The Diary of Francis Kilvert

Widely hailed as "the finest in the English language, after Peyps".

Introduction

Robert Francis Kilvert (1840-79) was a village vicar in Clyro, Wales, and in Langley Burrell, in the West Country of England on the Welsh border: an area that hadn't changed at all in centuries. His work took him into all walks of life, equally into the salons of society as the beggar's hut, for a clergyman had a lot more influence and respect in those times. In two consecutive entries on 28th and 29th June, Kilvert records the lifestyles of the haves and have-nots: the wealthy Walls with their new farm and servants, and the miserable Corfields.

The English are supposed to have a taste for corporal punishment, and Kilvert is no exception. He records the abuse of the Corfield girls in morbid detail. In two later entries he relates the story of the young Strange girl who is incorrigible despite repeated beatings. He readily offers to administer the beatings himself, or at least witness them, to increase the young girl's shame. And later he refers to a young girl's bottom as 'plump and smooth and in excellent whipping condition,' so we can safely assume that posteriors and the lash in proximity held sexual excitement for him.

Although middle class himself, Kilvert didn't disdain to get his boots muddy or hang out with a hermit and wonder about the solitary anchorite's life. One of his favourite parishioners was an old soldier who had fought in the Peninsular War in Spain against Napoleon's troops. Kilvert helped get him his pension, and records the soldier's wonderful anecdotes. These are as gripping as anything in Thackeray or the other popular pot-boiler Victorian novelists. In fact their terseness and precision of detail makes them more appealing to a modern sensibility than the verbose rambling triple-deckers that flooded the market in the mid-ninteenth century.

Kilvert is writing for himself, not for any other reader, yet he presents a fully fleshed-out story. What appeals to me, apart from his curiosity and his pantheistic sensibility ('the sloping woods budded into leaf'), is the modernity: a linearity to his writing that is more Robbe-Grillet than Thomas Hardy. His book reads like an Existential Victorian novel. Characters appear and disappear without resolution to their stories. Their actions, while he is interested or engaged, is all we learn: we don't get the all-knowing writer's overview we'd expect from George Eliot or Nikolai Gogol. We're dying to know what became of Lucretia Wall or Gipsy Lizzie, so we read on looking for other clues.

Kilvert attended Wadham College, Oxford, at the same time as Charles L. Dodgson (aka "Lewis Carroll"), with whom he shared an interest in young girls. From his diaristic fixation on them, we can tell that Kilvert was a true lover of young girls. His adoring descriptions, his careful choice of words, and above all the things he describes 'their red sweet full lips,' the 'vast spaces of white, skin as well as linen,' are particularly resonant.

In the excerpt from Easter Tuesday, 1870, Kilvert has difficulty placing his subjects socially. This would bother a Victorian gentleman who needed to know whether the family were stationed above or below him in the great hierarchy of things. Whether he owed them formal respect or whether, if they were simple people, he could be more familar. As it is, his engagement is limited to watching and encouraging the girls by his amusement. He refers to the 'father' in quotes which is a little odd, but characteristically shows us he is envious and dearly wants girls of his own - something we shall see again. This magical day was one his old collegian would have marked, in Biblical style, with a 'white stone.'

The events surrounding the Christian festival of Easter were important to Kilvert and he devotes several long entries in his diaries for April 1870 to the preparations for the celebration of the resurrection. He has persuaded his parishioners to revive the ancient custom of decorating the graves. Much of the day preceding Easter is taken up with gathering flowers and making floral crosses for grave decorating. On the day before Easter he helps the village schoolchildren make wreaths and then visits the churchyard

Here he helps a child decorate her grandfather's grave. Then they find her father, uncle, and sister buried close by, but 'my little friend had lavished so much of her flower wealth upon her grandfather's grave that there was not much left for the others and we were obliged to economize and make our scanty store go as far as possible.'

Kilvert runs into an old friend. Then, after this busy day, there is choir practise for the following morning, and finally Kilvert leaves with everything prepared. The stillness and surprise in his closing image in this entry is transcendent: 'As I walked down the Churchyard alone the decked graves had a strange effect in the moonlight and looked as if the people had laid down to sleep for the night out of doors, ready dressed to rise early on Easter morning.'

Part of finishing a proper education for young British gentlemen, as far back as the eighteenth century, was the Grand Tour: a trip to see the sights of Paris, Venice, Florence, Rome, and Athens. We don't know whether Kilvert made this trip, but from an entry in his diary from July 1870 we learn he had visited Norway: closer and less romantic than the Austrian alps but an interesting choice nonetheless. And from an oft-quoted entry we learn of his true feelings about tourism: 'Of all noxious animals, too, the most noxious is a tourist. And of all tourists, the most vulgar, ill-bred, offensive and loathsome is the British tourist.' (5 April 1870)

In his morning oration for 11 July 1870, Kilvert launches into a breathless rush of non-stop prose, which causes the tone of his revery about the 'fatherless girl' to become almost mystical. And again we encounter his longing for a child. His description of the sun sneaking into the girl's room and the state he finds her in, is astonishing.

