Anonymous - Go to Cromer

Transcribed from the 1889 Agas H. Goose edition by David Price, email ccx074@pglaf.org

BY
A RURAL RECTOR.

Norwich:
AGAS H. GOOSE,
RAMPANT HORSE STREET.
1889.

You should have gone to Cromer, my dear, if you went anywhere. Dr. Perry was a week at Cromer once, and he holds it to be the best of all sea-bathing places. A fine open sea, he says, and very pure air.Emma, by Jane Austen, page 72.

When do the dog-days begin? Francis Moore, Physician, and other authorities, ancient and modern, tell us on the 3rd of July. But the puzzling star, Sirius, in its gradual recession from our world, has not only changed its complexion from the ruddy hue of youth to the pallor of age, but owing either to the parsimonious habits of increasing years, or, perhaps, bodily infirmity, it has often withheld of late years the full downpour of its (supposed) heat-raising rays until the end of the month.

As soon, however, as the historic period of its influence returns, the crave for change and relief from the ties and worries of business of every kind, and town life generally, becomes well-nigh irresistible.

Now, as one who has for many a year resolutely sought, or made opportunity, to obey the annual prompting of nature to change his heavena feeling akin to the periodical impulse of winged bipeds to migratethus, and thus only, perhaps, maintaining in healthy vigour such power of mind and body as he has been endowed with, to a time of life when many shrink from the activities of muscular exertion, if they have not long ago abandoned pedestrian exploration and cycle tours, which the writer has not, let me back up the opinion of the faculty, as represented by Mr. Woodhouses family doctor, in the quotation at the head of this paper, and recommend a visit of fair length to Cromer, combined with such mild expeditions in its neighbourhood, by sea and land, as may be possible and convenient.

Far back in the pleasant past, I spent a holiday week at the Lands End, with a Cornish coast-painter of some fame and success. While I splashed my block in rough representation of the yellow sands, the many-hued rocks, bearded with a patriarchal growth of hoary lichen, the pea-green fore sea and purple distance, he was composing close by two or three large pictures of the same scenes, putting in a stranded vessel here, or making the sea alive there with fishers and their nets and boatsthe latter almost on the move beneath the leverage of the long oars, or the force on the bulging sails of the unseen wind blowing where it listed.

These objects and actors on other but similar scenes, that both eye and hand had kept copies of, perhaps for years, were now transferred by the painter to his canvas to improve the occasion by giving life and interest to a spotbeautiful always, though at the time barren of incidentwhich in the process of years most often present such stirring aspects as he then depicted.

I recalled the admirable pictures of my, alas! deceased friend, when my eye fell on the photographs ranged on the sides of the railway carriage that bore me to Cromer last summer.

We may well be thankful the Great Eastern Railway for the pleasure these cannot fail to give to the weary traveller.

As the ear soon ceases to be affected by the roaring of a Giessbach, so the eye becomes blind almost to those, perhaps, necessary evils, the huge placards that cover the walls of station after station. But the same advertisement reduced and ingeniously inserted between the pages of the Magazine that we listlessly turn over, spring on us ever and anon from their ambushes, and cannot be ignored; and the message they bring is often as prompt, if not as painful, a thrust into ones memory and heart as was Ehuds into the obese body of Eglon, King of Moab.

Such a-going upstairs in a carrying chair as meets the eye when the finger turns to the index of contents, if not a sad remembrancer of some sufferer near and dear, is distressingly suggestive of the ills that ones own flesh may be heir to, and the numbness of leg resulting from long sitting is apt to be magnified by apprehension into creeping paralysis.

While the complacency of the matron in her sixth decade, asserting a claim to the complexion of sweet seventeen, is so cheeky, and we feel annoyed that our attention should be called to the matter.

Horaces line, mors et fugacem persequitur virum, would be a cunningly alarming motto for the many systems of life assurance that tout in the same quarters for custom, and often frighten one into carrying grist to their mills. And if committed deeply to premium-paying already, and the annual shelling-out time is drawing near, the thought how to meet the inexorable call and holiday expenses together may cause qualm enough to make ones next meal dyspeptic.

What a relief it is to get clear from such insalutary thoughts, and to look up from the vibrating lines of a paper or book to the well-defined photographs that now adorn the carriages of the Great Eastern Railway.

Caister Castle, Beeston Ruins, North Repps Cottage, Somerleyton, Gunton, the wave-lapped beaches of the nerve-bracing Norfolk coast, and the various Broads, beget an instant desire to be knickered and jerseyed, and to rough it for a times in and about these restful solitudes. The pictures are pleasing to the eye, and helpful to the mind that would, even en route, be forming some pleasant plans for a free and easy life in the immediate future, and rid itself of the black care that used to sit behind the horseman, but in our days boldly essays to take a seat cheek by jowl with the railway traveller, and to glare into his eyes.

Not that one looks, perforce, at the opposite side of the compartment for diversion from the disappointments of life, or anxious and schemeful thought, as we are whirled by the green and ochre and umber of the pastures and ploughed lands of the pleasant and undulating country through which the Great Eastern Railway runs. The long-winged windmills, which one cannot see without a smile-begetting recollection of the doughty Don of Cervantes, or the churchyard ghost in the renowned History of Goody Two Shoes, the numerous church towers, in Norfolk so often flint-faced and round; the still well farmed fields and the cottage gardens uniformly characterised by an exuberance of vegetables and flowers, furnish a succession of varied objects that gratify and amuse the observing eye and mind.

But for the sake of Cromer, and therefore in the interests of the enterprising company aforesaid, I point out a faultthe only one I may sayin these photographs, although in doing so I feel like a man who knows that he is seen looking a gift-horse in the mouth.

Landscape, says Ruskin, requires figure-incident. If living, and the chosen photographer of the company that has banished advertisementsat what must be a serious sacrifice of incomefrom the walls of our temporary prisons, and embellished them with these sun-struck medals of scenic bits to be seen and done by our eyes and limbs, my artist friend would have turned touter with consummate skill. His photographs would have been full of figure-incidents,compositions like his lovely paintings. He would have had his tent-studded foregrounds packed with lithe lasses and be-blazered youth, tennising on the hard, soft sand; and bewitchingly dressed children shovelling and grovelling happily therein, with their parents serenely and approvingly looking on. Many a paterfamilias would come out in clear detail as he lazily enjoys the piping tunes of peace without the rebuke from his beaming better-half, which he would scarcely escape at home at such an hour. Big-booted fishermen would be picturesquely unloading their boats, and actini-hunters prosecuting their absorbing search in the pools of the flinty conglomerate that stretches away to the submerged walls of an older and long-lost Cromer.