Of course my acquaintance with him was chiefly at work-- at his bench or his chopping block, at the wheel-pit or the lathe or the timber stack. From the front edge of his bench a small point of steel stuck out about an eighth of an inch. Very bright it shone, because he pivoted his spokes tightly upon it when shaving them. The other end of the spoke was pressed against his waist. For this purpose he wore, strapped round him, a thick leather pad. I never knew anybody else have such a thing, but I suspect it was a part of a wheel-maker's outfit, and only partially effective. During my father's last illness a hard place on his waist, puzzling to the doctor, was explained as due to spoke-shaving, but perhaps he used no pad. In later years Cook adopted some revolving clamps for this purpose.
He was a left-handed man. Other workmen might be annoyed by apprentices or ignorant boys using their sharp axes; but you didn't do that twice with George Cook's axe--it was too dangerous a trick. Why did the confounded tool, albeit so keen-edged, seem to avoid the hard wood and aim viciously towards your thigh, or try to chop your fingers off? The reason was that in making the "shaft" for it (every good wheelwright put the ash shaft or handle to his own axe) Cook gave to his a slight bias for the left hand instead of for the right. The blade too was ground on the unaccustomed side. And though you might not have noticed these peculiarities before, you soon were scared into learning something about them if you foolishly tried to use the axe. Cook smiled. Besides his axe, of course he put in the shaft for his adze and handles for his hammers. He made his own mallets and gauges, and the "pegs" for his chisels. Truly it would not have been easy to put him out with an edged tool. I have seen him filing a sharper "nose" to an auger. It needed a sharp auger for some of his work. When he was boring inch-and-a-quarter holes in a set of dung-cart felloes the sweat would pour in streams from his pale face; but he used to look round with a deprecating smile, as who should say, " I'm sorry, but it can't be helped." He had a little grease-box-- that too hand-made--hanging amongst the row of chisels over his bench. But, come to think of it, every bench had this. A big auger-hole in a shaped-out block of tough beech served the purpose admirably. You could thrust your finger (I wonder why I preferred the middle finger?) into the grease-pot close at hand and easily take out grease for anointing both sides of your saw or the face of your plane.
Cook was, as I have said, deaf, and if you wanted to attract his attention when his back was turned it was useless to call to him. The best plan was to toss a little chip either to touch him or to arrest his sight. I laughed to myself once to see him and Will Hammond--far more deaf even than Cook--searching for something in a heap of felloe-patterns. Probably the blacksmith wanted a pattern for strakes. At any rate it was odd to see these two with their heads together making some sort of friendly conversation by involuntary signs, since neither could have heard the other's mutterings. When Cook wanted a felloe-pattern for himself, he did not hunt long for a ready-made one. It was easier to him to strike out a new one that should be exactly what he required. But it must be said that no mere pattern, newly made out of thin board, equalled the felloes he afterwards got out in accordance with it. When he had finished with a felloe, the belly of it (the inner curve) hewn out with his adze, was as smooth, to the exact dimensions too, as if it had been polished.
So much for his skill as a craftsman. But when he got home he became, rather, a villager, accomplished in genial rustic arts. The hamlet of Compton was a little nook of heath and scrubby oaks, tucked away warm and secluded between Culverlands and Waverley woods, an outlying end, I think, of Farnham Common. No high-road even now has found it. You get to it by narrow tracks of carts, up and down bosky hillocks, and I fancy the place is less populous to-day than it was forty years ago--which isn't saying much. It was probably a haunt of squatters, like its more out-at-elbows neighbour, The Bourne (Bettesworth's home), a mile away. Here dwelt Cook with his big family, in a little brick cottage, his mother (a widow then) living with him. Probably she was the owner of the cottage, and of the tiny hopkiln adjoining it.
The hop-kiln, when I saw it, chiefly interested me as the quiet scene of George Cook's annual labours. Every autumn, namely in September, he used to tell me he should be away from the shop for about a week, drying his (or perhaps he said his mother's) hops. I wondered chiefly at his having the staying power to do this- -for it was an unsleeping sort of job. Seeing it was Cook I did not so much wonder at his ability; yet it was by no means every working man in Farnham who had the sense -- the judgment--to dry hops, even when the hop trade was at its best and everybody looked upon a good dryer with a sort of friendly admiration. George Cook's turn at it was probably a holiday for him. I like to think of him in that little quiet kiln with the pungent scent of the hops all about him--their golden dust looking like the September sunshine grown solid. To be there at home, with your pipe whenever you wanted, and no wearisome walking--it was a pleasant change from making wheels to order. Here, in the kiln, a man was his own master. The hops alone had any claim on him. If his arduous duty to them would allow--and Cook would enjoy it the better for its being arduous--he might trot up the ladder to the upper floor whenever he liked; and there, with the sleepy-scented hops on the floor behind him, he could stand at the open doorway and see over the little hamlet--the tiny hop-ground, his garden, the autumn woods--could watch the neighbours and his own family down there in the pleasant light, and feel himself a man of importance amongst them, forgetting his daily wage-earning. An acceptable break in his long year's work this week must have made for him.