Kilvert was a great walker. He once wrote on the Black Mountain in Wales: 'It is a fine thing to be out on the hills alone. A man can hardly be a beast or a fool alone on a great mountain.' (29 May 1871) On a memorable day, a year earlier, his trek has a goal: a village school.

Kilvert's contemporary, the great novelist Thomas Love Peacock, celebrated Welsh culture in The Misfortunes of Elphin, however, after 700 years of English occupation few traces of a Welsh identity were left (even a century ago) except for the place names. In the deservedly famous extract from May 3, 1870, Kilvert uses an odd expression that seems to us ambiguous (a modern interpreter might call it a Freudian undertone) when he refers to 'fluttering the dove cot.' He is simply playing with the parson's pigeons.

In further entries for July 1870 we encounter the mysterious gypsy girl, Lizzie, with whom Kilvert is in love. He is so overcome with emotion when he thinks about her he babbles off into prayer. Like his fellow clergyman, 'Lewis Carroll,' he sublimates his feelings towards young girls, and his rapture veers into spiritual grace when he thinks about them. Lizzie was probably not part of his church congregation, so he hopes to bestow God's protection on her. His aching longing for the girl is palpable in his diary.

The Hay Flower Show in August 1870 provides a very funny vignette of slapstick humour. Kilvert volunteered at the local savings bank which is how he knows Trotter, who adds further Buster-Keatonesque touches to the scene. The subsequent entry records an encounter with the 'sunny haired girl' of the previous spontaneous on-rush of prose. Again she sends Kilvert into poetic rhapsodies.

In the entry for 15 April 1871 we learn of Kilvert's passion for a young lady of marriageable age, Kathleen Hall, which he discovers just as she leaves the village. On this occasion, after her departure, he is in a heightened emotional state and takes consolation in his pedophilia. (Kilvert did marry, when he was 49, but sadly died of peritonitis less than a month later.)

According to the editor, William Plomer, the entry for 23 August 1871, titled 'It began with a lass and it will end with a lass,' starts a fresh volume, the ninth, of Kilvert's manuscript diary. (Sadly, most of the originals were destroyed by Kilvert's descendants after the one-volume Jonathan Cape book of selections appeared in 1938; three of the twenty or so notebooks were spared. One is in the Welsh National Library, one in Durham University Library, and the other is unaccounted for.) He is staying with his father, the Reverend Robert Kilvert, at Langley Burrell in Wiltshire. We read here another little prose-poem of love and longing for the child he doesn't have.

Out of his habitual village rounds, on a train trip, Kilvert encounters two Irish girls who make their living peddling merchandise. Being unmoored from his usual routine he almost loses his head. According to Plomer, 'he is so ''irresistibly drawn'' as to seem to be on the brink of a major indiscretion. ''It is a strange and terrible gift,'' he says, ''this power of stealing hearts and exciting such love'', and we may add that it is even stranger when he who exercises it is obliged, by his own sense of morality and the conventions of time and place, to postpone its fullest exercise.' So the young girl's invitation to get to know her and see her again, almost accepted by the enchanted suitor, is turned into one of his most consciously literary short stories.

The young Irish girl sings a song about a Dolly Varden. This character in Dickens's novel Barnaby Rudge wore brightly spotted dresses. After the novel came out it was the name for a popular pink spotted calico print. By the late 1800s Dolly Varden became the name for a fish -- salvelinus malma -- a member of the char family, found from California to Alaska.

In the closing entries excerpted here, from summer 1875, Kilvert is on vacation at the seaside, where again he expresses a strong longing to have a daughter of his own. He visits Yaverland, an ancient country house which was featured in a novel he had read as a youth and long remembered. Although it wasn't open to the public, he managed to talk his way in to see it for himself. On a previous trip to the South Coast he wrote, 'The Vicar of St. Ives says the smell of fish there is sometimes so terrific as to stop the church clock.' (21 July 1870)

The final entry, from August 1875, shows Kilvert back in form playing with schoolgirls (particularly plump youngsters). He is 44 years old. The shocking exposure of the denouement is carefully amended into a classical allusion -- the Fall of Hebe -- which adds a humorous note to an embarrasing scene. Hebe was the Greek goddess of Youth who had the power of making the aged young again. Youth is all too fleeting, as Kilvert knew, but through his own words we can make him live again.

'Sir A.J.'

Further reading: Kilvert's Diary, chosen, edited and introduced by William Plomer (London: Jonathan Cape, 1938; corrected edition, 1960). Currently in-print from Penguin in the UK.

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Tuesday, 3 May 1870

No one was home at Pant-y-ci so I stuck a cowslip in the latch hole by way of leaving a card and went on to Crowther's Pool.

