tag="{http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml}a">[17]

The nine months spent in Ireland left an indelible mark upon Borrow’s imagination.  In later life he repeatedly referred to his knowledge of the country, its people, and their language.  In overcoming the difficulties of Erse, he had opened up for himself a larger prospect than was to be enjoyed by a traveller whose first word of greeting or enquiry is uttered in a hated tongue.

On 11th May 1816 the West Norfolk Militia was back again at Norwich.  Peace was now finally restored to Europe, and every nation was far too impoverished, both as regards men and money, to nourish any schemes of aggression.  Napoleon was safe at St Helena, under the eye of that instinctive gaoler, Sir Hudson Lowe.  The army had completed its work and was being disbanded with all possible speed.  The turn of the West Norfolk Militia came on 17th June, when they were formally mustered out for the second time within two years.  Three years later their Adjutant was retired upon full-pay—eight shillings a day.

CHAPTER II:
MAY 1816–MARCH 1824

For the first time since his marriage, Captain Borrow found himself at liberty to settle down and educate his sons.  He had spent much of his life in Norfolk, and he decided to remain there and make Norwich his home.  It was a quiet and beautiful old-world city: healthy, picturesque, ancient, and, above all, possessed of a Grammar School, where George could try and gather together the stray threads of education that he had acquired at various times and in various dialects.  It was an ideal city for a warrior to take his rest in; but probably what counted most with Captain Borrow was the Grammar School—more than the Norman Cathedral, the grim old Castle that stands guardian-like upon its mound, the fact of its being a garrison town, or even the traditions that surrounded the place.  He had two sons who must be appropriately sent out into the world, and Norwich offered facilities for educating both.  He accordingly took a small house in Willow Lane, to which access was obtained by a covered passage then called King’s, but now Borrow’s Court.

During the most nomadic portion of his life, when, with discouraging rapidity, he was moving from place to place, Captain Borrow never for one moment seems to have forgotten his obligations as a father.  Whenever he had been quartered in a town for a few months, he had sought out a school to which to send John and George, notably at Huddersfield and Sheffield.  Had he known it, these precautions were unnecessary; for he had two sons who were of what may be called the self-educating type: John, by virtue of the quickness of his parts; George, on account of the strangeness of his interests and his thirst for a knowledge of men and the tongues in which they communicate to each other their ideas.  It would be impossible for an unconventional linguist, such as George Borrow was by instinct, to remain uneducated, and it was equally impossible to educate him.

Quite unaware of the trend of his younger son’s genius, Captain Borrow obtained for him a free-scholarship at the Grammar School, then under the headmastership of the Rev. Edward Valpy, B.D., whose principal claims to fame are his severity, his having flogged the conqueror of the “Flaming Tinman,” and his destruction of the School Records of Admission, which dated back to the Sixteenth Century.  Among Borrow’s contemporaries at the Grammar School were “Rajah” Brooke of Sarawak (for whose achievements he in after life expressed a profound admiration), Sir Archdale Wilson of Delhi, Colonel Charles Stoddart, Dr James Martineau, and Thomas Borrow Burcham, the London Magistrate.

Borrow was now thirteen, and, it would appear, as determined as ever to evade as much as possible academic learning.  He was “far from an industrious boy, fond of idling, and discovered no symptoms by his progress either in Latin or Greek of that philology, so prominent a feature of his last work (Lavengro).” [20]  Borrow was an idler merely because his work was uncongenial to him.  “Mere idleness is the most disagreeable state of existence, and both mind and body are continually making efforts to escape from it,” he wrote in later years concerning this period.  He wanted an object in life, an occupation that would prove not wholly uncongenial.  That he should dislike the routine of school life was not unnatural; for he had lived quite free from those conventional restraints to which other boys of his age had always been accustomed.  Occupation of some sort he must have, if only to keep at a distance that insistent melancholy that seems to have been for ever hovering about him, and the tempter whispered “Languages.” [21a]  One day chance led him to a bookstall whereon lay a polyglot dictionary, “which pretended to be an easy guide to the acquirement of French, Italian, Low Dutch, and English.”  He took the two first, and when he had gleaned from the old volume all it had to teach him, he longed for a master.  Him he found in the person of an old French émigré priest, [21b] a study in snuff-colour and drab with a frill of dubious whiteness, who attended to the accents of a number of boarding-school young ladies.  The progress of his pupil so much pleased the old priest that “after six months’ tuition, the master would sometimes, on his occasional absences to teach in the country, request his so forward pupil to attend for him his home scholars.” [21c]  It was M. D’Eterville who uttered the second recorded prophecy concerning George Borrow: “Vous serez un jour un grand philologue, mon cher,” he remarked, and heard that his pupil nourished aspirations towards other things than mere philology.

In the study of French, Spanish, and Italian, Borrow spent many hours that other boys would have devoted to pleasure; yet he was by no means a student only.  He found time to fish and to shoot, using a condemned, honey-combed musket that bore the date of 1746.  His fishing was done in the river Yare, which flowed through the estate of John Joseph Gurney, the Quaker-banker of Earlham Hall, two miles out of Norwich.  It was here that he was reproached by the voice, “clear and sonorous as a bell,” of the banker himself; not for trespassing, but “for pulling all those fish out of the water, and leaving them to gasp in the sun.”

At Harford Bridge, some two miles along the Ipswich Road, lived “the terrible Thurtell,” a patron and companion of “the bruisers of England,” who taught Borrow to box, and who ultimately ended his own inglorious career by being hanged (9th January 1824) for the murder of Mr Weare, and incidentally figuring in De Quincey’s “On Murder Considered As One of the Fine Arts.”  It was through “the king of flash-men” that Borrow saw his first prize-fight at Eaton, near Norwich.

The passion for horses that came suddenly to Borrow with his first ride upon the cob in Ireland had continued to grow.  He had an opportunity of gratifying it at the Norwich Horse Fair, held each Easter under the shadow of the Castle, and famous throughout the country.