John Huntley Skrine

“ Lower down there are belts of woodland, fencing off the pastures which strew the lowest terraces of the mountains from the barren wastes above them, and these pastures are brightly flecked with patches of white-walled homesteads down to the brown edge of the marsh. And so, ridge after ridge, the hills enclose the scene in a half-circle, of which this breezy headland, our “specular mount,” is an extreme horn. But what the eye reposes on at last is the broad floor of marsh-land between mountain and sea. ”

“ Grounds for football were found when the autumn came; the best was a meadow just below Old Borth, of excellent turf, which dries quickly after rain; though the peaty soil, lately reclaimed from the marsh, would quake under the outset of the players.
The village boys, fired by a novel example, began to hold their own athletics. One might see the corduroyed urchins scrambling down the street in a footrace, or jerking their awkward little limbs over a roadside ditch. Our boys looked on as men look at a monkey, half amused, half indignant at the antics “which imitated humanity so abominably.” ”

“ And what a type that town is. “A city set upon a hill cannot be hid;” and surely as a school and a home, a home of learning and light, this place is both actually and figuratively set upon its hill. Everything of the past year has gone out into land after land, in letters and papers and narratives on all sides: the busy-boy mind and the busy-boy pen photographs most accurately all the minute incidents that interest their opening life, and it passes out everywhere. ”

“ An outbreak of this kind is too common an incident in a large school to merit much surprise or great alarm. But then our circumstances were exceptional. If the infection spread, it might be difficult to find hospital room; to communicate it to the villagers, as might easily befall, would be an unhappy return for their own ready hospitality; and then how miserable to have fled from sickness at Uppingham, and find it had followed us to Borth, as if, like the haunted family of the poem, “we had packed the thing among the beds.” ”

“ The shape of the village is determined by the narrow ridge of terra firma, the mere heaping of the tides, between the quaking marsh and the encroaching sea. The nidus of the present settlement is the tiny hamlet of Old Borth, perched on a spur of the promontory, and well out of reach of flood tides. We are not sure that the mother may not outlive her colony, unless substantial measures are taken to guard against another 30th of January. Near Old Borth, through a gap in the hills, comes the River Lery, a trout-stream known to our anglers, thanks again to Sir Pryse who owns it. ”

“ Though, perhaps, it is their own, if Nature, like Man, is most herself when seen in her best self; if her brightest moments are her truest.
Shall we be thought fanciful if we confess that we felt something of this same kind when, returning from a year-long exile, in the last gleams of a bright May evening we turned the corner of the High Street of Uppingham, and came face to face with our welcome. ”

“ All is over, and the place is very silent, except for the clink of hammers where they are breaking down our wooden walls, and, seaward, the cry and splash of gull and tern dipping for their prey in the shoal of herring-fry which is wandering about the bay. Close inshore a porpoise is wallowing, like the jolly sea-pig that he is, in his berth of glistening water. ”

“ Jones, The Baths, expressed the fears he once entertained, in common with others, that the Uppingham School would take Borth by storm, an opinion he had to change entirely after the boys had been there a week, for instead of laughing at the quaintness of some of the Welsh costumes or the peculiarities of the nation, they had obtained the goodwill of the inhabitants by their gentleness of demeanour, and completely won their hearts on that memorable day when masters and scholars, young and old, turned out to assist in reducing, as much as possible, the ill-effects of the storm. ”

“ You know as none can know what this school is. We came among you as strangers, and you looked upon us with the eyes of strangers; we stayed among you as friends, and we part from you as friends. (Cheers.) Everybody knows that the one thing on earth which makes life pleasant is the friendly atmosphere in which men live—the one thing that makes it hateful is to be surrounded by thoroughly bitter hearts. There is an old saying that “stone walls do not a prison make, nor iron bars a cage.” No, the life within can make any place enjoyable—nay, happy. ”

“ Well, this prosperous country, defended against the sea by embankments, was during the heroic age of Wales laid under water by the opening of the sluices in a drunken frolic. A fragment of it, the marsh between the pebble-ridge of Borth and the hills, would seem to have been recovered; but it enjoys a precarious safety, and even within our experience the sea gave a meaning threat of claiming his own again. ”

“ I would also refer to the extensive power which lies in a great school. It is quite true that some few years hence, these boys whom you have looked on with interest will be schoolmasters, barristers, and leaders in every part of the world. (Applause.) There is not a quarter of the globe where we have not our representative. It is now, and not in the future only, that I may venture to say that there is no part of this globe where men are to be found, where, here and there, Borth has not been heard of this year. ”

“ From the urn, where the house matron mounts guard up to the Sixth Form end of the table, where the head of the house is jotting down the list of absentees from the roll-call, the cloth is thickly studded with the viands in tins and jars, rich and various in colour, with which the schoolboy adds succulence to his meal. We open a door out of the dim corridor, and enter a room with three more houses seated round its walls. The sense of animation rises with the warmth and brightness of the fire which roars in the grate. ”