By Tyn-y-cwm Meadows to Newchurch village and in turning in at the old Vicarage garden door I heard the hum of the little school. The door under the latticed porch was open and as I went in a pretty dark girl was coming out of an inner door, but seeing me she retreated hastily and I heard an excited buzzing of voices within the schoolroom and eager whispers among the children: 'Here's Mr. Kilvert ‹ It¹s Mr. Kilvert.' Not finding the good parson in his study I went into the schoolroom and fluttered the dove cot not a little. The curate and his eldest daughter were away and pretty Emmeline in a russet brown stuff dress and her long fair curls was keeping school bravely with an austere look in her severe beautiful place, and hearing little Polly Greenway read. Janet and Matilda dressed just alike in black silk skirts, scarlet bodices and white pinafores, and with blue ribbons in their glossy bonny dark brown curls, were sitting on a form at a long desk with the older children working at sums. Janet was doing simple division and said she had done five sums, whereupon I kissed her and she was nothing loth. Moreover I offered to give her a kiss for every sum, at which she laughed. As I stood by the window making notes of things in general in my pocket book Janet kept on interrupting her work to glance round at me shyly but saucily with her mischievous beautiful grey eyes. Shall I confess that I travelled ten miles today over the hills for a kiss, to kiss that child's sweet face. Ten miles for a kiss.

The parson had been called away to receive strangers. After showing them the church he had taken them up to the house to tea, and when 4 o'clock came and Emmeline gravely broke up the school I walked up to Gilfach y rheol with Janet and Arthur, while Emmeline and Matilda came after us presently. we went down the lane and across the swift flowing little brook, the Milw, by the old foot bridge, plank and handrail, and up the steep bank through the trees over a recognized shard. We were soon spied from the house and Sarah Vaughan stood in the door to welcome us with her pretty fair face, beautiful white brow, and luxuriant clustering dark brown curls. I do think the way the Vaughan girls wear their short curling hair is the most natural and prettiest in the world. Oh if fashionable young ladies could but see and perceive and understand and know what utterly ludicrous guys they make of themselves, with the towers and spires and horns and clubs that they build and torture their hair up into! But slaves to fashion must its gods adore.

Monday, 4 July 1870

Since the inspection the classes and standards at the school have been rearranged and Gipsy Lizzie has been put into my reading class. How is the indescribable beauty of that most lovely face to be described ‹ the dark soft curls parting back from the pure white transparent brow, the exquisite little mouth and pearly tiny teeth, the pure straight delicate features, the long dark fringes and white eyelids that droop over and curtain her eyes, when they are cast down or bent upon her book, and seem to rest upon the soft clear cheek, and when the eyes are raised, that clear unfathomable blue depth of wide wonder and enquiry and unsullied and unsuspecting innocence. Oh, child, child, if you did but know your own power. Oh, Gipsy, if you only grow up as good as you are fair. Oh, that you might grow up good. May all God's angels guard you, sweet. The Lord bless thee and keep thee. The Lord make His Face to shine upon thee and be gracious unto thee. The Lord lift up His countenance upon thee peace, both now and evermore. Amen.

Saturday, 9 July 1870

It is a pretty lane this Bird's Nest lane, very shady and quiet, narrow and overbowered here and there with arching wyches and hazels. Sometimes my darling child Gipsy comes down to school this way, but more often she comes down Sunny Bank when the days are fine, and then over the stile by little Wern y Pentre. Yet often and often must those tiny feet have trodden this stony narrow green-arched lane, and those sweet blue eyes have looked down this vista to the blue mountains and those little hands have gathered flowers along these banks. O my child if you did but know. If you only knew that this lane and this dingle and these fields are sweet to me and holy ground for your sweet sake. But you can never know, and if you should ever guess or read the secret, it will be but a dim misty suspicion of the truth. Ah Gipsy.

As I came up the hill Bengough was playing his harmonium. When I went back he was working in his cowyard. There was something like autumn, a suspicion of late summer, a touch of autumnal stillness and melancholy in the afternoon. A great sultriness brooded over everything and made the air very oppressive and the mountains loomed dark blue.

