The Project Gutenberg eBook, The Retrospect, by Ada Cambridge

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Title: The Retrospect

Author: Ada Cambridge

Release Date: March 6, 2013 [eBook #42270]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1

***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE RETROSPECT***

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THE RETROSPECT

BY

ADA CAMBRIDGE

AUTHOR OF

"THIRTY YEARS IN AUSTRALIA," "PATH AND GOAL," ETC.

LONDON

STANLEY PAUL & CO.

31 ESSEX STREET, STRAND, W.C.

COLONIAL EDITION.

1912

TO

MY FRIENDS, KNOWN AND UNKNOWN

WHO WERE YOUNG AND HAVE GROWN OLD WITH ME

I DEDICATE THIS BOOK

CONTENTS

I. Coming Home
II. About Town
III. In Beautiful England
IV. The Home of Childhood
V. Halcyon Days
VI. Earliest Recollections
VII. Old Times and New
VIII. Some Early Sundays
IX. My Grandfather's Days
X. Outdoor Life
XI. At the Seaside
XII. Excursions to Sandringham
XIII. A Trip South
XIV. "Devon, Glorious Devon!"
XV. In the Garden of England

CHAPTER I

COMING HOME

There was a gap of thirty-eight years, almost to a day, between my departure from England (1870), a five-weeks-old young bride, and my return thither (1908), an old woman. And for about seven-eighths of that long time in Australia, while succeeding very well in making the best of things, I was never without a subconscious sense of exile, a chronic nostalgia, that could hardly bear the sight of a homeward-bound ship. This often-tantalised but ever-unappeased desire to be back in my native land wore the air of a secret sorrow gently shadowing an otherwise happy life, while in point of fact it was a considerable source of happiness in itself, as I now perceive. For where would be the interest and inspiration of life without something to want that you cannot get, but that it is open to you to try for? I tried hard to bridge the distance to my goal for over thirty years, working, planning, failing, starting again, building a thousand air-castles, more or less, and seeing them burst like soap-bubbles as soon as they began to materialise; then I gave up. The children had grown too old to be taken; moreover, they had attained to wills of their own and did not wish to go. One had fallen to the scythe of the indiscriminate Reaper, and that immense loss dwindled all other losses to nothing at all. I cared no more where I lived, so long as the rest were with me. In England my father and mother, who had so longed for me, as I for them, were in their graves; no old home was left to go back to. I was myself a grandmother, in spite of kindly and even vehement assurances that I did not look it; more than that, I could have been a great-grandmother without violating the laws of nature. At any rate, I felt that I was past the age for enterprises. It was too late now, I concluded, and so what was the use of fussing any more? In short, I sat down to content myself with the inevitable.

I was doing it. I had been doing it for several years. The time had come when I could look out of window any Tuesday morning, watch a homeward-bound mail-boat put her nose to sea, and turn from the spectacle without a pang. The business of building air-castles flourished, as of yore, but their bases now rested on Australian soil. What was left of the future was all planned out, satisfactorily, even delightfully, and England was not in it.

Then was the time for the unexpected to happen, and it did. A totally undreamed-of family legacy, with legal business attached to it, called my husband home. Even then it did not strike me that I was called too; for quite a considerable time it did not strike him either. But there befell a period of burning summer heat, the intensity and duration of which broke all past records of our State and established it as a historic event for future Government meteorologists; the weaklings of the community succumbed to it outright or emerged from it physically prostrate, and I, who had encountered it in a