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Updated: May 1, 2025
We were supposed to go to sleep at nine, but if there was anything exciting in the play, very little pressure was required to get Leaker to finish, even if it took an extra half-hour or a little more. In truth, she was always ready to read to us by night or day. Though no Sabbatarian, she had a tendency to give Paradise Lost a turn on Sundays.
Leaker, for when at her best she threw quotations from the English Classics around her in a kind of hailstorm. Some of the lines that had stuck in her mind were very curious, though she had forgotten where they came from. One specially amusing piece of Eighteenth-Century satirical verse I have never been able to trace.
Even at an age when I did not really know much more about the Duke of Grafton than did Leaker, and probably cared less, I had got the peroration of the first letter to the Duke of Grafton by heart. I used to walk up and down the terrace, or across the meadows that led to the waterfall, shouting to myself, or my bored companions, that torrent of lucid, thrilling invective.
It leapt, and crackled, and gleamed, and took on, like the witch's oils, every colour in the spectrum. Now crimson, now violet, now purple, now yellow, glowed and flashed the colours of her mind. Mrs. Leaker was brought up in a poor household, in an age when illiteracy, alas! seemed the natural fate of the poor.
I will end my account of Leaker with one of her memories of happier moods in which we can feel the magic of spring laying hold on the vivid imagination of the bright-eyed Devonshire girl: One early spring day I heard my eldest brother tell my mother that he had seen a primrose. She said, "Do not tell Salome, for if she knows there will be no keeping her at home."
But though she loved books and literature, it must not be supposed that she was indifferent to other forms of art. Anything beautiful in nature or art made a profound impression upon her. When Leaker first went to Paris, on our way to Pau or Cannes, I forget which, my mother sent her to the Louvre and told her specially to look at the Venus of Milo.
When any lazy member of my family wanted to find a particular line or passage in Shakespeare, he or she would go to Leaker rather than trouble to look up the quotation in a concordance; Leaker was certain to find you at once what you wanted. There was no pedantry about her and no mere tour de force of the memory. She entered into the innermost mental recesses of Shakespeare's characters.
I believe that in the sight of God both are equally sinful." Leaker says of her mother, "She had a large share of romance, and loved a tale of witches, or a love-story" and so did her daughter. The supernatural gained fresh interest from her skilful story-telling, and the art of the raconteur still lives in her pages. Here is one of the best of her stories.
I can distinctly recall the old lady. She was very thin and faded, but with all her wits about her, though weak and shy. Leaker told us, with pride, that her mother, when she was a little girl, had sat upon the knee of an old soldier who had fought at Blenheim. This is quite possible. If old Mrs.
Leaker had plenty of stories of the press-gang. Though she never herself saw it in operation, people not very much older told her of how they were "awakened in the night by people crying out that they had been taken." Her mother, too, used to tell her heartrending stories about these times. "I can hardly even now bear to think of the dreadful things done by the press-gang in the name of the law.
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