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Before I
leave the subject of Wortley, I would like to recall a strange little
episode.
We children were told that mummers were coming one evening to sing and
dance.
What that meant we had of course no idea, but we were allowed to sit up
later
than usual when they came, and that in itself gave us keen pleasure. We
assembled in a room with a stone floor. In came a party of men dressed
entrancingly in short coats with bright coloured
patterns on them, and long dark trousers. Their leader wore a
large
rabbit-skin cap with a small rabbit's head in front.
The songs
and dances were charming, and the men's faces interesting
and serious. These mummers were the real thing, and their
dances were
not inscribed on any printed page, but had come
down to them from their forebears. Harry Gust, who was married to our cousin, Nina Welby, was
there, and
he took down songs
and stories from one of the mummers. The man was surprised and
reluctant, but
eventually told him in scraps and fragments something of his own and
his friends'
mumming activities.
One of the
songs began pleasantly with,
Tantiro Tantiro,
the drums they
do beat,
The trumpets they do sound upon call,
Methinks
music's here, some bold captain's near,
March on, my brave soldiers, away! |
I remember now
Harry Gust's face
alight with interest as he talked
to the
captain of the mummers. He wrote an article about them in the Pall
Mall Gazette, which he was then editing for Waldorf Astor. I do
not know if
it interested people. It should have, because it was brilliantly
written, but
the cult of English folk lore had not dawned then on the horizon of the
intelligentsia.
I
remember in a childish way being interested in the mummers, realising
dimly
that they came from an alien world, quite different to the ordered and
staid mode of life in that
staid and orderly household of
Wortley
Hall, and that they represented something historical, rough, and elemental.
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