Monday, 11 July 1870

The view from my bedroom window looking up the dingle always reminds me of Norway, perhaps because of the spiry dark fir tops which rise above the lighter green trees. Often when I rise I look up to the white farm house of Penllan and think of the sweet grey eyes that have long been open and looking upon the pearly morning sky and the mists of the valley and the morning spread upon the mountains, and think of the young busy hands that have long been at work, milking or churning, with the sleeves rolled up the round arms as white and creamy as the milk itself, and the bright sweet morning face that the sunrise and the fresh early air have kissed into bloom and the sunny tresses ruffled by the moutain wind, and hope that the fatherless girl may ever be good, brave, pure, and true. So help her God. The sun looks through her window which the great pear tree frames and lattices in green leaves and fruit, and the leaves move and flicker and throw a chequering shadow upon the white bedroom wall, and on the white curtains of the bed. And before the sun has touched the sleeping village in the shade below or has even struck the weathercock into a golden gleam, or has crept down the steep green slope of the lower or upper Bron, he has stolen into her room and crept along the wall from chair to chair till he has reached the bed, and has kissed the fair hand and arm that lies upon the coverlet and the white bosom that heaves half uncovered after the restlessness of the sultry night, and has kissed her mouth whose scarlet lips, just parting in a smile and pouting like rosebuds to be kissed, show the pearly gleam of the white teeth, and has kissed the sweet face and the blue veined silky lashed eyelids and the white brow and the soft white tangled hair, till she has unclosed the sweetest eyes that ever opened to the dawn, and risen and unfastened the casement and stood awhile breathing the fresh fragrant mountain air as it blows cool upon her flushed cheek and her half veiled bosom, and lifts and ruffles her bright hair which still keeps the kiss of the sun. Then when she has dressed and prayed towards the east, she goes out to draw water from the holy spring St. Mary's Well. After which she goes about her honest holy work, all day long, with a light heart and a pure conscience.

Tueday 30 August 1870

Hay Flower Show, the first they have had, a very successful one. A nice large tent, the poles prettily wreathed with hop vine, and the flowers fruit and vegetables prettily arranged. There was an excursion train from Builth to Hay for the occasion. The town was hung with flags. The whole country was there. A row of pretty girls, Bevans and Thomases, were sitting on a form which broke down and left the whole row sprawling on their backs, with their heels in the air. Fanny Thomas was the only one who had any presence of mind about ancles. It was quite a case of being 'on view' and 'open to the public' and 'no reserve'. Twice round the tent was enough and as Trotter of the Bank and I were shaking hands with impressive cordiality our enthusiasm was so great that we tore off the top of an Osmunda frond. An Asplenium Marinum carried me back to dear Gurnard¹s Head, and for the moment I forgot the Show and people and everything else.

Friday, 2 September 1870

At 10.45 started across the fields to walk to Capel y Ffin. I came in sight of the little Capel y Ffin squatting like a stout grey owl among its seven great black yews. I hastened on, and in front of the Capel House farm there was the sunny haired girl washing at a tub as usual by the brook side, the girl with the blue eyes, not the blue of the sky, but the blue of the sea.

Saturday, 15 April 1871

Last night like a fool I drank strong tea and in consequence I tossed from side to side the livelong night and never closed my eyes till five o'clock this morning, with the additional comfort of being in a frantic state of nervous energy. At 3 o'clock I heard the cocks crowing through the village. Then there was silence broken only by the drip and plash of steady rain which began between one and two. Exactly at 4.30 the first bird began to pipe and twitter faintly, then another and in a few minutes the whole choir were in full song, from the garden, fields and orchards, before it was broad day. Then the cocks began to crow again and then the power of the tea having worn out, happily I fell asleep. When I woke the roads were swimming.

The Miss Halls left the vicarage this morning at 9.45 to catch the 10.13 train for Neath. I had promised to go and wish them goodbye but when I got to the Vicarage stable yard at 11 o'clock the carriage was gone. William Pugh was chaffcutting in the barn. 'They are at Hay by now,' he said consolingly. And I like an idiot though the train went at 11.26. Provoking, vexing. I would have given a sovereign to see them and speak to them once more. And what must they have thought? That I would not take the trouble to come to see them off in spite of my promise. I crossed the lawn, seeing Mrs. Venables and the baby in the drawing room. But in spite of them how cold blank dull and empty the room looked. There was the table at which they used to sit writing letters. Ten days ago I scarcely knew of their existence or cared. And now. Mrs. V. said they had left a kind message for me. They were all disappointed when I did not come in time. I am so vexed I should have loved dearly to take another look at their bonnie faces. Especially Kathleen¹s. How well I remember her standing at the head of the grave on Easter Eve and making up the primroses into bunches for the primrose cross. Her little foot peeped out from under her dress. I thought it was the prettiest foot I ever saw. Then there was church on Good Friday (just as Petrarch first saw Laura 'in the Cathedral on Good Friday' when and where was 'kindled that world-renowned flame'). And there was the drive to Boughrood, the call at Cae Mawr, the dinner party in the evening, and the place where she sat by the Maiden's Stile. Ah they are nice sweet girls, so natural and genuine, so pleasant and so kind. Well. Well. Such is life, comings and goings and meetings and partings. I thought I was not going to care for anyone again. I wonder if there is any receipt for hardening the heart and making it less impressible.

