Far Away and Long Ago

Far Away and Long Ago

W. H. Hudson

Preamble--The house where I was born--The singular Ombu tree--A tree

without a name--The plain--The ghost of a murdered slave--Our

playmate, the old sheep-dog--A first riding-lesson--The cattle: an

evening scene--My mother--Captain Scott--The hermit and his awful

penance.

It was never my intention to write an autobiography. Since I took to

writing in my middle years I have, from time to time, related some

incident of my boyhood, and these are contained in various chapters in

The Naturalist in La Plata, Birds and Man, Adventures among Birds,

and other works, also in two or three magazine articles: all this

material would have been kept back if I had contemplated such a book

as this. When my friends have asked me in recent years why I did not

write a history of my early life on the pampas, my answer was that I

had already told all that was worth telling in these books. And I

really believed it was so; for when a person endeavours to recall his

early life in its entirety he finds it is not possible: he is like

one who ascends a hill to survey the prospect before him on a day of

heavy cloud and shadow, who sees at a distance, now here, now there,

some feature in the landscape--hill or wood or tower or spire--touched

and made conspicuous by a transitory sunbeam while all else remains in

obscurity. The scenes, people, events we are able by an effort to call

up do not present themselves in order; there is no order, no sequence

or regular progression--nothing, in fact, but isolated spots or

patches, brightly illumined and vividly seen, in the midst of a wide

shrouded mental landscape.

It is easy to fall into the delusion that the few things thus

distinctly remembered and visualized are precisely those which were

most important in our life, and on that account were saved by memory

while all the rest has been permanently blotted out. That is indeed

how our memory serves and fools us; for at some period of a man's

life--at all events of some lives--in some rare state of the mind, it

is all at once revealed to him as by a miracle that nothing is ever

blotted out.

It was through falling into some such state as that, during which I

had a wonderfully clear and continuous vision of the past, that I was

tempted--forced I may say--to write this account of my early years. I

will relate the occasion, as I imagine that the reader who is a

psychologist will find as much to interest him in this incident as in

anything else contained in the book.

I was feeling weak and depressed when I came down from London one

November evening to the south coast: the sea, the clear sky, the

bright colours of the afterglow kept me too long on the front in an

east wind in that low condition, with the result that I was laid up

for six weeks with a very serious illness. Yet when it was over I

looked back on those six weeks as a happy time! Never had I thought so

little of physical pain. Never had I felt confinement less--I who

feel, when I am out of sight of living, growing grass, and out of

sound of birds' voices and all rural sounds, that I am not properly

alive!

On the second day of my illness, during an interval of comparative

ease, I fell into recollections of my childhood, and at once I had

that far, that forgotten past with me again as I had never previously

had it. It was not like that mental condition, known to most persons,

when some sight or sound or, more frequently, the perfume of some

flower, associated with our early life, restores the past suddenly and

We quit our old home--A winter day journey--Aspect of the country--Our

new home--A prisoner in the barn--The plantation--A paradise of rats--

An evening scene--The people of the house--A beggar on horseback--Mr.

Trigg our schoolmaster--His double nature--Impersonates an old woman--

Reading Dickens--Mr. Trigg degenerates--Once more a homeless wanderer

on the great plain.

The incidents and impressions recorded in the preceding chapter

relate, as I have said, to the last year or two of my five years of

life in the place of my birth. Further back my memory refuses to take

me. Some wonderful persons go back to their second or even their first

year; I can't, and could only tell from hearsay what I was and did up

to the age of three. According to all accounts, the clouds of glory I

brought into the world--a habit of smiling at everything I looked at

and at every person that approached me--ceased to be visibly trailed

at about that age; I only remember myself as a common little boy--just

a little wild animal running about on its hind legs, amazingly

interested in the world in which it found itself.

Here, then, I begin, aged five, at an early hour on a bright, cold

morning in June--midwinter in that southern country of great plains or

pampas; impatiently waiting for the loading and harnessing to be

finished; then the being lifted to the top with the other little ones

--at that time we were five; finally, the grand moment when the start

was actually made with cries and much noise of stamping and snorting

of horses and rattling of chains. I remember a good deal of that long

journey, which began at sunrise and ended between the lights some time

after sunset; for it was my very first, and I was going out into the

unknown. I remember how, at the foot of the slope at the top of which

the old home stood, we plunged into the river, and there was more

noise and shouting and excitement until the straining animals brought

us safely out on the other side. Gazing back, the low roof of the

house was lost to view before long, but the trees--the row of twenty-

five giant ombu-trees which gave the place its name--were visible,

blue in the distance, until we were many miles on our way.

The undulating country had been left behind; before us and on both

sides the land, far as one could see, was absolutely flat, everywhere

green with the winter grass, but flowerless at that season, and with

the gleam of water, over the whole expanse. It had been a season of

great rains, and much of the flat country had been turned into shallow

lakes. That was all there was to see, except the herds of cattle and

horses and an occasional horseman galloping over the plain, and the

sight at long distances of a grove or small plantation of trees,

marking the site of an estancia, or sheep and cattle farm, these

groves appearing like islands on the sea-like flat country. At length

this monotonous landscape faded and vanished quite away, and the

lowing of cattle and tremulous bleating of sheep died out of hearing,

so that the last leagues were a blank to me, and I only came back to

my senses when it was dark and they lifted me down, so stiff with cold

and drowsy that I could hardly stand on my feet.

Next morning I found myself in a new and strange world. The house to

my childish eyes appeared of vast size: it consisted of a long range

of rooms on the ground, built of brick, with brick floors and roof

thatched with rushes. The rooms at one end, fronting the road, formed

a store, where the people of the surrounding country came to buy and