Thomas Hardy Read Free

in the same spot, and to know no more people than he already knew’ – which was about half a dozen. 7 In other words, he was perfectly happy and content.
    At other times he would ‘go alone into the woods or on [to] the heath … with a telescope [and] stay peering into the distance by the half-hour …’ or in hot weather, lie ‘on a bank of thyme or camomile with the grasshoppers leaping over him’. 8 When one cold winter’s day he discovered the body of a fieldfare in the garden, and picked it up and found it to be ‘as light as a feather’ and ‘all skin and bone’, The memory remained to haunt him. The death of this small bird revealed not only Hardy’s love of animals, but also his understanding of the frailty of life itself. 9
Music: Books: School
    Thomas Hardy III was born into a musical family and he himself developed a love of music and musicianship which remained with him all his life. His grandfather, Thomas I, in his early years at Puddletown, played the bass viol (cello) in the string choir of the village’s church of St Mary. He also assisted other choirs at a time when church music was traditionally produced by musicians occupying the raised ‘minstrels’ gallery’ at the end of the nave. Having married Mary Head, he moved into the house at Bockhampton, provided for him by his father. From that time onwards he attended the local thirteenth-century parish church of St Michael, situated a mile or so away at Stinsford, where he commenced as a chorister. He was also much in demand to perform at ‘weddings, christenings, and other feasts’. 10
    Thomas I was dismayed, on attending Stinsford Church, that the music there was provided not, as was the case at Puddletown, by a group of ‘minstrels’, but by ‘a solitary old man with an oboe’. 11 With the help of its vicar, the Revd William Floyer, he therefore set about remedying the situation by gathering some like-minded instrumentalists together to play at the church. And from the year 1801, when he was aged 23, until his death in 1837, Thomas I himself conducted the church choir and played his bass viol at two services every Sunday.
    At Christmastime there were further duties for the members of Stinsford’s church choir to perform, including the onerous task of making copies of those carols which had been selected to be played. On Christmas Eve it was the custom for the choir, composed of ‘mainly poor men and hungry’, to play at various houses in the parish, then return to the Hardys’ house at Bockhampton for supper, only to set out again at midnight to play at yet more houses. 12
    After his death in 1822, the Revd Floyer was succeeded by the Revd Edward Murray, who was himself an ‘ardent musician’ and violin player. Murray chose to live at Stinsford House instead of at the rectory, and here, Thomas Hardy I and his sons, Thomas II and James, together with their brother-in-law James Dart, practised their music with Murray on two or three occasions per week. Practice sessions were also held at the Hardys’ house. As mentioned, in late 1836, fourteen years after the arrival of the Revd Murray at Stinsford, Jemima Hand became Murray’s cook, and this is how she came to meet her husband-to-be Thomas Hardy II.
    Thomas II is described as being devoted to sacred music as well as to the ‘mundane’, that is ‘country dance, hornpipe, and … waltz’. As for his wife Jemima, she loved to sing the songs of the times, including Isle of Beauty , Gaily the Troubadour , and so forth. 13 However, although the family possessed a pianoforte and the children practised on it, she herself did not play.
    A diagram was subsequently drawn by Thomas III, with the help of his father, of the relative positions occupied by the singers and musicians of the Stinsford church choir in its gallery in about the year 1835, five years prior to Thomas III's birth. At the rear were singers (‘counter’ – high alto), together with James Dart (counter violin).