I went sadly back to my room, took down and went sorrowfully on with my sermon for tomorrow, feeling as if all was dull and blank and as if some light and interest had suddenly gone out of life. It was pleasant to see Mrs. Nash downstairs again in the cosy little warm parlor. I went to read to Sackville Thomas. Being tub night Polly with great celerity and satisfaction stripped herself naked to her drawers before me and was very anxious to take off her drawers too for my benefit, but her grandmother would not allow her. As it happened the drawers in questions were so inadequately constructed that it made uncommonly little difference whether they were off or on, and there was a most interesting view from the rear. Then her grandfather washed her head with soft soap and hot water in a tub, the little image kneeling down in her drawers on the cold stone floor with her head in the tub close to the open door into the road.

Tuesday, 20 June 1871

An angel satyr walks these hills.

Wednesday, 28 June 1871

The beautiful fern gatherer. I went to Cabalva Banks. Near Cabalva on this side of the bridge and dingle I met Annie Dyke bareheaded in her luxuriant fair hair, gathering ferns along the bank. The child is becoming a grown-up young lady, and so like her sister Lucretia. She is as delighted as ever though to come back to the old home for the holidays and quite unspoilt. There is a wonderful beauty in her clear quiet deep grey eyes.

I went to the Walls' new farm house where they have been settled a week. The two nice girls Lucretia and Eliza were at home and quite unspoilt by the Bristol school and as simple and nice as ever. Their mother was gone to Hereford to buy furniture for the new house, but their father came in from the farm. Pretty Lucretia was burning to show me over the new house and do the honours. She went out leaving the door open and lingering outside as if inviting me to come. The father and children took me all over the new house. Lucretia showed me her bed, a French bed, blue and gold, the prettiest piece of furniture I saw. Wall pointed out to me with satisfaction the door with a lock which separated the sleeping rooms of the servant boys and girls.

Thursday, 29 June 1871

Villaging. I went to the Old Mill to see the beautiful child. A group of girls on their way home from market loitered by the stile above the Old Mill, resting and chattering over the stile. The Old Mill was silent, deserted, locked. I left a leaf in the latch hole. The brook twinkled past the house. Two cows grazed in the orchard slope across the brook above the house, and the gate of the poor little garden leaned and tottered, a frail defence against a cow with proclivities for cabbage.

Annie Corfield is better but we fear that she and her sisters, the twins Phoebe and Lizzie, and very miserable and badly treated by their father since their dear mother's death. What would she say if she could see them now, ragged, dirty, thin and half-clad and hungry? How unkindly their father uses them. The neighbours hear the sound of the whip on their naked flesh and the poor girls crying and screaming sadly sometimes when their father comes home late at night. It seems that when he comes home late he makes the girls get out of bed and strip themselves naked and then he flogs them severely or else he pulls the bed-clothes off them and whips them all three as they lie in bed together writhing and screaming under the castigation. It is said that sometimes Corfield strips the poor girls naked holds them face downwards across his knees on a bed or chair and whips their bare bottoms so cruelly that the blood runs down their legs. The neighbours fear there is little doubt that the girls are often flogged on their naked bodies till the blood comes, and it has been proposed that Mrs. Lewis or some woman should examine the children naked and see if there are marks of violence and cruelly severe whipping on the poor girls' backs and bottoms and thighs. We fear the soft tender flesh would be seen if the poor thin ragged frocks were lifted, sorely cut and wealed by the cruels stripes of the whip.

Wednesday, 23 August 1871

'It began with a lass and it will end with a lass.'

In the evening before sunset while the sun was yet warm and bright I went across the golden common and meadow to the Three Firs to call on Hannah Britton. I had not been long in the house when Hannah's beautiful seven year old child Carrie gradually stole up to me and nestled close in my arms. Then she laid her warm temples and soft round cheek lovingly to mine and stole first one arm then the other round my neck. I stroked back her fair soft curls. Her arms tightened round my neck and she pressed her face closer and closer to mine, kissing me again and again. then came the old, old story, the sweet confession as old as human hearts, 'I do love you so. Do you love me?' 'Yes,' said the child, lovingly clinging still closer with fresh caresses and endearments. 'You little bundle,' said her mother laughing and much amused. 'I wish I could take you with me.' 'You would soon grow tired of her,' said her mother. 'No,' said the child with the perfect trust and confidence of love, 'he said he wouldn't.' 'If you hold him so tight,' said her mother, 'he will faint.' 'Are you going further, Sir?' asked the child. 'Yes a litle further.' 'Then I will come with you,' said the child simply with another loving caress. 'You will come and see me tomorrow, Sir, won't you?' she added coaxingly. Time was of no account. An hour flew like a few seconds. I was in heaven. The people of the clusters of cottages moved about their gardens before the houses and came to draw water from the deep well close by the open door. A lodger came in and sat down, but I was lost to everything but love and the embrace and the sweet kisses and caresses of the child.

'God bless you my own love, my precious lamb.'

It seemed as if we could not part we loved each other so.

At last it grew dusk and with one long loving clasp and kiss I reluctantly rose to go. It was hard to leave the child.

