Memoirs of a Surrey Labourer

📖 The Scoop

Bettesworth, the old labouring man, who in the decline of his strengthfound employment in my garden and entertained me with his talk, neverknew that he had been made the subject of a book. To know it wouldhave pleased him vastly, and there is something tragical in thereflection that he had to wear through his last weary months withoutthe consolation of the little fame he had justly earned; and yet itwould have been a mistake to tell him of it. His up-bringing had notfitted him for publicity. On the contrary, there was so much dangerthat self-consciousness would send him boastfully drinking about theparish, and make him intolerable to his familiars and useless to anyemployer, that, instead of confessing to him what I had done, I tookevery precaution to keep him in ignorance of it, and sought by leavinghim in obscurity to preserve him from ruin.Obscure and unsuspicious he continued his work, and his pleasantgarrulity went on in its accustomed way. Queer anecdotes came from himas plentifully as ever, and shrewd observations. Now it would be ofhis harvesting in Sussex that he told; now, of an adventure with atroublesome horse, or an experience on the scaffolding of a building;and again he would gossip of his garden, or of his neighbours, or ofthe old village life, or would discuss some scrap of news picked up atthe public-house. And as this went on month after month, although Ihad no intention of adding to the first book or writing a second onthe same lines, still it happened frequently that some fragment orother of Bettesworth's conversation took my fancy and was jotted downin my note-book. But almost until the end no definite purpose informedme what to preserve and what to leave. The notes were made, for themost part, under the influence of whim only.Towards the end, however, a sort of progression seemed to revealitself in these haphazard jottings. His age was telling heavily uponBettesworth, and symptoms of the inevitable change appeared to havebeen creeping unawares into my careless memoranda of his talk. I donot know when I first noticed this: it probably dawned upon me veryslowly; but that it did dawn is certain, and in that perception I hadthe first crude vision of the present volume. I might not aim to makeanother book after the pattern of the first, grouping the materials asit pleased me for an artistic end; but by reproducing the notes intheir proper order, and leaving them to tell their own tale, it shouldbe possible to engage as it were the co-operation of Nature herself,my own part being merely that of a scribe, recording at the dictationof events the process of Bettesworth's decay.To this idea, formed a year or so before Bettesworth's death, I havenow tried to give shape. Unfortunately, the scribe's work was not welldone. Things that should have been written down prove to have beenoverlooked; and although in the first few chapters I have gone back toa much earlier period than was originally intended, and have preservedthe chronological order all through, the hoped-for sense ofprogression is too often wanting. It existed in my mind, in thememories which the notes called up for me, rather than inBettesworth's recorded conversations. Much explanatory comment,therefore, which I should have preferred to omit, has been introducedin order to give continuity to the narrative.

Genre: Biography & Autobiography / Cultural, Ethnic & Regional / General (fancy, right?)