Clay Lane

The Copy Book

A Library of History and Literature in English

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613

Lilies of the Field

Norman Leys complained that policymakers in Africa were interested more in training loyal and industrious workers than in nurturing free peoples.

In 1924, Dr Norman Leys (1875-1944) recorded his alarm at the direction that schools were taking in Kenya (then part of British East Africa), where chiefs’ sons were being indoctrinated for colonial government and everyone else trained for maximum productivity. But an Englishman’s prized liberties, he said, had not come from toiling in the State’s anthills; they had come from wandering in the fields of great literature.

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Picture: © CowieJemma, Wikimedia Commons. Licence: CC BY-SA 4.0.. Source.

614

The Conversion of Guthlac

Inspired by an avid interest in English warrior heroes, the fifteen-year-old Guthlac recruited a band of freebooting militiamen.

As a boy, so his biographer Felix tells us, St Guthlac (673-714) had been a mild-mannered child, a credit to his pious and well-to-do parents Penwald and Tette. But when he was fifteen, Guthlac began to be fascinated by stories of warriors and heroes and deeds of arms, and soon it became apparent that they were having a very negative effect on the blithe and innocent boy.

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Picture: From the British Library, via Wikimedia Commons. Licence: Public domain.. Source.

615

Guthlac, Pega and the Blind Boatman

St Pega welcomed a royal servant with a serious eye condition to the monastery founded by her brother, St Guthlac.

After the death of St Guthlac in 714, his sister St Pega was left in charge of his hermitage at Crowland in modern-day Lincolnshire. For many years, exiled Mercian prince Æthelbald had been a frequent guest, so when one of his servants developed an eye problem which had all the doctors baffled, Crowland was their first thought.

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Picture: © Adrian Cable, Geograph. Licence: CC BY-SA 2.0.. Source.

616

Mauled by a Lion

The villagers of Mabutso in Southern Africa begged Dr David Livingstone to rid them of a menacing pride of lions.

On February 16th, 1844, Scottish missionary David Livingstone was digging a water channel at his mission near the South African village of Mabotsa when the villagers rushed up, crying that lions had again raided their village and slaughtered their sheep and goats. Livingstone ‘very imprudently’ agreed to go with them and demoralise the pride by shooting one of the dominant males.

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Picture: © Clément Bardot, Wikimedia Commons. Licence: CC-BY-SA 4.0.. Source.

617

The Source of Civilisation

Diplomat William Eton warns his fellow Englishmen that shutting down debate does not make for a more united society.

In 1798, diplomat William Eton published some observations on life in the Ottoman Empire. He warned readers back home that no society can be made harmonious by silencing dissenting voices; in such societies loneliness, drug abuse and distrust spiral out of control, sneering passes for debate, and only fashionably coarse comedians are allowed to raise a laugh.

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Picture: By Amedeo Preziosi (1816–1882), via Wikimedia Commons. Licence: Public domain.. Source.

618

‘Let’s Be a Comfortable Couple’

The offices of the Cheeryble Brothers are humming with excitement over two upcoming weddings, and Tim Linkinwater finds the mood is catching.

Towards the close of Dickens’s ‘Nicholas Nickleby,’ young Frank Cheeryble has proposed to Kate Nickleby, and Kate’s brother Nicholas has proposed to Madeleine Bray. The atmosphere in the offices of the Cheeryble Brothers in London is heady with romance; and that old lion Tim Linkinwater, the company clerk, admits to Miss La Creevy, ‘a young lady of fifty,’ that the mood is infectious.

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Picture: By Barbara Krafft (1764–1825), Wikimedia Commons. Licence: Public domain.. Source.