When I went away she brought me the best flower she could find in the garden. I am exhausted with emotion.

Wednesday, 19 June 1872

Left Bockleton Vicarage for Liverpool. Mence drove me to Woofferton Station to catch the train.

We went through Shrewsbury where I changed trains and went on immediately, passing through Denbighshire and Flintshire by Wrexham to Chester and Birkenhead.

At Wrexham two merry saucy Irish hawking girls got into our carriage. The younger had a handsome saucy daring face showing splendid white teeth when she laughed and beautiful Irish eyes of dark grey which looked sometimes black and sometimes blue, with long silky black lashes and finely pencilled black eyebrows. This girl kept her companion and the whole carriage laughing from Wrexham to Chester, with her merriment, laughter and songs and her antics with a doll dressed like a boy, which she made dance in the air by pulling a string. She had a magnificent voice and sung to a comic popular air while the doll danced wildly,

'A-dressed in his Dolly Varden,

A-dressed in his Dolly Varden,

He looks so neat

And he smells so sweet,

A-dressed in his Dolly Varden.'

Then breaking down into merry laughter she hid her face and glanced roguishly at me from behind the doll.

Suddenly she became quiet and pensive and her face grew grave and sad as she sang a love song. And then up went the doll dancing furiously again and the Dolly Varden song accompanying his antics while the girl's white teeth laughed as she sung and her merry grey eyes sparkled as she watched the doll's gambols with her pretty head on one side amidst the inextinguishable laughter of the company. The tower of Chester Cathedral came in sight. 'Now we are in Cheshire,' exclaimed Irish Mary. 'Excuse me, my dear,' said the elder girl politely, 'you are in Flintshire yet. There's the river and the bridge and there's the Roodee.'

The two girls left the carriage at Chester and as she passed the younger put out her hand and shook hands with me. They stood by the carriage door on the platform for a few moments and Irish Mary, the younger girl, asked me to buy some nuts. I gave her sixpence and took a dozen nuts out of a full measure she was going to pour into my hands. She seemed surprized and looked up with a smile. 'You'll come and see me,' she said coaxingly. 'You are not Welsh are you?' 'No, we are a mixture of Irish and English.' 'Born in Ireland?' 'No, I was born at Huddersfield in Yorkshire.' 'You look Irish -- you have the Irish eye.' She laughed and blushed and hid her face. 'What do you think I am?' asked the elder girl, 'do you think I am Spanish?' 'No,' interrupted the other laughing, 'you have too much Irish between your eyes.' 'My eyes are blue,' said the elder girl, 'your eyes are grey, the gentleman's eyes are black.' 'Where did you get on?' I asked Irish Mary. 'At Wrexham,' she said. 'We were caught in the rain, walked a long way in it and got wet through,' said the poor girl pointing to a bundle of wet clothes they were carrying and which they had changed for dry ones. 'What do you do?' 'We go out hawking,' said the girl in a low voice. 'You have a beautiful voice.' 'Hasn¹t she?' interrupted the elder girl eagerly and delightedly. 'Where did you learn to sing?' She smiled and blushed and hid her face. A porter and some other people were looking wonderingly on, so I thought it best to end the conversation. But there was an attractive power about this poor Irish girl that fascinated me strangely. I felt irresistibly drawn to her. The singular beauty of her eyes, a beauty of deep sadness, a wistful sorrowful imploring look, her swift rich humour, her sudden gravity and sadness, her brilliant laughter, a certain intensity and power and richness of life and the extraordinary sweetness, softness and beauty of her voice in singing and talking gave her a power over me which I could not understand nor describe, but the power of a stronger over a weaker will and nature. She lingered about the carriage door. Her look grew more wistful, beautiful, imploring. Our eyes met again and again. Her eyes grew more and more beautiful. My eyes were fixed and riveted on hers. A few minutes more and I know not what might have happened. A wild reckless feeling came over me. Shall I leave all and follow her? No -- Yes -- No. At that moment the train moved on. She was left behind. Goodbye, sweet Irish Mary. So we parted. Shall we meet again? Yes -- No -- Yes.

Thursday, 4 June 1874

Went to Bristol with my Mother on a market ticket. She went to see Miss Evans at 6 Oakfield Place, and I to visit Janet Vaughan of Newchurch at the Clergy Daughters' School. On the way up to Great George St. where the C.D.S. is I went into the market to buy a nosegay of roses for Janet. As I was sitting in a confectioner's shop between the Drawbridge and College Green eating a bun I saw lingering about the door a barefoot child, a little girl, with fair hair tossed and tangled wild, an arch espiegle eager little face and beautiful wild eyes, large and grey, which looked shyly into the shop and at me with a wistful beseeching smile. She wore a poor faded ragged frock and her shapely limbs and tiny delicate beautiful feet were bare and stained with mud and dust. Still she lingered about the place with her sad and wistful smile and her winning beseeching look, half hiding herself shyly behind the door. It was irresistible. Christ seemed to be looking at me through the beautiful wistful imploring eyes of the barefooted hungry child. I took her out a bun, and I shall never forget the quick happy grateful smile which flashed over her face as she took it and began to eat. She said she was very hungry. Poor lamb.

