14 
LAND G? WATER 
August 29, 1918 
Life and Letters QjJXSouire 
Small Talk 
LAST Saturday, whilst walking in my suburb, I 
came across a cricket match, for the first time 
since the war. The field was a secluded one, 
surrounded by trees, and with very few houses 
in sight. I went in, and sat on an empty bench 
opposite the pav-ilion. Except for two or three people in 
the pavilion, there were no other spectators. Who the 
plaj'ers were I do not know. They may have been tlie local 
Unlit — although they did not look it ; they may have been 
wounded soldiers ; they may have been munition workers. 
But, whatever their occupation or condition of licalth, it 
could not be discerned from outside the ring. As I saw them, 
they were simply cricketers. All was as of old. The players 
were in faultless white ; the turf was flat and green ; a 
roller stood in the background. The game consisted mainly 
of fruitless bowling to cautious batsmen, of crossing to and 
fro as the overs finished. Now and again, in a moment of 
madness, some batsman let out and hit a four, thus enabling 
one of the cramped fieldsmen to get a little running exercise. 
At longer intervals a wicket fell. The eVent produced a 
little burst — if the word be not too strong — of that languid 
clapping which is peculiar to the game of cricket. A long 
rest followed, during which nine men lay about on the ground, 
and two more threw the ball to each other. Just as I was 
thinking of going away, a newcomer at last emerged from the 
pavilion. Nothing had changed. One forgot the war ; it 
was as though the war had never taken place ; the experience 
w^ the most refreshing I have had for months. The last 
time I felt anything like those sensations was when 
I saw some of the Gilbert and Sullivan operas at the Hammer- 
smith Theatre. But there the experience of transportation 
into the past was not complete. For one thing, the audience 
was largely composed of soldiers. For another, there ' \\^as 
naturally absent from those hilarious performances that 
atmosphere of leisure which completes the iOusion. The 
e.xperience has now been repeated — this time through the 
medium of a book. ' 
Since the war began very few books have appeared which 
are free from the war's influence. Even where novelists do 
not mention the war, it is in the background. And those 
who write books which are not novels are equally subject 
to the influence of the dominant event. Nobody will be 
able to say this of Small Talk at Wreyland, by Mr. Cecil 
Torr, which has just been published by the Cambridge 
University Pres» (7s. 6d. net). Mr. Torr does mention the 
war. He mentions it once or twice. But he mentions it in 
such a way as orfly to accentuate his prevailing remoteness 
from the war. By this one does not mean that he himself 
takes no interest in the war. But as a writer, he is forty or 
fifty years distant from it. He lives in a Devonshire house 
in a small village, where his ancestors have lived for a long 
time before him. He is a scholar, an antiquary ; he has 
lived for years in one small place ; the books and men he 
knows, he knows very well. He is versed in natural history, 
in dialect, and in folk-lore ; he has family papers to draw 
upon, his memories of old travel, the customs and outlook 
of his poorer neighbours, and a half a century of history 
looked at from the outside through the eyes of a quiet and 
curious observer. He has an inexhaustible store of anecdotes 
and odd learning ; and it suddenly occurred to him that he 
ought to make use of it : 
Down here, when any of the older natives die, I hear 
people lamenting that so much local knowledge has died 
with them, and sajdng that they should have written things 
down. Fearing that this might soon be said of me, I got a 
book last Christmas — 1916 — and began to write tilings down. 
I meant to keep to local matters, but have gone much 
further than I meant. 
This is his first paragraph. His second begins : " My memory 
is perhaps a little above the average ; but my brother had a 
memory that was quite abnormal, and sometimes rather 
inconvenient. One day, in talking to a lady . . ." That 
shows his method. He goes from story to story, from odd- 
ment to oddment, wasting no time in generalisations or 
connecting platitudes. The result is an extraordinary medley 
that might almost (save only for a few dates) have been 
written fifty years ago, or fifty years hence, by a man of 
Mr. Torr's knowledge, habits, and temperament, and that 
could have been read with as much pleasure by a man of 
George I.'s reign as it probably will be by people who acci- 
dentally run across it in the reign of George XII. — that 
nebulous but interesting monarch wliose story I may leave to 
a later occasion. 
