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Title: Lark Rise
Author: Thompson, Flora Jane (1876-1947)
Author [introduction]: Massingham, Harold John (1888-1952)
Date of first publication: 1939
Edition used as base for this ebook:
   London: Oxford University Press, 1957
   [reprint of the 1954 edition, volume 542
   of the OUP's The World's Classics series.
   Thompson's "Lark Rise to Candleford" trilogy of novels
   was first published as a single volume in 1945:
   "Lark Rise" is the first novel in the trilogy.]
Date first posted: 27 July 2009
Date last updated: 27 July 2009
Project Gutenberg Canada ebook #360

This ebook was produced by:
Andrew Templeton




          LARK RISE

          Part One of the trilogy "Lark Rise to Candleford"

          by FLORA THOMPSON

          Introduction to the trilogy by
          H. J. MASSINGHAM




                              INTRODUCTION


By absolute values, a true writer can never be other than what he is.
But in our imperfect world his living light will only shine among men if
it appears at precisely the right time. If it does so appear, it is not
merely good luck, because the truth should also possess a
super-sensitive probe (like the woodcock's bill) for testing the subsoil
of what it works on. This is something very different from what is
called 'appealing to the popular imagination'. Flora Thompson possesses
the attributes both of sympathetic presentation and literary power to
such a degree of quality and beauty that her claims upon posterity can
hardly be questioned. Her lovers guessed it when her three memorial
volumes, _Lark Rise, Over to Candleford_, and _Candleford Green_, were
published separately; now that they form a trilogy, each part
illuminating and reflecting the others in a delicate interplay, the time
of speculation is over. This wholeness, they will say, is a triune
achievement: a triumph of evocation in the resurrecting of an age that,
being transitional, was the most difficult to catch as it flew; another
in diversity of rural portraiture engagingly blended with autobiography;
and the last in the overtones and implications of a set of values which
is the author's 'message'.

Nor will these lovers be deceived by the limitations of her range, her
personal simplicity and humility of spirit and the excellent lowness of
her voice as the narrator of these quiet annals, into withholding from
her the full measure of what is her due. Is that range so restricted?
The trilogy enables us to appreciate for the first time what she has
done both for literature and social history. By the playing of these
soft pipes the hamlet, the village, and the small market town are
reawakened at the very moment when the rich, glowing life and culture of
an immemorial design for living was passing from them, at the precise
point of meeting when the beginnings of what was to be touched the last
lingering evidences of what was departing. Of late years memorial books,
I might almost say by the score, have strained to overhear the few
fading syllables of that country civilization of which the younger
generation of today knows and can know nothing. A few of these have been
of high distinction. I have only to mention the names of George Bourne,
Adrian Bell, Walter Rose, W. R. Mottram, and the author of _How Green
was My Valley_. But none of these authors singly achieved the triple
revelation of the hamlet, the village, and the market town; none, with
the possible exception of the last, has, like Flora Thompson, chronicled
the individual life as an integral part of the group life and as the
more of an individual one for it.

Again, by these three books being subdued into sections of one whole,
Laura now emerges into her full selfhood and as the chorus of the
complete drama. Now for the first time Flora Thompson's master work in
portrait-painting is seen to be herself. But we keep on forgetting that
Laura is her own self, so subtly has our author's spiritual humility
contributed to the fineness of the self-portrait. She has lost her life
to another and so exquisitely regained it that the personal quality of
Laura, which is the key to the whole and diffuses over it a tranquil
radiance, is never mistaken as other than that of a separate person. As
remote from the present day as Uncle Tom, Queenie, or Dorcas Lane, she
is yet more living even than they. At the same time, she is something
else than the Cranfordian Miss, 'quaint and old-fashioned', as another
character calls her, something else than the lover of Nature and of
books, the questing contemplative, the solitary in the Wordsworthian,
quite un-Cranfordian sense. She is the recorder of hamlet, village, and
country town who was of them but detached from them, and whose
observation of their inmates by intimacy by no means clouded precision
of insight and an objective capacity to grasp in a few sentences the
essentials of character. One of the very best things Laura ever did was
to become assistant post-mistress at Candleford Green. The post-office
magnetized the whole village.

When George Bourne described Bettesworth and the craftsmen of his
wheelwright's shop, he made them the vehicle of an immensely valuable
inquiry into social conditions now made obsolete by urban invasion.
Flora Thompson's method is entirely different. But the result is the
same in both writers. It is the revelation of a local self-acting
society living by a fixed pattern of behaviour and with its roots warmly
bedded in the soil. The pattern was disintegrating and the roots were
loosening, but enough remained for sure inferences to be drawn from it.
Flora Thompson does not reconstruct the shattered fabric like a
historian nor illustrate and analyse it like a sociologist: she
reanimates it.

In this tripartite book we distinguish three strata of social and
economic period, cross-hatched by differences of social degree. In terms
of geological time, the lowest stratum is the old order of rural England
surviving rare but intact from a pre-industrial and pre-Enclosure past
almost timeless in its continuity. The middle stratum, particularly
represented in Lark Rise, discloses the old order impoverished, reduced
in status, dispropertied but still clinging to the old values,
loyalties, and domestic stabilities. The top stratum, symbolized in the
row of new villas that began to link up Candleford Green with Candleford
Town, is modern suburbia. This wholly novel class in itself had shed the
older differentiations and possessed no rural background other than the
accident of place. It was the vanguard of the city black-coats and
proletariat, governed by the mass-mind.

Nor is the stratification a simple one. The two lower layers are not
only hierarchical in many grades between squire and labourer, but the
upper one of the pair is dyed a different colour from that of the
natural deposit. This is the sombre tint of Victorian moralism, quite
different from the social ethics of the old order to which it was alien.
Puritanism in rural England was never a home-brew; it was always
imported from the town. The topmost layer of the three had and has no
fixed principles; its aim was quantitative imitation and to 'keep up
appearances'. Mr. Green of _Candleford Green_, who read Nat Gould and
Marie Corelli because everybody did, considered the expert craftsman as
inferior in status to himself, sitting on a stool and adding up figures.

It is clear, then, that Flora Thompson's simple-seeming chronicles of
life in hamlet, village, and market town are, when regarded as an index
to social change, of great complexity and heavy with revolutionary
meaning. But this you do not notice until you look below the surface.
The surface is the family lives and characters of Laura and her
neighbours at Lark Rise, inhabited by ex-peasants, and the two
Candlefords, where society is more mixed and occupation more varied. But
the surface is transparent, and there are threatening depths of
dislocation and frustration below it. Flora Thompson's method of
revealing them is a literary one, as was George Eliot's; that is to say,
by the selective representation of domestic interiors in which living
personages pass their daily lives. The social document is a by-product
of people's normal activities and intercourse intensely localized, just
as beauty is a by-product of the craftsman's utility-work for his
neighbours.

Thus, the commonest occurrences, the lightest of words, the very
ordinariness of the home-task are pregnant with a dual meaning. This is
the reverse of a photographic method like that of the fashionable
'mass-observation' because it looks inward to human character and
outward to changes in environment affecting the whole structure of
society and modifying, even distorting, the way people think and act.
Her art is in fact universalized by its very particularity, its very
confinement to small places and the people Laura knew. It all seems a
placid water-colour of the English school, delicately and reticently
painted in and charmed by the character of Laura herself. But it is not.
What Flora Thompson depicts is the utter ruin of a closely knit organic
society with a richly interwoven and traditional culture that had defied
every change, every aggression, except the one that established the
modern world. It is notable that, though husbandry itself plays little
part in the trilogy, it is the story of the irreparable calamity of the
English fields. In the shell of her concealed art we hear the thunder of
an ocean of change, a change tragic indeed, since nothing has taken and
nothing can take the place of what has gone.

On the bottom layer once rested all England. In the perfect economy of a
few deft and happy strokes, _Lark Rise_ reveals it as surviving
principally in two households, those of Queenie, the lace-maker and
bee-mistress, and 'Old Sally', whose grandfather, the eggler, had by his
rheumatism to 'give up giving'. The old open fields community of
co-operative self-help destroyed by the Enclosures is caught in the
words. Old Sally is so closely identified with her house and furniture,
its two-feet-thick walls making a snuggery for the gate-legged table,
the dresser with its pewter and willow-pattern ware and the
grandfather's clock, that they can no more be prised apart than the
snail from its shell. In remembering the Rise when it was common land,
Sally was carrying in her mind the England of small properties based on
the land, the England whose native land belonged to its own people, not
to a State masquerading as such, not even to the manorial lords who
exacted services, but not from a landless proletariat. Still less to big
business whose _latifundia_ are the modern plan. Sally is
self-supporting peasant England, the bedrock of all, solid as her
furniture, enduring as her walls, the last of the longest of all lines.

Moving on to Candleford, we find in Uncle Tom, the cobbler with his
apprentices, the representative of the master-craftsman who did quite
literally build England, the England that Laura at Candleford Green saw
_in articulo mortis_. Uncle Tom is a townsman, but his spiritual brother
of the fields was the yeoman. Farm and workshop both were husbanded as a
responsible stewardship and according to inalienable first principles.
For both, yeoman and master-craftsman, the holding of property was the
guarantee of economic freedom and a dutiful right. Home, as the centre
alike of the family and of industry and the nucleus of neighbourliness,
was the ruling concept for them both. _Over to Candleford_ devotes
special pains to the portraiture of Uncle Tom and his household. The
interaction between his social value to the life of the little town and
his personal integrity, his pride in his work and virile personality are
described with the intent of revealing good living and the good life as
an historical unity of the older England. In a line, Laura looking back
and seeing herself, the other Laura, reading to Uncle Tom in his
workshop-cum-home, sums up his end, both as a symbol and a
living-figure. If he were alive now, she says, he would be the manager
of a chain-store.

In _Candleford Green_, the same parable of the past is spoken, with a
difference. Dorcas Lane, the post-mistress, and her household-workshop
with Matthew the foreman of the farriery, the smithy and the
wheelwright's shop and the journeymen sitting below the salt at Miss
Lane's table, other symbols of 'an age-old discipline', these have an
obvious affinity with Uncle Tom and _his_ little commonwealth. She too
has her willow-pattern plate and other bygones. But this household seems
embalmed, a show-piece, and we feel it would be a blunder to speak of
Old Sally's and Uncle Tom's possessions as 'bygones'. Dorcas's
'modernism', her sceptical outlook and partiality for reading Darwin
lends point to the sense of preservation, not use.

In _Candleford Green_, again, Mr. Coulsdon, the Vicar, and Sir Timothy,
the Squire, are held momentarily in the light before they too pass into
limbo. But both of them cast a shadow, however soft the illumination of
Laura's lamp. They are Victorianized, and it was Victoria's reign that,
partly through their agency, but mainly by the growth of the industrial
town and the industrial mentality, ended the self-sufficient England of
peasant and craftsman. The supreme value of Flora Thompson's
presentation is that she makes us see the passing of this England, not
as a milestone along the road of inevitable progress, but as the
attempted murder of something timeless in and quintessential to the
spirit of man. A design for living has become unravelled, and there can
be no substitute, because, however imperfect the pattern, it was part of
the essential constitution of human nature. The fatal flaw of the modern
theory of progress is that it is untrue to historical reality. The
frustrations and convulsions of our own time are the effect of aiming
this mortal blow at the core of man's integral nature, which can be
perverted, but not destroyed.

In _Lark Rise_ especially, we receive an unforgettable impression of the
transitional state between the old stable, work-pleasure England and the
modern world. World because non-differentiation is the mark of it, and
all modern industrial States have a common likeness such as that of
Manchester to Stalingrad, Paris to Buenos Aires. The society of _Lark
Rise_ is one of landlabourers' families--only they are now all landless.
They have lost that which made them what they are in Part I of the
trilogy; and the whole point of it is that the reader is given a picture
of a peasant class which is still a peasantry in everything but the one
thing that makes it so--the holding of land and stock. Here, the
labourers are dispropertied, though they still have gardens; here, they
are wage-earners only, keeping their families on ten shillings a week,
though in 1540 their forefathers in another village not a score of miles
from Lark Rise, and exactly the same class as that from which they were
descended, paid the lord of the manor 46,000 as copyholders to be free
of all dues and services to him. Lark Rise in the 'eighties of last
century, admittedly but a hamlet, could certainly not have collected
46,000 farthings.

Though pauperized, they were still craftsmanly men: the day of an
emptied country-side harvested by machines and chemicals and of mass,
mobile, skill-less labour in the towns serving the combine at the
assembly line was yet to come. It is significant that Lark Rise still
called the older generation 'master' not 'mister'. Though landless, they
still kept the cottage pig, which served a social no less than a
material need. The women still went leazing in the stubble fields and
fed their families the winter through on whole-grain bread baked by
themselves, not yet bleached and a broken reed instead of the staff of
life. The hedgerows were still utilized for wines and jellies, the
gardens for fresh vegetables and herbs. They even made mead and 'yarb
(yarrow) beer'. Of Candleford Green our author writes:


'The community was largely self-supporting. Every household grew its own
vegetables, produced its new-laid eggs and cured its own bacon. Jams and
jellies, wines and pickles, were made at home as a matter of course.
Most gardens had a row of beehives. In the houses of the well-to-do
there was an abundance of such foods, and even the poor enjoyed a rough
plenty.'


The last words are true of the hamlet of Lark Rise. Because they were
still an organic community, subsisting on the food, however scanty and
monotonous, they raised themselves, they enjoyed good health and so, in
spite of grinding poverty, no money to spend on amusements and hardly
any for necessities, happiness. They still sang out-of-doors and kept
May Day and Harvest Home. The songs were travesties of the traditional
ones, but their blurred echoes and the remnants of the old salty country
speech had not yet died and left the fields to their modern silence. The
songs came from their own lips, not out of a box.

Charity (in the old sense) survived, and what Laura's mother called the
'seemliness' of a too industrious life. Yet the tradition of the old
order was crumbling fast. What suffered most visibly was the inborn
aesthetic faculty, once a common possession of all countrymen. Almanacs
for samplers, the 'Present from Brighton' for willow-pattern, novelettes
for the Bible, Richardson and travel books, coarse, machined embroidery
for point-lace, cheap shoddy for oak and mahogany. The instalment system
was beginning. The manor and the rectory ever since the Enclosures were
felt to be against the people. The more amenable of these were now
regarded as 'the deserving poor' and Cobbett's 'the commons of England'
had become 'the lower orders'. When Laura's mother was outraged at
Edmund, her son, wanting to go on the land, the end was in sight. The
end of what? Of a self-sufficient country England living by the land,
cultivating it by husbandry and associating liberty with the small
property. It was not poverty that broke it--that was a secondary cause.
It was not even imported cheap and foodless foods. It was that the
Industrial Revolution and the Enclosures between them demolished the
structure and the pattern of country life. Their traces long lingered
like those of old ploughed fields on grassland in the rays of the
setting sun. But they have been all but effaced today, and now we plough
and sow and reap an empty land: One thing only can ever re-people it-the
restoration of the peasantry. But that industrialism does not
understand. Catastrophe alone can teach it to understand.

It has been Flora Thompson's mission to represent this great tragic epic
obliquely, and by the medium of humdrum but highly individualized
country people living their ordinary lives in their own homes. As I said
at the opening of this Introduction, she has conveyed it at just the
right time--namely, when the triumphs of industrial progress are
beginning to be seen for what they are. Or, as a recent correspondent to
_The Times_ expressed it, 'peace and beauty must inevitably give way to
progress'. She has conveyed this profound tragedy through so delicate a
mastery, with so beguiling an air and by so tender an elegy, that what
she has to tell is 'felt along the heart' rather than as a spectacular
eclipse. I regard this as an achievement in literature that will outlive
her own life. Or, as the gipsy said who told Laura's fortune at
Candleford Green--'You are going to be loved by people you've never seen
and never will see.'

                                                        H. J. MASSINGHAM

_Reddings, Long Crendon, Bucks._

_August 1944_



                                CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION



LARK RISE

      I. POOR PEOPLE'S HOUSES
     II. A HAMLET CHILDHOOD
    III. MEN AFIELD
     IV. AT THE 'WAGON AND HORSES'
      V. SURVIVALS
     VI. THE BESIEGED GENERATION
    VII. CALLERS
   VIII. 'THE BOX'
     IX. COUNTRY PLAYTIME
      X. DAUGHTERS OF THE HAMLET
     XI. SCHOOL
    XII. HER MAJESTY'S INSPECTOR
   XIII. MAY DAY
    XIV. TO CHURCH ON SUNDAY
     XV. HARVEST HOME





                               LARK RISE



                                   I

                         _Poor People's Houses_

The hamlet stood on a gentle rise in the flat, wheat-growing north-east
corner of Oxfordshire. We will call it Lark Rise because of the great
number of skylarks which made the surrounding fields their springboard
and nested on the bare earth between the rows of green corn.

All around, from every quarter, the stiff, clayey soil of the arable
fields crept up; bare, brown and windswept for eight months out of the
twelve. Spring brought a flush of green wheat and there were violets
under the hedges and pussy-willows out beside the brook at the bottom of
the 'Hundred Acres'; but only for a few weeks in later summer had the
landscape real beauty. Then the ripened cornfields rippled up to the
doorsteps of the cottages and the hamlet became an island in a sea of
dark gold.

To a child it seemed that it must always have been so; but the ploughing
and sowing and reaping were recent innovations. Old men could remember
when the Rise, covered with juniper bushes, stood in the midst of a
furzy heath--common land, which had come under the plough after the
passing of the Inclosure Acts. Some of the ancients still occupied
cottages on land which had been ceded to their fathers as 'squatters'
rights', and probably all the small plots upon which the houses stood
had originally been so ceded. In the eighteen-eighties the hamlet
consisted of about thirty cottages and an inn, not built in rows, but
dotted down anywhere within a more or less circular group. A deeply
rutted cart track surrounded the whole, and separate houses or groups of
houses were connected by a network of pathways. Going from one part of
the hamlet to another was called 'going round the Rise', and the plural
of 'house' was not 'houses', but 'housen'. The only shop was a small
general one kept in the back kitchen of the inn. The church and school
were in the mother village, a mile and a half away.

A road flattened the circle at one point. It had been cut when the heath
was enclosed, for convenience in fieldwork and to connect the main
Oxford road with the mother village and a series of other villages
beyond. From the hamlet it led on the one hand to church and school, and
on the other to the main road, or the turnpike, as it was still called,
and so to the market town where the Saturday shopping was done. It
brought little traffic past the hamlet. An occasional farm wagon, piled
with sacks or square-cut bundles of hay; a farmer on horseback or in his
gig; the baker's little old white-tilted van; a string of blanketed
hunters with grooms, exercising in the early morning; and a carriage
with gentry out paying calls in the afternoon were about the sum of it.
No motors, no buses, and only one of the old penny-farthing high
bicycles at rare intervals. People still rushed to their cottage doors
to see one of the latter come past.

A few of the houses had thatched roofs, whitewashed outer walls and
diamond-paned windows, but the majority were just stone or brick boxes
with blue-slated roofs. The older houses were relics of pre-enclosure
days and were still occupied by descendants of the original squatters,
themselves at that time elderly people. One old couple owned a donkey
and cart, which they used to carry their vegetables, eggs, and honey to
the market town and sometimes hired out at sixpence a day to their
neighbours. One house was occupied by a retired farm bailiff, who was
reported to have 'well feathered his own nest' during his years of
stewardship. Another aged man owned and worked upon about an acre of
land. These, the innkeeper, and one other man, a stonemason who walked
the three miles to and from his work in the town every day, were the
only ones not employed as agricultural labourers.

Some of the cottages had two bedrooms, others only one, in which case it
had to be divided by a screen or curtain to accommodate parents and
children. Often the big boys of a family slept downstairs, or were put
out to sleep in the second bedroom of an elderly couple whose own
children were out in the world. Except at holiday times, there were no
big girls to provide for, as they were all out in service. Still, it was
often a tight fit, for children swarmed, eight, ten, or even more in
some families, and although they were seldom all at home together, the
eldest often being married before the youngest was born, beds and
shakedowns were often so closely packed that the inmates had to climb
over one bed to get into another.

But Lark Rise must not be thought of as a slum set down in the country.
The inhabitants lived an open-air life; the cottages were kept clean by
much scrubbing with soap and water, and doors and windows stood wide
open when the weather permitted. When the wind cut across the flat land
to the east, or came roaring down from the north, doors and windows had
to be closed; but then, as the hamlet people said, they got more than
enough fresh air through the keyhole.

There were two epidemics of measles during the decade, and two men had
accidents in the harvest field and were taken to hospital; but, for
years together, the doctor was only seen there when one of the ancients
was dying of old age, or some difficult first confinement baffled the
skill of the old woman who, as she said, saw the beginning and end of
everybody. There was no cripple or mental defective in the hamlet, and,
except for a few months when a poor woman was dying of cancer, no
invalid. Though food was rough and teeth were neglected, indigestion was
unknown, while nervous troubles, there as elsewhere, had yet to be
invented: The very word 'nerve' was used in a different sense to the
modern one. 'My word! An' 'aven't she got a nerve!' they would say of
any one who expected more than was reasonable.

In nearly all the cottages there was but one room downstairs, and many
of these were poor and bare, with only a table and a few chairs and
stools for furniture and a superannuated potato-sack thrown down by way
of hearthrug. Other rooms were bright and cosy, with dressers of
crockery, cushioned chairs, pictures on the walls and brightly coloured
hand-made rag rugs on the floor. In these there would be pots of
geraniums, fuchsias, and old-fashioned, sweet-smelling musk on the
windowsills. In the older cottages there were grandfathers' clocks,
gate-legged tables, and rows of pewter, relics of a time when life was
easier for country folk.

The interiors varied, according to the number of mouths to be fed and
the thrift and skill of the housewife, or the lack of those qualities;
but the income in all was precisely the same, for ten shillings a week
was the standard wage of the farm labourer at that time in that
district.

Looking at the hamlet from a distance, one house would have been seen, a
little apart, and turning its back on its neighbours, as though about to
run away into the fields. It was a small grey stone cottage with a
thatched roof, a green-painted door and a plum tree trained up the wall
to the eaves. This was called the 'end house' and was the home of the
stonemason and his family. At the beginning of the decade there were two
children: Laura, aged three, and Edmund, a year and a half younger. In
some respects these children, while small, were more fortunate than
their neighbours. Their father earned a little more money than the
labourers. Their mother had been a children's nurse and they were well
looked after. They were taught good manners and taken for walks, milk
was bought for them, and they were bathed regularly on Saturday nights
and, after 'Gentle Jesus' was said, were tucked up in bed with a
peppermint or clove ball to suck. They had tidier clothes, too, for
their mother had taste and skill with her needle and better-off
relations sent them parcels of outgrown clothes. The other children used
to tease the little girl about the lace on her drawers and led her such
a life that she once took them off and hid them in a haystack.

Their mother at that time used to say that she dreaded the day when they
would have to go to school; children got so wild and rude and tore their
clothes to shreds going the mile and a half backwards and forwards. But
when the time came for them to go she was glad, for, after a break of
five years, more babies had begun to arrive, and, by the end of the
'eighties, there were six children at the end house.

As they grew, the two elder children would ask questions of anybody and
everybody willing or unwilling to answer them. Who planted the
buttercups? Why did God let the wheat get blighted? Who lived in this
house before we did, and what were their children's names? What's the
sea like? Is it bigger than Cottisloe Pond? _Why_ can't we go to Heaven
in the donkey-cart? Is it farther than Banbury? And so on, taking their
bearings in that small corner of the world they had somehow got into.

This asking of questions teased their mother and made them unpopular
with the neighbours. 'Little children should be seen and not heard',
they were told at home. Out of doors it would more often be 'Ask no
questions and you'll be told no lies.' One old woman once handed the
little girl a leaf from a pot-plant on her window-sill. 'What's it
called?' was the inevitable question. "Tis called mind your own
business,' was the reply; 'an' I think I'd better give a slip of it to
your mother to plant in a pot for you.' But no such reproofs could cure
them of the habit, although they soon learned who and who not to
question.

In this way they learned the little that was known of the past of the
hamlet and of places beyond. They had no need to ask the names of the
birds, flowers, and trees they saw every day, for they had already
learned these unconsciously, and neither could remember a time when they
did not know an oak from an ash, wheat from barley, or a Jenny wren from
a blue-tit. Of what was going on around them, not much was hidden, for
the gossips talked freely before children, evidently considering them
not meant to hear as well as not to be heard, and, as every house was
open to them and their own home was open to most people, there was not
much that escaped their sharp ears.

The first charge on the labourers' ten shillings was house rent. Most of
the cottages belonged to small tradesmen in the market town and the
weekly rents ranged from one shilling to half a crown. Some labourers in
other villages worked on farms or estates where they had their cottages
rent free; but the hamlet people did not envy them, for 'Stands to
reason,' they said, 'they've allus got to do just what they be told, or
out they goes, neck and crop, bag and baggage.' A shilling, or even two
shillings a week, they felt, was not too much to pay for the freedom to
live and vote as they liked and to go to church or chapel or neither as
they preferred.

Every house had a good vegetable garden and there were allotments for
all; but only three of the thirty cottages had their own water supply.
The less fortunate tenants obtained their water from a well on a vacant
plot on the outskirts of the hamlet, from which the cottage had
disappeared. There was no public well or pump. They just had to get
their water where and how they could; the landlords did not undertake to
supply water.

Against the wall of every well-kept cottage stood a tarred or
green-painted water butt to catch and store the rain-water from the
roof. This saved many journeys to the well with buckets, as it could be
used for cleaning and washing clothes and for watering small, precious
things in the garden. It was also valued for toilet purposes and the
women would hoard the last drops for themselves and their children to
wash in. Rain-water was supposed to be good for the complexion, and,
though they had no money to spend upon beautifying themselves, they were
not too far gone in poverty to neglect such means as they had to that
end.

For drinking water, and for cleaning water, too, when the water butts
failed, the women went to the well in all weathers, drawing up the
buckets with a windlass and carting them home suspended from their
shoulders by a yoke. Those were weary journeys 'round the Rise' for
water, and many were the rests and endless was the gossip, as they stood
at corners in their big white aprons and crossover shawls.

A few of the younger, more recently married women who had been in good
service and had not yet given up the attempt to hold themselves a little
aloof would get their husbands to fill the big red store crock with
water at night. But this was said by others to be 'a sin and a shame',
for, after his hard day's work, a man wanted his rest, not to do
''ooman's work'. Later on in the decade it became the fashion for the
men to fetch water at night, and then, of course, it was quite right
that they should do so and a woman who 'dragged her guts out' fetching
more than an occasional load from the well was looked upon as a traitor
to her sex.

In dry summers, when the hamlet wells failed, water had to be fetched
from a pump at some farm buildings half a mile distant. Those who had
wells in their gardens would not give away a spot, as they feared if
they did theirs, too, would run dry, so they fastened down the lids with
padlocks and disregarded all hints.

The only sanitary arrangement known in the hamlet was housed either in a
little beehive-shaped building at the bottom of the garden or in a
corner of the wood and toolshed known as 'the hovel'. It was not even an
earth closet; but merely a deep pit with a seat set over it, the
half-yearly emptying of which caused every door and window in the
vicinity to be sealed. Unfortunately, there was no means of sealing the
chimneys!

These 'privies' were as good an index as any to the characters of their
owners. Some were horrible holes; others were fairly decent, while some,
and these not a few, were kept well cleared, with the seat scrubbed to
snow-whiteness and the brick floor raddled. One old woman even went so
far as to nail up a text as a finishing touch, 'Thou God seest me'--most
embarrassing to a Victorian child who had been taught that no one must
even see her approach the door.

In other such places health and sanitary maxims were scrawled with lead
pencil or yellow chalk on the whitewashed walls. Most of them embodied
sound sense and some were expressed in sound verse, but few were so
worded as to be printable. One short and pithy maxim may pass: 'Eat
well, work well, sleep well, and ---- well once a day'.

On the wall of the 'little house' at Laura's home pictures cut from the
newspapers were pasted. These were changed when the walls were
whitewashed and in succession they were 'The Bombardment of Alexandria',
all clouds of smoke, flying fragments, and flashes of explosives;
'Glasgow's Mournful Disaster: Plunges for Life from the _Daphne_', and
'The Tay Bridge Disaster', with the end of the train dangling from the
broken bridge over a boiling sea. It was before the day of Press
photography and the artists were able to give their imagination full
play. Later, the place of honour in the 'little house' was occupied by
'Our Political Leaders', two rows of portraits on one print; Mr.
Gladstone, with hawklike countenance and flashing eyes, in the middle of
the top row, and kind, sleepy-Looking Lord Salisbury in the other. Laura
loved that picture because Lord Randolph Churchill was there. She
thought he must be the most handsome man in the world.

At the back or side of each cottage was a lean-to pigsty and the house
refuse was thrown on a nearby pile called 'the muck'll'. This was so
situated that the oozings from the sty could drain into it; the manure
was also thrown there when the sty was cleared, and the whole formed a
nasty, smelly eyesore to have within a few feet of the windows. 'The
wind's in the so-and-so,' some woman indoors would say, 'I can smell th'
muck'll', and she would often be reminded of the saying, 'Pigs for
health', or told that the smell was a healthy one.

It was in a sense a healthy smell for them; for a good pig fattening in
the sty promised a good winter. During its lifetime the pig was an
important member of the family, and its health and condition were
regularly reported in letters to children away from home, together with
news of their brothers and sisters. Men callers on Sunday afternoons
came, not to see the family, but the pig, and would lounge with its
owner against the pigsty door for an hour, scratching piggy's back and
praising his points or turning up their own noses in criticism. Ten to
fifteen shillings was the price paid for a pigling when weaned, and they
all delighted in getting a bargain. Some men swore by the 'dilling', as
the smallest of a litter was called, saying it was little and good, and
would soon catch up; others preferred to give a few shillings more for a
larger young pig.

The family pig was everybody's pride and everybody's business. Mother
spent hours boiling up the 'little taturs' to mash and mix with the
pot-liquor, in which food had been cooked, to feed to the pig for its
evening meal and help out the expensive barley meal. The children, on
their way home from school, would fill their arms with sow thistle,
dandelion, and choice long grass, or roam along the hedgerows on wet
evenings collecting snails in a pail for the pig's supper. These piggy
crunched up with great relish. 'Feyther', over and above farming out the
sty, bedding down, doctoring, and so on, would even go without his
nightly half-pint when, towards the end, the barley-meal bill mounted
until 'it fair frightened anybody'.

Sometimes, when the weekly income would not run to a sufficient quantity
of fattening food, an arrangement would be made with the baker or miller
that he should give credit now, and when the pig was killed receive a
portion of the meat in payment. More often than not one-half the
pig-meat would be mortgaged in this way, and it was no uncommon thing to
hear a woman say, 'Us be going to kill half a pig, please God, come
Friday,' leaving the uninitiated to conclude that the other half would
still run about in the sty.

Some of the families killed two separate half pigs a year; others one,
or even two, whole ones, and the meat provided them with bacon for the
winter or longer. Fresh meat was a luxury only seen in a few of the
cottages on Sunday, when six-pennyworth of pieces would be bought to
make a meat pudding. If a small joint came their way as a Saturday night
bargain, those without oven grates would roast it by suspending it on a
string before the fire, with one of the children in attendance as
turnspit. Or a 'Pot-roast' would be made by placing the meat with a
little lard or other fat in an iron saucepan and keeping it well shaken
over the fire. But, after all, as they said, there was nothing to beat a
'toad'. For this the meat was enclosed whole in a suet crust and well
boiled, a method which preserved all the delicious juices of the meat
and provided a good pudding into the bargain. When some superior person
tried to give them a hint, the women used to say, 'You tell us how to
get the victuals; we can cook it all right when we've got it'; and they
could.

When the pig was fattened--and the fatter the better--the date of
execution had to be decided upon. It had to take place some time during
the first two quarters of the moon; for, if the pig was killed when the
moon was waning the bacon would shrink in cooking, and they wanted it to
'plimp up'. The next thing was to engage the travelling pork butcher, or
pig-sticker, and, as he was a thatcher by day, he always had to kill
after dark, the scene being lighted with lanterns and the fire of
burning straw which at a later stage of the proceedings was to singe the
bristles off the victim.

The killing was a noisy, bloody business, in the course of which the
animal was hoisted to a rough bench that it might bleed thoroughly and
so preserve the quality of the meat. The job was often bungled, the pig
sometimes getting away and having to be chased; but country people of
that day had little sympathy for the sufferings of animals, and men,
women, and children would gather round to see the sight.

After the carcass had been singed, the pig-sticker would pull off the
detachable, gristly, outer coverings of the toes, known locally as 'the
shoes', and fling them among the children, who scrambled for, then
sucked and gnawed them, straight from the filth of the sty and blackened
by fire as they were.

The whole scene, with its mud and blood, flaring lights and dark
shadows, was as savage as anything to be seen in an African jungle. The
children at the end house would steal out of bed to the window. 'Look!
Look! It's hell, and those are the devils,' Edmund would whisper,
pointing to the men tossing the burning straw with their pitchforks; but
Laura felt sick and would creep back into bed and cry: she was sorry for
the pig.

But, hidden from the children, there was another aspect of the
pig-killing. Months of hard work and self-denial were brought on that
night to a successful conclusion. It was a time to rejoice, and rejoice
they did, with beer flowing freely and the first delicious dish of pig's
fry sizzling in the frying-pan.

The next day, when the carcass had been cut up, joints of pork were
distributed to those neighbours who had sent similar ones at their own
pig-killing. Small plates of fry and other oddments were sent to others
as a pure compliment, and no one who happened to be ill or down on his
luck at these occasions was ever forgotten.

Then the housewife 'got down to it', as she said. Hams and sides of
bacon were salted, to be taken out of the brine later and hung on the
wall near the fireplace to dry. Lard was dried out, hogs' puddings were
made, and the chitterlings were cleaned and turned three days in
succession under running water, according to ancient ritual. It was a
busy time, but a happy one, with the larder full and something over to
give away, and all the pride and importance of owning such riches.

On the following Sunday came the official 'pig feast', when fathers and
mothers, sisters and brothers, married children and grandchildren who
lived within walking distance arrived to dinner.

