youth of Claydon declare to be "Mockbeggar Hall." Claydon Hall is its true title; but the popular name has been handed down since many, many years ago, when the old house (not old then) long remained tenantless. Like the many other places named "Mockbeggar," it stands well within view of passing travellers, and must have induced many a sturdy rogue and vagabond to trudge wearily up the long approach in search of alms, only to find the windows dark, the chimneys innocent of smoke, the place, in fact, deserted of all but fluttering bats and screeching owls, whose shrill notes must have sounded like jeers to the disappointed vagrants. Inhabited now, Claydon Hall is a handsome old house bearing the date 1635 on its Dutch-like gables. It will probably never lose its popular name. Behind the old Hall winds the willow-fringed Orwell, coyly approaching within view of the road, and then, as it were, timorously retreating again; its brimming stream, although seen only in such fleeting glimpses, potent in its effect upon at least three miles' length of the road, from Claydon to Creeting All Saints, in the loveliest stretch of woodland, where the fierce mid-day sun is baffled by over-arching foliage, and twilight comes early in the afternoon through the dense masses of leaves. These are the woodlands of Shrubland Park. The Hall lies secluded to the right hand, somewhere away beyond the rather terrible lodges that confront the traveller, who wonders where he has seen their like before; until, like a flash, the memory of certain great London cemeteries and their mortuary chapels comes upon him in desolating fashion and blights the cheerful rustic surroundings of forest trees and the scurryings of white-tailed rabbits and gorgeous blue and brown pheasants that inhabit this domain of Lord de Saumarez. The lodges, built like the Hall, from designs by Sir Charles Barry, are of white brick and stone, in the Italian Renaissance style.

At no great distance from the entrance to this lordly domain, and noticeable from the road, in an exquisitely damp situation by the river, eminently calculated to foster rheumatism in old bones, is the Barham Union-house--the "Work'us" of peasant speech. It is quite an old-world building, and one of the earliest built under the new Poor Law Act of the early nineteenth century, when outdoor relief gave place to retirement within these prison-like buildings. Hodge well named them "Bastilles." They say who should know of what they speak, that life in Barham Union is nowadays quite desirable, but the design of the building, a quadrangular structure enclosing a courtyard, with outer walls blank or only provided with windows at a height from the ground, closely follows the prison, or restraining, idea.

The little roadside sign of the "Sorrel Horse," standing in midst of these leafy bowers, is in pleasing contrast with the Campo Santo pretentiousness of Shrubland lodges or the prison-like style of the Union, now left behind on a rising road, where the scarped side of the highway reveals a momentary change from the prevailing claylands to chalk; a change so sudden and so strictly confined to this hillside that it at once attracts the attention of even the least geologically-inclined. Here the campions bloom that love the chalk and refuse to grow on clay. Below this hilltop, in the deep hollow scoured out ages ago, when the now insignificant stream that crosses the road was a considerable force, is Creeting Bottom, and Creetings of several sorts are set about the countryside, all hiding from the road that goes now up hill and down dale with as lonely an air as though the little town of Needham Market and the larger town of Stowmarket were not almost within sight, over the shoulders of the hills, on the highway parallel with this, that runs to Bury St Edmunds. To be on "on the road to Needham" is an obvious Suffolk saying, applied to those who are badly off for worldly gear, and it is a little curious that Needham itself was for many years, and until quite recently, a place of fallen fortunes, lamenting the decay of its textile trades in empty houses and an "irreducible minimum" of rent for those that were so fortunate as to find occupants at all. The name of "Hungry-gut Hall" that still clings to a farmhouse marks that depressed period to all time; but in the spicy odours of the tanneries and the chemical manure stores and other thriving industries and businesses that cluster round the railway station, the explorer finds evidences enough that Needham is reviving.

Not a sign of those towns or of the railway is seen on the road to Norwich, where the cottage outposts of Stonham Earls and Stonham Aspall alone tell of the villages in the hinterland. In their gardens, spread on bushes or waving in the summer breeze, intimate articles of underclothing are prominently displayed, in the society of old hats and coats, not so much for the exhibition of the family wardrobe as in desperate attempts--bringing up all the reserves--at scaring away the hungry birds from currants, cherries and gooseberries. These contests, the only warring incidents on the way, in which the birds are generally the victors, bring one to a level road where Little Stonham stands, its chief feature the "Magpie" Inn. "Stonham Pie" owns one of those old gallows signs, stretching across the road, that were at one time a common feature. The picture-sign, with a painting of that saucy bird, has been hung below the cross-beam instead of in its old ironwork frame above, now that the piled-up coaches that once passed beneath are gone. Shortly before their going, and while turnpikes and tolls appeared likely to last for ever, the toll-gate that stood at the succeeding village of Brockford was removed two miles onward, to Stoke Ash, where, at the beginning of the pretty avenue at Stoke Chapel, the later toll-house remains, just as does the earlier one at Brockford. Brockford, the "badger's ford" of a tiny affluent of the Waveney, is preceded by Brockford Green, where the quiet road is made narrow by its sides being encroached upon by grass. It is here that the accompanying sketch of tall poplars and bushy willows was taken.

