The Samphire Gatherer - Page 2

happy faces, well-dressed and in a merry mood, all freely
talking and laughing. Some were staying at the hotel, and for the
others a score or so of motor-cars were standing before its gates to
take them inland to their homes, or to houses where they were staying.

We suspended the conversation while they were passing us, within three
yards of where we stood, and as they passed the story of the links
where they had been amusing themselves since luncheon-time came into my
mind. The land there was owned by an old, an ancient, family; they had
occupied it, so it is said, since the Conquest; but the head of the
house was now poor, having no house property in London, no coal mines
in Wales, no income from any other source than the land, the twenty or
thirty thousand acres let for farming. Even so he would not have been
poor, strictly speaking, but for the sons, who preferred a life of
pleasure in town, where they probably had private establishments of
their own. At all events they kept race-horses, and had their cars, and
lived in the best clubs, and year by year the patient old father was
called upon to discharge their debts of honour. It was a painful
position for so estimable a man to be placed in, and he was much pitied
by his friends and neighbours, who regarded him as a worthy
representative of the best and oldest family in the county. But he was
compelled to do what he could to make both ends meet, and one of the
little things he did was to establish golf-links over a mile or so of
sand-hills, lying between the ancient coast village and the sea, and to
build and run a Golfers' Hotel in order to attract visitors from all
parts. In this way, incidentally, the villagers were cut off from their
old direct way to the sea and deprived of those barren dunes, which
were their open space and recreation ground and had stood them in the
place of a common for long centuries. They were warned off and told
that they must use a path to the beach which took them over half a mile
from the village. And they had been very humble and obedient and had
made no complaint. Indeed, the agent had assured them that they had
every reason to be grateful to the overlord, since in return for that
trivial inconvenience they had been put to they would have the golfers
there, and there would be employment for some of the village boys as
caddies. Nevertheless, I had discovered that they were not grateful but
considered that an injustice had been done to them, and it rankled in
their hearts.

I remembered all this while the golfers were streaming by, and wondered
if this poor woman did not, like her fellow-villagers, cherish a secret
bitterness against those who had deprived them of the use of the dunes
where for generations they had been