If the house had no oven, permission was obtained from an old couple in
one of the thatched cottages to heat up the big bread-baking oven in
their wash-house. This was like a large cupboard with an iron door,
lined with brick and going far back into the wall. Faggots of wood were
lighted inside and the door was closed upon them until the oven was well
heated. Then the ashes were swept out and baking-tins with joints of
pork, potatoes, batter puddings, pork pies, and sometimes a cake or two,
were popped inside and left to bake without further attention.

Meanwhile, at home, three or four different kinds of vegetables would be
cooked, and always a meat pudding, made in a basin. No feast and few
Sunday dinners were considered complete without that item, which was
eaten alone, without vegetables, when a joint was to follow. On ordinary
days the pudding would be a roly-poly containing fruit, currants, or
jam; but it still appeared as a first course, the idea being that it
took the edge off the appetite. At the pig feast there would be no sweet
pudding, for that could be had any day, and who wanted sweet things when
there was plenty of meat to be had!

But this glorious plenty only came once or at most twice a year, and
there were all the other days to provide for. How was it done on ten
shillings a week? Well, for one thing, food was much cheaper than it is
to-day. Then, in addition to the bacon, all vegetables, including
potatoes, were home-grown and grown in abundance. The men took great
pride in their gardens and allotments and there was always competition
amongst them as to who should have the earliest and choicest of each
kind. Fat green peas, broad beans as big as a halfpenny, cauliflowers a
child could make an armchair of, runner beans and cabbage and kale, all
in their seasons went into the pot with the roly-poly and slip of bacon.

Then they ate plenty of green food, all home-grown and freshly pulled;
lettuce and radishes and young onions with pearly heads and leaves like
fine grass. A few slices of bread and home-made lard, flavoured with
rosemary, and plenty of green food 'went down good' as they used to say.

Bread had to be bought, and that was a heavy item, with so many growing
children to be fed; but flour for the daily pudding and an occasional
plain cake could be laid in for the winter without any cash outlay.
After the harvest had been carried from the fields, the women and
children swarmed over the stubble picking up the ears of wheat the
horse-rake had missed. Gleaning, or 'leazing', as it was called locally.

Up and down and over and over the stubble they hurried, backs bent, eyes
on the ground, one hand outstretched to pick up the ears, the other
resting on the small of the back with the 'handful'. When this had been
completed, it was bound round with a wisp of straw and erected with
others in a double rank, like the harvesters erected their sheaves in
shocks, beside the leazer's water-can and dinner-basket. It was hard
work, from as soon as possible after daybreak until nightfall, with only
two short breaks for refreshment; but the single ears mounted, and a
woman with four or five strong, well-disciplined children would carry a
good load home on her head every night. And they enjoyed doing it, for
it was pleasant in the fields under the pale blue August sky, with the
clover springing green in the stubble and the hedges bright with hips
and haws and feathery with traveller's joy. When the rest-hour came, the
children would wander off down the hedgerows gathering crab-apples or
sloes, or searching for mushrooms, while the mothers reclined and
suckled their babes and drank their cold tea and gossiped or dozed until
it was time to be at it again.

At the end of the fortnight or three weeks that the leazing lasted, the
corn would be thrashed out at home and sent to the miller, who paid
himself for grinding by taking toll of the flour. Great was the
excitement in a good year when the flour came home--one bushel, two
bushels, or even more in large, industrious families. The mealy-white
sack with its contents was often kept for a time on show on a chair in
the living-room and it was a common thing for a passer-by to be invited
to 'step inside an' see our little bit o' leazings'. They liked to have
the product of their labour before their own eyes and to let others
admire it, just as the artist likes to show his picture and the composer
to hear his opus played. 'Them's better'n any o' yer oil-paintin's,' a
man would say, pointing to the flitches on his wall, and the women felt
the same about the leazings.

Here, then, were the three chief ingredients of the one hot meal a day,
bacon from the flitch, vegetables from the garden, and flour for the
roly-poly. This meal, called 'tea', was taken in the evening, when the
men were home from the fields and the children from school, for neither
could get home at midday.

About four o'clock, smoke would go up from the chimneys, as the fire was
made up and the big iron boiler, or the three-legged pot, was slung on
the hook of the chimney-chain. Everything was cooked in the one utensil;
the square of bacon, amounting to little more than a taste each;
cabbage, or other green vegetables in one net, potatoes in another, and
the roly-poly swathed in a cloth. It sounds a haphazard method in these
days of gas and electric cookers; but it answered its purpose, for, by
carefully timing the putting in of each item and keeping the simmering
of the pot well regulated, each item was kept intact and an appetising
meal was produced. The water in which the food had been cooked, the
potato parings, and other vegetable trimmings were the pig's share.

When the men came home from work they would find the table spread with a
clean whitey-brown cloth, upon which would be knives and two-pronged
steel forks with buckhorn handles. The vegetables would then be turned
out into big round yellow crockery dishes and the bacon cut into dice,
with much the largest cube upon Feyther's plate, and the whole family
would sit down to the chief meal of the day. True, it was seldom that
all could find places at the central table; but some of the smaller
children could sit upon stools with the seat of a chair for a table, or
on the doorstep with their plates on their laps.

Good manners prevailed. The children were given their share of the food,
there was no picking and choosing, and they were expected to eat it in
silence. 'Please' and 'Thank you' were permitted, but nothing more.
Father and Mother might talk if they wanted to; but usually they were
content to concentrate upon their enjoyment of the meal. Father might
shovel green peas into his mouth with his knife, Mother might drink her
tea from her saucer, and some of the children might lick their plates
when the food was devoured; but who could eat peas with a two-pronged
fork, or wait for tea to cool after the heat and flurry of cooking, and
licking the plates passed as a graceful compliment to Mother's good
dinner. 'Thank God for my good dinner. Thank Father and Mother. Amen'
was the grace used in one family, and it certainly had the merit of
giving credit where credit was due.

For other meals they depended largely on bread and butter, or, more
often, bread and lard, eaten with any relish that happened to be at
hand. Fresh butter was too costly for general use, but a pound was
sometimes purchased in the summer, when it cost tenpence. Margarine,
then called 'butterine', was already on the market, but was little used
there, as most people preferred lard, especially when it was their own
home-made lard flavoured with rosemary leaves. In summer there was
always plenty of green food from the garden and home-made jam as long as
it lasted, and sometimes an egg or two, where fowls were kept, or when
eggs were plentiful and sold at twenty a shilling.

When bread and lard appeared alone, the men would spread mustard on
their slices and the children would be given a scraping of black treacle
or a sprinkling of brown sugar. Some children, who preferred it, would
have 'sop'--bread steeped in boiling water, then strained and sugar
added.

Milk was a rare luxury, as it had to be fetched a mile and a half from
the farmhouse. The cost was not great: a penny a jug or can,
irrespective of size. It was, of course, skimmed milk, but hand-skimmed,
not separated, and so still had some small proportion of cream left. A
few families fetched it daily; but many did not bother about it. The
women said they preferred their tea neat, and it did not seem to occur
to them that the children needed milk. Many of them never tasted it from
the time they were weaned until they went out in the world. Yet they
were stout-limbed and rosy-cheeked and full of life and mischief.

The skimmed milk was supposed by the farmer to be sold at a penny a
pint, that remaining unsold going to feed his own calves and pigs. But
the dairymaid did not trouble to measure it; she just filled the
proffered vessel and let it go as 'a pen'orth'. Of course, the jugs and
cans got larger and larger. One old woman increased the size of her
vessels by degrees until she had the impudence to take a small, new, tin
cooking boiler which was filled without question. The children at the
end house wondered what she could do with so much milk, as she had only
her husband and herself at home. 'That'll make you a nice big rice
pudding, Queenie', one of them said tentatively.

'Pudden! Lor' bless 'ee!' was Queenie's reply. 'I don't ever make no
rice puddens. That milk's for my pig's supper, an', my! ain't 'ee just
about thrivin' on it. Can't hardly see out of his eyes, bless him!'

'Poverty's no disgrace, but 'tis a great inconvenience' was a common
saying among the Lark Rise people; but that put the case too mildly, for
their poverty was no less than a hampering drag upon them. Everybody had
enough to eat and a shelter which, though it fell far short of modern
requirements, satisfied them. Coal at a shilling a hundredweight and a
pint of paraffin for lighting had to be squeezed out of the weekly wage;
but for boots, clothes, illness, holidays, amusements, and household
renewals there was no provision whatever. How did they manage?

Boots were often bought with the extra money the men earned in the
harvest field. When that was paid, those lucky families which were not
in arrears with their rent would have a new pair all round, from the
father's hobnailed dreadnoughts to little pink kid slippers for the
baby. Then some careful housewives paid a few pence every week into the
boot club run by a shopkeeper in the market town. This helped; but it
was not sufficient, and how to get a pair of new boots for 'our young
Ern or Alf' was a problem which kept many a mother awake at night.

Girls needed boots, too, and good, stout, nailed ones for those rough
and muddy roads; but they were not particular, any boots would do. At a
confirmation class which Laura attended, the clergyman's daughter, after
weeks of careful preparation, asked her catechumens: 'Now, are you sure
you are all of you thoroughly prepared for to-morrow. Is there anything
you would like to ask me?'

'Yes, miss,' piped up a voice in a corner, 'me mother says have you got
a pair of your old boots you could give me, for I haven't got any fit to
go in.'

Alice got her boots on that occasion; but there was not a confirmation
every day. Still, boots were obtained somehow; nobody went barefoot,
even though some of the toes might sometimes stick out beyond the toe of
the boot.

To obtain clothes was an even more difficult matter. Mothers of families
sometimes said in despair that they supposed they would have to black
their own backsides and go naked. They never quite came to that; but it
was difficult to keep decently covered, and that was a pity because they
did dearly love what they called 'anything a bit dressy'. This taste was
not encouraged by the garments made by the girls in school from material
given by the Rectory people--roomy chemises and wide-legged drawers made
of unbleached calico, beautifully sewn, but without an inch of trimming;
harsh, but strong flannel petticoats and worsted stockings that would
almost stand up with no legs in them--although these were gratefully
received and had their merits, for they wore for years and the calico
improved with washing.

For outer garments they had to depend upon daughters, sisters, and aunts
away in service, who all sent parcels, not only of their own clothes,
but also of those they could beg from their mistresses. These were worn
and altered and dyed and turned and ultimately patched and darned as
long as the shreds hung together.

But, in spite of their poverty and the worry and anxiety attending it,
they were not unhappy, and, though poor, there was nothing sordid about
their lives. 'The nearer the bone the sweeter the meat', they used to
say, and they were getting very near the bone from which their country
ancestors had fed. Their children and children's children would have to
depend wholly upon whatever was carved for them from the communal joint,
and for their pleasure upon the mass enjoyments of a new era. But for
that generation there was still a small picking left to supplement the
weekly wage. They had their home-cured bacon, their 'bit o' leazings',
their small wheat or barley patch on the allotment; their knowledge of
herbs for their homely simples, and the wild fruits and berries of the
countryside for jam, jellies, and wine, and round about them as part of
their lives were the last relics of country customs and the last echoes
of country songs, ballads, and game rhymes. This last picking, though
meagre, was sweet.




                                   II

                          _A Hamlet Childhood_

Oxford was only nineteen miles distant. The children at the end house
knew that, for, while they were small, they were often taken by their
mother for a walk along the turnpike and would never pass the milestone
until the inscription had been read to them: OXFORD XIX MILES.

They often wondered what Oxford was like and asked questions about it.
One answer was that it was 'a gert big town' where a man might earn as
much as five and twenty shillings a week; but as he would have to pay
'pretty near' half of it in house rent and have nowhere to keep a pig or
to grow many vegetables, he'd be a fool to go there.

One girl who had actually been there on a visit said you could buy a
long stick of pink-and-white rock for a penny and that one of her aunt's
young gentlemen lodgers had given her a whole shilling for cleaning his
shoes. Their mother said it was called a city because a bishop lived
there, and that a big fair was held there once a year, and that was all
she seemed to know about it. They did not ask their father, although he
had lived there as a child, when his parents had kept an hotel in the
city (his relations spoke of it as an hotel, but his wife once called it
a pot-house, so probably it was an ordinary public-house). They already
had to be careful not to ask their father too many questions, and when
their mother said, 'Your father's cross again,' they found it was better
not to talk at all.

So, for some time, Oxford remained to them a dim blur of bishops (they
had seen a picture of one with big white sleeves, sitting in a
high-backed chair) and swings and shows and coconut shies (for they knew
what a fair was like) and little girls sucking pink-and-white rock and
polishing shoes. To imagine a place without pigsties and vegetable
gardens was more difficult. With no bacon or cabbage, what could people
have to eat?

But the Oxford road with the milestone they had known as long as they
could remember. Round the Rise and up the narrow hamlet road they would
go until they came to the turning, their mother pushing the baby
carriage ('pram' was a word of the future) with Edmund strapped in the
high, slippery seat or, later, little May, who was born when Edmund was
five, and Laura holding on at the side or darting hither and thither to
pick flowers.

The baby carriage was made of black wickerwork, something like an
old-fashioned bath-chair in shape, running on three wheels and pushed
from behind. It wobbled and creaked and rattled over the stones, for
rubber tyres were not yet invented and its springs, if springs it had,
were of the most primitive kind. Yet it was one of the most cherished of
the family possessions, for there was only one other baby carriage in
the hamlet, the up-to-date new bassinet which the young wife at the inn
had recently purchased. The other mothers carried their babies on one
arm, tightly rolled in shawls, with only the face showing.

As soon as the turning was passed, the flat, brown fields were left
behind and they were in a different world with a different atmosphere
and even different flowers. Up and down went the white main road between
wide grass margins, thick, berried hedgerows and overhanging trees.
After the dark mire of the hamlet ways, even the milky-white road
surface pleased them, and they would splash up the thin, pale mud, like
uncooked batter, or drag their feet through the smooth white dust until
their mother got cross and slapped them.

Although it was a main road, there was scarcely any traffic, for the
market town lay in the opposite direction along it, the next village was
five miles on, and with Oxford there was no road communication from that
distant point in those days of horse-drawn vehicles. To-day, past that
same spot, a first-class, tar-sprayed road, thronged with motor traffic,
runs between low, closely trimmed hedges. Last year a girl of eighteen
was knocked down and killed by a passing car at that very turning: At
that time it was deserted for hours together. Three miles away trains
roared over a viaduct, carrying those who would, had they lived a few
years before or later, have used the turnpike. People were saying that
far too much money was being spent on keeping such roads in repair, for
their day was over; they were only needed now for people going from
village to village. Sometimes the children and their mother would meet a
tradesman's van, delivering goods from the market town at some country
mansion, or the doctor's tall gig, or the smart turn-out of a brewer's
traveller; but often they walked their mile along the turnpike and back
without seeing anything on wheels.

The white tails of rabbits bobbed in and out of the hedgerows; stoats
crossed the road in front of the children's feet--swift, silent,
stealthy creatures which made them shudder; there were squirrels in the
oak-trees, and once they even saw a fox curled up asleep in the ditch
beneath thick overhanging ivy. Bands of little blue butterflies flitted
here and there or poised themselves with quivering wings on the long
grass bents; bees hummed in the white clover blooms, and over all a deep
silence brooded. It seemed as though the road had been made ages before,
then forgotten.

The children were allowed to run freely on the grass verges, as wide as
a small meadow in places. 'Keep to the grinsard,' their mother would
call. 'Don't go on the road. Keep to the grinsard!' and it was many
years before Laura realized that that name for the grass verges, in
general use there, was a worn survival of the old English 'greensward'.

It was no hardship to her to be obliged to keep to the greensward, for
flowers strange to the hamlet soil flourished there, eyebright and
harebell, sunset-coloured patches of lady's-glove, and succory with
vivid blue flowers and stems like black wire.

In one little roadside dell mushrooms might sometimes be found, small
button mushrooms with beaded moisture on their cold milk-white skins.
The dell was the farthest point of their walk; after searching the long
grass for mushrooms, in season and out of season--for they would not
give up hope--they turned back and never reached the second milestone.

Once or twice when they reached the dell they got a greater thrill than
even the discovery of a mushroom could give; for the gipsies were there,
their painted caravan drawn up, their poor old skeleton horse turned
loose to graze, and their fire with a cooking pot over it, as though the
whole road belonged to them. With men making pegs, women combing their
hair or making cabbage nets, and boys and girls and dogs sprawling
around, the dell was full of dark, wild life, foreign to the hamlet
children and fascinating, yet terrifying.

When they saw the gipsies they drew back behind their mother and the
baby carriage, for there was a tradition that once, years before, a
child from a neighbouring village had been stolen by them. Even the cold
ashes where a gipsy's fire had been sent little squiggles of fear down
Laura's spine, for how could she know that they were not still lurking
near with designs upon her own person? Her mother laughed at her fears
and said, 'Surely to goodness they've got children enough of their own,'
but Laura would not be reassured. She never really enjoyed the game the
hamlet children played going home from school, when one of them went on
before to hide and the others followed slowly, hand in hand, singing:


             'I hope we shan't meet any gipsies to-night!
              I hope we shan't meet any gipsies to-night!'


And when the hiding-place was reached and the supposed gipsy sprung out
and grabbed the nearest, she always shrieked, although she knew it was
only a game.

But in those early days of the walks fear only gave spice to excitement,
for Mother was there, Mother in her pretty maize-coloured gown with the
rows and rows of narrow brown velvet sewn round the long skirt, which
stuck out like a bell, and her second-best hat with the honeysuckle. She
was still in her twenties and still very pretty, with her neat little
figure, rose-leaf complexion and hair which was brown in some lights and
golden in others. When her family grew larger and troubles crowded upon
her and the rose-leaf complexion had faded and the last of the
pre-marriage wardrobe had worn out, the walks were given up; but by that
time Edmund and Laura were old enough to go where they liked, and,
though they usually preferred to go farther afield on Saturdays and
other school holidays, they would sometimes go to the turnpike to jump
over and over the milestone and scramble about in the hedges for
blackberries and crab-apples.

It was while they were still small they were walking there one day with
a visiting aunt; Edmund and Laura, both in clean, white, starched
clothes, holding on to a hand on either side. The children were a little
shy, for they did not remember seeing this aunt before. She was married
to a master builder in Yorkshire and only visited her brother and his
family at long intervals. But they liked her, although Laura had already
sensed that their mother did not. Jane was too dressy and 'set up' for
her taste, she said. That morning, her luggage being still at the
railway station, she was wearing the clothes she had travelled in, a
long, pleated dove-coloured gown with an apron arrangement drawn round
and up and puffed over a bustle at the back, and, on her head, a tiny
toque made entirely of purple velvet pansies.

_Swish, swish, swish_, went her long skirt over the grass verges; but
every time they crossed the road she would relinquish Laura's hand to
gather it up from the dust, thus revealing to the child's delighted gaze
a frilly purple petticoat. When she was grown up she would have a frock
and petticoat just like those, she decided.

But Edmund was not interested in clothes. Being a polite little boy, he
was trying to make conversation. He had already shown his aunt the spot
where they had found the dead hedgehog and the bush where the thrush had
built last spring and told her the distant rumble they heard was a train
going over the viaduct, when they came to the milestone.

'Aunt Jenny,' he said, 'what's Oxford like?'

'Well, it's all old buildings, churches and colleges where rich people's
sons go to school when they're grown up.'

'What do they learn there?' demanded Laura.

'Oh, Latin and Greek and suchlike, I suppose.'

'Do they all go there?' asked Edmund seriously.

'Well, no. Some go to Cambridge; there are colleges there as well. Some
go to one and some to the other,' said the aunt with a smile that meant
'Whatever will these children want to know next?'

Four-year-old Edmund pondered a few moments, then said, 'Which college
shall I go to when I am grown up, Oxford or Cambridge?' and his
expression of innocent good faith checked his aunt's inclination to
laugh.

'There won't be any college for you, my poor little man,' she explained.
'You'll have to go to work as soon as you leave school; but if I could
have _my_ way, you should go to the very best college in Oxford,' and,
for the rest of the walk she entertained them with stories of her
mother's family, the Wallingtons.

She said one of her uncles had written a book and she thought Edmund
might turn out to be clever, like him. But when they told their mother
what she had said she tossed her head and said she had never heard about
any book, and what if he had, wasting his time. It was not as if he was
like Shakespeare or Miss Braddon or anybody like that. And she hoped
Edmund would not turn out to be clever. Brains were no good to a working
man; they only made him discontented and saucy and lose his jobs. She'd
seen it happen again and again.

Yet she had brains of her own and her education had been above the
average in her station in life. She had been born and brought up in a
cottage standing in the churchyard of a neighbouring village, 'just like
the little girl in _We are Seven_', she used to tell her own children.
At the time when she was a small girl in the churchyard cottage the
incumbent of the parish had been an old man and with him had lived his
still more aged sister. This lady, whose name was Miss Lowe, had become
very fond of the pretty, fair-haired little girl at the churchyard
cottage and had had her at the Rectory every day out of school hours.
Little Emma had a sweet voice and she was supposed to go there for
singing lessons; but she had learned other things, too, including
old-world manners and to write a beautiful antique hand with delicate,
open-looped pointed letters and long 's's', such as her instructress and
other young ladies had been taught in the last quarter of the eighteenth
century.

Miss Lowe was then nearly eighty, and had long been dead when Laura, at
two and a half years old, had been taken by her mother to see the by
then very aged Rector. The visit was one of her earliest memories, which
survived as an indistinct impression of twilight in a room with dark
green walls and the branch of a tree against the outside of the window;
and, more distinctly, a pair of trembling, veiny hands putting something
smooth and cold and round into her own. The smooth cold roundness was
accounted for afterwards. The old gentleman, it appeared, had given her
a china mug which had been his sister's in her nursery days. It had
stood on the mantelpiece at the end house for years, a beautiful old
piece with a design of heavy green foliage on a ground of translucent
whiteness. Afterwards it got broken, which was strange in that careful
home; but Laura carried the design in her mind's eye for the rest of her
life and would sometimes wonder if it accounted for her lifelong love of
green and white in conjunction.

Their mother would often tell the children about the Rectory and her own
home in the churchyard, and how the choir, in which her father played
the violin, would bring their instruments and practise there in the
evening. But she liked better to tell of that other rectory where she
had been nurse to the children. The living was small and the Rector was
poor, but three maids had been possible in those days, a cook-general, a
young housemaid, and Nurse Emma. They must have been needed in that
large, rambling old house, in which lived the Rector and his wife, their
nine children, three maids, and often three or four young men pupils.
They had all had such jolly, happy times she said; all of them, family
and maids and pupils, singing glees and part songs in the drawing-room
in the evening. But what thrilled Laura most was that she herself had
had a narrow escape from never having been born at all. Some relatives
of the family who had settled in New South Wales had come to England on
a visit and nearly persuaded Nurse Emma to go back with them. Indeed, it
was all settled when, one night, they began talking about snakes, which,
according to their account, infested their Australian bungalow and
garden. 'Then,' said Emma, 'I shan't go, for I can't abear the horrid
creatures,' and she did not go, but got married instead and became the
mother of Edmund and Laura. But it seems that the call was genuine, that
Australia had something for, or required something of, her descendants;
for of the next generation her own second son became a fruit-farmer in
Queensland, and of the next a son of Laura's is now an engineer in
Brisbane.

The little Johnstones were always held up as an example to the end house
children. They were always kind to each other and obedient to their
elders, never grubby or rowdy or inconsiderate. Perhaps they
deteriorated after Nurse Emma left, for Laura remembered being taken to
see them before they left the neighbourhood for good, when one of the
big boys pulled her hair and made faces at her and buried her doll
beneath a tree in the orchard, with one of the cook's aprons tied round
his neck by way of a surplice.

The eldest girl, Miss Lily, then about nineteen, walked miles of the way
back home with them and returned alone in the twilight (so Victorian
young ladies were not always as carefully guarded as they are now
supposed to have been!). Laura remembered the low murmur of conversation
behind her as she rode for a lift on the front of the baby carriage with
her heels dangling over the front wheel. Both a Sir George and a Mr.
Looker, it appeared, were paying Miss Lily 'particular attention' at the
time, and their rival advantages were under discussion. Every now and
then Miss Lily would protest, 'But, Emma, Sir George paid me _particular
attention_. Many remarked upon it to Mamma,' and Emma would say, 'But,
Miss Lily, my dear, do you think he is serious?' Perhaps he was, for
Miss Lily was a lovely girl; but it was as Mrs. Looker she became a kind
of fairy godmother to the end house family. A Christmas parcel of books
and toys came from her regularly, and although she never saw her old
nurse again, they were still writing to each other in the
nineteen-twenties.

Around the hamlet cottages played many little children, too young to go
to school. Every morning they were bundled into a piece of old shawl
crossed on the chest and tied in a hard knot at the back, a slice of
food was thrust into their hands and they were told to 'go play' while
their mothers got on with the housework. In winter, their little limbs
purple-mottled with cold, they would stamp around playing horses or
engines. In summer they would make mud pies in the dust, moistening them
from their own most intimate water supply. If they fell down or hurt
themselves in any other way, they did not run indoors for comfort, for
they knew that all they would get would be 'Sarves ye right. You
should've looked where you wer' a-goin'!'

They were like little foals turned out to grass, and received about as
much attention. They might, and often did, have running noses and
chilblains on hands, feet and ear-tips; but they hardly ever were ill
enough to have to stay indoors, and grew sturdy and strong, so the
system must have suited them. 'Makes 'em hardy,' their mothers said, and
hardy, indeed, they became, just as the men and women and older boys and
girls of the hamlet were hardy, in body and spirit.

Sometimes Laura and Edmund would go out to play with the other children.
Their father did not like this; he said they were little savages
already. But their mother maintained that, as they would have to go to
school soon, it was better for them to fall in at once with the hamlet
ways. 'Besides,' she would say, 'why shouldn't they? There's nothing the
matter with Lark Rise folks but poverty, and that's no crime. If it was,
we should likely be hung ourselves.'

So the children went out to play and often had happy times, outlining
houses with scraps of broken crockery and furnishing them with moss and
stones; or lying on their stomachs in the dust to peer down into the
deep cracks dry weather always produced in that stiff, clayey soil; or
making snow men or sliding on puddles in winter.

Other times were not so pleasant, for a quarrel would arise and kicks
and blows would fly freely, and how hard those little two-year-old fists
could hit out! To say that a child was as broad as it was long was
considered a compliment by the hamlet mothers, and some of those
toddlers in their knotted woollen wrappings were as near square as
anything human can be. One little girl named Rosie Phillips fascinated
Laura. She was plump and hard and as rosy-cheeked as an apple, with the
deepest of dimples and hair like bronze wire. No matter how hard the
other children bumped into her in the games, she stood four-square, as
firm as a little rock. She was a very hard hitter and had little,
pointed, white teeth that bit. The two tamer children always came out
worst in these conflicts. Then they would make a dash on their long
stalky legs for their own garden gate, followed by stones and cries of
'Long-shanks! Cowardy, cowardy custards!'

During those early years at the end house plans were always being made
and discussed. Edmund must be apprenticed to a good trade--a
carpenter's, perhaps--for if a man had a good trade in his hands he was
always sure of a living. Laura might become a school-teacher, or, if
that proved impossible, a children's nurse in a good family. But, first
and foremost, the family must move from Lark Rise to a house in the
market town. It had always been the parents' intention to leave. When he
met and married his wife the father was a stranger in the neighbourhood,
working for a few months on the restoration of the church in a
neighbouring parish and the end house had been taken as a temporary
home. Then the children had come and other things had happened to delay
the removal. They could not give notice until Michaelmas Day, or another
baby was coming, or they must wait until the pig was killed or the
allotment crops were brought in; there was always some obstacle, and at
the end of seven years they were still at the end house and still
talking almost daily about leaving it. Fifty years later the father had
died there and the mother was living there alone.

When Laura approached school-going age the discussions became more
urgent. Her father did not want the children to go to school with the
hamlet children and for once her mother agreed with him. Not because, as
he said, they ought to have a better education than they could get at
Lark Rise; but because she feared they would tear their clothes and
catch cold and get dirty heads going the mile and a half to and from the
school in the mother village. So vacant cottages in the market town were
inspected and often it seemed that the next week or the next month they
would be leaving Lark Rise for ever; but, again, each time something
would happen to prevent the removal, and, gradually, a new idea arose.
To gain time, their father would teach the two eldest children to read
and write, so that, if approached by the School Attendance Office, their
mother could say they were leaving the hamlet shortly and, in the
meantime, were being taught at home.

So their father brought home two copies of Mavor's First Reader and
taught them the alphabet; but just as Laura was beginning on words of
one syllable, he was sent away to work on a distant job, only coming
home at week-ends. Laura, left at the 'C-a-t s-i-t-s on the m-a-t'
stage, had then to carry her book round after her mother as she went
about her housework, asking: 'Please, Mother, what does h-o-u-s-e
spell?' or 'W-a-l-k, Mother, what is that?' Often when her mother was
too busy or too irritated to attend to her, she would sit and gaze on a
page that might as well have been printed in Hebrew for all she could
make of it, frowning and poring over the print as though she would wring
out the meaning by force of concentration.

After weeks of this, there came a day when, quite suddenly, as it seemed
to her, the printed characters took on a meaning. There were still many
words, even in the first pages of that simple primer, she could not
decipher; but she could skip those and yet make sense of the whole. 'I'm
reading! I'm reading!' she cried aloud. 'Oh, Mother! Oh, Edmund! I'm
reading!'

There were not many books in the house, although in this respect the
family was better off than its neighbours; for, in addition to 'Father's
books', mostly unreadable as yet, and Mother's Bible and _Pilgrim's
Progress_, there were a few children's books which the Johnstones had
turned out from their nursery when they left the neighbourhood. So, in
time, she was able to read Grimms' _Fairy Tales_, _Gulliver's Travels_,
_The Daisy Chain_, and Mrs. Molesworth's _Cuckoo Clock_ and _Carrots_.

As she was seldom seen without an open book in her hand, it was not long
before the neighbours knew she could read. They did not approve of this
at all. None of their children had learned to read before they went to
school, and then only under compulsion, and they thought that Laura, by
doing so, had stolen a march on them. So they attacked her mother about
it, her father conveniently being away. 'He'd no business to teach the
child himself,' they said. 'Schools be the places for teaching, and
you'll likely get wrong for him doing it when governess finds out.'
Others, more kindly disposed, said Laura was trying her eyes and begged
her mother to put an end to her studies; but, as fast as one book was
hidden away from her, she found another, for anything in print drew her
eyes as a magnet draws steel.

Edmund did not learn to read quite so early; but when he did, he learned
more thoroughly. No skipping unknown words for him and guessing what
they meant by the context; he mastered every page before he turned over,
and his mother was more patient with his inquiries, for Edmund was her
darling.

If the two children could have gone on as they were doing, and have had
access to suitable books as they advanced, they would probably have
learnt more than they did during their brief schooldays. But that happy
time of discovery did not last. A woman, the frequent absences from
school of whose child had brought the dreaded Attendance Officer to her
door, informed him of the end house scandal, and he went there and
threatened Laura's mother with all manner of penalties if Laura was not
in school at nine o'clock the next Monday morning.

So there was to be no Oxford or Cambridge for Edmund. No school other
than the National School for either. They would have to pick up what
learning they could like chickens pecking for grain--a little at school,
more from books, and some by dipping into the store of others.

Sometimes, later, when they read about children whose lives were very
different from their own, children who had nurseries with rocking-horses
and went to parties and for sea-side holidays and were encouraged to do
and praised for doing just those things they themselves were thought odd
for, they wondered why they had alighted at birth upon such an
unpromising spot as Lark Rise.

That was indoors. Outside there was plenty to see and hear and learn,
for the hamlet people were interesting, and almost every one of them
interesting in some different way to the others, and to Laura the old
people were the most interesting of all, for they told her about the old
times and could sing old songs and remember old customs, although they
could never remember enough to satisfy her. She sometimes wished she
could make the earth and stones speak and tell her about all the dead
people who had trodden upon them. She was fond of collecting stones of
all shapes and colours, and for years played with the idea that, one
day, she would touch a secret spring and a stone would fly open and
reveal a parchment which would tell her exactly what the world was like
when it was written and placed there.

There were no bought pleasures, and, if there had been, there was no
money to pay for them; but there were the sights, sounds and scents of
the different seasons: spring with its fields of young wheat-blades
bending in the wind as the cloud-shadows swept over them; summer with
its ripening grain and its flowers and fruit and its thunderstorms, and
how the thunder growled and rattled over that flat land and what
boiling, sizzling downpours it brought! With August came the harvest and
the fields settled down to the long winter rest, when the snow was often
piled high and frozen, so that the buried hedges could be walked over,
and strange birds came for crumbs to the cottage doors and hares in
search of food left their spoor round the pigsties.

The children at the end house had their own private amusements, such as
guarding the clump of white violets they found blooming in a cleft of
the brook bank and called their 'holy secret', or pretending the
scabious, which bloomed in abundance there, had fallen in a shower from
the mid-summer sky, which was exactly the same dim, dreamy blue. Another
favourite game was to creep silently up behind birds which had perched
on a rail or twig and try to touch their tails. Laura once succeeded in
this, but she was alone at the time and nobody believed she had done it.

A little later, remembering man's earthy origin, 'dust thou art and to
dust thou shalt return', they liked to fancy themselves bubbles of
earth. When alone in the fields, with no one to see them, they would
hop, skip and jump, touching the ground as lightly as possible and
crying 'We are bubbles of earth! Bubbles of earth! Bubbles of earth!'

But although they had these private fancies, unknown to their elders,
they did not grow into the ultra-sensitive, misunderstood, and thwarted
adolescents who, according to present-day writers, were a feature of
that era. Perhaps, being of mixed birth with a large proportion of
peasant blood in them, they were tougher in fibre than some. When their
bottoms were soundly smacked, as they often were, their reaction was to
make a mental note not to repeat the offence which had caused the
smacking, rather than to lay up for themselves complexes to spoil their
later lives; and when Laura, at about twelve years old, stumbled into a
rickyard where a bull was in the act of justifying its existence, the
sight did not warp her nature. She neither peeped from behind a rick,
nor fled, horrified, across country; but merely thought in her
old-fashioned way, 'Dear me! I had better slip quietly away before the
men see me.' The bull to her was but a bull performing a necessary
function if there was to be butter on the bread and bread and milk for
breakfast, and she thought it quite natural that the men in attendance
at such functions should prefer not to have women or little girls as
spectators. They would have felt, as they would have said, 'a bit
okkard'. So she just withdrew and went another way round without so much
as a kink in her subconscious.

