Sisters in the Wilderness - Charlotte Gray [7]
During the years at Stowe House the children were happily enclosed in two overlapping but self-contained worlds—their own close-knit family, and the timeless routines of rural Suffolk. During the mornings, they congregated in the brick-paved parlour for lessons. The elder children acted out scenes from Shakespeare, or studied Greek and Latin under their father’s supervision, while the younger children were taught to read by their mother. Elizabeth and Thomas were strict parents who insisted that their children’s education be well grounded in history, geography, mathematics and the theology and morality of the Church of England. Disobedience was punished by solitary confinement, without dinner. Thomas wanted his daughters as well as his sons to be self-reliant. His fourth daughter, Jane, never forgot his lessons. “‘Persevere and you must succeed,’ was one of his maxims,” she recalled years later. “‘God helps those who help themselves.’ When his right hand was disabled by gout, he used his left hand to write with—such was our father.”
After their mornings in the schoolroom, the Stricklands spent the afternoons around the garden and farmland, or accompanied their parents on local errands. With their mother, they would visit Bungay, a market town with a romantic ruined castle on the hill above it. Every Thursday, there was a lively market in the cobbled square by the seventeenth-century Butter Cross, a local stone monument. The town had a full complement of artisans who kept the local economy going, and whose workshops were irresistible draws for curious children. Harness-makers, wheelwrights, brick-makers, potters, basket-weavers, coopers, blacksmiths and farriers—the young Stricklands could watch their carriage horses being shod, or their cooking pots repaired, by men who had learned their skills from their fathers. They could eavesdrop on the old men who gathered in the sunshine for a “mardle” (as a casual chat was known locally) or count the grain sacks being unloaded for grinding in one of the local windmills.
With their father and his manservant, Lockwood, the children might set off on fishing expeditions along the River Waveney. The Waveney, which loops lazily around the town of Bungay and is still the haunt of otters, snipe and duck, was a favourite destination two hundred years ago for local eel-fishers. Their method of catching their prey was called “eelbabbing” and was unique to this little pocket of England. Worms spiced with a tasty mixture of dung were threaded onto a special kind of wool. The wool line was then fixed to a rod and dropped in the Waveney’s shallow waters, where an eel might snatch at the worm and get the wool caught in its teeth. Practised babbers swore by this technique, which saved them the slimy, frustrating job of removing a hook from the eel’s mouth. Thomas Strickland and his children would walk down to the Waveney in the late evening to watch the babbers at work. But Thomas himself was a rod-and-fly gentleman, whose fishing bible was Isaac Walton’s The Compleat Angler. He would read aloud passages to Catharine when he took her fishing, and his first-edition copy of Walton’s classic would become one of her most treasured possessions.
Thomas was often incapacitated by gout, and his wife would be too busy nursing him to pursue her children’s education. Then the girls had to amuse themselves. “In the long winter evenings we gathered around the fire and the elder ones would tell long stories bearing upon some point of history but embellished according to the invisible genius of their fertile minds,” Catharine recalled years later. “These improvised histories were continued night after night. New characters introduced and new events. And often this amusement gave place to the reading aloud [of] Shakespeare’s tragedies …” As the logs