BORROW'S MOTHER Throughout his whole life George Borrow adored his mother, who seems to have developed into a woman of great strength of character far remote from the pretty play-actor who won the heart of a young soldier at East Dereham in the last years of the eighteenth century.

We would gladly know something of the early years of Ann Perfrement.

Her father was a farmer, whose farm at Dumpling Green we have already described.

He did not, however, 'farm his own little estate' as Borrow declared.

The grandfather--a French Protestant--came, if we are to believe Borrow, from Caen in Normandy after the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, but there is no documentary evidence to support the contention.