From the time the two children began school they were merged in the
hamlet life, sharing the work and play and mischief of their younger
companions and taking harsh or kind words from their elders according to
circumstances. Yet, although they shared in the pleasures, limitations,
and hardships of the hamlet, some peculiarity of mental outlook
prevented them from accepting everything that existed or happened there
as a matter of course, as the other children did. Small things which
passed unnoticed by others interested, delighted, or saddened them.
Nothing that took place around them went unnoted; words spoken and
forgotten the next moment by the speaker were recorded in their
memories, and the actions and reactions of others were impressed on
their minds, until a clear, indelible impression of their little world
remained with them for life.

Their own lives were to carry them far from the hamlet. Edmund's to
South Africa, India, Canada, and, lastly, to his soldier's grave in
Belgium. Their credentials presented, they will only appear in this book
as observers of and commentators upon the country scene of their birth
and early years.


                                  III

                              _Men Afield_

A mile and a half up the straight, narrow road in the opposite direction
to that of the turnpike, round a corner, just out of sight of the
hamlet, lay the mother village of Fordlow. Here, again, as soon as the
turning of the road was passed, the scene changed, and the large open
fields gave place to meadows and elm trees and tiny trickling streams.

The village was a little, lost, lonely place, much smaller than the
hamlet, without a shop, an inn, or a post office, and six miles from a
railway station. The little squat church, without spire or tower,
crouched back in a tiny churchyard that centuries of use had raised many
feet above the road, and the whole was surrounded by tall, windy elms in
which a colony of rooks kept up a perpetual cawing. Next came the
Rectory, so buried in orchards and shrubberies that only the chimney
stacks were visible from the road; then the old Tudor farmhouse with its
stone, mullioned windows and reputed dungeon. These, with the school and
about a dozen cottages occupied by the shepherd, carter, blacksmith, and
a few other superior farm-workers, made up the village. Even these few
buildings were strung out along the roadside, so far between and so
sunken in greenery that there seemed no village at all. It was a
standing joke in the hamlet that a stranger had once asked the way to
Fordlow after he had walked right through it. The hamlet laughed at the
village as 'stuck up'; while the village looked down on 'that gipsy lot'
at the hamlet.

Excepting the two or three men who frequented the inn in the evening,
the villagers seldom visited the hamlet, which to them represented the
outer wilds, beyond the bounds of civilisation. The hamlet people, on
the other hand, knew the road between the two places by heart, for the
church and the school and the farmhouse which was the men's working
head-quarters were all in the village. The hamlet had only the inn.

Very early in the morning, before daybreak for the greater part of the
year, the hamlet men would throw on their clothes, breakfast on bread
and lard, snatch the dinner-baskets which had been packed for them
overnight, and hurry off across fields and over stiles to the farm.
Getting the boys off was a more difficult matter. Mothers would have to
call and shake and sometimes pull boys of eleven or twelve out of their
warm beds on a winter morning. Then boots which had been drying inside
the fender all night and had become shrunk and hard as boards in the
process would have to be coaxed on over chilblains. Sometimes a very
small boy would cry over this and his mother to cheer him would remind
him that they were only boots, not breeches. 'Good thing you didn't live
when breeches wer' made o' leather,' she would say, and tell him about
the boy of a previous generation whose leather breeches were so baked up
in drying that it took him an hour to get into them. 'Patience! Have
patience, my son', his mother had exhorted. 'Remember Job.' 'Job!'
scoffed the boy. 'What did he know about patience? He didn't have to
wear no leather breeches.'

Leather breeches had disappeared in the 'eighties and were only
remembered in telling that story. The carter, shepherd, and a few of the
older labourers still wore the traditional smock-frock topped by a round
black felt hat, like those formerly worn by clergymen. But this old
country style of dress was already out of date; most of the men wore
suits of stiff, dark brown corduroy, or, in summer, corduroy trousers
and an unbleached drill jacket known as a 'sloppy'.

Most of the young and those in the prime of life were thick-set,
red-faced men of good medium height and enormous strength who prided
themselves on the weights they could carry and boasted of never having
had 'an e-ache nor a pa-in' in their lives. The elders stooped, had
gnarled and swollen hands and walked badly, for they felt the effects of
a life spent out of doors in all weathers and of the rheumatism which
tried most of them. These elders wore a fringe of grey whisker beneath
the jaw, extending from ear to ear. The younger men sported drooping
walrus moustaches. One or two, in advance of the fashion of their day,
were clean-shaven; but as Sunday was the only shaving day, the effect of
either style became blurred by the end of the week.

They still spoke the dialect, in which the vowels were not only
broadened, but in many words doubled. 'Boy' was 'boo-oy', 'coal',
'coo-al', 'pail', 'pay-ull', and so on. In other words, syllables were
slurred, and words were run together, as 'brenbu'er' for bread and
butter. They had hundreds of proverbs and sayings and their talk was
stiff with simile. Nothing was simply hot, cold, or coloured; it was 'as
hot as hell', 'as cold as ice', 'as green as grass', or 'as yellow as a
guinea'. A botched-up job done with insufficient materials was 'like
Dick's hatband that went half-way round and tucked'; to try to persuade
or encourage one who did not respond was 'putting a poultice on a wooden
leg'. To be nervy was to be 'like a cat on hot bricks'; to be angry,
'mad as a bull'; or any one might be 'poor as a rat', 'sick as a dog',
'hoarse as a crow', 'as ugly as sin', 'full of the milk of human
kindness', or 'stinking with pride'. A temperamental person was said to
be 'one o' them as is either up on the roof or down the well'. The
dialect was heard at its best on the lips of a few middle-aged men, who
had good natural voices, plenty of sense, and a grave, dignified
delivery. Mr. Frederick Grisewood of the B.B.C. gave a perfect rendering
of the old Oxfordshire dialect in some broadcast sketches a few years
ago. Usually, such imitations are maddening to the native born; but he
made the past live again for one listener.

The men's incomes were the same to a penny; their circumstances,
pleasures, and their daily field work were shared in common; but in
themselves they differed; as other men of their day differed, in country
and town. Some were intelligent, others slow at the uptake; some were
kind and helpful, others selfish; some vivacious, others taciturn. If a
stranger had gone there looking for the conventional Hodge, he would not
have found him.

Nor would he have found the dry humour of the Scottish peasant, or the
racy wit and wisdom of Thomas Hardy's Wessex. These men's minds were
cast in a heavier mould and moved more slowly. Yet there were occasional
gleams of quiet fun. One man who had found Edmund crying because his
magpie, let out for her daily exercise, had not returned to her wicker
cage, said: 'Doo'nt 'ee take on like that, my man. You goo an' tell Mrs.
Andrews about it [naming the village gossip] an' you'll hear where your
Maggie's been seen, if 'tis as far away as Stratton.'

Their favourite virtue was endurance. Not to flinch from pain or
hardship was their ideal. A man would say, 'He says, says he, that field
o' oo-ats's got to come in afore night, for there's a rain a-comin'. But
we didn't flinch, not we! Got the last loo-ad under cover by midnight.
A'moost too fagged-out to walk home; but we didn't flinch. We done it!'
Or,'Ole bull he comes for me, wi's head down. But I didn't flinch. I
ripped off a bit o' loose rail an' went for he. 'Twas him as did th'
flinchin'. He! he!' Or a woman would say, 'I set up wi' my poor old
mother six nights runnin'; never had me clothes off. But I didn't
flinch, an' I pulled her through, for she didn't flinch neither.' Or a
young wife would say to the midwife after her first confinement, 'I
didn't flinch, did I? Oh, I do hope I didn't flinch.'

The farm was large, extending far beyond the parish boundaries; being,
in fact, several farms, formerly in separate occupancy, but now thrown
into one and ruled over by the rich old man at the Tudor farmhouse. The
meadows around the farmstead sufficed for the carthorses' grazing and to
support the store cattle and a couple of milking cows which supplied the
farmer's family and those of a few of his immediate neighbours with
butter and milk. A few fields were sown with grass seed for hay, and
sainfoin and rye were grown and cut green for cattle food. The rest was
arable land producing corn and root crops, chiefly wheat.

Around the farmhouse were grouped the farm buildings; stables for the
great stamping shaggy-fetlocked carthorses; barns with doors so wide
and high that a load of hay could be driven through; sheds for the
yellow-and-blue painted farm wagons, granaries with outdoor staircases;
and sheds for storing oilcake, artificial manures, and agricultural
implements. In the rickyard, tall, pointed, elaborately thatched ricks
stood on stone straddles; the dairy indoors, though small, was a model
one; there was a profusion of all that was necessary or desirable for
good farming.

Labour, too, was lavishly used. Boys leaving school were taken on at the
farm as a matter of course, and no time-expired soldier or settler on
marriage was ever refused a job. As the farmer said, he could always do
with an extra hand, for labour was cheap and the land was well tilled up
to the last inch.

When the men and boys from the hamlet reached the farmyard in the
morning, the carter and his assistant had been at work for an hour,
feeding and getting ready the horses. After giving any help required,
the men and boys would harness and lead out their teams and file off to
the field where their day's work was to be done.

If it rained, they donned sacks, split up one side to form a hood and
cloak combined. If it was frosty, they blew upon their nails and thumped
their arms across their chest to warm them. If they felt hungry after
their bread-and-lard breakfast, they would pare a turnip and munch it,
or try a bite or two of the rich, dark brown oilcake provided for the
cattle. Some of the boys would sample the tallow candles belonging to the
stable lanterns; but that was done more out of devilry than from hunger,
for, whoever went short, the mothers took care that their Tom or Dicky
should have 'a bit o' summat to peck at between meals'--half a cold
pancake or the end of yesterday's roly-poly.

With 'Gee!' and 'Wert up!' and 'Who-a-a, now!' the teams would draw out.
The boys were hoisted to the backs of the tall carthorses, and the men,
walking alongside, filled their clay pipes with shag and drew the first
precious puffs of the day, as, with cracking of whips, clopping of
hooves and jingling of harness, the teams went tramping along the muddy
byways.

The field names gave the clue to the fields' history. Near the
farmhouse, 'Moat Piece', 'Fishponds', 'Duffus [i.e. dovehouse] piece',
'Kennels', and 'Warren Piece' spoke of a time before the Tudor house
took the place of another and older establishment. Farther on, 'Lark
Hill', 'Cuckoos' Clump', 'The Osiers', and 'Pond Piece' were named after
natural features, while 'Gibbard's Piece' and 'Blackwell's' probably
commemorated otherwise long-forgotten former occupants. The large new
fields round the hamlet had been cut too late to be named and were known
as 'The Hundred Acres', 'The Sixty Acres', and so on according to their
acreage. One or two of the ancients persisted in calling one of these
'The Heath' and another 'The Racecourse'.

One name was as good as another to most of the men; to them it was just
a name and meant nothing. What mattered to them about the field in which
they happened to be working was whether the road was good or bad which
led from the farm to it; or if it was comparatively sheltered or one of
those bleak open places which the wind hurtled through, driving the rain
through the clothes to the very pores; and was the soil easily workable
or of back-breaking heaviness or so bound together with that 'hemmed'
twitch that a ploughshare could scarcely get through it.

There were usually three or four ploughs to a field, each of them drawn
by a team of three horses, with a boy at the head of the leader and the
ploughman behind at the shafts. All day, up and down they would go,
ribbing the pale stubble with stripes of dark furrows, which, as the day
advanced, would get wider and nearer together, until, at length, the
whole field lay a rich velvety plum-colour.

Each plough had its following of rooks, searching the clods with
side-long glances for worms and grubs. Little hedgerow birds flitted
hither and thither, intent upon getting their tiny share of whatever was
going. Sheep, penned in a neighbouring field, bleated complainingly; and
above the ma-a-ing and cawing and twittering rose the immemorial cries
of the land-worker: 'Wert up!' 'Who-o-o-a!' 'Go it, Poppet!' 'Go it,
Lightfoot!' 'Boo-oy, be you deaf, or be you hard of hearin', dang ye!'

After the plough had done its part, the horse-drawn roller was used to
break down the clods; then the harrow to comb out and leave in neat
piles the weeds and the twitch grass which infested those fields, to be
fired later and fill the air with the light blue haze and the scent that
can haunt for a lifetime. Then seed was sown, crops were thinned out and
hoed and, in time, mown, and the whole process began again.

Machinery was just coming into use on the land. Every autumn appeared a
pair of large traction engines, which, posted one on each side of a
field, drew a plough across and across by means of a cable. These toured
the district under their own steam for hire on the different farms, and
the outfit included a small caravan, known as 'the box', for the two
drivers to live and sleep in. In the 'nineties, when they had decided to
emigrate and wanted to learn all that was possible about farming, both
Laura's brothers, in turn, did a spell with the steam plough, horrifying
the other hamlet people, who looked upon such nomads as social outcasts.
Their ideas had not then been extended to include mechanics as a class
apart and they were lumped as inferiors with sweeps and tinkers and
others whose work made their faces and clothes black. On the other hand,
clerks and salesmen of every grade, whose clean smartness might have
been expected to ensure respect, were looked down upon as
'counter-jumpers'. Their recognized world was made up of landowners,
farmers, publicans, and farm labourers, with the butcher, the baker, the
miller, and the grocer as subsidiaries.

Such machinery as the farmer owned was horse-drawn and was only in
partial use. In some fields a horse-drawn drill would sow the seed in
rows, in others a human sower would walk up and down with a basket
suspended from his neck and fling the seed with both hands broadcast. In
harvest time the mechanical reaper was already a familiar sight, but it
only did a small part of the work; men were still mowing with scythes
and a few women were still reaping with sickles. A thrashing machine on
hire went from farm to farm and its use was more general; but men at
home still thrashed out their allotment crops and their wives' leazings
with a flail and winnowed the corn by pouring from sieve to sieve in the
wind.

The labourers worked hard and well when they considered the occasion
demanded it and kept up a good steady pace at all times. Some were
better workmen than others, of course; but the majority took a pride in
their craft and were fond of explaining to an outsider that field work
was not the fool's job that some townsmen considered it. Things must be
done just so and at the exact moment, they said; there were ins and outs
in good land work which took a man's lifetime to learn. A few of less
admirable build would boast: 'We gets ten bob a week, a' we yarns every
penny of it; but we doesn't yarn no more; we takes hemmed good care o'
that!' But at team work, at least, such 'slack-twisted 'uns' had to keep
in step, and the pace, if slow, was steady.

While the ploughmen were in charge of the teams, other men went singly,
or in twos or threes, to hoe, harrow, or spread manure in other fields;
others cleared ditches and saw to drains, or sawed wood or cut chaff or
did other odd jobs about the farmstead. Two or three highly skilled
middle-aged men were sometimes put upon piecework, hedging and ditching,
sheep-shearing, thatching, or mowing, according to the season. The
carter, shepherd, stockman, and blacksmith had each his own specialized
job. Important men, these, with two shillings a week extra on their
wages and a cottage rent free near the farmstead.

When the ploughmen shouted to each other across the furrows, they did
not call 'Miller' or 'Gaskins' or 'Tuffrey' or even 'Bill', 'Tom', or
'Dick', for they all had nicknames and answered more readily to 'Bishie'
or 'Pumpkin' or 'Boamer'. The origin of many of these names was
forgotten, even by the bearers; but a few were traceable to personal
peculiarities. 'Cockie' or'Cock-eye' had a slight cast; 'Old Stut'
stuttered, while 'Bavour' was so called because when he fancied a snack
between meals he would say 'I must just have my mouthful of bavour',
using the old name for a snack, which was rapidly becoming modernized
into 'lunch' or 'luncheon'.

When a few years later, Edmund worked in the fields for a time, the
carter, having asked him some question and being struck with the aptness
of his reply, exclaimed: 'Why, boo-oy, you be as wise as Solomon, an'
Solomon I shall call 'ee!' and Solomon he was until he left the hamlet.
A younger brother was called 'Fisher'; but the origin of this name was a
mystery. His mother, who was fonder of boys than girls, used to call him
her 'kingfisher'.

Sometimes afield, instead of the friendly shout, a low hissing whistle
would pass between the ploughs. It was a warning-note and meant that
'Old Monday', the farm bailiff, had been sighted. He would come riding
across the furrows on his little long-tailed grey pony, himself so tall
and his steed so dumpy that his feet almost touched the ground, a rosy,
shrivelled, nutcracker-faced old fellow, swishing his ash stick and
shouting, 'Hi, men! Ho, men! What do you reckon you're doing!'

He questioned them sharply and found fault here and there, but was in
the main fairly just in his dealings with them. He had one great fault
in their eyes, however; he was always in a hurry himself and he tried to
hurry them, and that was a thing they detested.

The nickname of 'Old Monday', or 'Old Monday Morning', had been bestowed
upon him years before when some hitch had occurred and he was said to
have cried: 'Ten o'clock Monday morning! To-day's Monday, to-morrow's
Tuesday, next day's Wednesday--half the week gone and nothing done!'
This name, of course, was reserved for his absence; while he was with
them it was 'Yes, Muster Morris' and 'No, Muster Morris', and 'I'll see
what I can do, Muster Morris'. A few of the tamer-spirited even called
him 'sir'. Then, as soon as his back was turned, some wag would point to
it with one hand and slap his own buttocks with the other, saying, but
not too loudly, 'My elbow to you, you ole devil!'

At twelve by the sun, or by signal from the possessor of one of the old
turnip-faced watches which descended from father to son, the teams would
knock off for the dinner-hour. Horses were unyoked, led to the shelter
of a hedge or a rick and given their nosebags and men and boys threw
themselves down on sacks spread out beside them and tin bottles of cold
tea were uncorked and red handkerchiefs of food unwrapped. The lucky
ones had bread and cold bacon, perhaps the top or the bottom of a
cottage loaf, on which the small cube of bacon was placed, with a finger
of bread on top, called the thumb-piece, to keep the meat untouched by
hand and in position for manipulation with a clasp-knife. The
consumption of this food was managed neatly and decently, a small sliver
of bacon and a chunk of bread being cut and conveyed to the mouth in one
movement. The less fortunate ones munched their bread and lard or morsel
of cheese; and the boys with their ends of cold pudding were jokingly
bidden not to get 'that 'ere treacle' in their ears.

The food soon vanished, the crumbs from the red handkerchiefs were
shaken out for the birds, the men lighted their pipes and the boys
wandered off with their catapults down the hedgerows. Often the elders
would sit out their hour of leisure discussing politics, the latest
murder story, or local affairs; but at other times, especially when one
man noted for that kind of thing was present, they would while away the
time in repeating what the women spoke of with shamed voices as 'men's
tales'.

These stories, which were kept strictly to the fields and never repeated
elsewhere, formed a kind of rustic _Decameron_, which seemed to have
been in existence for centuries and increased like a snowball as it
rolled down the generations. The tales were supposed to be extremely
indecent, and elderly men would say after such a sitting, 'I got up an'
went over to th' osses, for I couldn't stand no more on't. The brimstone
fair come out o' their mouths as they put their rascally heads
together.' What they were really like only the men knew; but probably
they were coarse rather than filthy. Judging by a few stray specimens
which leaked through the channel of eavesdropping juniors, they
consisted chiefly of 'he said' and 'she said', together with a lavish
enumeration of those parts of the human body then known as 'the
unmentionables'.

Songs and snatches on the same lines were bawled at the plough-tail and
under hedges and never heard elsewhere. Some of these ribald rhymes were
so neatly turned that those who have studied the subject have attributed
their authorship to some graceless son of the Rectory or Hall. It may be
that some of these young scamps had a hand in them, but it is just as
likely that they sprung direct from the soil, for, in those days of
general churchgoing, the men's minds were well stored with hymns and
psalms and some of them were very good at parodying them.

There was 'The Parish Clerk's Daughter', for instance. This damsel was
sent one Christmas morning to the church to inform her father that the
Christmas present of beef had arrived after he left home. When she
reached the church the service had begun and the congregation, led by
her father, was half-way through the psalms. Nothing daunted, she sidled
up to her father and intoned:

'Feyther, the me-a-at's come, an' what's me mother to d-o-o-o w'it?'

And the answer came pat: 'Tell her to roast the thick an' boil th' thin,
an' me-ak a pudden o' th' su-u-u-u-et.' But such simple entertainment
did not suit the man already mentioned. He would drag out the filthiest
of the stock rhymes, then go on to improvise, dragging in the names of
honest lovers and making a mock of fathers of first children. Though
nine out of ten of his listeners disapproved and felt thoroughly
uncomfortable, they did nothing to check him beyond a mild 'Look out, or
them boo-oys'll hear 'ee!' or 'Careful! some 'ooman may be comin' along
th' roo-ad.'

But the lewd scandalizer did not always have everything his own way.
There came a day when a young ex-soldier, home from his five years'
service in India, sat next to him. He sat through one or two such
extemporized songs, then, eyeing the singer, said shortly, 'You'd better
go and wash out your dirty mouth.'

The answer was a bawled stanza in which the objector's name figured. At
that the ex-soldier sprung to his feet, seized the singer by the scruff
of his neck, dragged him to the ground and, after a scuffle, forced
earth and small stones between his teeth. 'There, that's a lot cleaner!'
he said, administering a final kick on the buttocks as the fellow slunk,
coughing and spitting, behind the hedge.

A few women still did field work, not with the men, or even in the same
field as a rule, but at their own special tasks, weeding and hoeing,
picking up stones, and topping and tailing turnips and mangel; or, in
wet weather, mending sacks in a barn. Formerly, it was said, there had
been a large gang of field women, lawless, slatternly creatures, some of
whom had thought nothing of having four or five children out of wedlock.
Their day was over; but the reputation they had left behind them had
given most country-women a distaste for 'goin' afield'. In the 'eighties
about half a dozen of the hamlet women did field work, most of them
being respectable middle-aged women who, having got their families off
hand, had spare time, a liking for an open-air life, and a longing for a
few shillings a week they could call their own.

Their hours, arranged that they might do their housework before they
left home in the morning and cook their husband's meal after they
returned, were from ten to four, with an hour off for dinner. Their wage
was four shillings a week. They worked in sunbonnets, hobnailed boots
and men's coats, with coarse aprons of sacking enveloping the lower part
of their bodies. One, a Mrs. Spicer, was a pioneer in the wearing of
trousers; she sported a pair of her husband's corduroys. The others
compromised with ends of old trouser legs worn as gaiters. Strong,
healthy, weather-beaten, hard as nails, they worked through all but the
very worst weathers and declared they would go 'stark, staring mad' if
they had to be shut up in a house all day.

To a passer-by, seeing them bent over their work in a row, they might
have appeared as alike as peas in a pod. They were not. There was Lily,
the only unmarried one, big and strong and clumsy as a carthorse and
dark as a gipsy, her skin ingrained with field mould and the smell of
the earth about her, even indoors. Years before she had been betrayed by
a man and had sworn she would never marry until she had brought up the
boy she had had by him--a quite superfluous oath, her neighbours
thought, for she was one of the very few really ugly people in the
world.

The 'eighties found her a woman of fifty, a creature of earth, earthy,
whose life was a round of working, eating, and sleeping. She lived alone
in a tiny cottage, in which, as she boasted, she could get her meals,
eat them, and put the things away without leaving her seat by the
hearth. She could read a little, but had forgotten how to write, and
Laura's mother wrote her letters to her soldier son in India.

Then there was Mrs. Spicer, the wearer of the trousers, a rough-tongued
old body, but independent and upright, who kept her home spotless and
boasted that she owed no man a penny and wanted nothing from anybody.
Her gentle, hen-pecked, little husband adored her.

Very different from either was the comfortable, pink-cheeked Mrs. Braby,
who always carried an apple or a paper of peppermints in her pocket, in
case she should meet a child she favoured. In her spare time she was a
great reader of novelettes and out of her four shillings subscribed to
_Bow Bells_ and the _Family Herald_. Once when Laura, coming home from
school, happened to overtake her, she enlivened the rest of the journey
with the synopsis of a serial she was reading, called _His Ice Queen_,
telling her how the heroine, rich, lovely, and icily virtuous in her
white velvet and swansdown, almost broke the heart of the hero by her
cool aloofness; then, suddenly melting, threw herself into his arms.
But, after all, the plot could not have been quite as simple as that,
for there was a villainous colonel in it. 'Oh! I do just about hate that
colonel!' Mrs. Braby ejaculated at intervals. She pronounced it
'col-on-el', as spelt, which so worked upon Laura that at last she
ventured, 'But don't they call that word "colonel", Mrs. Braby?' Which
led to a spelling lesson: 'Col-on-el; that's as plain as the nose on
your face. Whatever be you a-thinkin' of, child? They don't seem to
teach you much at school these days!' She was distinctly offended and
did not offer Laura a peppermint for weeks, which served her right, for
she should not have tried to correct her elders.

One man worked with the field women or in the same field. He was a poor,
weedy creature, getting old and not very strong and they had put him
upon half-pay. He was known as 'Algy' and was not a native, but had
appeared there suddenly, years before, out of a past he never mentioned.
He was tall and thin and stooping, with watery blue eyes and long ginger
side-whiskers of the kind then known as 'weepers'. Sometimes, when he
straightened his back, the last vestiges of a military bearing might be
detected, and there were other grounds for supposing he had at some time
been in the Army. When tipsy, or nearly so, he would begin, 'When I was
in the Grenadier Guards . . .' a sentence that always tailed off into
silence. Although his voice broke on the high notes and often
deteriorated into a squeak, it still bore the same vague resemblance to
that of a man of culture as his bearing did to that of a soldier. Then,
instead of swearing with 'd----s' and 'b----s' as the other men did, he
would, when surprised, burst into a 'Bai Jove!' which amused everybody,
but threw little light on his mystery.

Twenty years before, when his present wife had been a widow of a few
weeks' standing, he had knocked at her door during a thunderstorm and
asked for a night's lodging, and had been there ever since, never
receiving a letter or speaking of his past, even to his wife. It was
said that during his first days at field work his hands had blistered
and bled from softness. There must have been great curiosity in the
hamlet about him at first; but it had long died down and by the
'eighties he was accepted as 'a poor, slack-twisted crittur', useful for
cracking jokes on. He kept his own counsel and worked contentedly to the
best of his power. The only thing that disturbed him was the rare visit
of the German band. As soon as he heard the brass instruments strike up
and the 'pom, pom' of the drum, he would stick his fingers in his ears
and run, across fields, anywhere, and not be seen again that day.

On Friday evening, when work was done, the men trooped up to the
farmhouse for their wages. These were handed out of a window to them by
the farmer himself and acknowledged by a rustic scraping of feet and
pulling of forelocks. The farmer had grown too old and too stout to ride
horseback, and, although he still made the circuit of his land in his
high dogcart every day, he had to keep to the roads, and pay-day was the
only time he saw many of his men. Then, if there was cause for
complaint, was the time they heard of it. 'You, there! What were you up
to in Causey Spinney last Monday, when you were supposed to be clearing
the runnels?' was a type of complaint that could always be countered by
pleading. 'Call o' Nature, please, sir.' Less frequent and harder to
answer was: 'I hear you've not been too smart about your work lately,
Stimson. 'Twon't do, you know, 'twon't do! You've got to earn your money
if you're going to stay here.' But, just as often, it would be: 'There,
Boamer, there you are, my lad, a bright and shining golden
half-sovereign for you. Take care you don't go spending it all at once!'
or an inquiry about some wife in childbed or one of the ancients'
rheumatism. He could afford to be jolly and affable: he paid poor old
Monday Morning to do his dirty work for him.

Apart from that, he was not a bad-hearted man and had no idea he was
sweating his labourers. Did they not get the full standard wage, with no
deduction for standing by in bad weather? How they managed to live and
keep their families on such a sum was their own affair. After all, they
did not need much, they were not used to luxuries. He liked a cut off a
juicy sirloin and a glass of good port himself; but bacon and beans were
better to work on. 'Hard liver, hard worker' was a sound old country
maxim, and the labouring man did well to follow it. Besides, was there
not at least one good blowout for everybody once a year at his
harvest-home dinner, and the joint of beef at Christmas, when he killed
a beast and distributed the meat, and soup and milk-puddings for anybody
who was ill; they had only to ask for and fetch them.

He never interfered with his men as long as they did their work well.
Not he! He was a staunch Conservative himself, a true blue, and they
knew his colour when they went to vote; but he never tried to influence
them at election times and never inquired afterwards which way they had
voted. Some masters did it, he knew, but it was a dirty, low-down trick,
in his opinion. As to getting them to go to church--that was the
parson's job.

Although they hoodwinked him whenever possible and referred to him
behind his back as 'God a'mighty', the farmer was liked by his men. 'Not
a bad ole sort,' they said; 'an' does his bit by the land.' All their
rancour was reserved for the bailiff.

There is something exhilarating about pay-day, even when the pay is poor
and already mortgaged for necessities. With that morsel of gold in their
pockets, the men stepped out more briskly and their voices were cheerier
than ordinary. When they reached home they handed the half-sovereign
straight over to their wives, who gave them back a shilling for the next
week's pocket-money. That was the custom of the countryside. The men
worked for the money and the women had the spending of it. The men had
the best of the bargain. They earned their half-sovereign by hard toil,
it is true, but in the open air, at work they liked and took an interest
in, and in congenial company. The women, kept close at home, with
cooking, cleaning, washing, and mending to do, plus their constant
pregnancies and a tribe of children to look after, had also the worry of
ways and means on an insufficient income.

Many husbands boasted that they never asked their wives what they did
with the money. As long as there was food enough, clothes to cover
everybody, and a roof over their heads, they were satisfied, they said,
and they seemed to make a virtue of this and think what generous,
trusting, fine-hearted fellows they were. If a wife got in debt or
complained, she was told: 'You must larn to cut your coat accordin' to
your cloth, my gal.' The coats not only needed expert cutting, but
should have been made of elastic.

On light evenings, after their tea-supper, the men worked for an hour or
two in their gardens or on the allotments. They were first-class
gardeners and it was their pride to have the earliest and best of the
different kinds of vegetables. They were helped in this by good soil and
plenty of manure from their pigsties; but good tilling also played its
part. They considered keeping the soil constantly stirred about the
roots of growing things the secret of success and used the Dutch hoe a
good deal for this purpose. The process was called 'tickling'. 'Tickle
up old Mother Earth and make her bear!' they would shout to each other
across the plots, or salute a busy neighbour in passing with: 'Just
tickling her up a bit, Jack?'

The energy they brought to their gardening after a hard day's work in
the fields was marvellous. They grudged no effort and seemed never to
tire. Often, on moonlight nights in spring, the solitary fork of some
one who had not been able to tear himself away would be heard and the
scent of his twitch fire smoke would float in at the windows. It was
pleasant, too, in summer twilight, perhaps in hot weather when water was
scarce, to hear the _swish_ of water on parched earth in a garden--water
which had been fetched from the brook a quarter of a mile distant. 'It's
no good stintin' th' land,' they would say. 'If you wants anything out
you've got to put summat in, if 'tis only elbow-grease.'

The allotment plots were divided into two, and one half planted with
potatoes and the other half with wheat or barley. The garden was
reserved for green vegetables, currant and gooseberry bushes, and a few
old-fashioned flowers. Proud as they were of their celery, peas and
beans, cauliflowers and marrows, and fine as were the specimens they
could show of these, their potatoes were their special care, for they
had to grow enough to last the year round. They grew all the
old-fashioned varieties--ashleaf kidney, early rose, American rose,
magnum bonum, and the huge misshaped white elephant. Everybody knew the
elephant was an unsatisfactory potato, that it was awkward to handle
when paring and that it boiled down to a white pulp in cooking; but it
produced tubers of such astonishing size that none of the men could
resist the temptation to plant it. Every year specimens were taken to
the inn to be weighed on the only pair of scales in the hamlet, then
handed round for guesses to be made of the weight. As the men said, when
a patch of elephants was dug up and spread out, 'You'd got summat to put
in your eye and look at.'

Very little money was spent on seed; there was little to spend, and they
depended mainly upon the seed saved from the previous year. Sometimes,
to secure the advantage of fresh soil, they would exchange a bag of seed
potatoes with friends living at a distance, and sometimes a gardener at
one of the big houses around would give one of them a few tubers of a
new variety. These would be carefully planted and tended, and, when the
crop was dug up, specimens would be presented to neighbours.

Most of the men sang or whistled as they dug or hoed. There was a good
deal of outdoor singing in those days. Workmen sang at their jobs; men
with horses and carts sang on the road; the baker, the miller's man, and
the fish-hawker sang as they went from door to door; even the doctor and
parson on their rounds hummed a tune between their teeth. People were
poorer and had not the comforts, amusements, or knowledge we have
to-day; but they were happier. Which seems to suggest that happiness
depends more upon the state of mind--and body, perhaps--than upon
circumstances and events.



                                   IV

                      _At the 'Wagon and Horses'_

Fordlow might boast of its church, its school, its annual concert, and
its quarterly penny reading, but the hamlet did not envy it these
amenities, for it had its own social centre, warmer, more human, and
altogether preferable in the taproom of the 'Wagon and Horses'.

There the adult male population gathered every evening, to sip its
half-pints, drop by drop, to make them last, and to discuss local
events, wrangle over politics or farming methods, or to sing a few songs
'to oblige'.

It was an innocent gathering. None of them got drunk; they had not money
enough, even with beer, and good beer, at twopence a pint. Yet the
parson preached from the pulpit against it, going so far on one occasion
as to call it a den of iniquity. ''Tis a great pity he can't come an'
see what it's like for his own self,' said one of the older men on the
way home from church. 'Pity he can't mind his own business,' retorted a
younger one. While one of the ancients put in pacifically, 'Well, 'tis
his business, come to think on't. The man's paid to preach, an' he's got
to find summat to preach against, stands to reason.'

Only about half a dozen men held aloof from the circle and those were
either known to 'have religion', or suspected of being 'close wi' their
ha'pence'.

