Jim Davis
_By_
John Masefield
CHAPTER I
MY FIRST JOURNEY
I was born in the year 1800, in the town of Newnham-on-Severn, in
Gloucestershire. I am sure of the year, because my father always told
me that I was born at the end of the century, in the year that they
began to build the great house. The house has been finished now these
many years. The red-brick wall, which shuts its garden from the road
(and the Severn), is all covered with valerian and creeping
plants. One of my earliest memories is of the masons at work, shaping
the two great bows. I remember how my nurse used to stop to watch
them, at the corner of the road, on the green strip by the river-bank,
where the gipsies camped on the way to Gloucester horse-fair. One of
the masons was her sweetheart (Tom Farrell his name was), but he got
into bad ways, I remember, and was hanged or transported, though that
was years afterwards, when I had left that countryside.
My father and mother died when I was still a boy--my mother on the day
of Trafalgar battle, in 1805, my father four years later. It was very
sad at home after mother died; my father shut himself up in his study,
never seeing anybody. When my father died, my uncle came to Newnham
from his home in Devonshire; my old home was sold then, and I was
taken away. I remember the day so very clearly. It was one sunny
morning in early April. My uncle and I caught the coach at the top of
the hill, at the door of the old inn opposite the church. The coachman
had a hot drink handed up to him, and the ostlers hitched up the new
team. Then the guard (he had a red coat, like a soldier) blew his
horn, and the coach started off down the hill, going so very fast that
I was afraid, for I had never ridden on a coach before, though I had
seen them every day. The last that I saw of Newnham was the great
house at the corner. It was finished by that time, of course, and as
we drove past I saw the beautiful woman who lived there walking up and
down the lawn with her husband, Captain Rylands, a very tall, handsome
man, who used to give me apples. I was always afraid to eat the
apples, because my nurse said that the Captain had killed a man. That
was in the wars in Spain, fighting against the French.
I remember a great deal about my first coach-ride. We slept that night
at Bristol in one of the famous coaching inns, where, as a great
treat, I had bacon and eggs for supper, instead of bread-and-milk. In
the morning, my uncle took me with him to the docks, where he had some
business to do. That was the first time I ever really saw big ships,
and that was the first time I spoke with the sailors. There was a
capstan on one of the wharves, and men were at work, heaving round it,
hoisting casks out of a West Indiaman. One of the men said, "Come on,
young master; give us a hand on the bar here." So I put my hands on to
the bar and pushed my best, walking beside him till my uncle called me
away. There were many ships there at the time, all a West Indian
convoy, and it was fine to see their great figureheads, and the brass
cannon at the ports, and to hear the men singing out aloft as they
shifted spars and bent and unbent sails. They were all very lofty
ships, built for speed; all were beautifully kept, like men-of-war,
and all of them had their house-flags and red ensigns flying, so that
in the sun they looked splendid. I shall never forget them.
After that, we went back to the inn, and climbed into another coach,
and drove for a long, long time, often very slowly, till we reached a
place near Newton Abbot, where there was a kind woman who put me to
bed (I was too tired to notice more). Then, the next morning, I
remember a strange man who was very cross at breakfast, so that the
kind woman cried till my uncle sent me out of the room. It is funny
how these things came back to me; it might have been only yesterday.
Late that afternoon we reached the south coast of Devon, so that we
had the sea close beside us until the sun set. I heard the sea, as I
thought, when we reached my uncle's house, at the end of the twilight;
but they told me that it was a trout-stream, brawling over its
boulders, and that the sea was a full mile away. My aunt helped to put
me to bed, but I was too much excited to sleep well. I lay awake for a
long, long time, listening to the noise of the brook, and to the wind
among the trees outside, and to the cuckoo clock on the landing
calling out the hours and half-hours. When I fell asleep I seemed to
hear the sea and the crying out of the sailors. Voices seemed to be
talking close beside me in the room; I seemed to hear all sorts of
things, strange things, which afterwards really happened. There was a
night-light burning on the wash-handstand. Whenever I woke up in the
night the light would show me the shadow of the water jug upon the
ceiling. It looked like an old, old man, with a humped back, walking
the road, bowed over his cudgel.
I am not going to say very much about my life during the next few
years. My aunt and uncle had no children of their own, and no great
fondness for the children of others. Sometimes I was very lonely
there; but after my tenth birthday I was at school most of my time, at
Newton Abbot. I used to spend my Easter holidays (never more than a
week) with the kind woman who put me to bed that night of my journey.
My summer and winter holidays I spent with my uncle and aunt in their
little house above the trout-stream.
The trout-stream rose about three miles from my uncle's house, in a
boggy wood full of springs. It was a very rapid brook, nowhere more
than three or four feet deep, and never more than twenty feet across,
even near its mouth. Below my uncle's house it was full of little
falls, with great mossy boulders which checked its flow, and pools
where the bubbles spun. Further down, its course was gentler, for the
last mile to the sea was a flat valley, with combes on each side
covered with gorse and bramble. The sea had once come right up that
valley to just below my uncle's house; but that was many years
before--long before anybody could remember. Just after I went to live
there, one of the farmers dug a drain, or "rhine," in the valley, to
clear a boggy patch. He dug up the wreck of a large fishing-boat, with
her anchor and a few rusty hoops lying beside her under the ooze about
a foot below the surface. She must have sailed right up from the sea
hundreds of years ago, before the brook's mouth got blocked with
shingle (as I suppose it was) during some summer gale when the stream
was nearly dry. Often, when I was a boy, I used to imagine the ships
coming up from the sea, along that valley, firing their cannon. In the
winter, when the snow melted, the valley would be flooded, till it
looked just like a sea, and then I would imagine sea-fights there,
with pirates in red caps boarding Spanish treasure galleons.
The seacoast is mostly very bold in that part of Devon. Even where
there are no cliffs, the land rises steeply from the sea, in grassy
hills, with boulders and broken rock, instead of a beach, below
them. There are small sandy beaches wherever the brooks run into the
sea. Everywhere else the shore is "steep-to"--so much so that in many
places it is very difficult to reach the sea. I mention this because,
later on, that steep coast gave me some queer adventures.