A book of this kind one can describe only by free quotation. 
(Reviewers, I may add, are prejudiced at first sight in favour 
of books which can only be described by free quotation.) 
Many of his stories relate to rehgious beliefs and superstitions. 
There is one concerning a father who endeavoured to cure 
his child's rupture by splitting an ash tree, wedging the 
split with chunks of oak, and passing the child three times 
through the hole at dawn. The tree was then bandaged, 
and its recovery was supposed to run parallel with that of 
the child. Asked if he thought it did any good, the father, 
with a typically rustic mingling of scepticism and super- 
stitious mysticism, repHed : "Well, as much good as sloppin' 
water over'n in church." The two most unpopular characters 
at Wreyland appear to be the Devil and the Pope — who are 
also bracketed together in Ulster. An old woman, hearing 
that Mr. Torr had been to see the Pope, said : "Well, now, 
maister, what be he like ? I reckon he be a proper tiger 
to fight." Her husband 
always felt that a great chance had been missed, when the 
Devil came into Widdicombe Church on Sunday, 2 ist 
October, 1638. My grandfather pressed Mm as to what 
he would have done ; and his reply was : " Dock 'n, maister, 
dock 'n — cut the tail of 'n off." I imagine that the Devil's 
tail at Widdicombe would have drawn more pilgrims than 
all the relics of the saints at other places. 
That is indisputable. Mr. Torr has other stories about 
relics. There was a saint's arm in Sweden which turned 
out to be a seal's fin. But what has he not got stories about ? 
Anything he sees or hears in the street, any odd book or 
picture that he finds or remembers, can set him off. His 
mind is hke an old curiosity shop full of furniture and objects 
of art, scraps of mediaeval writing, pipes smoked by the 
Duke of Clarence, bronzes, porcelain, plate, and faded photo- 
graph albums. 
In towns and newspapers change seems rapid. In the 
countrysides whence the towns recruit their population, 
change seems slow and miimportant. The landscape re- 
mains ; the buildings remain ; surnames and customs and 
speech largely remain ; and such changes as occur do not 
obscure the permanent elements in human nature, and the 
great facts that men must work, rear and support their families 
and die — for death itself, like the relations between life and 
the products of the soil, were before the war half-ignored by 
urban civilisation. The changes that have occurred at 
Wreyland arc not favoured by Mr. Torr ; he takes immense 
pleasure in recording the fact that fifty years of education 
have not prevented his neighbours from clinging to idioms 
like "us didn't love He, 'twas Him loved we." Sixty years 
ago Mr. Torr's father was also deploring change. "The old 
barn-door or dung-hill cock appears to be extinct. . . . The 
sort they have now are so hoarse and dull in their crowing 
that there is nothing to attract attention, nothing agreeable 
in their sound, and not loud enough to be heard by one 
another, so that there is no answering each other. In my 
boyhood the whole valley would ring with them." But 
what is this ? A small matter. He catalogues among 
his wonders the fact that his father took him 
to call upon an old Mr. Woodin ; and from him I had an 
account of the Fire of London, as he heard it from a great- 
aunt of his ; and she heard it from an old lady, who was 
about ten years old at the time of the fire. But it was 
only a child's account, dwclHng on the raisins and such things 
that she ate, while they were being salved. 
That was 1666. In 1916 Mr. Torr was talking to one of the 
oldest inhabitants about the war. The sage said : " It be 
a terrible thing, this war ; proper terrible it be. I never 
knowed bacon such a price." Taken together, the two 
stories illustrate the tenacity of human characteristics, the 
obstinate habit that most men have of thinking and feeling 
most about the smafl things nearest at hand, and the way in 
which our greatest cataclysms when they are over — as when 
they are distant — fall into perspective. "Small talk," after 
all, fills the greater part of our Uves, and in time everything 
turns into small talk. 