The others went as a matter of course, appropriating their own special
seats on settle or bench. It was as much their home as their own
cottages, and far more homelike than many of them, with its roaring
fire, red window curtains, and well-scoured pewter.

To spend their evenings there was, indeed, as the men argued, a saving,
for, with no man in the house, the fire at home could be let die down
and the rest of the family could go to bed when the room got cold. So
the men's spending money was fixed at a shilling a week, sevenpence for
the nightly half-pint and the balance for other expenses. An ounce of
tobacco, Nigger Head brand, was bought for them by their wives with the
groceries.

It was exclusively a men's gathering. Their wives never accompanied
them; though sometimes a woman who had got her family off hand, and so
had a few halfpence to spend on herself, would knock at the back door
with a bottle or jug and perhaps linger a little, herself unseen, to
listen to what was going on within. Children also knocked at the back
door to buy candles or treacle or cheese, for the innkeeper ran a small
shop at the back of his premises, and the children, too, liked to hear
what was going on. Indoors, the innkeeper's children would steal out of
bed and sit on the stairs in their nightgowns. The stairs went up from
the taproom, with only the back of the settle between, and it gave the
men a bit of a shock one night when what looked at first sight like a
big white bird came flopping down among them. It was little Florrie, who
had gone to sleep on the stairs and fallen. They nursed her on their
knees, held her feet to the fire, and soon dried her tears, for she was
not hurt, only frightened.

The children heard no bad language beyond an occasional 'b----' or
'd----', for their mother was greatly respected and the merest hint of
anything stronger was hushed by nudges and whispers of, 'Don't forget
Landlady', or 'Mind! 'Ooman present'. Nor were the smutty songs and
stories of the fields ever repeated there; they were kept for their own
time and place.

Politics was a favourite topic, for, under the recently extended
franchise, every householder was a voter, and they took their new
responsibility seriously. A mild Liberalism prevailed, a Liberalism that
would be regarded as hide-bound Toryism now, but was daring enough in
those days. One man who had been to work in Northampton proclaimed
himself a Radical; but he was cancelled out by the landlord, who called
himself a 'true blue'. With the collaboration of this Left and Right,
questions of the moment were thrashed out and settled to the
satisfaction of the majority.

'Three Acres and a Cow', 'The Secret Ballot', 'The Parnell Commission
and Crime', 'Disestablishment of the Church', were catchwords that flew
about freely. Sometimes a speech by Gladstone, or some other leader
would be read aloud from a newspaper and punctuated by the fervent
'Hear! Hear' of the company. Or Sam, the man with advanced opinions,
would relate with reverent pride the story of his meeting and shaking
hands with Joseph Arch, the farm-worker's champion. 'Joseph Arch!' he
would cry. 'Joseph Arch is the man for the farm labourer!' and knock on
the table and wave aloft his pewter mug, very carefully, for every drop
was precious.

Then the landlord, standing back to the fireplace with legs astride,
would say with the authority of one in his own house, 'It's no good you
chaps think'n you're goin' against the gentry. They've got the land and
they've got the money, _an_' they'll keep it. Where'd _you_ be without
them to give you work an' pay your wages, I'd like to know?' and this,
as yet, unanswerable question would cast a chill over the company until
some one conjured it away with the name of Gladstone. Gladstone! The
Grand Old Man! The People's William! Their faith in his power was
touching, and all voices would join in singing:


                    God bless the people's William,
                     Long may he lead the van
                    Of Liberty and Freedom,
                     God bless the Grand Old Man.


But the children, listening, without and within, liked better the
evenings of tale-telling; when, with curdling blood and creeping spine,
they would hear about the turnpike ghost, which, only a mile away from
the spot where they stood, had been seen in the form of a lighted
lantern, bobbing up and down in the path of a solitary wayfarer, the
bearer, if any, invisible. And the man in a neighbouring village who, on
his six-mile walk in the dark to fetch medicine for his sick wife, met a
huge black dog with eyes of fire--the devil, evidently. Or perhaps the
talk would turn to the old sheep-stealing days and the ghost which was
said still to haunt the spot where the gibbet had stood; or the lady
dressed in white and riding a white horse, but minus her head, who,
every night as the clock struck twelve, rode over a bridge on the way to
the market town.

One cold winter night, as this tale was being told, the doctor, an old
man of eighty, who still attended the sick in the villages for miles
around, stopped his dogcart at the inn gate and came in for hot brandy
and water.

'You, sir, now,' said one of the men. 'You've been over Lady Bridge at
midnight many's the time, I'll warrant. Can you say as you've ever seen
anything?'

The doctor shook his head. 'No,' he replied, 'I can't say that I have.
But,' and he paused to weigh his words, 'well, it's rather a curious
thing. During the fifty years I've been amongst you I've had many
horses, as you know, and not one of them have I got over that bridge at
night without urging. Whether they can see more than we can see, of
course, I don't know; but there it is for what it is worth. Good night,
men.'

In addition to these public and well-known ghost stories, there were
family tales of death warnings, or of a father, mother, or wife who had
appeared after death to warn, counsel, or accuse. But it was all
entertainment; nobody really believed in ghosts, though few would have
chosen to go at night to haunted spots, and it all ended in: 'Well,
well, if the livin' don't hurt us, the dead can't. The good wouldn't
want to come back, an' the bad wouldn't be let to.'

The newspapers furnished other tales of dread. Jack the Ripper was
stalking the streets of East London by night, and one poor wretched
woman after another was found murdered and butchered. These crimes were
discussed for hours together in the hamlet and everybody had some theory
as to the identity and motive of the elusive murderer. To the children
the name was indeed one of dread and the cause of much anguished
sleeplessness. Father might be hammering away in the shed and Mother
quietly busy with her sewing downstairs; but the Ripper! the Ripper! he
might be nearer still, for he might have crept in during the day and be
hiding in the cupboard on the landing!

One curious tale had to do with natural phenomena. Some years before,
the people in the hamlet had seen a regiment of soldiers marching in the
sky, all complete with drum and fife band. Upon inquiry it had been
found that such a regiment had been passing at the time along a road
near Bicester, six miles away, and it was concluded that the apparition
in the sky must have been a freak reflection.

Some of the tales related practical jokes, often cruel ones, for even in
the 'eighties the sense of humour there was not over-refined, and it
had, in past times, been cruder still. It was still the practice there
to annoy certain people by shouting after them a nickname or a
catchword, and one old and very harmless woman was known as 'Thick and
thin'. One winter night, years before, when the snowdrifts were
knee-high and it was still snowing, a party of thoughtless youths had
knocked at her cottage door and got her and her husband out of bed by
telling them that their daughter, married and living three miles away,
was brought to bed and had sent for her mother.

The old couple huddled on all the clothes they possessed, lighted their
lantern, and set out, the practical jokers shadowing them. They
struggled through the snowdrifts for some distance, but the road was all
but impassable, and the old man was for turning back. Not so the mother.
Determined to reach her child in her hour of need, she struggled onward,
encouraging her husband the while by coaxing, 'Come on John. Through
thick and thin!' and 'Thick and thin' she was ever after.

But tastes were changing, if slowly, by the 'eighties, and such a story,
though it might be still current, no longer produced the loud guffaws it
had formerly done. A few sniggers, perhaps, then silence; or 'I calls it
a shame, sarvin' poor old people like that. Now let's have a song to
te-ake the taste of it out of our mouths.'

All times are times of transition; but the eighteen-eighties were so in
a special sense, for the world was at the beginning of a new era, the
era of machinery and scientific discovery. Values and conditions of life
were changing everywhere. Even to simple country people the change was
apparent. The railways had brought distant parts of the country nearer;
newspapers were coming into every home; machinery was superseding hand
labour, even on the farms to some extent; food bought at shops, much of
it from distant countries, was replacing the home-made and home-grown.
Horizons were widening; a stranger from a village five miles away was no
longer looked upon as 'a furriner'.

But, side by side with these changes, the old country civilization
lingered. Traditions and customs which had lasted for centuries did not
die out in a moment. State-educated children still played the old
country rhyme games; women still went leazing, although the field had
been cut by the mechanical reaper; and men and boys still sang the old
country ballads and songs, as well as the latest music-hall successes.
So, when a few songs were called for at the 'Wagon and Horses', the
programme was apt to be a curious mixture of old and new.

While the talking was going on, the few younger men, 'boy-chaps', as
they were called until they were married, would not have taken a great
part in it. Had they shown any inclination to do so, they would have
been checked, for the age of youthful dominance was still to come; and,
as the women used to say, 'The old cocks don't like it when the young
cocks begin to crow'. But, when singing began they came into their own,
for they represented the novel.

They usually had first innings with such songs of the day as had
percolated so far. 'Over the Garden Wall', with its many parodies,
'Tommy, Make Room for Your Uncle', 'Two Lovely Black Eyes', and other
'comic' or 'sentimental' songs of the moment. The most popular of these
would have arrived complete with tune from the outer world; others,
culled from the penny song-book they most of them carried, would have to
have a tune fitted to them by the singer. They had good lusty voices and
bawled them out with spirit. There were no crooners in those days.

The men of middle age inclined more to long and usually mournful stories
in verse, of thwarted lovers, children buried in snowdrifts, dead
maidens, and motherless homes. Sometimes they would vary these with
songs of a high moral tone, such as:


        Waste not, want not,
         Some maxim I would teach;
        Let your watchword be never despair
         And practise what you preach.
        Do not let your chances like the sunbeams pass you by,
        For you'll never miss the water till the well runs dry.


But this dolorous singing was not allowed to continue long. 'Now, then,
all together, boys,' some one would shout, and the company would revert
to old favourites. Of these, one was 'The Barleymow'. Trolled out in
chorus, the first verse went:


             Oh, when we drink out of our noggins, my boys.
               We'll drink to the barleymow.
             We'll drink to the barleymow, my boys,
               We'll drink to the barleymow.
             So knock your pint on the settle's back;
               Fill again, in again, Hannah Brown,
             We'll drink to the barleymow, my boys,
               We'll drink now the barley's mown.


So they went on, increasing the measure in each stanza, from noggins to
half-pints, pints, quarts, gallons, barrels, hogsheads, brooks, ponds,
rivers, seas, and oceans. That song could be made to last a whole
evening, or it could be dropped as soon as they got tired of it.

Another favourite for singing in chorus was 'King Arthur', which was
also a favourite for outdoor singing and was often heard to the
accompaniment of the jingling of harness and cracking of whips as the
teams went afield. It was also sung by solitary wayfarers to keep up
their spirits on dark nights. It ran:


                 When King Arthur first did reign,
                   He ru-led like a king;
                 He bought three sacks of barley meal
                   To make a plum pud-ding.

                 The pudding it was made
                   And duly stuffed with plums,
                 And lumps of suet put in it
                   As big as my two thumbs.

                 The king and queen sat down to it
                   And all the lords beside:
                 And what they couldn't eat that night
                   The queen next morning fried.


Every time Laura heard this sung she saw the queen, a gold crown on her
head, her train over her arm, and her sleeves rolled up, holding the
frying-pan over the fire. Of course, a queen _would_ have fried pudding
for breakfast: ordinary common people seldom had any left over to fry.

Then Lukey, the only bachelor of mature age in the hamlet, would oblige
with:


                Me feyther's a hedger and ditcher,
                  An' me mother does nothing but spin,
                But I'm a pretty young girl and
                  The money comes slowly in.
                    Oh, dear! what can the matter be?
                      Oh, dear! what shall I do?
                    For there's nobody coming to marry,
                      And there's nobody coming to woo.

                They say I shall die an old maid,
                  Oh, dear! how shocking the thought!
                For them all my beauty will fade,
                  And I'm sure it won't be my own fault.
                    Oh, dear! what can the matter be?
                      Oh, dear! what shall I do?
                    There's nobody coming to marry,
                      And there's nobody coming to woo!


This was given point by Luke's own unmarried state. He sang it as a
comic song and his rendering certainly made it one. Perhaps, then, for a
change, poor old Algy, the mystery man, would be asked for a song and he
would sing in a cracked falsetto, which seemed to call for the tinkling
notes of a piano as accompaniment:


             Have you ever been on the Penin-su-lah?
             If not, I advise you to stay where you haw,
               For should you adore a
               Sweet Spanish senor-ah,
             She may prove what some might call sin-gu-lah.


Then there were snatches that any one might break out with at any time
when no one else happened to be singing:


                   I wish, I wish, 'twer all in vain,
                   I wish I were a maid again!
                   A maid again I ne'er shall be
                   Till oranges grow on an apple tree

or:

  Now all you young chaps, take a warning by me,
  And do not build your nest at the top of any tree,
  For the green leaves they will wither and the flowers they will decay,
  And the beauty of that fair maid will soon pass away.


One comparatively recent settler, who had only lived at the hamlet about
a quarter of a century, had composed a snatch for himself, to sing when
he felt homesick. It ran:


             Where be Dedington boo-oys, where be they now?
             They be at Dedington at the 'Plough';
             If they be-ent, they be at home,
             And this is the 'Wagon and Horses'.


But, always, sooner or later, came the cry, 'Let's give the old 'uns a
turn. Here you, Master Price, what about "It was my father's custom and
always shall be mine", or "Lord Lovell stood", or summat of that sort'
as has stood the testing o' time?' and Master Price would rise from his
corner of the settle, using the stick he called his 'third leg' to
support his bent figure as he sang:


         Lord Lovell stood at his castle gate,
           Calming his milk-white steed,
         When up came Lady Nancy Bell
           To wish her lover God-speed.

         'And where are you going, Lord Lovell?' she said.
          'And where are you going?' said she.
         'Oh, I'm going away from my Nancy Bell,
           Away to a far country-tre-tre;
           Away to a far coun-tre.'

         'And when will you come back, Lord Lovell?' she said,
           'When will you come back?' said she.
         'Oh, I will come back in a year and a day,
           Back to my Lady Nancy-ce-ce-ce.
           Back to my Lady Nan-cee.'


But Lord Lovell was gone more than his year and a day, much longer, and
when he did at last return, the church bells were tolling:


         'And who is it dead?' Lord Lovell, he said.
           'And who is it dead,' said he.
         And some said, 'Lady Nancy Bell,'
           And some said, 'Lady Nancy-ce-ce-ce,
           And some said,'Lady Nan-cee.'


                 .    .    .    .    .    .    .    .    .


           Lady Nancy died as it were to-day;
             And Lord Lovell, he died to-morrow,
           And she, she died for pure, pure grief,
             And he, he died for sorrow.

           And they buried her in the chancel high,
             And they buried him in the choir;
           And out of her grave sprung a red, red rose,
             And out of his sprung a briar.

           And they grew till they grew to the church roof,
             And then they couldn't grow any higher;
           So they twined themselves in a true lovers' knot,
             For all lovers true to admire.


After that they would all look thoughtfully into their mugs. Partly
because the old song had saddened them, and partly because by that time
the beer was getting low and the one half-pint had to be made to last
until closing time. Then some would say, 'What's old Master Tuffrey up
to, over in his corner there? Ain't heard him strike up to-night', and
there would be calls for old David's 'Outlandish Knight'; not because
they wanted particularly to hear it--indeed, they had heard it so often
they all knew it by heart--but because, as they said, 'Poor old feller
be eighty-three. Let 'un sing while he can.'

So David would have his turn. He only knew the one ballad, and that, he
said, his grandfather had sung, and had said that he had heard his own
grandfather sing it. Probably a long chain of grandfathers had sung it;
but David was fated to be the last of them. It was out of date, even
then, and only tolerated on account of his age. It ran:


          An outlandish knight, all from the north lands,
            A-wooing came to me,
          He said he would take me to the north lands
            And there he would marry me.

          'Go, fetch me some of your father's gold
            And some of your mother's fee,
          And two of the best nags out of the stable
            Where there stand thirty and three.'

          She fetched him some of her father's gold
            And some of her mother's fee,
          And two of the best nags out of the stable
            Where there stood thirty and three.

          And then she mounted her milk-white steed
            And he the dapple grey,
          And they rode until they came to the sea-shore,
            Three hours before it was day.

          'Get off, get off thy milk-white steed
            And deliver it unto me,
          For six pretty maids I have drowned here
            And thou the seventh shall be.

          'Take off, take off, thy silken gown,
            And deliver it unto me,
          For I think it is too rich and too good
            To rot in the salt sea.'

          'If I must take off my silken gown,
            Pray turn thy back to me,
          For I think it's not fitting a ruffian like you
            A naked woman should see.'

          He turned his back towards her
            To view the leaves so green,
          And she took hold of his middle so small
            And tumbled him into the stream.

          And he sank high and he sank low
            Until he came to the side.
          'Take hold of my hand, my pretty ladye,
            And I will make you my bride.'

          'Lie there, lie there, you false-hearted man,
            Lie there instead of me,
          For six pretty maids hast thou drowned here
            And the seventh hath drowned thee.'

          So then she mounted the milk-white steed
            And led the dapple grey,
          And she rode till she came to her own father's door,
            An hour before it was day.


As this last song was piped out in the aged voice, women at their
cottage doors on summer evenings would say: 'They'll soon be out now.
Poor old Dave's just singing his "Outlandish Knight".'

Songs and singers all have gone, and in their places the wireless blares
out variety and swing music, or informs the company in cultured tones of
what is happening in China or Spain. Children no longer listen outside.
There are very few who could listen, for the thirty or forty which
throve there in those days have dwindled to about half a dozen, and
these, happily, have books, wireless, and a good fire in their own
homes. But, to one of an older generation, it seems that a faint echo of
those songs must still linger round the inn doorway. The singers were
rude and untaught and poor beyond modern imagining; but they deserve to
be remembered, for they knew the now lost secret of being happy on
little.



                                   V

                              _Survivals_

There were three distinct types of home in the hamlet. Those of the old
couples in comfortable circumstances, those of the married people with
growing families, and the few new homes which had recently been
established. The old people who were not in comfortable circumstances
had no homes at all worth mentioning, for, as soon as they got past
work, they had either to go to the workhouse or find accommodation in
the already overcrowded cottages of their children. A father or a mother
could usually be squeezed in, but there was never room for both, so one
child would take one parent and another the other, and even then, as
they used to say, there was always the in-law to be dealt with. It was a
common thing to hear ageing people say that they hoped God would be
pleased to take them before they got past work and became a trouble to
anybody.

But the homes of the more fortunate aged were the most comfortable in
the hamlet, and one of the most attractive of these was known as 'Old
Sally's'. Never as 'Old Dick's', although Sally's husband, Dick, might
have been seen at any hour of the day, digging and hoeing and watering
and planting his garden, as much a part of the landscape as his own row
of beehives.

He was a little, dry, withered old man, who always wore his smock-frock
rolled up round his waist and the trousers on his thin legs gartered
with buckled straps. Sally was tall and broad, not fat, but massive, and
her large, beamingly good-natured face, with its well-defined moustache
and tight, coal-black curls bobbing over each ear, was framed in a white
cap frill; for Sally, though still strong and active, was over eighty,
and had remained faithful to the fashions of her youth.

She was the dominating partner. If Dick was called upon to decide any
question whatever, he would edge nervously aside and say, 'I'll just
step indoors and see what Sally thinks about it,' or 'All depends upon
what Sally says.' The house was hers and she carried the purse; but Dick
was a willing subject and enjoyed her dominion over him. It saved him a
lot of thinking, and left him free to give all his time and attention to
the growing things in his garden.

Old Sally's was a long, low, thatched cottage with diamond-paned windows
winking under the eaves and a rustic porch smothered in honeysuckle.
Excepting the inn, it was the largest house in the hamlet, and of the
two downstair rooms one was used as a kind of kitchen-storeroom, with
pots and pans and a big red crockery water vessel at one end, and
potatoes in sacks and peas and beans spread out to dry at the other. The
apple crop was stored on racks suspended beneath the ceiling and bunches
of herbs dangled below. In one corner stood the big brewing copper in
which Sally still brewed with good malt and hops once a quarter. The
scent of the last brewing hung over the place till the next and mingled
with apple and onion and dried thyme and sage smells, with a dash of
soapsuds thrown in, to compound the aroma which remained in the
children's memories for life and caused a whiff of any two of the
component parts in any part of the world to be recognized with an
appreciative sniff and a mental ejaculation of 'Old Sally's!'

The inner room--'the house', as it was called--was a perfect snuggery,
with walls two feet thick and outside shutters to close at night and a
padding of rag rugs, red curtains and feather cushions within. There was
a good oak, gate-legged table, a dresser with pewter and willow-pattern
plates, and a grandfather's clock that not only told the time, but the
day of the week as well. It had even once told the changes of the moon;
but the works belonging to that part had stopped and only the fat, full
face, painted with eyes, nose and mouth, looked out from the square
where the four quarters should have rotated. The clock portion kept such
good time that half the hamlet set its own clocks by it. The other half
preferred to follow the hooter at the brewery in the market town, which
could be heard when the wind was in the right quarter. So there were two
times in the hamlet and people would say when asking the hour, 'Is that
hooter time, or Old Sally's?'

The garden was a large one, tailing off at the bottom into a little
field where Dick grew his corn crop. Nearer the cottage were fruit
trees, then the yew hedge, close and solid as a wall, which sheltered
the beehives and enclosed the flower garden. Sally had such flowers, and
so many of them, and nearly all of them sweet-scented! Wallflowers and
tulips, lavender and sweet william, and pinks and old-world roses with
enchanting names--Seven Sisters, Maiden's Blush, moss rose, monthly
rose, cabbage rose, blood rose, and, most thrilling of all to the
children, a big bush of the York and Lancaster rose, in the blooms of
which the rival roses mingled in a pied white and red. It seemed as
though all the roses in Lark Rise had gathered together in that one
garden. Most of the gardens had only one poor starveling bush or none;
but, then, nobody else had so much of anything as Sally.

A continual subject for speculation was as to how Dick and Sally managed
to live so comfortably with no visible means of support beyond their
garden and beehives and the few shillings their two soldier sons might
be supposed to send them, and Sally in her black silk on Sundays and
Dick never without a few ha'pence for garden seeds or to fill his
tobacco pouch. 'Wish they'd tell me how 'tis done,' somebody would
grumble. 'I could do wi' a leaf out o' their book.'

But Dick and Sally did not talk about their affairs. All that was known
of them was that the house belonged to Sally, and that it had been built
by her grandfather before the open heath had been cut up into fenced
fields and the newer houses had been built to accommodate the labourers
who came to work in them. It was only when Laura was old enough to write
their letters for them that she learned more. They could both read and
Dick could write well enough to exchange letters with their own
children; but one day they received a business letter that puzzled them,
and Laura was called in, sworn to secrecy, and consulted. It was one of
the nicest things that happened to her as a child, to be chosen out of
the whole hamlet for their confidence and to know that Dick and Sally
liked her, though so few other people did. After that, at twelve years
old, she became their little woman of business, writing letters to
seedsmen and fetching postal orders from the market town to put in them
and helping Dick to calculate the interest due on their savings bank
account. From them she learned a great deal about the past life of the
hamlet.

Sally could just remember the Rise when it still stood in a wide expanse
of open heath, with juniper bushes and furze thickets and close,
springy, rabbit-bitten turf. There were only six houses then and they
stood in a ring round an open green, all with large gardens and fruit
trees and faggot piles. Laura could pick out most of the houses, still
in a ring, but lost to sight of each other among the newer, meaner
dwellings that had sprung up around and between them. Some of the houses
had been built on and made into two, others had lost their lean-tos and
outbuildings. Only Sally's remained the same, and Sally was eighty.
Laura in her lifetime was to see a ploughed field where Sally's stood;
but had she been told that she would not have believed it.

Country people had not been so poor when Sally was a girl, or their
prospects so hopeless. Sally's father had kept a cow, geese, poultry,
pigs, and a donkey-cart to carry his produce to the market town. He
could do this because he had commoners' rights and could turn his
animals out to graze, and cut furze for firing and even turf to make a
lawn for one of his customers. Her mother made butter, for themselves
and to sell, baked their own bread, and made candles for lighting. Not
much of a light, Sally said, but it cost next to nothing, and, of
course, they went to bed early.

Sometimes her father would do a day's work for wages, thatching a rick,
cutting and laying a hedge, or helping with the shearing or the harvest.
This provided them with ready money for boots and clothes; for food they
relied almost entirely on home produce. Tea was a luxury seldom indulged
in, for it cost five shillings a pound. But country people then had not
acquired the taste for tea; they preferred home-brewed.

Everybody worked; the father and mother from daybreak to dark. Sally's
job was to mind the cow and drive the geese to the best grass patches.
It was strange to picture Sally, a little girl, running with her switch
after the great hissing birds on the common, especially as both common
and geese had vanished as completely as though they never had been.

Sally had never been to school, for, when she was a child, there was no
dame school near enough for her to attend; but her brother had gone to a
night school run by the vicar of an adjoining parish, walking the three
miles each way after his day's work was done, and he had taught Sally to
spell out a few words in her mother's Bible. After that, she had been
left to tread the path of learning alone and had only managed to reach
the point where she could write her own name and read the Bible or
newspaper by skipping words of more than two syllables. Dick was a
little more advanced, for he had had the benefit of the night-school
education at first hand.

It was surprising to find how many of the old people in the hamlet who
had had no regular schooling could yet read a little. A parent had
taught some; others had attended a dame school or the night school, and
a few had made their own children teach them in later life. Statistics
of illiteracy of that period are often misleading, for many who could
read and write sufficiently well for their own humble needs would
modestly disclaim any pretensions to being what they called 'scholards'.
Some who could write their own name quite well would make a cross as
signature to a document out of nervousness or modesty.

After Sally's mother died, she became her father's right hand, indoors
and out. When the old man became feeble, Dick used to come sometimes to
do a bit of hard digging or to farm out the pigsties, and Sally had many
tales to tell of the fun they had had carting their bit of hay or
hunting for eggs in the loft. When, at a great age, the father died, he
left the house and furniture and his seventy-five pounds in the savings
bank to Sally, for, by that time, both her brothers were thriving and
needed no share. So Dick and Sally were married and had lived there
together for nearly sixty years. It had been a hard, frugal, but happy
life. For most of the time Dick had worked as a farm labourer while
Sally saw to things about home, for the cow, geese and other stock had
long gone the way of the common. But when Dick retired from wage-earning
the seventy-five pounds was not only intact, but had been added to. It
had been their rule, Sally said, to save something every week, if only a
penny or twopence, and the result of their hard work and self-denial was
their present comfortable circumstances. 'But us couldn't've done it if
us'd gone havin' a great tribe o' children,' Sally would say. 'I didn't
never hold wi' havin' a lot o' poor brats and nothin' to put into their
bellies. Took us all our time to bring up our two.' She was very bitter
about the huge families around her and no doubt would have said more had
she been talking to one of maturer age.

They had their little capital reckoned up and allotted; they could
manage on so much a year in addition to the earnings of their garden,
fowls, and beehives, and that much, and no more, was drawn every year
from the bank. 'Reckon it'll about last our time,' they used to say, and
it did, although both lived well on into the eighties.

After they had gone, their house stood empty for years. The population
of the hamlet was falling and none of the young newly married couples
cared for the thatched roof and stone floors. People who lived near used
the well; it saved them many a journey. And many were not above taking
the railings or the beehive bench or anything made of wood for firing,
or gathering the apples or using the poor tattered remnant of the flower
garden as a nursery. But nobody wanted to live there.

When Laura visited the hamlet just before the War, the roof had fallen
in, the yew hedge had run wild and the flowers were gone, excepting one
pink rose which was shedding its petals over the ruin. To-day, all has
gone, and only the limy whiteness of the soil in a corner of a ploughed
field is left to show that a cottage once stood there.

Sally and Dick were survivals from the earliest hamlet days. Queenie
represented another phase of its life which had also ended and been
forgotten by most people. She lived in a tiny, thatched cottage at the
back of the end house, which, although it was not in line, was always
spoken of as 'next door'. She seemed very old to the children, for she
was a little, wrinkled, yellow-faced old woman in a sunbonnet; but she
cannot have been nearly as old as Sally. Queenie and her husband were
not in such comfortable circumstances as Sally and Dick; but old Master
Macey, commonly called 'Twister', was still able to work part of the
time, and they managed to keep their home going.

It was a pleasant home, though bare, for Queenie kept it spotless,
scrubbing her deal table and whitening her floor with hearthstone every
morning and keeping the two brass candlesticks on her mantelpiece
polished till they looked like gold. The cottage faced south and, in
summer, the window and door stood open all day to the sunshine. When the
children from the end house passed close by her doorway, as they had to
do every time they went beyond their own garden, they would pause a
moment to listen to Queenie's old sheep's-head clock ticking. There was
no other sound; for, after she had finished her housework, Queenie was
never indoors while the sun shone. If the children had a message for
her, they were told to go round to the beehives, and there they would
find her, sitting on a low stool with her lace-pillow on her lap,
sometimes working and sometimes dozing with her lilac sunbonnet drawn
down over her face to shield it from the sun.

Every fine day, throughout the summer, she sat there 'watching the
bees'. She was combining duty and pleasure, for, if they swarmed, she
was making sure of not losing the swarm; and, if they did not, it was
still, as she said, 'a trate' to sit there, feeling the warmth of the
sun, smelling the flowers, and watching 'the craturs' go in and out of
the hives.

When, at last, the long-looked-for swarm rose into the air, Queenie
would seize her coal shovel and iron spoon and follow it over cabbage
beds and down pea-stick alleys, her own or, if necessary, other
peoples', tanging the spoon on the shovel: _Tang-tang-tangety-tang!_

She said it was the law that, if they were not tanged, and they settled
beyond her own garden bounds, she would have no further claim to them.
Where they settled, they belonged. That would have been a serious loss,
especially in early summer, for, as she reminded the children:


              A swarm in May's worth a rick of hay;
              And a swarm in June's worth a silver spoon;


while


              A swarm in July isn't worth a fly.


So she would follow and leave her shovel to mark her claim, then go back
home for the straw skep and her long, green veil and sheepskin gloves to
protect her face and hands while she hived her swarm.

In winter she fed her bees with a mixture of sugar and water and might
often have been seen at that time of the year with her ear pressed to
one of the red pan roofs of the hives, listening. 'The craturs! The poor
little craturs,' she would say, 'they must be a'most frozed. If I could
have my way I'd take 'em all indoors and set 'em in rows in front of a
good fire.'

Queenie at her lace-making was a constant attraction to the children.
They loved to see the bobbins tossed hither and thither, at random it
seemed to them, every bobbin weighted with its bunch of bright beads and
every bunch with its own story, which they had heard so many times that
they knew it by heart, how this bunch had been part of a blue bead
necklace worn by her little sister who had died at five years old, and
this other one had belonged to her mother, and that black one had been
found, after she was dead, in a work-box belonging to a woman who was
reputed to have been a witch.

There had been a time, it appeared, when lace-making was a regular
industry in the hamlet. Queenie, in her childhood, had been 'brought up
to the pillow', sitting among the women at eight years old and learning
to fling her bobbins with the best of them. They would gather in one
cottage in winter for warmth, she said, each one bringing her faggot or
shovel of coals for the fire, and there they would sit all day, working,
gossiping, singing old songs, and telling old tales till it was time to
run home and put on the pots for their husbands' suppers. These were the
older women and the young unmarried girls; the women with little
children did what lace-making they could at home. In very cold winter
weather the lace-makers would have a small earthen pot with a lid,
called a 'pipkin', containing hot embers, at which they warmed their
hands and feet and sometimes sat upon.

In the summer they would sit in the shade behind one of the 'housen',
and, as they gossiped, the bobbins flew and the lovely, delicate pattern
lengthened until the piece was completed and wrapped in blue paper and
stored away to await the great day when the year's work was taken to
Banbury Fair and sold to the dealer.

'Them wer' the days!' she would sigh. 'Money to spend.' And she would
tell of the bargains she had bought with her earnings. Good brown calico
and linsey-woolsey, and a certain chocolate print sprigged with white,
her favourite gown, of which she could still show a pattern in her big
patchwork quilt. Then there was a fairing to be bought for those at
home--pipes and packets of shag tobacco for the men, rag dolls and
ginger-bread for the 'little 'uns', and snuff for the old grannies. And
the homecoming, loaded with treasure, and money in the pocket besides.
Tripe. They always bought tripe; it was the only time in the year they
could get it, and it was soon heated up, with onions and a nice bit of
thickening; and after supper there was hot, spiced elderberry wine, and
so to bed, everybody happy.

Now, of course, things were different. She didn't know what the world
was coming to. This nasty machine-made stuff had killed the lace-making;
the dealer had not been to the Fair for the last ten years; nobody knew
a bit of good stuff when they saw it. Said they liked the Nottingham
lace better; it was wider and had more pattern to it! She still did a
bit to keep her hand in. One or two old ladies still used it to trim
their shifts, and it was handy to give as presents to such as the
children's mother; but, as for living by it, no, those days were over.
So it emerged from her talk that there had been a second period in the
hamlet more prosperous than the present. Perhaps the women's earnings at
lace-making had helped to tide them over the Hungry 'Forties, for no one
seemed to remember that time of general hardship in country villages;
but memories were short there, and it may have been that life had always
been such a struggle they had noticed no difference in those lean years.

Queenie's ideal of happiness was to have a pound a week coming in. 'If I
had a pound a week,' she would say, 'I 'udn't care if it rained hatchets
and hammers.' Laura's mother longed for thirty shillings a week, and
would say, 'If I could depend on thirty shillings, regular, I could keep
you all so nice and tidy, and keep such a table!'

Queenie's income fell far short of even half of the pound a week she
dreamed of, for her husband, Twister, was what was known in the hamlet
as 'a slack-twisted sort o' chap', one who 'whatever he died on, 'uldn't
kill hisself wi' hard work'. He was fond of a bit of sport and always
managed to get taken on as a beater at shoots, and took care never to
have a job on hand when hounds were meeting in the neighbourhood. Best
of all, he liked to go round with one of the brewers' travellers,
perched precariously on the back seat of the high dogcart, to open and
shut the gates they had to pass through and to hold the horse outside
public houses. But, although he had retired from regular farm labour on
account of age and chronic rheumatism, he still went to the farm and
lent a hand when he had nothing more exciting to do. The farmer must
have liked him, for he had given orders that whenever Twister was
working about the farmstead he was to have a daily half-pint on demand.
That half-pint was the salvation of Queenie's housekeeping, for, in
spite of his varied interests, there were many days when Twister must
either work or thirst.

