More About Nowt

By the late C. E. Benson

” You say, dear mamma, it is good to be talking
With those who will kindly endeavour to teach ;
And I think I have learnt something whilst I was walking
Along with the sailor-boy down on the beach.”

Quite. I should not be in the least surprised if that ingenuous infant did pick up a wrinkle or two on that occasion. I myself have had my own education in modern lauguages supplemented by hearing sailor folk exchanging compliments. I am quite certain I should have been glad of a Mariner’s First Aid to Self Expression last June.

I was featuring on that occasion as a speleologist of the Alice in Wonderland type.  I did not do it on purpose, please. If solitary climbing be universally condemned, what about solitary caving ?

We were sitting, Madame and I, at the foot of the Milestone Buttress. She was putting on rubbers. I was raking about in the rucksack for odds and ends when suddenly one of her puttees took it into its head to feature as the White Rabbit. It emerged from the rucksack, paused a second, and then bolted down the nearest thing which looked like a rabbit-hole. It was my fault entirely. I ought to have been more up to the ways of these semi-domesticated creatures. Only the previous summer an apple had served me a similar trick at the top of Cwm Glas. In like manner it executed a sudden bolt. Then for a short way it tantalizingly kept its distance. After which it took the rest of the descent in about four hops—long hops.

I did not immediately feature as Alice by following down, because the hole was too small. A little poking around, however, revealed an opening about, I should say, 12 inches by 12 over all. This would have been a regular Gaping Ghyll had it been square or circular, but it was not. It was a rough, a very rough isosceles triangle, somewhat on a slant and narrowing at the bottom. I do not like such places. I nearly got into trouble in one, and that too in the familiar Druid’s Cave, or whatever the name is, at familiar Brimham Rocks.

I was wandering round with some friends and, of course, went through that ordeal, and, whilst it was in process, someone looked up and reflected, poetically, how terrible it would be to be imprisoned at the bottom of that shaft with the blue sky in sight but escape impossible. Poets sometimes write nonsense. People sometimes talk nonsense. I asked myself, ” Would escape be impossible ? ” On my next visit I put my theory to the test.

For some it would be impossible. The last time I was there my companion, a fine climber but some 6 ft. 2 in. and 14 stone, could not make a start owing to insufficient accom­modation for what Ashley Abraham terms that portion of his anatomy incapable of deflation. I was all right in that respect and the chimney itself presented no serious difficulty in spite of the darkness, but the exit did. In fact I also stuck amidships with my legs swinging free. The situation was alarming, not on account of possible danger to life or limb, but by reason of its being a tourists’ resort. My fertile brain quickly devised a method of extrication but what if a party of Yahoos came along before it was executed ? Worse still, what if a girls’ school came along half a minute after ?  Still courage is a sovereign virtue of the intrepid mountaineer. With deft fingers I swiftly unbuttoned my braces, let my knickers drop over my knees, pulled through and was clothed and respectable before any dangerous craft showed in the offing.

No such extreme measures were needed below the Milestone. My feet went through easily enough. The legs followed, then the thighs. The shoulders stuck, but this hindrance was dodged by wriggling out of my coat (whereat it promptly started to rain ; the sort of thing it would do): and I was on the floor of the chasm. A good deal of wriggling and peering revealed the puttee, of course as far away as it possibly could be, at the back of a sloping cleft. Alas ! I had not been trained, like the Mock Turtle and Gryphon, at a school where wreathing, writhing, and fainting in coils were taught, though I came somewhat near the last. My position indeed was, mutatis mutandis, an exact replica of Tenniel’s picture of Alice in the White Rabbit’s house. My head was bent on to my chest. One leg was under me, doubled up ; the other was stuck straight out up a crack and my arm was poked out through the opening of the cleft, the equivalent of the rabbit’s window, with wildly clutching fingers at the end. Alas ! the puttee was just out of reach. Like the Gryphon I exclaimed Hjckrrh or something to that effect. I might perhaps have touched it but then I was not sure whether the blackness beyond was a hole or solid rock. Consequently I had to undouble myself, wriggle out, trot back to the cottage, get a hooked stick, double myself up again, retrieve the puttee, unbuckle myself, and wriggle out.  All which, of course, put me into splendid fettle and we had a jolly good scramble up and down and in and out and round about the Milestone.

” However we brave it out, we men are a little breed ” and uncharitable to our fellow man. When a lady comes down to breakfast in the morning with a headache and can’t touch her breakfast, we say, men and women, ” Poor girl! ” It is a sleepless night, or anxiety, or biliousness or something innocent which is the cause, and she is coaxed and petted. When a man comes down in that unhappy condition, the cause is invariably either drink or dissipation, generally both. Unless of course the victim is a parson, and even then someone will suggest in a whisper that he keeps his booze in his bed­room. These factors were not always the cause of similar ” indispositions ” on my part. I used to suffer terribly from headaches and consequent distaste for breakfast when I was a boy. So did my female relations in girlhood. When I came of age the cause of these symptoms changed in my case, but persisted on the distaff side.

Not that I have really anything serious to grumble about in respect of these misapplications of cause and effect, or rather of effect and cause. One such gave me the inestimable satisfaction of getting back my own. Another was instru­mental in conferring on me the healthiest physical joy of existence.