Of his garden I remember nothing. But I can surmise that the seasonal interests of it were his all the year round. Did he keep a pig, I wonder? That there was a donkey--of course with stable, hay, and all manner of country accessories I do happen to know, for his mother's donkey-cart was sometimes mended in the old shop.
But of all his country crafts the most real part to me was the making of elderberry wine. I surmised his gardening and his keeping of donkey and pigs; I heard of his hop-drying; but of the elderberry wine I had personal knowledge.
It was like this. One winter Cook was ill for weeks with some eye trouble that would not yield to the treatment of the club doctor and in the end had to be treated at Moorfields Hospital. During that time I used to go to his cottage about once a week to make enquiries. This was after work was done. The walk out of Farnham up the hill into the night, then down the steeper hill under the pitchy darkness of Culverlands trees into the all but unknown murk of Compton--this mile and a half or so which was Cook's daily portion when he was in health -- found its goal when at last the cottage door was opened and, momentarily dazzled, I was let in from the night to the little warm-lit living room. Of all this, however, little or no recollection remains. Save for the light I cannot recover any memory of the room or its inmates. I only remember that I was expected to drink, and therefore did drink, about three parts of a tumblerful of hot elderberry wine. It was "the thing" to do for keeping out the cold, and it did keep out the cold. The Cooks evidently looked upon it as the natural reward after my walk and a proper preparation for the return. Two or three times this must have happened, and I surmise that the winter nights were cold as well as dark--that the ruts in the road were frozen hard under one's feet, and so on. But the point now is this elderberry wine. It gives a provincial air. Anything less suggestive of the London suburbs can hardly be imagined. It means that the Cooks knew how to live in a country hamlet. Where a city dweller would be helpless this family profited by centuries of tradition, and they were keeping old England going ("old" England, not modern England) when they made their elderberry wine and warmed some of it up for a friend on a cold winter night.
I cannot remember when Cook left Compton and came to live in Farnham. It seemed a good thing for him; good to be able to get to and from his work without that long hill. For the hilly walk used to set him coughing convulsively and for a long time, and during a fit of coughing the water would stream from his eyes. I was glad for him to be spared this exhaustion morning and night. Now, there were but three or four minutes of level street between his home and his work.
But who shall judge the cost of this change--from woodlands to the neighbourhood of gas-works, from old English rusticity to the state of the proletariat of the eighteen-nineties? I suppose that Cook's mother had died and that her little property had to be shared amongst her several sons and daughters; but anyhow it was a comedown for Cook, not financially only, when he had to leave Compton. I begin to think it was a come-down for me too, little though I dreamt of such a thing at the time. My intercourse with him underwent a profound though unnoticed change. Precisely where he got to in Farnham I never learnt. There was no need for me to go to see him. When at last, after many years, he took to his bed and died, I not only left him alone: I didn't even go to his funeral. It's true I was myself down with bronchitis at that time; but the fact remains --and I am not proud of it--that I had unawares allowed a gulf to widen between George Cook and myself.
I did not know it at the time. I always chatted with him for a minute or two every day. I never failed to sympathise with his winter desire for the return of cuckoo- time, or to laugh at his assumed dismalness (so characteristic of an ageing villager) before any cheerful prospect. Thus if, in mid December, I happened to remark "We shall soon have Christmas here," then he, assenting, was sure to add gloomily, "Whoever lives to see it!" whereat we smiled as if we liked one another. Yet, for all this, we were no longer on the old terms. I was not in touch, through him, with the quiet dignified country life of England and I was more of a capitalist. Each of us had slipped a little nearer to the ignominious class division of these present times-- I to the employer's side, he to the disregarded workman's. The mutual respect was decaying. Nor yet might Cook, for his part, view his own life with the earlier satisfaction. From being one of a community of rustics, he was becoming more and more a mechanic--a cog in an industrial machine. Those were not yet the days of " Unrest." The stealthy changes which were destined, after thirty years, to oust the old skill altogether seemed to Cook, if he discerned them at all, due to his advancing years. If life' was meaner, less interesting, than of old, was it not chiefly because he had been born too soon? He would have said so. He remained an opinionated Conservative and read The Standard every day.