He was a small, thin-legged, jackdaw-eyed old fellow, and dressed in an
old velveteen coat that had once belonged to a gamekeeper, with a
peacock's feather stuck in the band of his battered old bowler and a
red-and-yellow neckerchief knotted under one ear. The neckerchief was a
relic of the days when he had taken baskets of nuts to fairs, and,
taking up his stand among the booths and roundabouts, had shouted:
'Bassalonies big as ponies!' until his throat felt dry. Then he had
adjourned to the nearest public house and spent his takings and
distributed the rest of his stock, gratis. That venture soon came to an
end for want of capital.

To serve his own purposes, Twister would sometimes pose as a half-wit;
but, as the children's father said, he was no fool where his own
interests were concerned. He was ready at any time to clown in public
for the sake of a pint of beer; but at home he was morose--one of those
people who 'hang their fiddle up at the door when they go home', as the
saying went there.

But in old age Queenie had him well in hand. He knew that he had to
produce at least a few shillings on Saturday night, or, when Sunday
dinner-time came, Queenie would spread the bare cloth on the table and
they would just have to sit down and look at each other; there would be
no food.

Forty-five years before she had served him with a dish even less to his
taste. He had got drunk and beaten her cruelly with the strap with which
he used to keep up his trousers. Poor Queenie had gone to bed sobbing;
but she was not too overcome to think, and she decided to try an old
country cure for such offences.

The next morning when he came to dress, his strap was missing. Probably
already ashamed of himself, he said nothing, but hitched up his trousers
with string and slunk off to work, leaving Queenie apparently still
asleep.

At night, when he came home to tea, a handsome pie was placed before
him, baked a beautiful golden-brown and with a pastry tulip on the top;
such a pie as must have seemed to him to illustrate the old saying: '_A
woman, a dog and a walnut tree, the more you beat 'em the better they
be_.'

'You cut it, Tom,' said a smiling Queenie. 'I made it a-purpose for you.
Come, don't 'ee be afraid on it. 'Tis all for you.' And she turned her
back and pretended to be hunting for something in the cupboard.

Tom cut it; then recoiled, for, curled up inside, was the leather strap
with which he had beaten his wife. 'A just went as white as a ghoo-ost,
an' got up an' went out,' said Queenie all those years later. 'But it
cured 'en, it cured 'en, for's not so much as laid a finger on me from
that day to this!'

Perhaps Twister's clowning was not all affected; for, in later years, he
became a little mad and took to walking about talking to himself, with a
large, open clasp-knife in his hand. Nobody thought of getting a doctor
to examine him; but everybody in the hamlet suddenly became very polite
to him.

It was at this time he gave the children's mother the fright of her
life. She had gone out to hang out some clothes in the garden, leaving
one of her younger children alone, asleep in his cradle. When she came
back, Twister was stooping over the child with his head inside the hood
of the cradle, completely hiding the babe from her sight. As she rushed
forward, fearing the worst, the poor, silly old man looked up at her
with his eyes full of tears. 'Ain't 'ee like little Jesus? Ain't 'ee
just like little Jesus?' he said, and the little baby of two months woke
up at that moment and smiled. It was the first time he had been known to
smile.

But Twister's exploits did not always end as happily. He had begun to
torture animals and was showing an inclination to turn nudist, and
people were telling Queenie he ought to be 'put away' when the great
snowstorm came. For days the hamlet was cut off from the outer world by
great drifts which filled the narrow hamlet road to the tops of the
hedges in places. In digging a way out they found a cart with the horse
still between the shafts and still alive; but there was no trace of the
boy who was known to have been in charge. Men, women, and children
turned out to dig, expecting to find a dead body, and Twister was one of
the foremost amongst them. They said he worked then as he had never
worked before in his life; his strength and energy were marvellous. They
did not find the boy, alive or dead, for the very good reason that he
had, at the height of the storm, deserted the cart, forgotten the horse,
and scrambled across country to his home in another village; but poor
old Twister got pneumonia and was dead within a fortnight.

On the evening of the day he died, Edmund was round at the back of the
end house banking up his rabbit-hutches with straw for the night, when
he saw Queenie come out of her door and go towards her beehives. For
some reason or other, Edmund followed her. She tapped on the roof of
each hive in turn, like knocking at a door, and said, '_Bees, bees, your
master's dead, an' now you must work for your missis_.' Then, seeing the
little boy, she explained: 'I 'ad to tell 'em, you know, or they'd
all've died, poor craturs.' So Edmund really heard bees seriously told
of a death.

Afterwards, with parish relief and a little help here and there from her
children and friends, Queenie managed to live. Her chief difficulty was
to get her ounce of snuff a week, and that was the one thing she could
not do without; it was as necessary to her as tobacco is to a smoker.

All the women over fifty took snuff. It was the one luxury in their hard
lives. 'I couldn't do wi'out my pinch o' snuff,' they used to say. "Tis
meat an' drink to me,' and, tapping the sides of their snuffboxes, ''Ave
a pinch, me dear.'

Most of the younger women pulled a face of disgust as they refused the
invitation, for snuff-taking had gone out of fashion and was looked upon
as a dirty habit; but Laura's mother would dip her thumb and forefinger
into the box and sniff at them delicately, 'for manners' sake', as she
said. Queenie's snuffbox had a picture of Queen Victoria and the Prince
Consort on the lid. Sometimes, when every grain of the powder was gone,
she would sniff at the empty box and say, 'Ah! That's better. The ghost
o' good snuff's better nor nothin'.'

She still had one great day every year, when, every autumn, the dealer
came to purchase the produce of her beehives. Then, in her pantry
doorway, a large muslin bag was suspended to drain the honey from the
broken pieces of comb into a large, red pan which stood beneath, while,
on her doorstep, the end house children waited to  see 'the honeyman'
carry out and weigh the whole combs. One year--one never-to-be-forgotten
year--he had handed to each of them a rich, dripping fragment of comb.
He never did it again; but they always waited, for the hope was almost
as sweet as the honey.

There had been, when Laura was small, one bachelor's establishment near
her home. This had belonged to 'the Major', who, as his nickname
denoted, had been in the Army. He had served in many lands and then
returned to his native place to set up house and do for himself in a
neat, orderly, soldier-like manner. All went well until he became old
and feeble. Even then, for some years, he struggled on alone in his
little home, for he had a small pension. Then he was ill and spent some
weeks in Oxford Infirmary. Before he went there, as he had no relatives
or special friends, Laura's mother nursed him and helped him to get
together the few necessities he had to take with him. She would have
visited him at the hospital had it been possible; but money was scarce
and her children were too young to be left, so she wrote him a few
letters and sent him the newspaper every week. It was, as she said, 'the
least anybody could do for the poor old fellow'. But the Major had seen
the world and knew its ways and he did not take such small kindnesses as
a matter of course.

He came home from the hospital late one Saturday night, after the
children were in bed, and, next morning, Laura, waking at early dawn,
thought she saw some strange object on her pillow. She dozed and woke
again. It was still there. A small wooden box. She sat up in bed and
opened it. Inside was a set of doll's dishes with painted wax food upon
them--chops and green peas and new potatoes, and a jam tart with
criss-cross pastry. Where could it have come from? It was not Christmas
or her birthday. Then Edmund awoke and called out he had found an
engine. It was a tiny tin engine, perhaps a penny one, but his delight
was unbounded. Then Mother came into their room and said that the Major
had brought the presents from Oxford. She had a little red silk
handkerchief, such as were worn inside the coat-collar at that time for
extra warmth. It was before fur collars were thought of. Father had a
pipe and the baby a rattle. It was amazing. To be thought of! To be
brought presents, and such presents, by one who was not even a relative!
The good, kind Major was in no danger of being forgotten by the family
at the end house. Mother made his bed and tidied his room, and Laura was
sent with covered plates whenever there was anything special for dinner.
She would knock at his door and go in and say in her demure little way,
'Please, Mr. Sharman, Mother says could you fancy a little of
so-and-so?'

But the Major was too old and ill to be able to live alone much longer,
even with such help as the children's mother and other kind neighbours
could give. The day came when the doctor called in the relieving
officer. The old man was seriously ill; he had no relatives. There was
only one place where he could be properly looked after, and that was the
workhouse infirmary. They were right in their decision. He was not able
to look after himself; he had no relatives or friends able to undertake
the responsibility; the workhouse _was_ the best place for him. But they
made one terrible mistake. They were dealing with a man of intelligence
and spirit, and they treated him as they might have done one in the
extreme of senile decay. They did not consult him or tell him what they
had decided; but ordered the carrier's cart to call at his house the
next morning and wait at a short distance while they, in the doctor's
gig, drove up to his door. When they entered, the Major had just dressed
and dragged himself to his chair by the fire. 'It's a nice morning, and
we've come to take you for a drive,' announced the doctor cheerfully,
and, in spite of his protests, they hustled on his coat and had him out
and in the carrier's cart in a very few minutes.

Laura saw the carrier touch up his horse with the whip and the cart
turn, and she always wished afterwards she had not, for, as soon as he
realized where he was being taken, the old soldier, the independent old
bachelor, the kind family friend, collapsed and cried like a child. He
was beaten. But not for long. Before six weeks were over he was back in
the parish and all his troubles were over, for he came in his coffin.

As he had no relatives to be informed, the time appointed for his
funeral was not known in the hamlet, or no doubt a few of his old
neighbours would have gathered in the churchyard. As it was, Laura,
standing back among the graves, a milk-can in her hand, was the only
spectator, and that quite by chance. No mourner followed the coffin into
the church, and she was far too shy to come forward; but when it was
brought out and carried towards the open grave it was no longer
unaccompanied, for the clergyman's middle-aged daughter walked behind
it, an open prayer-book in her hand and an expression of gentle pity in
her eyes. She could barely have known him in life, for he was not a
church-goer; but she had seen the solitary coffin arrive and had hurried
across from her home to the church that he might at least have one
fellow human being to say 'Farewell' to him. In after years, when Laura
heard her spoken of slightingly, and, indeed, often felt irritated
herself by her interfering ways, she thought of that graceful action.

The children's grandparents lived in a funny little house out in the
fields. It was a round house, tapering off at the top, so there were two
rooms downstairs and only one--and that a kind of a loft, with a sloping
ceiling--above them. The garden did not adjoin the house, but was shut
away between high hedges on the other side of the cart track which led
to it. It was full of currant and gooseberry bushes, raspberry canes,
and old hardy flowers run wild, almost solid with greenery, for, since
the gardener had grown old and stiff in the joints, he had not been able
to do much pruning or trimming. There Laura spent many happy hours,
supposed to be picking fruit for jam, but for the better part of the
time reading or dreaming. One corner, overhung by a damson tree and
walled in with bushes and flowers, she called her 'green study'.

Laura's grandfather was a tall old man with snow-white hair and beard
and the bluest eyes imaginable. He must at that time have been well on
in the seventies, for her mother had been his youngest child and a
latecomer. One of her outstanding distinctions in the eyes of her own
children was that she had been born an aunt, and, as soon as she could
talk, had insisted upon her two nieces, both older than herself,
addressing her as 'Aunt Emma'.

Before he retired from active life, the grandfather had followed the old
country calling of an eggler, travelling the countryside with a little
horse and trap, buying up eggs from farms and cottages and selling them
at markets and to shopkeepers. At the back of the round house stood the
little lean-to stable in which his pony Dobbin had lived. The children
loved to lie in the manger and climb about among the rafters. The death
of Dobbin of old age had put an end to his master's eggling, for he had
no capital with which to buy another horse. Far from it. Moreover, by
that time he was himself suffering from Dobbin's complaint; so he
settled down to doing what he could in his garden and making a private
daily round on his own feet, from his home to the end house, from the
end house to church, and back home again.

At the church he not only attended every service, Sunday and weekday,
but, when there was no service, he would go there alone to pray and
meditate, for he was a deeply religious man. At one time he had been a
local preacher, and had walked miles on Sunday evenings to conduct, in
turn with others, the services at the cottage meeting houses in the
different villages. In old age he had returned to the Church of England,
not because of any change of opinion, for creeds did not trouble
him--his feet were too firmly planted on the Rock upon which they are
all founded--but because the parish church was near enough for him to
attend its services, was always open for his private devotions, and the
music there, poor as it was, was all the music left to him.

Some members of his old meeting-house congregations still remembered
what they considered his inspired preaching 'of the Word'. 'You did
ought to be a better gal, wi' such a gran'fer,' said a Methodist woman
to Laura one day when she saw her crawl through a gap in a hedge and
tear her new pinafore. But Laura was not old enough to appreciate her
grandfather, for he died when she was ten, and his loving care for her
mother, his youngest and dearest child, led to many lectures and
reproofs. Had he seen the torn pinafore, it would certainly have
provoked both. However, she had just sufficient discrimination to know
he was better than most people.

As has already been mentioned, he had at one time played the violin in
one of the last instrumental church choirs in the district. He had also
played it at gatherings at home and in neighbours' houses and, in his
earlier, unregenerate days, at weddings and feasts and fairs. Laura,
happening to think of this one day, said to her mother, 'Why doesn't
Grandfather ever play his fiddle now! What's he done with it?'

'Oh,' said her mother in a matter-of-fact tone. 'He hasn't got it any
longer. He sold it once when Granny was ill and they were a bit short of
money. It was a good fiddle and he got five pounds for it.'

She spoke as though there was no more in selling your fiddle than in
selling half a pig or a spare sack of potatoes in an emergency; but
Laura, though so much younger, felt differently about it. Though devoid
of the most rudimentary musical instinct herself, she had imagination
enough to know that to a musician his musical instrument must be a most
precious possession. So, when she was alone with her grandfather one
day, she said, 'Didn't you miss your fiddle, Granda?'

The old man gave her a quick, searching look, then smiled sadly. 'I did,
my maid, more than anything I've ever had to part with, and that's not a
little, and I miss it still and always shall. But it went for a good
cause, and we can't have everything we want in this world. It wouldn't
be good for us.' But Laura did not agree. She thought it would have been
good for him to have his dear old fiddle. That wretched money, or rather
the lack of it, seemed the cause of everybody's troubles.

The fiddle was not the only thing he had had to give up. He had given up
smoking when he retired and they had to live on their tiny savings and
the small allowance from a brother who had prospered as a coal-merchant.
Perhaps what he felt most keenly of all was that he had had to give up
giving, for he loved to give.

One of Laura's earliest memories was of her grandfather coming through
the gate and up the end house garden in his old-fashioned close-fitting
black overcoat and bowler hat, his beard nicely trimmed and shining,
with a huge vegetable marrow under his arm. He came every morning and
seldom came empty-handed. He would bring a little basket of early
raspberries or green peas, already shelled, or a tight little bunch of
sweet williams and moss rosebuds, or a baby rabbit, which some one else
had given him--always something. He would come indoors, and if anything
in the house was broken, he would mend it, or he would take a stocking
out of his pocket and sit down and knit, and all the time he was working
he would talk in a kind, gentle voice to his daughter, calling her
'Emmie'. Sometimes she would cry as she told him of her troubles, and he
would get up and smooth her hair and wipe her eyes and say, 'That's
better! That's better! Now you're going to be my own brave little wench!
And remember, my dear, there's One above who knows what's best for us,
though we may not see it ourselves at the time.'

By the middle of the 'eighties the daily visits had ceased, for the
chronic rheumatism against which he had fought was getting the better of
him. First, the church was too far for him; then the end house; then his
own garden across the road, and at last his world narrowed down to the
bed upon which he was lying. That bed was not the four-poster with the
silk-and-satin patchwork quilt in rich shades of red and brown and
orange which stood in the best downstairs bedroom, but the plain white
bed beneath the sloping ceiling in the little whitewashed room under the
roof. He had slept there for years, leaving his wife the downstair room,
that she might not be disturbed by his fevered tossing during his
rheumatic attacks, and also because, like many old people, he woke
early, and liked to get up and light the fire and read his Bible before
his wife was ready for her cup of tea to be taken to her.

Gradually, his limbs became so locked he could not turn over in bed
without help. Giving to and doing for others was over for him. He would
lie upon his back for hours, his tired old blue eyes fixed upon the
picture nailed on the wall at the foot of his bed. It was the only
coloured thing in the room; the rest was bare whiteness. It was of the
Crucifixion, and, printed above the crown of thorns were the words:


                      This have I done for thee.


And underneath the pierced and bleeding feet:


                      What hast thou done for me?


His, two years' uncomplaining endurance of excruciating pain answered
for him.

When her husband was asleep, or lying, washed and tended, gazing at his
picture, Laura's grandmother would sit among her feather cushions
downstairs reading _Bow Bells_ or the _Princess Novelettes_ or the
_Family Herald_. Except when engaged in housework, she was never seen
without a book in her hand. It was always a novelette, and she had a
large assortment of these which she kept tied up in flat parcels, ready
to exchange with other novelette readers.

She had been very pretty when she was young. 'The Belle of Hornton',
they had called her in her native village, and she often told Laura of
the time when her hair had reached down to her knees, like a great
yellow cape, she said, which covered her. Another of her favourite
stories was of the day when she had danced with a real lord. It was at
his coming-of-age celebrations, and a great honour, for he had passed
over his own friends and the daughters of his tenants in favour of one
who was but a gamekeeper's daughter. Before the evening was over he had
whispered in her ear that she was the prettiest girl in the county, and
she had cherished the compliment all her life. There were no further
developments. My Lord was My Lord, and Hannah Pollard was Hannah
Pollard, a poor girl, but the daughter of decent parents. No further
developments were possible in real life, though such affairs ended
differently in her novelettes. Perhaps that was why she enjoyed them.

It was difficult for Laura to connect the long, yellow hair and the
white frock with blue ribbons worn at the coming-of-age fte with her
grandmother, for she saw her only as a thin, frail old woman who wore
her grey hair parted like curtains and looped at the ears with little
combs. Still, there was something which made her worth looking at.
Laura's mother said it was because her features were good. 'My mother,'
she would say, 'will look handsome in her coffin. Colour goes and the
hair turns grey, but the framework lasts.'

Laura's mother was greatly disappointed in her little daughter's looks.
Her own mother had been an acknowledged belle, she herself had been
charmingly pretty, and she naturally expected her children to carry on
the tradition. But Laura was a plain, thin child: 'Like a moll heron,
all legs and wings,' she was told in the hamlet, and her dark eyes and
wide mouth looked too large for her small face. The only compliment ever
paid her in childhood was that of a curate who said she was 'intelligent
looking'. Those around her would have preferred curly hair and a rosebud
mouth to all the intelligence in the world.

Laura's grandmother had never tramped ten miles on a Sunday night to
hear her husband preach in a village chapel. She had gone to church once
every Sunday, unless it rained or was too hot, or she had a cold, or
some article of her attire was too shabby. She was particular about her
clothes and liked to have everything handsome about her. In her bedroom
there were pictures and ornaments, as well as the feather cushions and
silk patchwork quilt.

When she came to the end house, the best chair was placed by the fire
for her and the best possible tea put on the table, and Laura's mother
did not whisper her troubles to her as she did to her father. If some
little thing did leak out, she would only say, 'All men need a bit of
humouring.'

Some women, too, thought Laura, for she could see that her grandmother
had always been the one to be indulged and spared all trouble and
unpleasantness. If the fiddle had belonged to her, it would never have
been sold; the whole family would have combined to buy a handsome new
case for it.

After her husband died, she went away to live with her eldest son, and
the round house shared the fate of Sally's. Where it stood is now a
ploughed field. The husband's sacrifices, the wife's romance, are as
though they had never been--'melted into air, into thin air'.

Those were a few of the old men and women to whom the Rector referred as
'our old folks' and visiting townsmen lumped together as 'a lot of old
yokels'. There were a few other homes of old people in the hamlet; that
of Master Ashley, for instance, who, like Sally, had descended from one
of the original squatters and still owned the ancestral cottage and
strip of land. He must have been one of the last people to use a
breast-plough, a primitive implement consisting of a ploughshare at one
end of a stout stick and a cross-piece of shaped wood at the other which
the user pressed to his breast to drive the share through the soil. On
his land stood the only surviving specimen of the old furze and daub
building which had once been common in the neighbourhood. The walls were
of furze branches closely pressed together and daubed with a mixture of
mud and mortar. It was said that the first settlers built their cottages
of these materials with their own hands.

Then there were one or two poorer couples, just holding on to their
homes, but in daily fear of the workhouse. The Poor Law authorities
allowed old people past work a small weekly sum as outdoor relief; but
it was not sufficient to live upon, and, unless they had more than
usually prosperous children to help support them, there came a time when
the home had to be broken up. When, twenty years later, the Old Age
Pensions began, life was transformed for such aged cottagers. They were
relieved of anxiety. They were suddenly rich. Independent for life! At
first when they went to the Post Office to draw it, tears of gratitude
would run down the cheeks of some, and they would say as they picked up
their money, 'God bless that Lord George! [for they could not believe
one so powerful and munificent could be a plain 'Mr.'] and God bless
_you_, miss!' and there were flowers from their gardens and apples from
their trees for the girl who merely handed them the money.



                                   VI

                       _The Besieged Generation_

To Laura, as a child, the hamlet once appeared as a fortress. She was
coming home alone from school one wild, grey, March afternoon, and,
looking up from her battling against the wind, got a swift new
impression of the cluster of stark walls and slated roofs on the Rise,
with rooks tumbling and clouds hurrying overhead, smoke beating down
from the chimneys, and clothes on clothes-lines straining away in the
wind.

'It's a fort! It's a fort!' she cried, and she went on up the road,
singing in her flat, tuneless little voice the Salvation Army hymn of
the day, 'Hold the fort, for I am coming'.

There was a deeper likeness than that of her childish vision. The hamlet
was indeed in a state of siege, and its chief assailant was Want. Yet,
like other citizens during a long, but not too desperate siege, its
inhabitants had become accustomed to their hard conditions and were able
to snatch at any small passing pleasure and even at times to turn their
very straits to laughter.

To go from the homes of the older people to those of the besieged
generation was to step into another chapter of the hamlet's history. All
the graces and simple luxuries of the older style of living had
disappeared. They were poor people's houses rich only in children,
strong, healthy children, who, in a few years, would be ready to take
their part in the work of the world and to provide good, healthy blood
for the regeneration of city populations; but, in the meantime, their
parents had to give their all in order to feed and clothe them.

In their houses the good, solid, hand-made furniture of their
forefathers had given place to the cheap and ugly products of the early
machine age. A deal table, the top ribbed and softened by much
scrubbing; four or five windsor chairs with the varnish blistered and
flaking; a side table for the family photographs and ornaments, and a
few stools for fireside seats, together with the beds upstairs, made up
the collection spoken of by its owners as 'our few sticks of furniture'.

If the father had a special chair in which to rest after his day's work
was done, it would be but a rather larger replica of the hard windsors
with wooden arms added. The clock, if any, was a cheap, foreign
timepiece, standing on the mantelshelf--one which could seldom be relied
upon to keep correct time for twelve hours together. Those who had no
clock depended upon the husband's watch for getting up in the morning.
The watch then went to work with him, an arrangement which must have
been a great inconvenience to most wives; but was a boon to the gossips,
who could then knock at a neighbour's door and ask the time when they
felt inclined for a chat.

The few poor crocks were not good enough to keep on show and were hidden
away in the pantry between mealtimes. Pewter plates and dishes as
ornaments had gone. There were still plenty of them to be found, kicked
about around gardens and pigsties. Sometimes a travelling tinker would
spy one of these and beg or buy it for a few coppers, to melt down and
use in his trade. Other casual callers at the cottages would buy a set
of handwrought, brass drop-handles from an inherited chest of drawers
for sixpence; or a corner cupboard, or a gate-legged table which had
become slightly infirm, for half a crown. Other such articles of
furniture were put out of doors and spoilt by the weather, for the newer
generation did not value such things; it preferred the products of its
own day, and, gradually, the hamlet was being stripped of such relics.

As ornaments for their mantelpieces and side tables the women liked
gaudy glass vases, pottery images of animals, shell-covered boxes and
plush photograph frames. The most valued ornaments of all were the white
china mugs inscribed in gilt lettering 'A Present for a Good Child', or
'A Present from Brighton', or some other sea-side place. Those who had
daughters in service to bring them would accumulate quite a collection
of these, which were hung by the handles in rows from the edge of a
shelf, and were a source of great pride in the owner and of envy in the
neighbours.

Those who could find the necessary cash covered their walls with
wall-paper in big, sprawling, brightly coloured flower designs. Those
who could not, used whitewash or pasted up newspaper sheets. On the wall
space near the hearth hung the flitch or flitches of bacon, and every
house had a few pictures, mostly coloured ones given by grocers as
almanacks and framed at home. These had to be in pairs, and lovers'
meetings lovers' partings, brides in their wedding gowns, widows
standing by newly made graves, children begging in the snow or playing
with puppies or kittens in nurseries were the favourite subjects.

Yet, even out of these unpromising materials, in a room which was
kitchen, living-room, nursery, and wash-house combined, some women would
contrive to make a pleasant, attractive-looking home. A well-whitened
hearth, a home-made rag rug in bright colours, and a few geraniums on
the window-sill would cost nothing, but make a great difference to the
general effect. Others despised these finishing touches. What was the
good of breaking your back pegging rugs for the children to mess up when
an old sack thrown down would serve the same purpose, they said. As to
flowers in pots, they didn't hold with the nasty, messy things. But they
did, at least, believe in cleaning up their houses once a day, for
public opinion demanded that of them. There were plenty of bare,
comfortless homes in the hamlet, but there was not one really dirty one.

Every morning, as soon as the men had been packed off to work, the older
children to school, the smaller ones to play, and the baby had been
bathed and put to sleep in its cradle, rugs and mats were carried out of
doors and banged against walls, fireplaces were 'ridded up', and tables
and floors were scrubbed. In wet weather, before scrubbing, the stone
floor had often to be scraped with an old knife-blade to loosen the
trodden-in mud; for, although there was a scraper for shoes beside every
doorstep, some of the stiff, clayey mud would stick to the insteps and
uppers of boots and be brought indoors.

To avoid bringing in more during the day, the women wore pattens over
their shoes to go to the well or the pigsty. The patten consisted of a
wooden sole with a leather toepiece, raised about two inches from the
ground on an iron ring. _Clack! Clack! Clack!_ over the stones, and
_Slush! Slush! Slush!_ through the mud went the patten rings. You could
not keep your movements secret if you wore pattens to keep yourself dry
shod.

A pair of pattens only cost tenpence and lasted for years. But the
patten was doomed. Vicarage ladies and farmers' wives no longer wore
them to go to and fro between their dairies and poultry yards, and newly
married cottagers no longer provided themselves with a pair. 'Too proud
to wear pattens' was already becoming a proverb at the beginning of the
decade, and by the end of it they had practically disappeared.

The morning cleaning proceeded to the accompaniment of neighbourly
greetings and shouting across garden and fences, for the first sound of
the banging of mats was a signal for others to bring out theirs, and it
would be 'Have 'ee heard this?' and 'What d'ye think of that?' until
industrious housewives declared that they would take to banging their
mats overnight, for they never knew if it was going to take them two
minutes or two hours.

Nicknames were not used among the women, and only the aged were spoken
of by their Christian names, Old Sally or Old Queenie or sometimes
Dame--Dame Mercer or Dame Morris. The other married women were Mrs. This
or Mrs. That, even with those who had known them from their cradles. Old
men were called Master, not Mister. Younger men were known by their
nicknames or their Christian names, excepting a few who were more than
usually respected. Children were carefully taught to address all as Mr.
or Mrs.

Cleaning began at about the same time in every house, but the time of
finishing varied. Some housewives would have everything spick-and-span
and themselves 'tidied up' by noon; others would still be at it at
teatime. 'A slut's work's never done' was a saying among the good
housewives.

It puzzled Laura that, although everybody cleaned up every day, some
houses looked what they called there 'a pictur' and others a muddle. She
remarked on this to her mother.

'Come here,' was the answer. 'See this grate I'm cleaning? Looks done,
doesn't it? But you wait.'

Up and down and round and round and between the bars went the brush;
then: 'Now look. Looks different, doesn't it?' It did. It had been
passably polished before; now it was resplendent. 'There!' said her
mother. 'That's the secret; just that bit of extra elbow-grease after
some folks would consider a thing done.'

But that final polish, the giving of which came naturally to Laura's
mother, could not have been possible to all. Pregnancy and nursing and
continual money worries must have worn down the strength and energy of
many. Taking these drawbacks into account, together with the
inconvenience and overcrowding of the cottages, the general standard of
cleanliness was marvellous.

There was one postal delivery a day, and towards ten o'clock, the heads
of the women beating their mats would be turned towards the allotment
path to watch for 'Old Postie'. Some days there were two, or even three,
letters for Lark Rise; quite as often there were none; but there were
few women who did not gaze longingly. This longing for letters was
called 'yearning' (pronounced 'yarnin''); 'No, I be-ant expectin'
nothin', but I be so yarnin'' one woman would say to another as they
watched the old postman dawdle over the stile and between the allotment
plots. On wet days he carried an old green gig umbrella with whalebone
ribs, and, beneath its immense circumference he seemed to make no more
progress than an overgrown mushroom. But at last he would reach and
usually pass the spot where the watchers were standing.

'No, I ain't got nothin' for you, Mrs. Parish,' he would call. 'Your
young Annie wrote to you only last week. She's got summat else to do
besides sittin' down on her arse writing home all the time.' Or, waving
his arm for some woman to meet him, for he did not intend to go a step
further than he was obliged: 'One for you, Mrs. Knowles, and, my! ain't
it a thin-roed 'un! Not much time to write to her mother these days. I
took a good fat 'un from her to young Chad Gubbins.'

So he went on, always leaving a sting behind, a gloomy, grumpy old man
who seemed to resent having to serve such humble people. He had been a
postman forty years and had walked an incredible number of miles in all
weathers, so perhaps the resulting flat feet and rheumaticky limbs were
to blame; but the whole hamlet rejoiced when at last he was pensioned
off and a smart, obliging young postman took his place on the Lark Rise
round.

Delighted as the women were with the letters from their daughters, it
was the occasional parcels of clothing they sent that caused the
greatest excitement. As soon as a parcel was taken indoors, neighbours
who had seen Old Postie arrive with it would drop in, as though by
accident, and stay to admire, or sometimes to criticise, the contents.

All except the aged women, who wore what they had been accustomed to
wearing and were satisfied, were very particular about their clothes.
Anything did for everyday wear, as long as it was clean and whole and
could be covered with a decent white apron; it was the 'Sunday best'
that had to be just so. 'Better be out of the world than out of the
fashion' was one of their sayings. To be appreciated, the hat or coat
contained in the parcel had to be in the fashion, and the hamlet had a
fashion of its own, a year or two behind outside standards, and strictly
limited as to style and colour.

The daughter's or other kinswoman's clothes were sure to be appreciated,
for they had usually already been seen and admired when the girl was at
home for her holiday, and had indeed helped to set the standard of what
was worn. The garments bestowed by the mistresses were unfamiliar and
often somewhat in advance of the hamlet vogue, and so were often
rejected for personal wear as 'a bit queer' and cut down for the
children; though the mothers often wished a year or two later when that
particular fashion arrived that they had kept them for themselves. Then
they had colour prejudices. A red frock! Only a fast hussy would wear
red. Or green--sure to bring any wearer bad luck! There was a positive
taboo on green in the hamlet; nobody would wear it until it had been
home-dyed navy or brown. Yellow ranked with red as immodest; but there
was not much yellow worn anywhere in the 'eighties. On the whole, they
preferred dark or neutral colours; but there was one exception; blue had
nothing against it. Marine and sky blue were the favourite shades, both
very bright and crude.

Much prettier were the colours of the servant girls' print morning
dresses--lilac, or pink, or buff, sprigged with white--which were cut
down for the little girls to wear on May Day and for churchgoing
throughout the summer.

To the mothers the cut was even more important than the colour. If
sleeves were worn wide they liked them to be very wide; if narrow, skin
tight. Skirts in those days did not vary in length; they were made to
touch the ground. But they were sometimes trimmed with frills or
flounces or bunched up at the back, and the women would spend days
altering this trimming to make it just right, or turning gathers into
pleats or pleats into gathers.

The hamlet's fashion lag was the salvation of its wardrobes, for a style
became 'all the go' there just as the outer world was discarding it, and
good, little-worn specimens came that way by means of the parcels. The
Sunday garment at the beginning of the decade was the tippet, a little
shoulder cape of black silk or satin with a long, dangling fringe. All
the women and some of the girls had these, and they were worn proudly to
church or Sunday school with a posy of roses or geraniums pinned in
front.

Hats were of the chimney-pot variety, a tall cylinder of straw, with a
very narrow brim and a spray of artificial flowers trained up the front.
Later in the decade, the shape changed to wide brims and squashed
crowns. The chimney-pot hat had had its day, and the women declared they
would not be seen going to the privy in one.

Then there were the bustles, at first looked upon with horror, and no
wonder! but after a year or two the most popular fashion ever known in
the hamlet and the one which lasted longest. They cost nothing, as they
could be made at home from any piece of old cloth rolled up into a
cushion and worn under any frock. Soon all the women, excepting the
aged, and all the girls, excepting the tiniest, were peacocking in their
bustles, and they wore them so long that Edmund was old enough in the
day of their decline to say that he had seen the last bustle on earth
going round the Rise on a woman with a bucket of pig-wash.

This devotion to fashion gave a spice to life and helped to make
bearable the underlying poverty. But the poverty was there; one might
have a velvet tippet and no shoes worth mentioning; or a smart frock,
but no coat; and the same applied to the children's clothes and the
sheets and towels and cups and saucepans. There was never enough of
anything, except food.

