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212 THE SUSSEX COAST |
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An old neighbour recently told the present writer about his experiences at election time: " There was a motor down't the bottom o'the lane an' the gentleman says to me, 'Who be ye goin' to vote for?' An' I says I voted for Mr. Jones last time an* I'm goin' to vote for t'other man this time, so's I can say I had a vote f'r each. 'All right, then,' he says, ' jump in'; but no! I doan't like they motors. I be safer on my pins."
As a rule good temper and friendliness characterise our Sussex people, and there is not the same tendency in Sussexians of mature age as in some who had better be nameless to jeer at other people's misfortunes. More than once on a lonely road the writer has been comforted for that most aggravating of experiences, a punctured bicycle tyre, by the kindly and sympathetic remarks of the rustics. Just now and then the opposite quality appears, and an old washerwoman in a hamlet just beyond the district treated in this book had to be remonstrated with for her abominable temper. "Lor, mum," she rejoined, " it ain't my temper, it's the tempers I do meet, and everywhere I go it's the same." People from other counties, with the doubtful exception of Kent, are foreigners in Sussex, and by no means sure of a welcome. Chancellor Parish has preserved a remark about a woman from Lincolnshire to the effect that she had "such a good notion of work that you'd never find out but what she was an Englishwoman, without you was to hear her talk."
The following story, also from Chancellor Parish, is a good sample of the Sussex dialect, and illustrates the belief in farisees (or fairies), which is being rapidly destroyed by modern education; |
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