I asked her name and she told me, but amidst the roar of the street and the bustle of the crowded pavement I could not catch the accents of the childish voice. Never mind. I shall know some day.

In Great George Street, leading out of Park St., I did not know at first where to find the Clergy Daughters' School, but the sound of two or three pianos guided me to the top of the street where stood a large old-fashioned red brick house in a pretty garden. 'Is Miss Vaughan at home?' 'Yes,' and I was shown upstairs into a room overlooking the basin and sweep of the vast smoky town and the dark grey battlements of the Cathedral Tower rising above the avenues of College Green.

Presently I heard a sweet voice singing along the passages and Janet Vaughan came in much grown and with her hair cut short over the forehead, but unchanged in other ways and as sweet and simple and affectionate as ever. She gave me a long loving kiss and we sat down by the open window to talk. Then some ladies came in to see another of the girls of the school and I sent Janet to ask if we might go out into the garden. Leave was given and we went out into a pretty garden at the back of the house with steep sloping lawns and shady winding walks under the trees. Janet took me down a steep path into a secluded walk, dark and shady, at the bottom of the garden, called in the school traditions the 'Poet's Retreat'. Here we walked up and down talking of Clyro and Gilfa and Newchurch and old times. Then girls came out into the garden with their books and work and soon all the shady nooks were full of light dresses and bright pretty faces and pleasant voices.

The walk called the 'Poet's Retreat' was fringed with young trees upon some of which the girls had carved their initials. Upon the stem of a young beech whose bark was grimly black with Bristol smuts I carved Janet's initials J.V. and reluctantly at her earnest request my own R.F.K. above.

I joined my Mother at Miss Evans' house and we drove to the Bristol Station and returned together. As we drove home up Huntsman's Hill from the Chippenham Station we overheard the following conversation between two boys. 'Was that the first butterfly thee'st seed this year?' 'Ees.' 'Why didn'st kill him then?' 'What for?' ''Cause theed'st had good luck, mon.' 'Don't tell I.' 'I know thee would'st then have good luck too.'

Monday, 29 June 1874

In the evening I went again to see John Gough. By the fireplace sat Clara in her shift which scarcely concealed her beautiful white limbs plump and naked. I took her up in my arms. How soft and warm she was and she put one little arm lovingly round my neck. She was just ready for bed and presently she climbed the stairs with her pretty little bare feet and limbs nearly as white as her shift, as pretty as a picture.

Wednesday, 5 August 1874

A splendid romp with Polly Tavener.

Thursday, 6 August 1874

I received this evening a wild strange unhappy note from Susan Strange begging me to come and see her as soon as possible. She was worse and in some trouble of mind about herself. She was also troubled about her daughter Fanny who grieves her sadly by frequently lying and stealing. I told her she must correct the girl in time. 'I do flog her,' she said. 'And the other morning she was a naughty girl and her brother Jospeh brought her in to me in her shimmy while I was in bed. I held her hands while Joseph and Charlie whipped her on her naked bottom as hard as ever they were able to flog her.'

I was rather astonished at this system of correction which set two brothers to whip their sister's naked bottom while their mother held her hands, but the poor mother was sick and weak, the girl deserved instant and severe chastizement and merited her flogging richly.

Friday, 7 August 1874

I went to see Mrs. Strange again this afternoon. She was better and downstairs and her nice young neighbour Annie Gale was washing her house up for her. She told me that her child Fanny was still incorrigible though she had been severely 'whipped six times or more this week and on some days she had been flogged twice severely on her naked bottom.'

The pastures are burnt to a whitish livid green very pale and ghastly, but the clouds looked stormy and the sky was bright and lurid and wildly tumbled.

Saturday, 8 August 1874

In the afternoon there was a very good cricket match on the Common between Langley Burrell and the Chippenham 2nd eleven. We were beaten by two runs, and up to the last moment it was anybody's match. I scored.

Just at the end of the match I got a mesage from Peckingell that little Fanny Strange had suddenly been taken ill and wanted to see me. I went immediately. The child was in bed upstairs. I sat down by the bed and took her little hot hand. She seemed very feverish but was quite sensible and appeared to be much softened and humbled. If so the severe chastizement she has undergone may have had a happy effect and have broken her self-will and cured her of her faults. Her parents very wisely have not spared her nor the rod. She has during the last few weeks been repeatedly stripped and has had her bottom flogged naked with great severity. At one time she seemed absolutely incorrigible. The severest whippings her mother could inflict upon her bare flesh seemed to have no effect upon her. She was whipped every day, and often twice or three times in the day and then when her father came home at night he got a stout switch, stripped the girl naked, laid her on her face across his knees and whipped her bare bottom and thighs again till they were covered with weals and the blood came. I asked her mother if it would shame the girl and have a good effect if I were to whip her myself or if she were to flog her in my presence. 'No,' she said, 'she is so hardened that she wouldn't care if I made her strip herself bare and then flogged her on her naked bottom before you. You can whip her as much as you please.' But now happily the poor child has come to a better mind.