Monday was washing-day, and then the place fairly hummed with activity.
'What d'ye think of the weather?' 'Shall we get 'em dry?' were the
questions shouted across gardens, or asked as the women met going to and
from the well for water. There was no gossiping at corners that morning.
It was before the days of patent soaps and washing powders, and much
hard rubbing was involved. There were no washing coppers, and the
clothes had to be boiled in the big cooking pots over the fire. Often
these inadequate vessels would boil over and fill the house with ashes
and steam. The small children would hang round their mothers' skirts and
hinder them, and tempers grew short and nerves frayed long before the
clothes, well blued, were hung on the lines or spread on the hedges. In
wet weather they had to be dried indoors, and no one who has not
experienced it can imagine the misery of living for several days with a
firmament of drying clothes on lines overhead.

After their meagre midday meal, the women allowed themselves a little
leisure. In summer, some of them would take out their sewing and do it
in company with others in the shade of one of the houses. Others would
sew or read indoors, or carry their babies out in the garden for an
airing. A few who had no very young children liked to have what they
called 'a bit of a lay down' on the bed. With their doors locked and
window-blinds drawn, they, at least, escaped the gossips, who began to
get busy at this hour.

One of the most dreaded of these was Mrs. Mullins, a thin, pale, elderly
woman who wore her iron-grey hair thrust into a black chenille net at
the back of her head and wore a little black shawl over her shoulders,
summer and winter alike. She was one of the most common sights of the
hamlet, going round the Rise in her pattens, with her door-key dangling
from her fingers.

That door-key was looked upon as a bad sign, for she only locked her
door when she intended to be away some time. 'Where's she a prowlin' off
to?' one woman would ask another as they rested with their water-buckets
at a corner. 'God knows, an' He won't tell us,' was likely to be the
reply. 'But, thanks be, she won't be a goin' to our place now she's seen
me here.'

She visited every cottage in turn, knocking at the door and asking the
correct time, or for the loan of a few matches, or the gift of a
pin--anything to make an opening. Some housewives only opened the door a
crack, hoping to get rid of her, but she usually managed to cross the
threshold, and, once within, would stand just inside the door, twisting
her door-key and talking.

She talked no scandal. Had she done so, her visits might have been less
unwelcome. She just babbled on, about the weather, or her sons' last
letters, or her pig, or something she had read in the Sunday newspaper.
There was a saying in the hamlet: 'Standing gossipers stay longest', and
Mrs. Mullins was a standing example of this. 'Won't you sit down, Mrs.
Mullins?' Laura's mother would say if she happened herself to be seated.
But it was always, 'No, oh no, thankee. I mustn't stop a minute'; but
her minutes always mounted up to an hour or more, and at last her
unwilling hostess would say, 'Excuse me, I must just run round to the
well,' or 'I'd nearly forgotten that I'd got to fetch a cabbage from the
allotment,' and, even then, the chances were that Mrs. Mullins would
insist upon accompanying her, talking them both to a standstill every
few yards.

Poor Mrs. Mullins! With her children all out in the world, her home must
have seemed to her unbearably silent, and, having no resources of her
own and a great longing to hear her own voice, she was forced out in
search of company. Nobody wanted her, for she had nothing interesting to
say, and yet talked too much to allow her listener a fair share of the
conversation. She was that worst of all bores, a melancholy bore, and at
the sight of her door-key and little black shawl the pleasantest of
little gossiping groups would scatter.

Mrs. Andrews was an even greater talker; but, although most people
objected to her visits on principle, they did not glance at the clock
every two minutes while she was there or invent errands for themselves
in order to get rid of her. Like Mrs. Mullins, she had got her family
off hand and so had unlimited leisure; but, unlike her, she had always
something of interest to relate. If nothing had happened in the hamlet
since her last call, she was quite capable of inventing something. More
often, she would take up some stray, unimportant fact, blow it up like a
balloon, tie it neatly with circumstantial detail and present it to her
listener, ready to be launched on the air of the hamlet. She would watch
the clothesline of some expectant mother, and if no small garments
appeared on it in what she considered due time, it would be: 'There's
that Mrs. Wren, only a month from her time, and not a stitch put into a
rag yet.' If she saw a well-dressed stranger call at one of the
cottages, she would know 'for a fac'' that he was the bailiff with a
County Court summons, or that he had been to tell the parents that
'their young Jim', who was working up-country, had got into trouble with
the police over some money. She 'sized up' every girl at home on holiday
and thought that most of them looked pregnant. She took care to say
'thought' and 'looked' in those cases, because she knew that in
ninety-nine cases out of a hundred time would prove her suspicions to
have been groundless.

Sometimes she would widen her field and tell of the doings in high
society. She 'knew for a fac'' that the then Prince of Wales had given
one of his ladies a necklace with pearls the size of pigeon's eggs, and
that the poor old Queen, with her crown on her head and tears streaming
down her cheeks, had gone down on her knees to beg him to turn the whole
lot of saucy hussies out of Windsor Castle. It was said in the hamlet
that, when Mrs. Andrews spoke, you could see the lies coming out of her
mouth like steam, and nobody believed a word she said, even when,
occasionally, she spoke the truth. Yet most of the women enjoyed a chat
with her. As they said, it 'made a bit of a change'. Laura's mother was
too hard on her when she called her a pest, or interrupted one of her
stories at a crucial point to ask, 'Are you sure that is right, Mrs.
Andrews?' In a community without cinemas or wireless and with very
little reading matter, she had her uses.

Borrowers were another nuisance. Most of the women borrowed at some
time, and a few families lived entirely on borrowing the day before
pay-day. There would come a shy, low-down, little knock at the door, and
when it was opened, a child's voice would say, 'Oh, please Mrs.
So-and-So, could you oblige me mother with a spoonful of tea [or a cup
of sugar, or half a loaf] till me Dad gets his money?' If the required
article could not be spared at the first house, she would go from door
to door repeating her request until she got what she wanted, for such
were her instructions.

The borrowings were usually repaid, or there would soon have been
nowhere to borrow from; but often an insufficient quantity or an
inferior quality were returned, and the result was a smouldering
resentment against the habitual borrowers. But no word of direct
complaint was uttered. Had it been, the borrower might have taken
offence, and the women wished above all things to be on good terms with
their neighbours.

Laura's mother detested the borrowing habit. She said that when she had
first set up housekeeping she had made it her rule when a borrower came
to the door to say, 'Tell your mother I never borrow myself and I never
lend. But here's the tea. I don't want it back again. Tell your mother
she's welcome to it.' The plan did not work. The same borrower came
again and again, until she had to say, 'Tell your mother I must have it
back this time.' Again the plan did not work. Laura once heard her
mother say to Queenie, 'Here's half a loaf, Queenie, if it's any good to
you. But I won't deceive you about it; it's one that Mrs. Knowles sent
back that she'd borrowed from me, and I can't fancy it myself, out of
her house. If you don't have it, it'll have to go in the pig-tub.'

'That's all right, me dear,' was Queenie's smiling response. 'It'll do
fine for our Tom's tea. He won't know where it's been, an' 'ould'nt care
if he did. All he cares about's a full belly.'

However, there were other friends and neighbours to whom it was a
pleasure to lend, or to give on the rare occasions when that was
possible. They seldom asked directly for a loan, but would say, 'My poor
old tea-caddy's empty,' or 'I ain't got a mossel o' bread till the baker
comes.' They spoke of this kind of approach as 'a nint' and said that if
anybody liked to take it they could; if not, no harm was done, for they
hadn't demeaned themselves by asking.

As well as the noted gossips, there were in Lark Rise, as elsewhere,
women who, by means of a dropped hint or a subtle suggestion, could
poison another's mind, and others who wished no harm to anybody, yet
loved to discuss their neighbours' affairs and were apt to babble
confidences. But, though few of the women were averse to a little
scandal at times, most of them grew restive when it passed a certain
point. 'Let's give it a rest,' they would say, or 'Well, I think we've
plucked enough feathers out of her wings for one day,' and they would
change the subject and talk about their children, or the rising prices,
or the servant problem--from the maid's standpoint.

Those of the younger set who were what they called 'folks together',
meaning friendly, would sometimes meet in the afternoon in one of their
cottages to sip strong, sweet, milkless tea and talk things over. These
tea-drinkings were never premeditated. One neighbour would drop in, then
another, and another would be beckoned to from the doorway or fetched in
to settle some disputed point. Then some one would say, 'How about a cup
o' tay?' and they would all run home to fetch a spoonful, with a few
leaves over to help make up the spoonful for the pot.

Those who assembled thus were those under forty. The older women did not
care for little tea-parties, nor for light, pleasant chit-chat; there
was more of the salt of the earth in their conversation and they were
apt to express things in terms which the others, who had all been in
good service, considered coarse and countrified.

As they settled around the room to enjoy their cup of tea, some would
have babies at the breast or toddlers playing 'bo-peep' with their
aprons, and others would have sewing or knitting in their hands. They
were pleasant to look at, with their large clean white aprons and
smoothly plaited hair, parted in the middle. The best clothes were kept
folded away in their boxes from Sunday to Sunday, and a clean apron was
full dress on week-days.

It was not a countryside noted for feminine good looks and there were
plenty of wide mouths, high cheekbones, and snub noses among them; but
they nearly all had the country-bred woman's clear eyes, strong, white
teeth and fresh colour. Their height was above that of the average
working-class townswoman, and, when not obscured by pregnancy, their
figures were straight and supple, though inclining to thickness.

This tea-drinking time was the women's hour. Soon the children would be
rushing in from school; then would come the men, with their loud voices
and coarse jokes and corduroys reeking of earth and sweat. In the
meantime, the wives and mothers were free to crook their little fingers
genteely as they sipped from their teacups and talked about the, to
them, latest fashion, or discussed the serial then running in the
novelette they were reading.

Most of the younger women and some of the older ones were fond of what
they called 'a bit of a read', and their mental fare consisted almost
exclusively of the novelette. Several of the hamlet women took in one of
these weekly, as published, for the price was but one penny, and these
were handed round until the pages were thin and frayed with use. Copies
of others found their way there from neighbouring villages, or from
daughters in service, and there was always quite a library of them in
circulation.

The novelette of the 'eighties was a romantic love story, in which the
poor governess always married the duke, or the lady of title the
gamekeeper, who always turned out to be a duke or an earl in disguise.
Midway through the story there had to be a description of a ball, at
which the heroine in her simple white gown attracted all the men in the
room; or the gamekeeper, commandeered to help serve, made love to the
daughter of the house in the conservatory. The stories were often
prettily written and as innocent as sugared milk and water; but,
although they devoured them, the women looked upon novelette reading as
a vice, to be hidden from their menfolk and only discussed with fellow
devotees.

The novelettes were as carefully kept out of the children's way as the
advanced modern novel is, or should be, to-day; but children who wanted
to read them knew where to find them, on the top shelf of the cupboard
or under the bed, and managed to read them in secret. An ordinarily
intelligent child of eight or nine found them cloying; but they did the
women good, for, as they said, they took them out of themselves.

There had been a time when the hamlet readers had fed on stronger food,
and Biblical words and imagery still coloured the speech of some of the
older people. Though unread, every well-kept cottage had still its
little row of books, neatly arranged on the side table with the lamp,
the clothes brush and the family photographs. Some of these collections
consisted solely of the family Bible and a prayer-book or two; others
had a few extra volumes which had either belonged to parents or been
bought with other oddments for a few pence at a sale--_The Pilgrim's
Progress, Drelincourt on Death_, Richardson's _Pamela, Anna Lee: The
Maiden Wife and Mother_, and old books of travel and sermons. Laura's
greatest find was a battered old copy of Belzoni's _Travels_ propping
open somebody's pantry window. When she asked for the loan of it, it was
generously given to her, and she had the, to her, intense pleasure of
exploring the burial chambers of the pyramids with her author.

Some of the imported books had their original owner's book-plate, or an
inscription in faded copper-plate handwriting inside the covers, while
the family ones, in a ruder hand, would proclaim:


              George Welby, his book:
              Give me grace therein to look,
              And not only to look, but to understand,
              For learning is better than houses and land
              When land is lost and money spent
              Then learning is most excellent.


Or:


                     George Welby is my name,
                       England is my nation,
                     Lark Rise is my dwelling place
                       And Christ is my salvation.

                     When I am dead and in my grave
                       And all my bones are rotten,
                     Take this book and think of me
                       And mind I'm not forgotten.


Another favourite inscription was the warning:


                 Steal not this book for fear of shame,
                 For in it doth stand the owner's name,
                 And at the last day God will say
                 'Where is that book you stole away?'
                 And if you say, 'I cannot tell;
                 He'll say, 'Thou cursed, go to hell.'


All or any of these books were freely lent, for none of the owners
wanted to read them. The women had their novelettes, and it took the men
all their time to get through their Sunday newspapers, one of which came
into almost every house, either by purchase or borrowing. The _Weekly
Despatch_, _Reynolds's News_, and _Lloyd's News_ were their favourites,
though a few remained faithful to that fine old local newspaper, the
_Bicester Herald_.

Laura's father, as well as his _Weekly Despatch_, took the _Carpenter
and Builder_, through which the children got their first introduction to
Shakespeare, for there was a controversy in it as to Hamlet's words, 'I
know a hawk from a handsaw'. It appeared that some scholar had suggested
that it should read, 'I know a hawk from a heron, pshaw!' and the
carpenters and builders were up in arms. Of course, the hawk was the
mason's and plasterer's tool of that name, and the handsaw was just a
handsaw. Although that line and a few extracts that she afterwards found
in the school readers were all that Laura was to know of Shakespeare's
works for some time, she sided warmly with the carpenters and builders,
and her mother, when appealed to, agreed, for she said 'that heron,
pshaw!' certainly sounded a bit left-handed.

While the novelette readers, who represented the genteel section of the
community, were enjoying their tea, there would be livelier gatherings
at another of the cottages. The hostess, Caroline Arless, was at that
time about forty-five, and a tall, fine, upstanding woman with flashing
dark eyes, hair like crinkled black wire, and cheeks the colour of a
ripe apricot. She was not a native of the hamlet, but had come there as
a bride, and it was said that she had gipsy blood in her.

Although she was herself a grandmother, she still produced a child of
her own every eighteen months or so, a proceeding regarded as bad form
in the hamlet, for the saying ran, 'When the young 'uns begin, 'tie time
for the old 'uns to finish.' But Mrs. Arless recognized no rules,
excepting those of Nature. She welcomed each new arrival, cared for it
tenderly while it was helpless, swept it out of doors to play as soon as
it could toddle, to school at three, and to work at ten or eleven. Some
of the girls married at seventeen and the boys at nineteen or twenty.

Ways and means did not trouble her. Husband and sons at work 'brassed
up' on Friday nights, and daughters in service sent home at least half
of their wages. One night she would fry steak and onions for supper and
make the hamlet's mouth water; another night there would be nothing but
bread and lard on her table. When she had money she spent it, and when
she had none she got things on credit or went without. 'I shall feather
the foam,' she used to say. 'I have before an' I shall again, and what's
the good of worrying.' She always did manage to feather it, and usually
to have a few coppers in her pocket as well, although she was known to
be deeply in debt. When she received a postal order from one of her
daughters she would say to any one who happened to be standing by when
she opened the letter, 'I be-ant goin' to squander this bit o' money in
paying me debts.'

Her idea of wise spending was to call in a few neighbours of like mind,
seat them round a roaring fire, and despatch one of her toddlers to the
inn with the beer can. They none of them got drunk, or even fuddled, for
there was not very much each, even when the can went round to the inn a
second or a third time. But there was just enough to hearten them up and
make them forget their troubles; and the talk and laughter and scraps of
song which floated on the air from 'that there Mrs. Arless's house' were
shocking to the more sedate matrons. Nobody crooked their finger round
the handle of a teacup or 'talked genteel' at Mrs. Arless's gatherings,
herself least of all. She was so charged with sex vitality that with her
all subjects of conversation led to it--not in its filthy or furtive
aspects, but as the one great central fact of life.

Yet no one could dislike Mrs. Arless, however much she might offend
their taste and sense of fitness. She was so full of life and vigour and
so overflowing with good nature that she would force anything she had
upon any one she thought needed it, regardless of the fact that it was
not and never would be paid for. She knew the inside of a County Court
well, and made no secret of her knowledge, for a County Court summons
was to her but an invitation to a day's outing from which she would
return victorious, having persuaded the judge that she was a model wife
and mother who only got into debt because her family was so large and
she herself was so generous. It was her creditor who retired
discomfited.

Another woman who lived in the hamlet and yet stood somewhat aside from
its ordinary life was Hannah Ashley. She was the daughter-in-law of the
old Methodist who drove the breast plough, and she and her husband were
also Methodists. She was a little brown mouse of a woman who took no
part in the hamlet gossip or the hamlet disputes. Indeed, she was seldom
seen on weekdays, for her cottage stood somewhat apart from the others
and had its own well in the garden. But on Sunday evenings her house was
used as a Methodist meeting place, and then all her week-day reserve was
put aside and all who cared to come were made welcome. As she listened
to the preacher, or joined in the hymns and prayers, she would look
round on the tiny congregation, and those whose eyes met hers would see
such a glow of love in them that they could never again think, much less
say, ill of her, beyond 'Well, she's a Methody', as though that
explained and excused anything strange about her.

These younger Ashleys had one child, a son, about Edmund's age, and the
children at the end house sometimes played with him. When Laura called
at his home for him one Saturday morning she saw a picture which stamped
itself upon her mind for life. It was the hour when every other house in
the hamlet was being turned inside out for the Saturday cleaning. The
older children, home from school, were running in and out of their
homes, or quarrelling over their games outside. Mothers were scolding
and babies were crying during the process of being rolled in their
shawls for an outing on the arm of an older sister. It was the kind of
day Laura detested, for there was no corner indoors for her and her
book, and outside she was in danger of being dragged into games that
either pulled her to pieces or bored her.

Inside Freddy Ashley's home all was peace and quiet and spotless purity.
The walls were freshly whitewashed, the table and board floor were
scrubbed to a pale straw colour, the beautifully polished grate glowed
crimson, for the oven was being heated, and placed half-way over the
table was a snowy cloth with paste-board and rolling-pin upon it. Freddy
was helping his mother make biscuits, cutting the pastry she had rolled
into shapes with a little tin cutter. Their two faces, both so plain and
yet so pleasant, were close together above the pasteboard, and their two
voices as they bade Laura come in and sit by the fire sounded like
angels' voices after the tumult outside.

It was a brief glimpse into a different world from the one she was
accustomed to, but the picture remained with her as something quiet and
pure and lovely. She thought that the home at Nazareth must have been
something like Freddy's.

The women never worked in the vegetable gardens or on the allotments,
even when they had their children off hand and had plenty of spare time,
for there was a strict division of labour and that was 'men's work'.
Victorian ideas, too, had penetrated to some extent, and any work
outside the home was considered unwomanly. But even that code permitted
a woman to cultivate a flower garden, and most of the houses had at
least a narrow border beside the pathway. As no money could be spared
for seeds or plants, they had to depend upon roots and cuttings given by
their neighbours, and there was little variety; but they grew all the
sweet old-fashioned cottage garden flowers, pinks and sweet williams and
love-in-a-mist, wallflowers and forget-me-nots in spring and hollyhocks
and Michaelmas daisies in autumn. Then there were lavender and
sweetbriar bushes, and southernwood, sometimes called 'lad's love', but
known there as 'old man'.

Almost every garden had its rose bush; but there were no coloured roses
amongst them. Only Old Sally had those; the other people had to be
content with that meek, old-fashioned white rose with a pink flush at
the heart known as the 'maiden's blush'. Laura used to wonder who had
imported the first bush, for evidently slips of it had been handed round
from house to house.

As well as their flower garden, the women cultivated a herb corner,
stocked with thyme and parsley and sage for cooking, rosemary to flavour
the home-made lard, lavender to scent the best clothes, and peppermint,
pennyroyal, horehound, camomile, tansy, balm, and rue for physic. They
made a good deal of camomile tea, which they drank freely to ward off
colds, to soothe the nerves, and as a general tonic. A large jug of this
was always prepared and stood ready for heating up after confinements.
The horehound was used with honey in a preparation to be taken for sore
throats and colds on the chest. Peppermint tea was made rather as a
luxury than a medicine; it was brought out on special occasions and
drunk from wine-glasses; and the women had a private use for the
pennyroyal, though, judging from appearances, it was not very effective.

As well as the garden herbs, still in general use, some of the older
women used wild ones, which they gathered in their seasons and dried.
But the knowledge and use of these was dying out; most people depended
upon their garden stock. Yarrow, or milleflower, was an exception;
everybody still gathered that in large quantities to make 'yarb beer'.
Gallons of this were brewed and taken to work in their tea cans by the
men and stood aside in the pantry for the mother and children to drink
whenever thirsty. The finest yarrow grew beside the turnpike, and in dry
weather the whole plant became so saturated with white dust that the
beer, when brewed, had a milky tinge. If the children remarked on this
they were told, 'Us've all got to eat a peck o' dust before we dies, an'
it'll slip down easy in this good yarb beer.'

The children at the end house used to wonder how they would ever obtain
their peck of dust, for their mother was fastidiously particular. Such
things as lettuce and watercress she washed in three waters, instead of
giving them the dip and shake considered sufficient by most other
people. Watercress had almost to be washed away, because of the story of
the man who had swallowed a tadpole which had grown to a full-sized frog
in his stomach. There was an abundance of watercress to be had for the
picking, and a good deal of it was eaten in the spring, before it got
tough and people got tired of it. Perhaps they owed much of their good
health to such food.

All kinds of home-made wines were brewed by all but the poorest. Sloes
and blackberries and elderberries could be picked from the hedgerows,
dandelions and coltsfoot and cowslips from the fields, and the garden
provided rhubarb, currants and gooseberries and parsnips. Jam was made
from garden and hedgerow fruit. This had to be made over an open fire
and needed great care in the making; but the result was generally
good--too good, the women said, for the jam disappeared too soon. Some
notable housewives made jelly. Crab-apple jelly was a speciality at the
end house. Crab-apple trees abounded in the hedgerows and the children
knew just where to go for red crabs, red-and-yellow streaked crabs, or
crabs which hung like ropes of green onions on the branches.

It seemed to Laura a miracle when a basket of these, with nothing but
sugar and water added, turned into jelly as clear and bright as a ruby.
She did not take into account the long stewing, tedious straining, and
careful measuring, boiling up and clarifying that went to the filling of
the row of glass jars which cast a glow of red light on the whitewash at
the back of the pantry shelf.

A quickly made delicacy was cowslip tea. This was made by picking the
golden pips from a handful of cowslips, pouring boiling water over them,
and letting the tea stand a few minutes to infuse. It could then be
drunk either with or without sugar as preferred.

Cowslip balls were made for the children. These were fashioned by taking
a great fragrant handful of the flowers, tying the stalks tightly with
string, and pulling down the blooms to cover the stems. The bunch was
then almost round, and made the loveliest ball imaginable.

Some of the older people who kept bees made mead, known there as
'metheglin'. It was a drink almost superstitiously esteemed, and the
offer of a glass was regarded as a great compliment. Those who made it
liked to make a little mystery of the process; but it was really very
simple. Three pounds of honey were allowed to every gallon of spring
water. This had to be running spring water, and was obtained from a
place in the brook where the water bubbled up; never from the well. The
honey and water were boiled together, and skimmed and strained and
worked with a little yeast; then kept in a barrel for six months, when
the metheglin was ready for bottling.

Old Sally said that some folks messed up their metheglin with lemons,
bay leaves, and suchlike; but all she could say was that folks who'd add
anything to honey didn't deserve to have bees to work for them.

Old metheglin was supposed to be the most intoxicating drink on earth,
and it was certainly potent, as a small girl once found when, staying up
to welcome home a soldier uncle from Egypt, she was invited to take a
sip from his glass and took a pull.

All the evening it had been 'Yes, please, Uncle Reuben', and 'Very well,
thank you, Uncle Reuben' with her; but as she went upstairs to bed she
astonished every one by calling pertly: 'Uncle Reuby is a booby!' It was
the mead speaking, not her. There was a dash in her direction; but,
fortunately for her, it was stayed by Sergeant Reuben draining his
glass, smacking his lips, and declaring: 'Well, I've tasted some liquors
in my time; but this beats all!' and under cover of the fresh uncorking
and pouring out, she tumbled sleepily into bed with her white, starched
finery still on her.

The hamlet people never invited each other to a meal; but when it was
necessary to offer tea to an important caller, or to friends from a
distance, the women had their resources. If, as often happened, there
was no butter in the house, a child would be sent to the shop at the inn
for a quarter of the best fresh, even if it had to 'go down on the book'
until pay-day. Thin bread and butter, cut and arranged as in their old
days in service, with a pot of homemade jam, which had been hidden away
for such an occasion, and a dish of lettuce, fresh from the garden and
garnished with little rosy radishes, made an attractive little meal,
fit, as they said, to put before anybody.

In winter, salt butter would be sent for and toast would be made and
eaten with celery. Toast was a favourite dish for family consumption.
'I've made 'em a stack o' toast as high as up to their knees', a mother
would say on a winter Sunday afternoon before her hungry brood came in
from church. Another dish upon which they prided themselves was thin
slices of cold, boiled streaky bacon on toast, a dish so delicious that
it deserves to be more widely popular.

The few visitors from the outer world who came that way enjoyed such
simple food, with a cup of tea; and a glass of homemade wine at their
departure; and the women enjoyed entertaining them, and especially
enjoyed the feeling that they, themselves, were equal to the occasion.
'You don't want to be poor and look poor, too,' they would say; and
'We've got our pride. Yes, we've got our pride.'



                                  VII

                               _Callers_

Callers made a pleasant diversion in the hamlet women's day, and there
were more of these than might have been expected. The first to arrive on
Monday morning was old Jerry Parish with his cartload of fish and fruit.
As he served some of the big houses on his round, Jerry carried quite a
large stock; but the only goods he took round to the doors at Lark Rise
were a box of bloaters and a basket of small, sour oranges. The bloaters
were sold at a penny each and the oranges at three a penny. Even at
these prices they were luxuries; but, as it was still only Monday and a
few coppers might remain in a few purses, the women felt at liberty to
crowd round his cart to examine and criticize his wares, even if they
bought nothing.

Two or three of them would be tempted to buy a bloater for their midday
meal, but it had to be a soft-roed one, for, in nearly every house there
were children under school age at home; so the bloater had to be shared,
and the soft roes spread upon bread for the smallest ones.

'Lor' blime me!' Jerry used to say. 'Never knowed such a lot in me life
for soft roes. Good job I ain't a soft-roed 'un or I should've got aten
up meself before now.' And he pinched the bloaters between his great red
fingers, pretended to consider the matter with his head on one side,
then declared each separate fish had the softest of soft roes, whether
it had or not. 'Oozin', simply oozin' with goodness, I tell ye!' and
oozing it certainly was when released from his grip. 'But what's the
good of one bloater amongst the lot of ye? Tell ye what I'll do,' he
would urge. 'I'll put ye in these three whoppers for tuppence-ha'penny.'

It was no good. The twopence-halfpenny was never forthcoming; even the
penny could so ill be spared that the purchaser often felt selfish and
greedy after she had parted with it; but, after a morning at the
washtub, she needed a treat so badly, and a bloater made a tasty change
from her usually monotonous diet.

The oranges were tempting, too, for the children loved them. It was one
of their greatest treats to find oranges on the mantelshelf when they
came home from school in winter. Sour they might be and hard and skinny
within; but without how rich and glowing! and what a strange foreign
scent pervaded the room when their mother divided each one into quarters
and distributed them. Even when the pulp had been eaten, the peel
remained, to be dried on the hob and taken to school to chew in class or
'swopped' for conkers or string or some other desirable object.

Jerry's cart had a great attraction for Laura. At the sound of his
wheels she would run out to feast her eyes on the lovely rich colours of
grapes and pears and peaches. She loved to see the fish, too, with their
cool colours and queer shapes, and would imagine them swimming about in
the sea or resting among the seaweed. 'What is that one called?' she
asked one day, pointing to a particularly queer-looking one.

'That's a John Dory, me dear. See them black marks? Look like
finger-marks, don't 'em? An' they do say that they be finger-marks. _He_
made 'em, that night, ye know, when they was fishin', ye know, an' _He_
took some an' cooked 'em all ready for 'em, an' ever since, they say,
that ivery John Dory as comes out o' th' sea have got _His_ finger-marks
on 'un.'

Laura was puzzled, for Jerry had mentioned no name and he was, moreover,
a drinking, swearing old man, little likely, as she thought, to repeat a
sacred legend.

'Do you mean the Sea of Galilee?' she asked timidly.

'That's it, me dear. That's what they say, whether true or not, of
course, I _don't_ know; but there be the finger-marks, right enough, an'
that's what they say in our trade.'

It was on Jerry's cart tomatoes first appeared in the hamlet. They had
not long been introduced into this country and were slowly making their
way into favour. The fruit was flatter in shape then than now and deeply
grooved and indented from the stem, giving it an almost starlike
appearance. There were bright yellow ones, too, as well as the scarlet;
but, after a few years, the yellow ones disappeared from the market and
the red ones became rounder and smoother, as we see them now.

At first sight, the basket of red and yellow fruit attracted Laura's
colour-loving eye. 'What are those?' she asked old Jerry.

'Love-apples, me dear. Love-apples, they be; though some hignorant folks
be a callin'.'em tommytoes. But you don't want any o' they--nasty sour
things, they be, as only gentry can eat. You have a nice sweet orange
wi' your penny.' But Laura felt she must taste the love-apples and
insisted upon having one.

Such daring created quite a sensation among the onlookers. 'Don't 'ee go
tryin' to eat it, now,' one woman urged. 'It'll only make 'ee sick. I
know because I had one of the nasty horrid things at our Minnie's.' And
nasty, horrid things tomatoes remained in the popular estimation for
years; though most people to-day would prefer them as they were then,
with the real tomato flavour pronounced, to the watery insipidity of our
larger, smoother tomato.

Mr. Wilkins, the baker, came three times a week. His long, lank figure,
girded by a white apron which always seemed about to slip down over his
hips, was a familiar one at the end house. He always stayed there for a
cup of tea, for which he propped himself up against the end of the
dresser. He would never sit down; he said he had not time, and that was
why he did not stop to change his flour-dusty bakehouse clothes before
he started on his round.

He was no ordinary baker, but a ship's carpenter by trade who had come
to the neighbouring village on a visit to relatives, met his present
wife, married her, and cast anchor inland. Her father was old, she was
the only child, and the family business had to be attended to; so,
partly for love and partly for future gain he had given up the sea, but
he still remained a sailor at heart.

He would stand in the doorway of Laura's home and look out at the
wheatfields billowing in the breeze and the white clouds hurrying over
them, and say: 'All very fine; but it seems a bit dead to me, right away
from the sea, like this.' And he would tell the children how the waves
pile up in a storm, 'like the wall of a house coming down on your ship',
and about other seas, calm and bright as a looking-glass, with little
islands and palm trees-but treacherous, too--and treacherous little men
living in palm leaf huts, 'their faces as brown as your frock, Laura.'
Once he had been shipwrecked and spent nine days in an open boat, the
last two without water. His tongue had stuck to the roof of his mouth
and he had spent weeks after rescue in hospital.

'And yet,' he would say, 'I'd dearly love just one more trip; but my
dear wife would cry her eyes out if I mentioned it, and the business, of
course, couldn't be left. No. I've swallowed the anchor, all right. I've
swallowed the anchor.'

Mr. Wilkins brought the image of the real living sea to the end house;
otherwise the children would have only known it in pictures. True, their
mother in her nursing days had been to the seaside with her charges and
had many pleasant stories to tell of walks on piers, digging on sands,
gathering seaweed, and shrimping with nets. But the seaside was
different--delightful in its way, no doubt, but nothing like the wide
tumbling ocean with ships on it.

The only portion of the sea which came their way was contained in a
medicine bottle which a hamlet girl in service at Brighton brought home
as a curiosity. In time the bottle of sea-water became the property of a
younger sister, a school-fellow of Laura's, who was persuaded to barter
it for a hunch of cake and a blue-bead necklace. Laura treasured it for
years.

Many casual callers passed through the hamlet. Travelling tinkers with
their barrows, braziers, and twirling grindstones turned aside from the
main road and came singing:


                Any razors or scissors to grind?
                  Or anything else in the tinker's line?
                Any old pots or kettles to mend?


After squinting into any leaking vessel against the light, or trying the
edges of razors or scissors upon the hard skin of their palms, they
would squat by the side of the road to work, or start their emery wheel
whizzing, to the delight of the hamlet children, who always formed a
ring around any such operations.

Gipsy women with cabbage-nets and clothes-pegs to sell were more
frequent callers for they had a camping-place only a mile away and no
place was too poor to yield them a harvest. When a door was opened to
them, if the housewife appeared to be under forty, they would ask in a
wheedling voice: 'Is your mother at home, my dear?' Then, when the
position was explained, they would exclaim in astonished tones: 'You
don't mean to tell me you be the mother? Look at that, now. I shouldn't
have taken you to be a day over twenty.'

No matter how often repeated, this compliment was swallowed whole, and
made a favourable opening for a long conversation, in the course of
which the wily 'Egyptian' not only learned the full history of the
woman's own family, but also a good deal about those of her neighbours,
which was duly noted for future use. Then would come a request for
'handful of little 'taters, or an onion or two for the pot', and, if
these were given, as they usually were, 'My pretty lady' would be asked
for an old shift of her own or an old shirt of her husband's, or
anything that the children might have left off, and, poverty-stricken
though the hamlet was, a few worn-out garments would be secured to swell
the size of the bundle which, afterwards, would be sold to the rag
merchant.

Sometimes the gipsies would offer to tell fortunes; but this offer was
always refused, not out of scepticism or lack of curiosity about the
future, but because the necessary silver coin was not available. 'No,
thank 'ee,' the women would say. 'I don't want nothink of that sort. My
fortune's already told.'

'Ah, my lady! you med think so; but them as has got childern never
knows. You be born, but you ain't dead yet, an' you may dress in silks
and ride in your own carriage yet. You wait till that fine strappin' boy
o' yourn gets rich. He won't forget his mother, I'll bet!' and after
this free prognostication, they would trail off to the next house,
leaving behind a scent as strong as a vixen's.

The gipsies paid in entertainment for what they received. Their calls
made a welcome break in the day. Those of the tramps only harrowed the
feelings and left the depressed in spirit even more depressed.