I. In Brief. Long ago, in my pre-marital days, my sister went to Buxton for Bath and Water Treatment. I went with her. The Doctor was the husband of a very old friend of ours. My sister asked the Doctor whether he thought treat­ment might not help me, as I was a bit run clown. He thought it might and prescribed treatment. It did me no good. On the contrary, it reduced me to the condition of a bit of chewed string.  I went to the Doctor.  He diagnosed the waters as being simply poison to me and recommended me to take a country walk. Probably his ideas of a country walk and mine differed. I went to the Cromford Black Rocks and there, whilst backing up a chimney, my plantaris muscle went phut. I crawled back to Cromford, after the manner of a spider which has stuck one leg in treacle, and so to the Doctor. The Doctor doctored me. He also added quite unnecessarily that if my habit of life had been more careful, my plantaris tendon would not have busted. Three months later my dear old friend, his wife, wrote to tell me that poor dear Jack had broken exactly the same tendon as 1 had, getting over a stile at golf. I promptly wrote p.d.J. a letter of condolence, adding that if his habit, etc., etc. The reply, on a postcard, was monosyllabic and dealt with eschatology.

There were two by-issues to this episode. Of course the Doctor wanted to put me to bed. Equally of course I struck, and got on to crutches in two days’ time. Ten days later 1 was at the Lakes. On my way thither, at Manchester, I was taken in charge by a kindly Irish porter who endeavoured to put me into the wrong part of the train. On my pointing this out, he exclaimed, ” O begorra. I am that,” and forth­with whipped my crutches under one arm, seized my bag, and set off leaving me on one leg, like a disconsolate pelican of the wilderness. A week later I out-titaned the Titans. They piled Pelion on Ossa. I went up Helvellyn on saddle­back, the one and only pony ascent of my career.

II. Doctors, invaluable as they be, are just weak mortals like ourselves. They make mistakes. They suffer from stunts. Just at the commencement of the present century, or at the end of the last, they discovered appendicitis. It was a most mischievous discovery. No one had ever died of appendicitis before. Now the fell complaint claimed its victims by the score, by the hundred. A man took a nasty toss in the hunting field and was knocked out. A doctor was summoned and at once made a bee line for the danger point. Across it he found pasted the legend : “I have been operated on for appendicitis.” I had this from a doctor, so it must be true. Then came the pyorrhoea stunt, but that is too painful a subject to touch on. I was one of the victims and have not been able to enjoy a pipe since.

Honoured and blessed above all stunts be the Heart Stunt. It was simply raging Xteen years ago. Everybody was infected and a small proportion failed to survive. I was a victim. Nay. Not a victim. To it I owe my physical salvation. I confess I was a bit run down. It was a hissing hot summer and I had been working double-tides by day and fulfilling my society duties at night. I went to a doctor—a first-class man and a real friend. He told me I was run down, which I knew. That was why I went to him. Then he made an idiot of himself. Instead of saying I had been working too hard by day, he rather more than suggested that I had been a bit too late and lively at night. Of course he added that my heart was a bit dicky and superadded that on no account must I walk uphill.  Light lie the turf on his tomb !

” That done it.” All unwittingly I had been injected with the Elixir Vitae (Wheateye I suppose it is pronounced in these days of Wellerian—spell it with a ‘ wee,’ Samivel,—pro­nunciation). Mountains had always called to me from afar, but up to date I had got no nearer than the Sussex Downs, and might have remained amongst those attractive, if insignificant purlieus but for that caution, that prohibition. I repeat, ” That done it.” It generally does. Forbid a one-lump man who takes salt with his porridge to indulge in sugar, and you will find him burgling his own store-cupboard at midnight and coming away with three lumps in his cheek or breakfasting out in order that he may cover his porridge with Demerara. Unfortunately my holidays were booked that year, or I believe I should have made for Wales or Cumberland right away. As it was I went to fish in Dumfries­shire.  That was providential.

The fishing was enough that season to dishearten the keenest angler, on that particular river anyhow. It continued to be hissing hot and consequently the water, what there was of it, was like gin. One might as weU have thrown one’s hat in as a fly for all the chance one had of taking a fish, though you could see the herling lying so thick below the bridge that it seemed impossible one could make a cast without foul-hooking a brace at least. As for the evening rise — I know that evening rise :—

At evening, when the light was dim,
He saw a fish—or a fish saw him—

And hooked it.

And then, with high-erected comb,
He took the fish—or the story—home,

And cooked it.

Night fishing ! With the water so infernally low, besides turning over about five fish for every one landed, you were, in a mixed river like that, just as likely to find yourself fast in a chub or some foul bottom-grubber as a trout. Like Professor Brussiloff, in The Clicking of Cuthbert, it gave me the pipovitch. Next morning daylight revealed a placard, and the placard revealed that a Tradesmen’s Excursion was in the near offing. For the information of those who do not know what these excursions are I may say, out of hand, that a Choir Treat is not in it with them. You set off at somewhere about 5 a.m. and return at what Whitaker calls 23.59. That indicates the depression to which I was reduced.

The expedition landed me in paradise via the Carlisle and Maryport Railway, which is suggestive. Before me was the view up Borrowdale ; on my right flank rose Skiddaw. I walked up to the summit, I walked back, and so to bed, several hours later, via the Maryport, Carlisle, and Caledonian Railway. Next week there was another Tradesmen’s holiday from a nearby centre. This time Arran was the objective. I got there too.  I walked up that Temple of Beelzebub, Goatfell, and enjoyed myself in spite of the flies. I felt much better. I fell quite happy, even at Kilmarnock Station. My joy was a bit damped when I got home to find that the liquor in my whisky bottle had sunk the label. I did not enquire. I did not complain. I went round to The Blue Bell and got half a bottle of whisky and hung round its neck a card bearing the following legend. ” Please help yourselves out of this bottle and leave mine alone.” From that day neither was touched.

I weathered the winter and next year saw me on the hills as much as ever I could get. On my return I met the Doctor. He shook hands heartily and said heartily, ” You are looking fit. What have you been doing ? ” I told him. Then he said, still more heartily, ” Damn that Lake District. It has lost me a promising patient.”