Off to the left hand, in strong contrast with this level stretch of road, the country is tumbled into combes and rounded hills, where the River Gipping takes its rise in the village of that name, springing from the hill where the church tower stands solemn and grim, as though it held inviolate the story of the place, away from those days when the Gippings first settled here and gave it a title.

But let not the hurried seek Gipping, along the winding by-roads. The way, if not far, is not easy, and passengers are few. Scattered and infrequent farmhouses there be, at whose back doors to inquire the way, but rustic directions are apt to mislead. In any case, it is little use approaching the front door of a farmhouse. No one will hear you knocking, unless indeed it be a watchful and savage dog, trained to be on the alert for tramps; and you are like to hear him snuffling and gasping on the other side in a ferociously suggestive manner which will render you thankful that the door is closed and bolted. And not only bolted on this occasion, but always. The steps, and the space between the door and the threshold, where stray straws and wind-blown rubbish have collected, are evidence of the fact that the farmer and his family do not use the front door, but make their exits and entrances by way of the kitchen. It is an old East Anglian custom, and although many of the farmers nowadays pretend to culture and set up to be as up-to-date as the retired tradesfolk and small squires they are neighbourly with, many others would no more think of using the principal entrance to their homes than they would make use of the "parlour," where massive and sombre furniture, covered with antimacassars, is disposed with geometric accuracy around the room, in company with the family Bible and the prizes taken at school by the farmer's children; the stale and stuffy atmosphere proclaiming that this state apartment is only used on rare and solemn occasions. In fact, the "best room" and the front door only came into use in the old days on the occasion of a funeral. Perhaps it is a custom originating in a laudable idea of paying the greatest possible respect to the dead, but it is one which certainly gives a gruesome mortuary significance to both the entrance and the room.

Thwaite or "Twaite," as East Anglians, incapable of pronouncing "th," call it, less than a mile beyond Brockford, numbers few cottages. Beyond it, where the hitherto flat road makes a descent, is in local parlance, "Thwaite Low House," not so called on account of any disreputable character it may once have earned, but from its situation. The name obviously entails the existence of a "High House," which was, like the other, a coaching and posting inn. The last named, now a farmstead, was in those days the "Cock," the other the "Queen's Head." While the "Low House" has fallen upon times so irredeemably evil that it has been long untenanted and is now a veritable scarecrow of a house, with gaping holes in its walls and windows battened up, the "Cock," save that its sign is gone, still remains much as it was, to show a later generation what manner of place the roadside inn was in days of yore.

Stoke Ash, or "Aish," as Suffolkers pronounce it, like many another village, makes no sign from the road. Its church tower seen to the right, dimly, amid a hilltop screen of trees, a square, box-like red-brick chapel by the way, and that pretty inn, "Stoke White Horse," are the only other evidences of its being. The remaining six miles to the Norfolk border lead through Yaxley and Brome: Yaxley, where a branch railway runs under the road, on its way to Eye, and narrowly misses the old church: Brome, where the "Swan" stands for all the village to those who look to neither side of the road; church and houses skulking down a by-road on the way to Hoxne. There, down that pretty road, where the thatched cottages nestle under tall trees and the blue wood-smoke from rustic hearths curls upwards into the boughs and makes the sparrows cough and sneeze--there is the Rectory, approached in lordly fashion past a fine brick entrance and exquisite avenue, and, at a little greater distance the old black flint, round-towered church, restored and titivated out of all antiquity of tone: the stone sand-papered, and the flints polished with a handkerchief. The only thing missing--and, under the circumstances, it is missed--is a glass case, so that no damp, nor lichen, nor any effects of weather may come to spoil the housewifely neatness.

It was along this road to Hoxne that those who sought the revered head of St Edmund, King and Martyr, in the miraculous legend, were led to it by the voice calling, "Here, here, here;" at length finding the sainted relic in charge of a wolf, who allowed it to be taken from between his paws. But the voice thus calling was probably a much less supernatural manifestation, and was doubtless the hooting of owls in the woods. They still mock the belated traveller, only, to ears untuned to the miraculous, they simply seem to ask, "Who, who, who?" Ingenuity, however, vainly seeks the basis in nature of the wolf incident.