There must have been hundreds of tramps on the roads at that time. It
was a common sight, when out for a walk, to see a dirty, unshaven man,
his rags topped with a battered bowler, lighting a fire of sticks by the
roadside to boil his tea-can. Sometimes he would have a poor bedraggled
woman with him and she would be lighting the fire while he lolled at
ease on the turf or picked out the best pieces from the bag of food they
had collected at their last place of call.

Some of them carried small, worthless things to sell--matches,
shoe-laces, or dried lavender bags. The children's mother often bought
from these out of pity; but never from the man who sold oranges, for
they had seen him on one of their walks, spitting on his oranges and
polishing them with a filthy rag. Then there was the woman who, very
early one morning, knocked at the door with small slabs of tree-bark in
her apron. She was cleaner and better-dressed than the ordinary tramp
and brought with her a strong scent of lavender. The bark appeared to be
such as could have been hacked with a clasp-knife from the nearest pine
tree; but she claimed for it a very different origin. It was the famous
lavender bark, she said, brought from foreign parts by her sailor son.
One fragment kept among clothes was not only an everlasting perfume, but
it was also death to moths. 'You just smell it, my dears,' she said,
handing pieces to the mother and the children, who had crowded to the
door.

It certainly smelt strongly of lavender. The children handled it
lovingly, fascinated by a substance which had travelled so far and smelt
so sweetly.

She asked sixpence a slab; but obligingly came down to twopence, and
three pieces were purchased and placed in a fancy bowl on the side table
to perfume the room and to be exhibited as a rarity.

Alas! the vendor had barely time to clear out of the hamlet before all
the perfume had evaporated and the bark became what it had been before
she sprinkled it with oil of lavender--just ordinary bark from a pine
trunk!

Such brilliance was exceptional. Most of the tramps were plain beggars.
'Please could you give me a morsel of bread, for I be so hungry. I'm
telling God I haven't put a bite between my lips since yesterday
morning' was a regular formula with them when they knocked at the door
of a cottage; and, although many of them looked well-nourished, they
were never turned away. Thick slices, which could ill be spared, were
plastered with lard; the cold potatoes which the housewife had intended
to fry for her own dinner were wrapped in newspaper, and by the time
they left the hamlet they were insured against starvation for at least a
week. The only reward for such generosity, beyond the whining
professional 'God bless ye', was the cheering reflection that however
badly off one might be oneself, there were others poorer.

Where all these wayfarers came from or how they had fallen so low in the
social scale was uncertain. According to their own account, they had
been ordinary decent working people with homes 'just such another as
yourn, mum'; but their houses had been burned down or flooded, or they
had fallen out of work, or spent a long time in hospital and had never
been able to start again. Many of the women pleaded that their husbands
were dead, and several men came begging with the plea that, having lost
their wives, they had the children to look after and could not leave
them to work for their living.

Sometimes whole families took to the road with their bags and bundles
and tea-cans, begging their food as they went and sleeping in casual
wards or under ricks or in ditches. Laura's father, coming home from
work at dusk one night, thought he heard a rustling in the ditch by the
roadside. When he looked down into it, a row of white faces looked up at
him, belonging to a mother, a father, and three or four children. He
said that in the half light only their faces were visible and that they
looked like a set of silver coins, ranging from a florin to a threepenny
bit. Though late in the summer, the night was not cold. 'Thank God for
that!' said the children's mother when she heard about them, for, had it
been cold, he might have brought them all home with him. He had brought
home tramps before and had them sit at table with the family, to his
wife's disgust, for he had what she considered peculiar ideas on
hospitality and the brotherhood of man.

There was no tallyman, or Johnny Fortnight, in those parts; but once,
for a few months, a man who kept a small furniture shop in a
neighbouring town came round selling his wares on the instalment plan.
On his first visit to Lark Rise he got no order at all; but on his
second one of the women, more daring than the rest, ordered a small
wooden washstand and a zinc bath for washing day. Immediately washstands
and zinc baths became the rage. None of the women could think how they
had managed to exist so long without a washstand in their bedroom. They
were quite satisfied with the buckets and basins of water in the pantry
or by the fireside or out of doors for their own use; but supposing some
one fell ill and the doctor had to wash his hands in a basin placed on a
clean towel on the kitchen table! or supposing some of their town
relatives came on a visit, those with a real sink and water laid on!
They felt they would die with mortification if they had to apologize for
having no washstand. As to the zinc bath, that seemed even more
necessary. That wooden tub their mother had used was 'a girt okkard old
thing'. Although they had not noticed its weight much before, it seemed
almost to break their backs when they could see a bright, shining new
bath hanging under the eaves of the next-door barn.

It was not long before practically every house had a new bath and
washstand. A few mothers of young children went farther and ordered a
fireguard as well. Then the fortnightly payments began. One-and-six was
the specified instalment, and, for the first few fortnights, this was
forthcoming. But it was so difficult to get that eighteenpence together.
A few pence had always to be used out of the first week's ninepence,
then in the second week some urgent need for cash would occur. The
instalments fell to a shilling. Then to sixpence. A few gave up the
struggle and defaulted.

Month after month the salesman came round and collected what he could;
but he did not try to tempt them to buy anything more, for he could see
that he would never be paid for it. He was a good-hearted man who
listened to their tales of woe and never bullied or threatened to County
Court them. Perhaps the debts were not as important to him as they
appeared to his customers; or he may have felt he was to blame for
tempting them to order things they could not afford. He continued
calling until he had collected as much as he thought possible, then
disappeared from the scene.

A more amusing episode was that of the barrels of beer. At that time in
that part of the country, brewers' travellers, known locally as
'outriders', called for orders at farm-houses and superior cottages, as
well as at inns. No experienced outrider visited farm labourers'
cottages; but the time came when a beginner, full of youthful enthusiasm
and burning to fill up his order book, had the brilliant idea of
canvassing the hamlet for orders.

Wouldn't it be splendid, he asked the women, to have their own
nine-gallon cask of good ale in for Christmas, and only have to go into
the pantry and turn the tap to get a glass for their husband and
friends. The ale cost far less by the barrel than when bought at the
inn. It would be an economy in the long run, and how well it would look
to bring out a jug of foaming ale from their own barrel for their
friends. As to payment, they sent in their bills quarterly, so there
would be plenty of time to save up.

The women agreed that it would, indeed, be splendid to have their own
barrel, and even the men, when told of the project at night, were
impressed by the difference in price when buying by the nine-gallon
cask. Some of them worked it out on paper and were satisfied that,
considering that they would be spending a few shillings extra at
Christmas in any case, and that the missus had been looking rather
peaked lately and a glass of good beer cost less than doctor's physic,
and that maybe a daughter in service would be sending a postal order,
they might venture to order the cask.

Others did not trouble to work it out; but, enchanted with the idea,
gave the order lightheartedly. After all, as the outrider said,
Christmas came but once a year, and this year they would have a jolly
one. Of course there were kill-joys, like Laura's father, who said
sardonically: 'They'll laugh the other side of their faces when it comes
to paying for it.'

The barrels came and were tapped and the beer was handed around. The
barrels were empty and the brewer's carter in his leather apron heaved
them into the van behind his steaming, stamping horses; but none of the
mustard or cocoa tins hidden away in secret places contained more than a
few coppers towards paying the bill. When the day of reckoning came only
three of the purchasers had the money ready. But time was allowed. Next
month would do; but, mind! it must be forthcoming then. Most of the
women tried hard to get that money together; but, of course, they could
not. The traveller called again and again, each time growing more
threatening, and, after some months, the brewer took the matter to the
County Court, where the judge, after hearing the circumstances of sale
and the income of the purchasers, ordered them all to pay twopence
weekly off the debt. So ended the great excitement of having one's own
barrel of beer on tap.

The packman, or pedlar, once a familiar figure in that part of the
country, was seldom seen in the 'eighties. People had taken to buying
their clothes at the shops in the market town, where fashions were newer
and prices lower. But one last survivor of the once numerous clan still
visited the hamlet at long and irregular intervals.

He would turn aside from the turnpike and come plodding down the narrow
hamlet road, an old white-headed, white-bearded man, still hale and
rosy, although almost bent double under the heavy, black canvas-covered
pack he carried strapped on his shoulders. 'Anything out of the pack
to-day?' he would ask at each house, and, at the least encouragement,
fling down his load and open it on the door-step. He carried a tempting
variety of goods: dress-lengths and shirt-lengths and remnants to make
up for the children; aprons and pinafores, plain and fancy; corduroys
for the men, and coloured scarves and ribbons for Sunday wear.

'That's a bit of right good stuff, ma'am, that is,' he would say,
holding up some dress-length to exhibit it. 'A gown made of this piece'd
last anybody for ever and then make 'em a good petticoat afterwards.'
Few of the hamlet women could afford to test the quality of his piece
goods; cottons or tapes, or a paper of pins, were their usual purchases;
but his dress-lengths and other fabrics were of excellent quality and
wore much longer than any one would wish anything to wear in these days
of rapidly changing fashions. It was from his pack the soft, warm
woollen, grey with a white fleck in it, came to make the frock Laura
wore with a little black satin apron and a bunch of snowdrops pinned to
the breast when she went to sell stamps in the post office.

Once every summer a German band passed through the hamlet and halted
outside the inn to play. It was composed of an entire family, a father
and his six sons, the latter graded in size like a set of jugs, from the
tall young man who played the cornet to the chubby pink-faced little boy
who beat the drum.

Drawn up in the semicircle in their neat, green uniforms, they would
blow away at their instruments until their chubby German cheeks seemed
near to bursting point. Most of the music they played was above the
heads of the hamlet folks, who said they liked something with a bit more
'chune' in it; but when, at the end of the performance, they gave _God
Save the Queen_ the standers-by joined with gusto in singing it.

That was the sign for the landlord to come out in his shirt-sleeves with
three frothing beer mugs. One for the father, who poured the beer down
his throat like water down a sink, and the other two to be passed
politely from son to son. Unless a farmer's gig or a tradesman's trap
happened to pull up at the inn gate during the performance, the beer was
their only reward for the entertainment. They did not take their
collecting bag round to the women and children who had gathered to
listen, for they knew from experience there were no stray halfpence for
German bands in a farm labourer's wife's pocket. So after shaking the
saliva from their brass instruments, they bowed, clicked their heels,
and marched off up the dusty road to the mother village. It was good
beer and they were hot and thirsty, so perhaps the reward was
sufficient.

The only other travelling entertainment which came there was known as
the dancing dolls. These, alas! did not dance in the open, but in a
cottage to which a penny admission was charged, and, as the cottage was
not of the cleanest, Laura was never allowed to witness this
performance. Those who had seen them said the dolls were on wires and
that the man who exhibited them said the words for them, so it must have
been some kind of marionette show.

Once, very early in their school life, the end house children met a man
with a dancing bear. The man, apparently a foreigner, saw that the
children were afraid to pass, and, to reassure them, set his bear
dancing. With a long pole balanced across its front paws, it waltzed
heavily to the tune hummed by its master, then shouldered the pole and
did exercises at his word of command. The elders of the hamlet said the
bear had appeared there at long intervals for many years; but that was
its last appearance. Poor Bruin, with his mangy fur and hot, tainted
breath, was never seen in those parts again. Perhaps he died of old age.

The greatest thrill of all and the one longest remembered in the hamlet,
was provided by the visit of a cheap-jack about half-way through the
decade. One autumn evening, just before dusk, he arrived with his
cartload of crockery and tinware and set out his stock on the grass by
the roadside before a back-cloth painted with icebergs and penguins and
polar bears. Soon he had his naphtha lamps flaring and was clashing his
basins together like bells and calling: 'Come buy! Come buy!'

It was the first visit of a cheap-jack to the hamlet and there was great
excitement. Men, women, and children rushed from the houses and crowded
around in the circle of light to listen to his patter and admire his
wares. And what bargains he had! The tea-service decorated with fat,
full-blown pink roses: twenty-one pieces and not a flaw in any one of
them. The Queen had purchased its fellow set for Buckingham Palace, it
appeared. The teapots, the trays, the nests of dishes and basins, and
the set of bedroom china which made every one blush when he selected the
most intimate utensil to rap with his knuckles to show it rang true.

'Two bob!' he shouted. 'Only two bob for this handsome set of jugs.
Here's one for your beer and one for your milk and another in case you
break one of the other two. Nobody willing to speculate? Then what about
this here set of trays, straight from Japan and the peonies
hand-painted; or this lot of basins, exact replicas of the one the
Princess of Wales supped her gruel from when Prince George was born. Why
damme, they cost me more n'r that. I could get twice the price I'm
asking in Banbury to-morrow; but I'll give 'em to you, for you can't
call it selling, because I like your faces and me load's heavy for me
'oss. Alarming bargains! Tremendous sacrifices! Come buy! Come buy!'

But there were scarcely any offers. A woman here and there would give
threepence for a large pudding-basin or sixpence for a tin saucepan. The
children's mother bought a penny nutmeg-grater and a set of wooden
spoons for cooking; the innkeeper's wife ran to a dozen tumblers and a
ball of string; then there was a long pause during which the vendor kept
up a continual stream of jokes and anecdotes which sent his audience
into fits of laughter. Once he broke into song:


    There was a man in his garden walked
    And cut his throat with a lump of chalk;
    His wife, she knew not what she did,
    She strangled herself with the saucepan lid.
    There was a man and a fine young fellow
    Who poisoned himself with an umbrella.
    Even Joey in his cradle shot himself dead with a silver ladle.
    When you hear this horrible tale
    It makes your faces all turn pale,
    Your eyes go green, you're overcome,
    So tweedle, tweedle, tweedle twum.


All very fine entertainment; but it brought him no money and he began to
suspect that he would draw a blank at Lark Rise.

'Never let it be said,' he implored, 'that this is the
poverty-strickenist place on God's earth. Buy something, if only for
your own credit's sake. Here!' snatching up a pile of odd plates. 'Good
dinner-plates for you. Every one a left-over from a first-class service.
Buy one of these and you'll have the satisfaction of knowing you're
eating off the same ware as lords and dukes. Only three-halfpence each.
Who'll buy? Who'll buy?'

There was a scramble for the plates, for nearly every one could muster
three-halfpence; but every time anything more costly was produced there
was dead silence. Some of the women began to feel uncomfortable. 'Don't
be poor and look poor, too' was their motto, and here they were looking
poor indeed, for who, with money in their pockets, could have resisted
such wonderful bargains.

Then the glorious unexpected happened. The man had brought the pink rose
tea-service forward again and was handing one of the cups round. 'You
just look at the light through it--and you, ma'am--and you. Ain't it
lovely china, thin as an eggshell, practically transparent, and with
every one of them roses hand-painted with a brush? You can't let a set
like that go out of the place, now can you? I can see all your mouths
a-watering. You run home, my dears, and bring out them stockings from
under the mattress and the first one to get back shall have it for
twelve bob.'

Each woman in turn handled the cup lovingly, then shook her head and
passed it on. None of them had stockings of savings hidden away. But,
just as the man was receiving back the cup, a little roughly, for he was
getting discouraged, a voice spoke up in the background.

'How much did you say, mister? Twelve bob? I'll give you ten.' It was
John Price, who, only the night before, had returned from his soldiering
in India. A very ordinary sort of chap at most times, for he was a
teetotaller and stood no drinks at the inn, as a returned soldier should
have done; but now, suddenly, he became important. All eyes were upon
him. The credit of the hamlet was at stake.

'I'll give you ten bob.'

'Can't be done, matey. Cost me more nor that. But, look see, tell you
what I will do. You give me eleven and six and I'll throw in this
handsome silver-gilt vase for your mantelpiece.'

'Done!' The bargain was concluded; the money changed hands, and the
reputation of the hamlet was rehabilitated. Willing hands helped John
carry the tea-service to his home. Indeed, it was considered an honour
to be trusted with a cup. His bride-to-be was still away in service and
little knew how many were envying her that night. To have such a lovely
service awaiting her return, no cracked or odd pieces, every piece alike
and all so lovely; lucky, lucky, Lucy! But though they could not help
envying her a little, they shared in her triumph, for surely such a
purchase must shed a glow of reflected prosperity on the whole hamlet.
Though it might not be convenient to all of them to buy very much on
that particular night, the man must see there was a bit of money in the
place and folks who knew how to spend it.

What came after was anti-climax, and yet very pleasant from the end
house children's point of view. A set of pretty little dishes, suitable
for holding jam, butter or fruit, according to size, was being
exhibited. The price had gone down from half a crown to a shilling
without response, when once more a voice spoke up in the background.
'Pass them over, please. I expect my wife can find a use for them,' and,
behold, it was the children's father who had halted on his way home from
work to see what the lights and the crowd meant.

Perhaps in all the man took a pound that night, which was fifteen
shillings more than any one could have foretold; but it was not
sufficient to tempt him to come again, and thenceforth the year was
dated as 'that time the cheap-jack came'.



                                  VIII

                              '_The Box_'

A familiar sight at Lark Rise was that of a young girl--any young girl
between ten and thirteen--pushing one of the two perambulators in the
hamlet round the Rise with a smallish-sized, oak clothes box with black
handles lashed to the seat. Those not already informed who met her would
read the signs and inquire: 'How is your mother'--or your sister or your
aunt--'getting on?' and she, well-primed, would answer demurely, 'As
well as can be expected under the circumstances, thank you, Mrs.
So-and-So.'

She had been to the Rectory for THE BOX, which appeared almost
simultaneously with every new baby, and a gruelling time she would have
had pushing her load the mile and a half and, at the same time, keeping
it from slipping from its narrow perch. But, very soon, such small
drawbacks would be forgotten in the pleasure of seeing it unpacked. It
contained half a dozen of everything--tiny shirts, swathes, long flannel
barrows, nighties, and napkins, made, kept in repair, and lent for every
confinement by the clergyman's daughter. In addition to the loaned
clothes, it would contain, as a gift, packets of tea and sugar and a tin
of patent groats for making gruel.

The box was a popular institution. Any farm labourer's wife, whether she
attended church or not, was made welcome to the loan of it. It appeared
in most of the cottages at regular intervals and seemed to the children
as much a feature of family life as the new babies. It was so constantly
in demand that it had to have an understudy, known as 'the second-best
box', altogether inferior, which fell to the lot of those careless
matrons who had neglected to bespeak the loan the moment they 'knew
their luck again'.

The boxes were supposed to be returned at the end of a month with the
clothes freshly laundered; but, if no one else required them, an
extension could be had, and many mothers were allowed to keep their box
until, at six or seven weeks old, the baby was big enough to be put into
short clothes; so saving them the cost of preparing a layette other than
the one set of clothes got ready for the infant's arrival. Even that
might be borrowed. The stock at the end house was several times called
for in what, by a polite fiction, passed as an emergency. Other women
had their own baby clothes, beautifully sewn and laundered; but there
was scarcely one who did not require the clothes in the box to
supplement them. For some reason or other, the box was never allowed to
go out until the baby had arrived.

The little garments on loan were all good quality and nicely trimmed
with embroidery and hand tucking. The clergyman's daughter also kept two
christening robes to lend to the mothers, and made a new frock, as a
gift, for every baby's 'shortening'. Summer or winter, these little
frocks were made of flowered print, blue for the boys and pink for the
girls, and every one of the tiny, strong stitches in them were done by
her own hands. She got little credit for this. The mothers, like the
children, looked upon the small garments, both loaned and given, as a
provision of Nature. Indeed, they were rather inclined to criticize. One
woman ripped off the deep flounce of old Buckinghamshire lace from the
second-best christening robe and substituted a frill of coarse,
machine-made embroidery, saying she was not going to take her child to
church 'trigged out' in that old-fashioned trash. As she had not troubled
to unpick the stitches, the lace was torn beyond repair, and the gown
ever after was decidedly second-best, for the best one was the old
Rectory family christening robe and made of the finest lawn, tucked and
inserted all over with real Valenciennes.

When the hamlet babies arrived, they found good clothes awaiting them,
and the best of all nourishment--Nature's own. The mothers did not fare
so well. It was the fashion at that time to keep maternity patients on
low diet for the first three days, and the hamlet women found no
difficulty in following this rgime; water gruel, dry toast, and weak
tea was their menu. When the time came for more nourishing diet, the
parson's daughter made for every patient one large sago pudding,
followed up by a jug of veal broth. After these were consumed they
returned to their ordinary food, with a half-pint of stout a day for
those who could afford it. No milk was taken, and yet their own milk
supply was abundant. Once, when a bottle-fed baby was brought on a visit
to the hamlet, its bottle was held up as a curiosity. It had a long,
thin rubber tube for the baby to suck through which must have been
impossible to clean.

The only cash outlay in an ordinary confinement was half a crown, the
fee of the old woman who, as she said, saw the beginning and end of
everybody. She was, of course, not a certified midwife; but she was a
decent, intelligent old body, clean in her person and methods and very
kind. For the half-crown she officiated at the birth and came every
morning for ten days to bath the baby and make the mother comfortable.
She also tried hard to keep the patient in bed for the ten days; but
with little success. Some mothers refused to stay there because they
knew they were needed downstairs; others because they felt so strong and
fit they saw no reason to lie there. Some women actually got up on the
third day, and, as far as could be seen at the time, suffered no ill
effects.

Complications at birth were rare; but in the two or three cases where
they did occur during her practice, old Mrs. Quinton had sufficient
skill to recognize the symptoms and send post haste for the doctor. No
mother lost her life in childbed during the decade.

In these more enlightened days the mere mention of the old, untrained
village midwife raises a vision of some dirty, drink-sodden old hag
without skill or conscience. But not all of them were Sairey Gamps. The
great majority were clean, knowledgeable old women who took a pride in
their office. Nor had many of them been entirely without instruction.
The country doctor of that day valued a good midwife in an outlying
village and did not begrudge time and trouble in training her. Such a
one would save him many a six or eight mile drive over bad roads at
night, and, if a summons did come, he would know that his presence was
necessary.

The trained district nurses, when they came a few years later, were a
great blessing in country districts; but the old midwife also had her
good points, for which she now receives no credit. She was no superior
person coming into the house to strain its resources to the utmost and
shame the patient by forced confessions that she did not possess this or
that; but a neighbour, poor like herself, who could make do with what
there was, or, if not, knew where to send to borrow it. This Mrs.
Quinton possessed quite a stock of the things she knew she would not
find in every house, and might often be met with a baby's little round
bath in her hand, or a clothes-horse, for airing, slung over her arm.

Other days, other ways; and, although they have now been greatly
improved upon, the old country midwives did at least succeed in bringing
into the world many generations of our forefathers, or where should we
be now?

The general health of the hamlet was excellent. The healthy, open-air
life and the abundance of coarse but wholesome food must have been
largely responsible for that; but lack of imagination may also have
played a part. Such people at that time did not look for or expect
illness, and there were not as many patent medicine advertisements then
as now to teach them to search for symptoms of minor ailments in
themselves. Beecham's and Holloway's Pills were already familiar to all
newspaper readers, and a booklet advertising Mother Siegel's Syrup
arrived by post at every house once a year. But only Beecham's Pills
were patronized, and those only by a few; the majority relied upon an
occasional dose of Epsom salts to cure all ills. One old man, then
nearly eighty, had for years drunk a teacupful of frothing soapsuds
every Sunday morning. 'Them cleans the outers,' he would say, 'an'
stands to reason they must clean th' innards, too.' His dose did not
appear to do him any harm; but he made no converts.

Although only babies and very small children had baths, the hamlet folks
were cleanly in their persons. The women would lock their cottage doors
for a whole afternoon once a week to have what they called 'a good clean
up'. This consisted of stripping to the waist and washing downward; then
stepping into a footbath and washing upward. 'Well, I feels all the
better for that; some woman would say complacently. 'I've washed up as
far as possible and down as far as possible,' and the ribald would
inquire what poor 'possible' had done that that should not be included.

Toothbrushes were not in general use; few could afford to buy such
luxuries; but the women took a pride in their strong white teeth and
cleaned them with a scrap of clean, wet rag dipped in salt. Some of the
men used soot as a tooth-powder.

After a confinement, if the eldest girl was too young and there was no
other relative available, the housework, cooking, and washing would be
shared among the neighbours, who would be repaid in kind when they
themselves were in like case.

Babies, especially young babies, were adored by their parents and loved
and petted and often spoilt by the whole family until another arrived;
then, as they used to say, its 'nose was put out of joint'; all the
adoration was centred on the newcomer, and the ex-baby was fortunate if
it had a still devoted elder sister to stand by it.

In the production of their large families the parents appeared reckless.
One obvious method of birth control, culled from the Old Testament, was
known in the hamlet and practised by one couple, which had managed to
keep their family down to four. The wife told their secret to another
woman, thinking to help her; but it only brought scorn down on her own
head. 'Did you ever! Fancy begrudging a little child a bit o' food, the
nasty greedy selfish hussy, her!' was the general verdict. But, although
they protested so volubly, and bore their own frequent confinements with
courage and cheerfulness, they must have sometimes rebelled in secret,
for there was great bitterness in the tone in which in another mood they
would say: 'The wife ought to have the first child and the husband the
second, then there wouldn't ever be any more.'

That showed how the land lay, as Laura's mother said to her in later
life. She herself lived to see the decline in the birth-rate, and, when
she discussed it with her daughter in the early 1930s, laughed heartily
at some of the explanations advanced by the learned, and said: 'If they
knew what it meant to carry and bear and bring up a child themselves,
they wouldn't expect the women to be in a hurry to have a second or
third now they've got a say in the matter. Now, if they made it a bit
easier for people, dividing it out a bit, so to speak, by taking over
some of the money worry. It's never seemed fair to my mind that the one
who's got to go through all a confinement means should have to scrape
and pinch beforehand to save a bit as well. Then there's the other child
or children. What mother wants to rob those she's already got by
bringing in another to share what there's too little of already?'

None of the unmarried hamlet girls had babies in the 'eighties, although
there must have been quite a crop of illegitimate births a few years
earlier, for when the attendance register was called out at school the
eldest children of several families answered to another surname than
that borne by their brothers and sisters and by which they themselves
were commonly known. These would be the children of couples who had
married after the birth of their first child, a common happening at that
time--and little thought of.

In the 'eighties a young woman of thirty came from Birmingham to have
her illegitimate baby at her sister's home in the hamlet, and a widow
who had already three legitimate children and afterwards married again
managed to produce two children between her two marriages. These births
passed without much comment; but when a young girl of sixteen whose home
was out in the fields near the hamlet was known to be 'in trouble'
public feeling was stirred.

One evening, a few weeks before the birth, Emily passed through the
hamlet with her father on their way to interview the young man she had
named as responsible for her condition. It was a sad little sight.
Emily, who had so recently been romping with the other children, going
slowly, unwillingly, and red-eyed from crying, her tell-tale figure
enveloped in her mother's plaid shawl, and her respectable, grey-headed
father in his Sunday suit urging her to 'Come on!' as though longing to
be through with a disagreeable business. Women came to their cottage
gates and children left their play to watch them pass by, for every one
knew or guessed their errand, and much sympathy was felt towards them on
account of Emily's youth and her parents' respectability.

The interview turned out even more mortifying than the father could have
expected, for Emily had named the young son of the house where she had
been in service, and he not only repudiated the charge, but was able to
prove that he had been away from home for some time before and after the
crucial date. Yet, in spite of the evidence, the neighbours still
believed Emily's version of the story and treated her as a wronged
heroine, to be petted and made much of. Perhaps they made too much of
her, for what should have been an episode turned into a habit, and,
although she never married, Emily had quite a good-sized family.

The hamlet women's attitude towards the unmarried mother was
contradictory. If one of them brought her baby on a visit to the hamlet
they all went out of their way to pet and fuss over them. 'The pretty
dear!' they would cry. 'How ever can anybody say such a one as him ought
not to be born. Ain't he a beauty! Ain't he a size! They always say, you
know, that that sort of child is the finest. An' don't you go mindin'
what folks says about you, me dear. It's only the good girls, like you,
that has 'em; the others is too artful!'

But they did not want their own daughters to have babies before they
were married. 'I allus tells my gals,' one woman would say
confidentially to another, 'that if they goes getting theirselves into
trouble they'll have to go to th' work'us, for I won't have 'em at
home.' And the other would agree, saying, 'So I tells mine, an' I allus
think that's why I've had no trouble with 'em.'

To those who knew the girls, the pity was that their own mothers should
so misjudge their motives for keeping chaste; but there was little room;
for their finer feelings in the hamlet mother's life. All her strength,
invention and understanding were absorbed in caring for her children's
bodies; their mental and spiritual qualities were outside her range. At
the same time, if one of the girls had got into trouble, as they called
it, the mother would almost certainly have had her home and cared for
her. There was more than one home in the hamlet where the mother was
bringing up a grandchild with her own younger children, the grandchild
calling the grandmother 'Mother'.

If, as sometimes happened, a girl had to be married in haste, she was
thought none the worse of on that account. She had secured her man. All
was well. ''Tis but Nature' was the general verdict.

But though they were lenient with such slips, especially when not in
their own families, anything in the way of what they called 'loose
living' was detested by them. Only once in the history of the hamlet had
a case of adultery been known to the general public, and, although that
had occurred ten or twelve years before, it was still talked of in the
'eighties. The guilty couple had been treated to 'rough music'. Effigies
of the pair had been made and carried aloft on poles by torchlight to
the house of the woman, to the accompaniment of the banging of pots,
pans, and coal-shovels, the screeching of tin whistles and mouth-organs,
and cat-calls, hoots, and jeers. The man, who was a lodger at the
woman's house, disappeared before daybreak the next morning, and soon
afterwards the woman and her husband followed him.

About the middle of the decade, the memory of that historic night was
revived when an unmarried woman with four illegitimate children moved
into a vacant house in the hamlet. Her coming raised a fury of
indignation. Words hitherto only heard by the children when the Lessons
were read in church were flung about freely: 'harlot' was one of the
mildest. The more ardent moralists were for stoning her or driving her
out of the place with rough music. The more moderate proposed getting
her landlord to turn her out as a bad character. However, upon closer
acquaintance, she turned out to be so clean, quiet, and well-spoken,
that her sins, which she had apparently abandoned, were forgiven her,
and one after another of the neighbours began 'passing the time of day'
with her when they met. Then, as though willing to do anything in reason
to conform to their standard, she got married to a man who had been
navvying on a stretch of new railway line and then settled down to farm
labour. So there were wedding bells instead of rough music and the
family gradually merged into ordinary hamlet life.

It was the hamlet's gain. One of the boys was musical, an aunt had
bought him a good melodeon, and, every light evening, he played it for
hours on the youths' gathering ground in front of the 'Wagon and
Horses'.

Before his arrival there had been no musical instrument of any kind at
Lark Rise, and, in those days before gramophones or wireless, any one
who liked 'a bit of a tune' had to go to church to hear it, and then it
would only be a hymn tune wheezed out by an ancient harmonium. Now they
could have all the old favourites--'Home, Sweet Home', 'Annie Laurie',
'Barbara Allen', and 'Silver Threads Among the Gold'--they had only to
ask for what they fancied. Alf played well and had a marvellous ear. If
the baker or any other caller hummed the tune of a new popular song in
his hearing, Alf would be playing it that night on his melodeon.

Women stood at their cottage gates, men leaned out of the inn window,
and children left their play and gathered around him to listen. Often he
played dance tunes, and the youths would foot it with each other as
partners, for there was seldom a grown-up girl at home and the little
ones they despised. So the little girls, too, had to dance with each
other. One stout old woman, who was said to have been gay in her time,
would come out and give them hints, or she would take a turn herself,
gliding around alone, her feet hidden by her long skirts, massively
graceful.

Sometimes they would sing to the dance music, and the standers-by would
join in:


                  I have a bonnet, trimmed with blue,
                  Why don't you wear it? So I do.
                  When do you wear it? When I can,
                  When I go out with my young man.

                  My young man is gone to sea
                  With silver buckles on his knee,
                  With his blue coat and yellow hose,
                  And that's the way the polka goes.


Or perhaps it would be:



                Step and fetch her, step and fetch her,
                  Step and fetch her, pretty litle dear.
                Do not tease her, try and please her,
                  Step and fetch her, pretty litle dear.


And so they would dance and sing through the long summer evenings, until
dusk fell and the stars came out and they all went laughing and panting
home, a community simple enough to be made happy by one little boy with
a melodeon.



                                   IX

                           _Country Playtime_

'Shall we dance to-night or shall we have a game?' was a frequent
question among the girls after Alf's arrival. Until the novelty of the
dancing wore off, the old country games were eclipsed; but their day was
not over. Some of the quieter girls always preferred the games, and,
later, on those evenings when Alf was away, playing for dancers in other
villages, they all went back to the games.

Then, beneath the long summer sunsets, the girls would gather on one of
the green open spaces between the houses and bow and curtsey and sweep
to and fro in their ankle-length frocks as they went through the game
movements and sang the game rhymes as their mothers and grandmothers had
done before them.

How long the games had been played and how they originated no one knew,
for they had been handed down for a time long before living memory and
accepted by each succeeding generation as a natural part of its
childhood. No one inquired the meaning of the words of the game rhymes;
many of the girls, indeed, barely mastered them, but went through the
movements to the accompaniment of an indistinct babbling. But the rhymes
had been preserved; breaking down into doggerel in places; but still
sufficiently intact to have spoken to the discerning, had any such been
present, of an older, sweeter country civilization than had survived,
excepting in a few such fragments.

Of all the generations that had played the games, that of the 'eighties
was to be the last. Already those children had one foot in the national
school and one on the village green. Their children and grandchildren
would have left the village green behind them; new and as yet
undreamed-of pleasures and excitements would be theirs. In ten years'
time the games would be neglected, and in twenty forgotten. But all
through the 'eighties the games went on and seemed to the children
themselves and to onlookers part of a life that always had been and
always would be.

The Lark Rise children had a large repertoire, including the well-known
games still met with at children's parties, such as 'Oranges and
Lemons', 'London Bridge', and 'Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush'; but
also including others which appear to have been peculiar to that part of
the country. Some of these were played by forming a ring, others by
taking sides, and all had distinctive rhymes, which were chanted rather
than sung.