Saturday, 12 June 1875

My father came back from Clifton this afternoon. I drove to the Station to meet him and went on into the town. I went to see my dear little lover Mary Tavener, the deaf and half dumb child. When I opened the door of the poor old crazy cottage in the yard the girl uttered a passionate inarticulate cry of joy and running to me she flung her arms round my neck and covered me with kisses.

Well. I have lived and I have loved, and no one can take this from me.

In the bright evening shining and sunset breeze the limes quivered with a dazzle and shimmer of moving foliage and the wind swept back the tresses of the birch from her bared white limbs while the multitude of leaves fluttered and thrilled swiftly twinkling. When I went out later the stormy moon was going down behind the acacia and a mighty sigh swept through all the trees of the garden.

Wednesday, 7 July 1875

To Matins as usual at St. Saviour's on the Cliff. At 4.40 I went to the Shanklin Station to meet my Mother, Dora and Teddy, but to my disappointment they did not come. At 5 o'clock we all went down to the beach leaving Mrs. Cowper Coles in her Bath Chair on the top of the Cliff. Mrs. Powles, Miss Deason, Gussie and Alice sat down by the bathing machine to sketch Sampson's Cottage at the mouth of the Chine, Minna, Sherard, Commerell, Cowper Todd and I set to work to dig sand castles and trenches. The tide was going out, a number of children were paddling in the shallow water left by the white retreating surges, and it was a fair sight to watch the merry girls with their pretty white feet and bare limbs wading through the little rippling waves or walking on the wet and shining sand. Oh, as I watched them there came over me such a longing, such a hungry yearning to have one of those children for my own. Oh that I too had a child to love and to love me, a daughter with such fair limbs and blue eyes archly dancing, and bright clustering curls blown wild and golden in the sunshine and sea air. It came over me like a storm and I turned away hungry at heart and half envying the parents as they sat upon the sand watching their children at play.

After dinner we went to Church and heard a roaring sermon about Abraham from a strange American clergyman. There was a new and pretty hymn tune composed by Miss Anson.

Tuesday, 13 July 1875

This morning after breakfast I started to walk to Bembridge through Sandown and Yaverland. Yaverland, my own beautiful Yaverland. The morning was blue and lovely with a warm sun and fresh breeze blowing from the sea and the Culver Downs.

As I walked from Shanklin to Sandown along the cliff edge I stopped to watch some children bathing from the beach directly below. One beautiful girl stood entirely naked on the sand, and there as she half sat, half reclined sideways, leaning upon her elbow with her knees bent and her legs and feet partly drawn back and up, she was a model for a sculptor, there was the supple slender waist, the gentle dawn and tender swell of the the bosom and the budding breasts, the graceful rounding of the delicately beautiful limbs and above all the soft and exquisite curves of the rosy dimpled bottom and broad white thigh. Her dark hair fell in thick masses on her white shoulders as she threw her head back and looked out to sea. She seemed a Venus Anadyomene fresh risen from the waves.

Thursday, 12 August 1875

I walked across to Kingston St. Michael to be present at the school feast.

As we were swinging the children under the elms that crown the Tor Hill a girl came up to me with a beseeching look in her eyes and an irresistible request for a swing. She was a perfect little beauty with a plump rosy face, dark hair, and lovely soft dark eyes melting with tenderness and a sweet little mouth as pretty as a rosebud. I think her name was Coates. I lifted her into the swing and away she went. But about the sixth flight the girl suddenly slipped off the swing seat feet foremost and still keeping hold of the ropes she hung from the swing helpless. Unfortunately her clothes had got hitched upon the seat of the swing and were all pulled up round her waist and it instantly became apparent that she wore no drawers. A titter and then a shout of laughter ran through the crowd as the girl's plump person was seen naked hanging from the swing. O ye gods, the fall of Hebe was nothing to it. We hustled her out of the swing and her clothes into their proper place as soon as possible and perhaps she did not know what a spectacle she had presented. I believe it was partly my fault. When I lifted the girl into the swing there were many aspirants for the seat and in the struggle and confusion I suppose I set her down with her clothes rumpled up and her bare flesh (poor child) upon the board and as her flesh was plump and smooth and in excellent whipping condition and the board slippery, they managed to part company with this result. Poor child, when she begged so earnestly for a swing she scarcely contemplated the exhibition of herself for the amusement of the spectators. I shall never see the elms on the Tor Hill now without thinking of the fall of Hebe.

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