“ If we were little worse off than at home in the appliances for games, there were other recreations which were proper to the place, and clear gain to the immigrants. For example, the fishing in the Lery, along whose banks groups of anglers might be seen strolling, whipping the water to the full entertainment of themselves and the fish, or now and then blessing Sir Pryse, as the angler landed his first trout from our good friend’s waters. Yet we had our old sportsmen too, who could kill trout as well as amuse themselves, and bring home a delicate dish for a half-holiday tea. ”

“ For, as it often happens that, when things without are stillest, men hear most audibly the tumult of their own brains, so is it now with us. Action is ended, and memory begins to work. Into the vacuum which the silence makes, the stream of our little history pours in a long backwater. Our thoughts go back to the beginning of it, the hour when, as we were sailing prosperously under press of canvas, the blast struck us suddenly out of a sunny sky. We live again the slow months of enforced vacation, and the brief spell of apparent security, broken by the second stroke. ”

“ I do not say that in years to come there should not again have been a school as great as this, or greater; but this I am sure of, that we were in the very last week of the life of this present school; that at the beginning of the week, when it was decided to go, there was news from different quarters that made it absolutely certain that another Monday would have seen no school here. For a school is not a mere machine which can be set going to order, and which anybody who happens at the time to have the mastery of can deal with like a machine. ”

“ Why there they are, lying overlooked at our feet all the while, a straggle of lowly white-roofed dwellings clinging to the long pebble ridge like barnacles on a rock, breathing a thin smoke from their scattered chimneys, whence the blessed smell of peat-fires is wafted through the dry air to our nostrils. But one great house I notice with a crowd about its door-steps, and a flag waving over them a device I have somewhere seen before, where the kitchen chimney smokes with a most hospitable volume ”

“ It is not too much to say that the social life of the school would have been of a different and lower stamp, and its organisation crude and ineffective, if there had been no place of assembly where we could meet for common occasions, for roll-call, prayers, addresses, lectures, entertainments—no place to furnish the visible unity, which is so large an influence in a healthy social life. ”

“ June 29th and 30th were the days of the “Old Boys’ Match,” the annual reunion of the Past and Present School. There seemed no reason why absence from our native soil should sever our ties with the Past. Quite the contrary. Ubi Cæsar ibi patria, thought our Old Boys, who, indeed, never before felt so glad to claim their heritage in the fortunes of Uppingham. The game, which was like other games of cricket, and need not be described, was played on the Gogerddan field, where the Headmaster, in lieu of his customary supper, not practicable at Borth, gave a luncheon each day. ”

“ But the ill-starred folk of Troy could not have shown more enthusiasm in haling within their walls the fatal wooden horse, than did the men and boys of Uppingham, who harnessed themselves, some four-score of them, to that guileless structure, which, though indeed it has some other name, we will call at present our triumphal car. ”

“ A broad smooth floor, which would be vacant and dull enough had not Nature taken thought to drape its formlessness the more lovingly and richly. She has unrolled on it a carpet of various and solemn-tinted stuffs, where pale breadths of rusted bents sometimes mellow into strips of verdurous pasture, sometimes deepen into belts of embrowned peat-beds, sometimes take a yellower barrenness in parched flats, still briny and unreclaimed, and shaggy with bristling reeds. ”

“ Assuredly as our eyes looked on this pleasant hill and the familiar fields, we felt a deep thankfulness for the great peril passed, the page of life turned, and a year such as never can come again closed with success. ”

“ The fishermen of Borth, as they creep past the headlands in their fishing-smacks, have seen deep down in the clear waters, the firmly-cemented stones of a causeway, which must once have traversed the plain, and the line of which may be not indistinctly descried stretching far out to seaward from the mouth of a little combe. It is true that geologists whom we have consulted ridicule the fancy of masonry offering such resistance to the tides, and explain it away as a pebble-ridge built up by the action of currents. ”

“ But since the day when they drifted to land the cradle of the bard, the waves have ebbed away from Gwyddno’s weir, and left a broad stretch of p. 3marsh and meadow between it and the present coast, where stands the fishing village of Borth. The village fringes the sea-line with half a mile of straggling cottages; but the eye is caught at once by a massive building of white stone, standing at the head of the long street, and forming a landmark in the plain. This building is the Cambrian Hotel, reared on a scale that would suggest the neighbourhood of a populous health-resort. ”

“ We have been brought by our troubles much before the eyes of the public. They speak of ‘the fierce light that beats upon a throne,’ but that is hardly so intolerable as the fierce light that beats upon a great calamity. Yet I trust that fierce light may prove to the school a refining fire. Certainly the present school has behaved worthily under their novel circumstances; they have shown themselves true sons of Uppingham. You of the past school see round you your successors, and you may be proud of them ”

“ They exist very easily in the same room with the microscope, and even in railway carriages: what banishes them is the vacuum in gentleman and lady passengers. How should all the apparatus of heaven and earth, from the farthest firmament to the tender bosom of the mother who nourished us, make poetry for a mind that has no movements of awe and tenderness, no sense of fellowship which thrills from the near to the distant, and back again from the distant to the near? ”