The boys of the hamlet did not join in them, for the amusement was too
formal and restrained for their taste, and even some of the rougher
girls when playing would spoil a game, for the movements were stately
and all was done by rule. Only at the end of some of the games, where
the verse had deteriorated into doggerel, did the play break down into a
romp. Most of the girls when playing revealed graces unsuspected in them
at other times; their movements became dignified and their voices softer
and sweeter than ordinarily, and when hauteur was demanded by the part,
they became, as they would have said, 'regular duchesses'. It is
probable that carriage and voice inflexion had been handed down with the
words.

One old favourite was 'Here Come Three Tinkers'. For this all but two of
the players, a big girl and a little one, joined hands in a row, and the
bigger girl out took up her stand about a dozen paces in front of the
row with the smaller one lying on the turf behind her feigning sleep.
Then three of the line of players detached themselves and, hand in hand,
tripped forward, singing:


              Here come three tinkers, three by three,
              To court your daughter, fair ladye,
              Oh, can we have a lodging here, here, here?
              Oh, can we have a lodging here?


Upon which the fair lady (pronounced 'far-la-dee') admonished her
sleeping daughter:


              Sleep, sleep, my daughter. Do not wake.
              Here come three tinkers you can't take.


Then, severely, to the tinkers:


              You cannot have a lodging here, here, here.
              You cannot have a lodging here.


And the tinkers returned to the line, and three others came forward,
calling themselves tailors, soldiers, sailors, gardeners, bricklayers,
or policemen, according to fancy, the rhymes being sung for each three,
until it was time for the climax, and, putting fresh spirit into their
tones, the conquering candidates came forward, singing:


              Here come three princes, three by three,
              To court your daughter, fair ladye,
              Oh, can we have a lodging here, here, here?
              Oh, can we have a lodging here?


At the mere mention of the rank of the princes the scene changed. The
fair lady became all becks and nods and smiles, and, lifting up her
supposedly sleeping daughter, sang:


              Oh, wake, my daughter, wake, wake, wake.
              Here come three princes you can take.


And, turning to the princes:


              Oh, you can have a lodging here, here, here.
              Oh, you can have a lodging here.


Then, finally, leading forward and presenting her daughter, she said:


              Here is my daughter, safe and sound,
              And in her pocket five thousand pound,
              And on her finger a gay gold ring,
              And I'm sure she's fit to walk with a king.


For 'Isabella' a ring was formed with one of the players standing alone
in the centre. Then circling slowly, the girls sang:


           Isabella, Isabella, Isabella, farewell.
             Last night when we parted
             I left you broken-hearted,
           And on the green gravel there stands a young man.

           Isabella, Isabella, Isabella, farewell.
           Take your choice, love, take your choice, love,
           Take your choice, love. Farewell.


The girl in the middle of the ring then chose another who took up her
position inside with her, while the singers continued:


           Put the banns up, put the banns up,
           Put the banns up. Farewell.
           Come to church, love, come to church, love. Farewell.

           Put the ring on, put the ring on,
           Put the ring on. Farewell.

           Come to supper, love, come to supper, love,
           Come to supper, love. Farewell.

           Now to bed, love, now to bed, love,
           Now to bed, love. Farewell.


With other instructions, all of which were carried out in dumb show by
the couple in the middle of the ring. Having got the pair wedded and
bedded, the spirit of the piece changed. The stately game became a romp.
Jumping up and down, still with joined hands, round the two in the
middle, the girls shouted:


           Now they're married we wish them joy,
           First a girl and then a boy,
           Sixpence married sevenpence's daughter,
           Kiss the couple over and over.


In that game the Isabella of the sad farewell to whom the sweet
plaintive tune of the rhyme originally belonged had somehow got mixed up
in a country courtship and wedding.

A pretty, graceful game to watch was 'Thread the Tailor's Needle'. For
this two girls joined both hands and elevated them to form an arch or
bridge, and the other players, in single file and holding on to each
other's skirts, passed under, singing:


                  Thread the tailor's needle,
                  Thread the tailor's needle.
                  The tailor's blind and he can't see,
                  So thread the tailor's needle.


As the end of the file passed under the arch the last two girls detached
themselves, took up their stand by the original two and joined their
hands and elevated them, thus widening the arch, and this was repeated
until the arch became a tunnel. As the file passing under grew shorter,
the tune was quickened, until, towards the end, the game became a merry
whirl.

A grim little game often played by the younger children was called
'Daddy'. For this a ring was formed, one of the players remaining
outside it, and the outside player stalked stealthily round the silent
and motionless ring and chose another girl by striking her on the
shoulder. The chosen one burst from the ring and rushed round it,
closely pursued by the first player, the others chanting meanwhile:


                  Round a ring to catch a king,
                  Round a ring to catch a king,
                  Round a ring to catch a king----


and, as the pursuer caught up with the pursued and struck her neck with
the edge of her hand:


                  Down falls Daddy!


At the stroke on the neck the second player fell flat on the turf,
beheaded, and the game continued until all were stretched on the turf.

Round _what_ ring, to catch _what_ king? And who was Daddy? Was the game
founded on some tale dished up for the commonalty of the end of one who
'nothing common did or mean'? The players did not know or care, and we
can only guess.

'Honeypots' was another small children's game. For this the children
squatted down with their hands clasped tightly under their buttocks and
two taller girls approached them, singing:


                  Honeypots, honeypots, all in a row!
                  Who will buy my honeypots, O?


One on each side of a squatting child, they 'tried' it by swinging by
the arms, the child's hands still being clasped under its buttocks. If
the hands gave way, the honeypot was cast away as broken; if they held,
it was adjudged a good pot.

A homely game was 'The Old Woman from Cumberland'. For this a row of
girls stood hand in hand with a bigger one in the middle to represent
the old woman from Cumberland. Another bigger girl stood alone a few
paces in front. She was known as the 'mistress'. Then the row of girls
tripped forward, singing:


                Here comes an old woman from Cumberland
                With all her children in her hand.
                And please do you want a servant to-day?


'What can they do?' demanded the mistress as they drew up before her.
Then the old woman of Cumberland detached herself and walked down the
row, placing a hand on the heads of one after another of her children as
she said:


                This can brew, and this can bake,
                This can make a wedding cake,
                This can wear a gay gold ring,
                This can sit in the barn and sing,
                This can go to bed with a king,
                And this one can do everything.


'Oh! I will have that one', said the mistress, pointing to the one who
could do everything, who then went over to her. The proceedings were
repeated until half the girls had gone over, when the two sides had a
tug-of-war.

'The Old Woman from Cumberland' was a brisk, business-like game; but
most of the rhymes of the others were long-drawn-out and sad, and
saddest of all was 'Poor Mary is A-weeping', which went:


  Poor Mary is a-weeping, a-weeping, a-weeping,
  Poor Mary is a-weeping on a bright summer's day.

  And what's poor Mary a-weeping for, a-weeping for, aweeping for?
  Oh, what's poor Mary a-weeping for on a bright summer's day?

  She's weeping for her own true love on a bright summer's own true love.
  She's weeping for her own true love on a bright summer's day.

  Then let her choose another love, another love, another love.
  Then let her choose another love on a bright summer's day.


'Waly, Waly, Wallflower' ran 'Poor Mary' close in gentle melancholy; but
the original verse in this seems to have broken down after the fourth
line. The Lark Rise version ran:


           Waly, waly, wallflower, growing up so high.
           We're all maidens, we must all die,
           Excepting So-and-So [_naming one of the players_]
           And she's the youngest maid.


Then, the tune changing to a livelier air:


                   She can hop and she can skip,
                   She can play the candlestick,
                   Fie! Fie! Fie!
                   Turn your face to the wall again.


All clasping hands and jumping up and down:


  All the boys in this town
    Lead a happy life,
  Excepting So-and-So [_naming some hamlet boy, not necessarily present_]
    And he wants a wife.
  A wife he shall have and a-courting he shall go,
  Along with So-and-So; because he loves her so.


  He kissed her, he cuddled her, he sat her on his knee,
  And he said 'My dearest So-and-So, how happy we shall be.'
  First he bought the frying-pan and then he bought the cradle
  And then he bought the knives and forks and set them on the table.

  So-and-So made a pudding, she made it very sweet,
  She daren't stick the knife in till So-and-So came home at night.
  Taste, So-and-So, taste, and do not be afraid,
  Next Monday morning the wedding day shall be,
  And the cat shall sing and the bells shall ring
  And we'll all clap hands together.


Evidently in the course of the centuries 'Waly, Waly, Wallflower' had
become mixed with something else. The youngest maid of the first verse
would never have played the candlestick or been courted by such a lover.
Her destiny was very different. But what?

'Green Gravel' was another ring game. The words were:


       Green gravel, green gravel, the grass is so green,
       The fairest young damsel that ever was seen,
       Sweet So-and-So, sweet So-and-So, your true love is dead,
       I send you a letter, so turn round your head.


And as each name was mentioned the bearer turned outwards from the
middle of the ring and, still holding hands with the others, went on
revolving. When all had turned, the girls jigged up and down, shouting:


       Bunch o' rags! Bunch o' rags! Bunch o' rags!


until all fell down.

Then there was 'Sally, Sally Waters'; who 'sprinkled in the pan'; and
'Queen Anne, Queen Anne', who 'sat in the sun'. The local version of the
first verse of the latter ran:


              Queen Anne, Queen Anne, she sat in the sun,
              She had a pair of ringlets on.
              She shook them off, she shook them on,
              She shook them into Scotland.


Which seems to suggest that the Queen Anne intended was Anne of Denmark,
consort of our James the First, and not the last of our Stuart monarchs,
as sometimes supposed. When the founders of the new royal house first
arrived in England, there would certainly be gossip about them, and
Queen Anne would most probably be supposed to favour Scotland, Scots,
and things Scottish.

The brisk and rather disagreeable little game known as 'Queen Caroline'
must have been of comparatively recent date. For this two lines of girls
stood facing each other, while one other one ran the gauntlet. As she
dashed between the lines the girls on both sides 'buffeted' her with
hands, pinafores and handkerchiefs, singing:


                     Queen, Queen Caroline,
                     Dipped her head in turpentine.
                     Why did she look so fine?
                     Because she wore a crinoline.


An echo of the coronation scene of George IV?

Contemporary with that was 'The Sheepfold', which began:


             Who's that going round my sheepfold?
             Oh, it's only your poor neighbour Dick.
             Do not steal my sheep while I am fast asleep.


But that was not a favourite and no one seemed to know the whole of it.
Then there were 'How Many Miles to Banbury Town?', 'Blind Man's Buff',
and many other games. The children could play for hours without
repeating a game.

As well as the country games, a few others, probably as old, but better
known, were played by the hamlet children. Marbles, peg-tops, and
skipping-ropes appeared in their season, and when there happened to be a
ball available a game called 'Tip-it' was played. There was not always a
ball to be had; for the smallest rubber one cost a penny, and pennies
were scarce. Even marbles, at twenty a penny, were seldom bought,
although there were a good many in circulation, for the hamlet boys were
champion marble players and thought nothing of walking five or six miles
on a Saturday to play with the boys of other villages and replenish
their own store with their winnings. Some of them owned as trophies the
scarce and valued glass marbles, called 'alleys'. These were of clear
glass enclosing bright, wavy, multicoloured threads, and they looked
very handsome among the dingy-coloured clay ones. The girls skipped with
any odd length of rope, usually a piece of their mothers' old
clothes-lines.

A simple form of hopscotch was played, for which three lines, or steps,
enclosed in an oblong were scratched in the dust. The elaborate
hopscotch diagrams, resembling an astrological horoscope, still to be
seen chalked on the roads in the West Country were unknown there.

'Dibs' was a girls' game, played with five small, smooth pebbles, which
had to be kept in the air at the same time and caught on the back of the
hand. Laura, who was clumsy with her hands, never mastered this game;
nor could she play marbles or spin tops or catch balls, or play
hopscotch. She was by common consent 'a duffer'. Skipping and running
were her only accomplishments.

Sometimes in the summer the 'pin-a-sight' was all the rage, and no girl
would feel herself properly equipped unless she had one secreted about
her. To make a 'pin-a-sight' two small sheets of glass, a piece of brown
paper, and plenty of flowers were required. Then the petals were
stripped from the flowers and arranged on one of the sheets of glass
with the other sheet placed over it to form a kind of floral sandwich,
and the whole was enveloped in brown paper; in which a little square
window was cut, with a flap left hanging to act as a drop-scene. Within
the opening then appeared a multi-coloured medley of flower petals, and
that was the 'pin-a-sight'. No design was aimed at; the object being to
show as many and as brightly coloured petals as possible; but Laura,
when alone, loved to arrange her petals as little pictures, building up
a geranium or a rose, or even a little house, against a background of
green leaves.

Usually, the girls only showed their 'pin-a-sights' to each other; but
sometimes they would approach one of the women, or knock at a door,
singing:


                 A pin to see a pin-a-sight,
                 All the ladies dressed in white.
                 A pin behind and a pin before,
                 And a pin to knock at the lady's door.


They would then lift the flap and show the 'pin-a-sight', for which they
expected to be rewarded with a pin. When this was forthcoming, it was
stuck with any others that might be received on the front of the
pinafore. There was always a competition as to who should get the
longest row of pins.

After they reached school-going age, the boys no longer played with the
girls, but found themselves a separate pitch on which to play marbles or
spin tops or kick an old tin about by way of a football. Or they would
hunt in couples along the hedgerows, shooting at birds with their
catapults, climbing trees, or looking for birds' nests, mushrooms, or
chestnuts, according to the season.

The birds'-nesting was a cruel sport, for not only was every egg taken
from every nest they found, but the nests themselves were demolished and
all the soft moss and lining feathers were left torn and scattered
around on the grass and bushes.

'Oh, dear! What must the poor bird have felt when she saw that!' was
Laura's cry when she came upon that, to her, saddest of all sad sights,
and once she even dared to remonstrate with some boys she had found in
the act. They only laughed and pushed her aside. To them, the idea that
anything so small as a mother chaffinch could feel was ridiculous. They
were thinking of the lovely long string of threaded eggshells, blue and
speckled and pearly white, they hoped to collect and hang up at home as
an ornament. The tiny whites and yolks which would come from the eggs
when blown they would make their mothers whip up and stir into their own
cup of tea as a delicacy, and their mothers would be pleased and say
what kind, thoughtful boys they had, for they, like the boys, did not
consider the birds' point of view.

No one in authority told them that such wholesale robbery of birds'
nests was cruel. Even the Rector, when he called at the cottages, would
admire the collections and sometimes even condescend to accept a rare
specimen. Ordinary country people at that time, though not actively
cruel to animals, were indifferent to their sufferings. 'Where there's
no sense there's no feeling,' they would say when they had hurt some
creature by accident or through carelessness. By sense they meant wits
or understanding, and these they imagined purely human attributes.

A few birds were sacred. No boy would rob a robin's or a wren's nest;
nor would they have wrecked a swallow's nest if they could have reached
one, for they believed that:


                   The robin and the wrens
                   Be God Almighty's friends.
                   And the martin and the swallow
                   Be God Almighty's birds to follow.


And those four were safe from molestation. Their cruelty to the other
birds and to some other animals was due to an utter lack of imagination,
not to bad-heartedness. When, a little later; country boys were taught
in school to show mercy to animals and especially to birds, one egg only
from a clutch became the general rule. Then came the splendid Boy Scout
movement, which has done more than all the Preservation of Wild Birds
Acts to prevent the wholesale raiding of nests, by teaching the boys
mercy and kindness.

In winter in the 'eighties the youths and big boys of the hamlet would
go out on dark nights 'spadgering'. For this a large net upon four poles
was carried; two bearers going on one side of a hedge and two on the
other. When they came to a spot where a flock of sparrows or other small
birds was roosting, the net was dropped over the hedge and drawn tight
and the birds enclosed were slaughtered by lantern light. One boy would
often bring home as many as twenty sparrows, which his mother would
pluck and make into a pudding. A small number of birds, or a single
bird, would be toasted in front of the fire. Many of the children and
some of the women set traps for birds in their gardens. This was done by
strewing crumbs or corn around and beneath a sieve or a shallow box set
up endways. To the top of the trap as it stood, one end of a length of
fine twine was attached and the other end was held by some one lurking
in a barn doorway or behind a hedge or wall. When a bird was in a
favourable position, the trap was jerked down upon it. One old woman in
particular excelled as a bird-trapper, and, even in snowy weather, she
might often have been seen sitting in her barn doorway with the string
of a trap in her hand. Had a kindly disposed stranger seen her, his
heart would have bled with pity for the poor old soul, so starving that
she spent hours in the snow snaring a sparrow for her supper. His pity
would have been wasted. She was quite comfortably off according to
hamlet standards, and often did not trouble to pluck and cook her bag.
She was out for the sport.

In one way and another a bird, or a few birds, were a regular feature of
the hamlet menu. But there were birds and birds. 'Do you think you could
fancy a bird, me dear?' a man would say to his ailing wife or child, and
if they thought they would the bird would appear; but it would not be a
sparrow, or even a thrush or a lark. It would be a much bigger bird with
a plump breast; but it would never be named and no feathers would be
left lying about by which to identify it. The hamlet men were no
habitual poachers. They called poaching 'a mug's game' and laughed at
those who practised it. 'One month in quod and one out,' as they said.
But, when the necessity arose, they knew where the game birds were and
how to get them.

Edmund and Laura once witnessed a neat bit of poaching. They had climbed
a ladder they had found set against the side of a haystack which had
been unthatched, ready for removal, and, after an exciting hour of
sticking out their heads and making faces to represent gargoyles on a
tower, they were lying, hidden from below, while the men on their way
home from work passed along the footpath beneath the rick.

It was near sunset and the low, level light searched the path and the
stubble and aftermath on either side of it. The men sauntered along in
twos and threes, smoking and talking, then disappeared, group by group,
over the stile at the farther side of the field. Just as the last group
was nearing the stile and the children were breathing a sigh of relief
at not having been seen and scolded, a hare broke from one of the hedges
and went bounding and capering across the field in the headlong way
hares have. It looked for a moment as if it would land under the feet of
the last group of men, who were nearing the stile; but, suddenly, it
scented danger and drew up and squatted motionless behind a tuft of
green clover a few feet from the pathway. Just then one of the men fell
behind to tie his bootlace: the others passed over the stile. The moment
they were out of sight, in one movement, the man left behind rose and
flung himself sideways over the clover clump where the hare was hiding.
There was a short scuffle, a slight raising of dust; then a limp form
was pressed into a dinner-basket, and, after a good look round to make
sure his action had not been observed, the man followed his workmates.



                                   X

                       _Daughters of the Hamlet_

A stranger coming to Lark Rise would have looked in vain for the sweet
country girl of tradition, with her sunbonnet, hay-rake, and air of
rustic coquetry. If he had, by chance, seen a girl well on in her teens,
she would be dressed in town clothes, complete with gloves and veil, for
she would be home from service for her fortnight's holiday, and her
mother would insist upon her wearing her best every time she went out of
doors, in order to impress the neighbours.

There was no girl over twelve or thirteen living permanently at home.
Some were sent out to their first place at eleven. The way they were
pushed out into the world at that tender age might have seemed heartless
to a casual observer. As soon as a little girl approached school-leaving
age, her mother would say, 'About time you was earnin' your own livin',
me gal,' or, to a neighbour, 'I shan't be sorry when our young So-and-So
gets her knees under somebody else's table. Five slices for breakfast
this mornin', if you please!' From that time onward the child was made
to feel herself one too many in the overcrowded home; while her
brothers, when they left school and began to bring home a few shillings
weekly, were treated with a new consideration and made much of. The
parents did not want the boys to leave home. Later on, if they wished to
strike out for themselves, they might even meet with opposition, for
their money, though barely sufficient to keep them in food, made a
little more in the family purse, and every shilling was precious. The
girls, while at home, could earn nothing.

Then there was the sleeping problem. None of the cottages had more than
two bedrooms, and when children of both sexes were entering their teens
it was difficult to arrange matters, and the departure of even one small
girl of twelve made a little more room for those remaining.

When the older boys of a family began to grow up, the second bedroom
became the boys' room. Boys, big and little, were packed into it, and
the girls still at home had to sleep in the parents' room. They had
their own standard of decency; a screen was placed or a curtain was
drawn to form a partition between the parents' and children's beds; but
it was, at best, a poor makeshift arrangement, irritating, cramped, and
inconvenient. If there happened to be one big boy, with several girls
following him in age, he would sleep downstairs on a bed made up every
night and the second bedroom would be the girls' room. When the girls
came home from service for their summer holiday, it was the custom for
the father to sleep downstairs that the girl might share her mother's
bed. It is common now to hear people say, when looking at some little
old cottage, 'And they brought up ten children there. Where on earth did
they sleep?' And the answer is, or should be, that they did not all
sleep there at the same time. Obviously they could not. By the time the
youngest of such a family was born, the eldest would probably be twenty
and have been out in the world for years, as would those who came
immediately after in age. The overcrowding was bad enough; but not quite
as bad as people imagine.

Then, again, as the children grew up, they required more and more food,
and the mother was often at her wits' end to provide it. It was no
wonder her thoughts and hopes sprang ahead to the time when one, at
least, of her brood would be self-supporting. She should not have spoken
her thoughts aloud, for many a poor, sensitive, little girl must have
suffered. But the same mother would often at mealtimes slip the morsel
of meat from her own to her child's plate, with a 'I don't seem to feel
peckish to-night. You have it. You're growing.'

After the girls left school at ten or eleven, they were usually kept at
home for a year to help with the younger children, then places were
found for them locally in the households of tradesmen, schoolmasters,
stud grooms, or farm bailiffs. Employment in a public house was looked
upon with horror by the hamlet mothers, and farm-house servants were a
class apart. 'Once a farm-house servant, always a farm-house servant'
they used to say, and they were more ambitious for their daughters.

The first places were called 'petty places' and looked upon as
stepping-stones to better things. It was considered unwise to allow a
girl to remain in her petty place more than a year; but a year she must
stay whether she liked it or not, for that was the custom. The food in
such places was good and abundant, and in a year a girl of thirteen
would grow tall and strong enough for the desired 'gentlemen's service',
her wages would buy her a few clothes, and she would be learning.

The employers were usually very kind to these small maids. In some
houses they were treated as one of the family; in others they were put
into caps and aprons and ate in the kitchen, often with one or two of
the younger children of the house to keep them company. The wages were
small, often only a shilling a week; but the remuneration did not end
with the money payment. Material, already cut out and placed, was given
them to make their underwear, and the Christmas gift of a best frock or
a winter coat was common. Caps and aprons and morning print dresses, if
worn, were provided by the employer. 'She shan't want for anything while
she is with me' was a promise frequently made by a shopkeeper's wife
when engaging a girl, and many were even better than their word in that
respect. They worked with the girls themselves and trained them; then as
they said, just as they were becoming useful they left to 'better
themselves'.

The mothers' attitude towards these mistresses of small households was
peculiar. If one of them had formerly been in service herself, her
situation was avoided, for 'a good servant makes a bad missis' they
said. In any case they considered it a favour to allow their small
untrained daughters to 'oblige' (it was always spoken of as 'obliging')
in a small household. They were jealous of their children's rights, and
ready to rush in and cause an upset if anything happened of which they
did not approve; and they did not like it if the small maid became fond
of her employer or her family, or wished to remain in her petty place
after her year was up. One girl who had been sent out at eleven as maid
to an elderly couple and had insisted upon remaining there through her
teens, was always spoken of by her mother as 'our poor Em'. 'When I sees
t'other girls and how they keeps on improvin' an' think of our poor Em
wastin' her life in a petty place, I could sit down an' howl like a dog,
that I could', she would say, long after Em had been adopted as a
daughter by the people to whom she had become attached.

Of course there were queer places and a few definitely bad places; but
these were the exception and soon became known and avoided. Laura once
accompanied a schoolfellow to interview a mistress who was said to
require a maid. At ordinary times a mother took her daughter to such
interviews; but Mrs. Beamish was near her time, and it was not thought
safe for her to venture so far from home. So Martha and Laura set out,
accompanied by a younger brother of Martha's, aged about ten. Martha in
her mother's best coat with the sleeves turned back to the elbows and
with her hair, done up for the first time that morning, plaited into an
inverted saucer at the back of her head and bristling with black
hairpins. Laura in a chimney-pot hat, a short brown cape, and buttoned
boots reaching nearly to her knees. The little brother wore a pale grey
astrakan coat, many sizes too small, a huge red knitted scarf, and
carried no pocket-handkerchief.

It was a mild, grey November day with wisps of mist floating over the
ploughed fields and water drops hanging on every twig and thorn of the
hedgerows. The lonely country house they were bound for was said to be
four miles from the hamlet; but, long before they reached it, the
distance seemed to them more like forty. It was all cross-country going;
over field-paths and stiles, through spinneys and past villages. They
asked the way of everybody they met or saw working in the fields and
were always directed to some short cut or other, which seemed to bring
them out at the same place as before. Then there were delays. Martha's
newly done-up hair kept tumbling down and Laura had to take out all the
hairpins and adjust it. The little brother got stones in his shoes, and
all their feet felt tired from the rough travelling and the stiff mud
which caked their insteps. The mud was a special source of worry to
Laura, because she had put on her best boots without asking permission,
and knew she would get into trouble about it when she returned.

Still, such small vexations and hindrances could not quite spoil her
pleasure in the veiled grey day and the new fields and woods and
villages, of which she did not even know the names.

It was late afternoon when, coming out of a deep, narrow lane with a
stream trickling down the middle, they saw before them a grey-stone
mansion with twisted chimney-stacks and a sundial standing in long grass
before the front door. Martha and Laura were appalled at the size of the
house. Gentry must live there. Which door should they go to and what
should they say?

In a paved yard a man was brushing down a horse, hissing so loudly as he
did so that he did not hear their first timid inquiry. When it was
repeated he raised his head and smiled. 'Ho! Ho!' he said. 'Yes, yes,
it's Missis at the house there you'll be wanting, I'll warrant.'

'Please does she want a maid?'

'I dare say she do. She generally do. But where's the maid? Goin' to
roll yourselves up into one, all three of ye? You go on round by that
harness-room and across the lawn by the big pear trees and you'll find
the back door. Go on; don't be afraid. She's not agoin' to eat ye.'

In response to their timid knock, the door was opened by a youngish
woman. She was like no one Laura had ever seen. Very slight--she would
have been called 'scraggy' in the hamlet--with a dead white face, dark,
arched brows, and black hair brushed straight back from her forehead,
and with all this black and whiteness set off by a little scarlet jacket
that, when Laura described it to her mother later, was identified as a
garibaldi. She seemed glad to see the children, though she looked
doubtful when she heard their errand and saw Martha's size.

'So you want a place?' she asked as she conducted them into a kitchen as
large as a church and not unlike one with its stone-paved floor and
central pillar. Yes, she wanted a maid, and she thought Martha might do.
How old was she? Twelve? And what could she do? Anything she was told?
Well, that was right. It was not a hard place, for, although there were
sixteen rooms, only three or four of them were in use. Could she get up
at six without being called? There would be the kitchen range to light
and the flues to be swept once a week, and the dining-room to be swept
and dusted and the fire lighted before breakfast. She herself would be
down in time to cook breakfast. No cooking was required, beyond
preparing vegetables. After breakfast Martha would help her with the
beds, turning out the rooms, paring the potatoes and so on; and after
dinner there was plenty to do--washing up, cleaning knives and boots and
polishing silver. And so she went on, mapping out Martha's day, until at
nine o'clock she would be free to go to bed, after placing hot water in
her mistress's bedroom.

Laura could see that Martha was bewildered. She stood, twisting her
scarf, curtseying, and saying 'Yes, mum' to everything.

'Then, as wages, I can offer you two pounds ten a year. It is not a
great wage, but you are very small, and you'll have an easy place and a
comfortable home. How do you like your kitchen?'

Martha's gaze wandered round the huge place, and once more she said,
'Yes, mum.'

'You'll find it nice and cosy here, eating your meals by the fire. You
won't feel lonely, will you?'

This time Martha said, 'No, mum.'

'Tell your mother I shall expect her to fit you out well. You will want
caps and aprons. I like my maids to look neat. And tell her to let you
bring plenty of changes, for we only wash once in six weeks. I have a
woman in to do it all up,' and although Martha knew her mother had not a
penny to spend on her outfit, and that she had been told the last thing
before she left home that morning to ask her prospective employer to
send her mother her first month's wages in advance to buy necessaries,
once again she said, 'Yes, mum.'

'Well, I shall expect you next Monday, then. And, now, are you hungry?'
and for the first time there was feeling in Martha's tone as she
answered, 'Yes, mum.'

Soon a huge sirloin of cold beef was placed on the table and liberal
helpings were being carved for the three children. It was such a joint
of beef as one only sees in old pictures with an abbot carving; immense,
and so rich in flavour and so tender that it seemed to melt in the
mouth. The three plates were clean in a twinkling.

'Would any of you like another helping?'

Laura, conscious that she was no principal in the affair, and only
invited to partake out of courtesy, declined wistfully but firmly;
Martha said she would like a little more if 'mum' pleased, and the
little brother merely pushed his plate forward. Martha, mindful of her
manners, refused a third helping. But the little brother had no such
scruples; he was famishing, and accepted a third and a fourth plateful,
the mistress of the house standing by with an amused smile on her face.
She must have remembered him for the rest of her life as the little boy
with the large appetite.

It was dark before they reached home, and Laura got into trouble, not
only for spoiling her best boots, but still more for telling a lie, for
she had led her mother to believe they were going into the market town
shopping. But even when she lay in bed supperless she felt the
experience was worth the punishment, for she had been where she had
never been before and seen the old house and the lady in the scarlet
jacket and tasted the beef and seen Tommy Beamish eat four large
helpings.

After all, Martha did not go to live there. Her mother was not satisfied
with her account of the place and her father heard the next day that the
house was haunted. 'She shan't goo there while we've got a crust for
her,' said her Dad. 'Not as I believes in ghostesses--lot o' rubbish I
calls 'em--but the child might think she seed summat and be scared out
of her wits an' maybe catch her death o' cold in that girt, draughty,
old kitchen.'

So Martha waited until two sisters, milliners in the market town, wanted
a maid; and, once there, grew strong and rosy and, according to their
report, learned to say a great deal more than 'Yes, mum'; for their only
complaint against her was that she was inclined to be saucy and sang so
loudly about her work that the customers in the shop could hear her.

When the girls had been in their petty places a year, their mothers
began to say it was time they 'bettered themselves' and the clergyman's
daughter was consulted. Did she know if a scullery-maid or a tweeny was
required at any of the big country houses around? If not, she would wait
until she had two or three such candidates for promotion on her list,
then advertise in the _Morning Post_ or the _Church Times_ for
situations for them. Other girls secured places through sisters or
friends already serving in large establishments.

When the place was found, the girl set out alone on what was usually her
first train journey, with her yellow tin trunk tied up with thick cord,
her bunch of flowers and brown paper parcel bursting with left-overs.

The tin trunk would be sent on to the railway station by the carrier and
the mother would walk the three miles to the station with her daughter.
They would leave Lark Rise, perhaps before it was quite light on a
winter morning, the girl in her best, would-be fashionable clothes and
the mother carrying the baby of the family, rolled in its shawl.
Neighbours would come to their garden gates to see them off and call
after them 'Pleasant journey! Hope you'll have a good place!' or 'Mind
you be a good gal, now, an' does just as you be told!' or, more
comfortingly, 'You'll be back for y'r holidays before you knows where
you are and then there won't be no holdin' you, you'll have got that
London proud!' and the two would go off in good spirits, turning and
waving repeatedly.

Laura once saw the departure of such a couple, the mother enveloped in a
large plaid shawl, with her baby's face looking out from its folds, and
the girl in a bright blue, poplin frock which had been bought at the
second-hand clothes shop in the town-a frock made in the extreme fashion
of three years before, but by that time ridiculously obsolete. Laura's
mother, foreseeing the impression it would make at the journey's end,
shook her head and clicked her tongue and said, 'Why ever couldn't they
spend the money on a bit of good navy serge!' But they, poor innocents,
were delighted with it.

They went off cheerfully, even proudly; but, some hours later, Laura met
the mother returning alone. She was limping, for the sole of one of her
old boots had parted company with the upper, and the eighteen-months-old
child must have hung heavily on her arm. When asked if Aggie had gone
off all right, she nodded, but could not answer; her heart was too full.
After all, she was just a mother who had sent her young daughter into
the unknown and was tormented with doubts and fears for her.

What the girl, bound for a strange and distant part of the country to
live a new, strange life among strangers, felt when the train moved off
with her can only be imagined. Probably those who saw her round, stolid
little face and found her slow in learning her new duties for the next
few days would have been surprised and even a little touched if they
could have read her thoughts.

The girls who 'went into the kitchen' began as scullerymaids, washing up
stacks of dishes, cleaning saucepans and dish covers, preparing
vegetables, and doing the kitchen scrubbing and other rough work. After
a year or two of this, they became under kitchen-maids and worked up
gradually until they were second in command to the cook. When they
reached that point, they did much of the actual cooking under
supervision; sometimes they did it without any, for there were stories
of cooks who never put hand to a dish, but, having taught the
kitchen-maid, left all the cooking to her, excepting some spectacular
dish for a dinner party. This pleased the ambitious kitchen-maid, for
she was gaining experience and would soon be a professional cook
herself; then, if she attained the summit of her ambition,
cook-housekeeper.

Some girls preferred house to kitchen work, and they would be found a
place in some mansion as third or fourth house-maid and work upward.
Troops of men and maid-servants were kept in large town and country
houses in those days.

The maids on the lower rungs of the ladder seldom saw their employers.
If they happened to meet one or other of them about the house, her
ladyship would ask kindly how they were getting on and how their parents
were; or his lordship would smile and make some mild joke if he happened
to be in a good humour. The upper servants were their real mistresses,
and they treated beginners as a sergeant treated recruits, drilling them
well in their duties by dint of much scolding; but the girl who was
anxious to learn and did not mind hard work or hard words and could keep
a respectful tongue in her head had nothing to fear from them.

The food of the maids in those large establishments was wholesome and
abundant, though far from dainty. In some houses they would be given
cold beef or mutton, or even hot Irish stew for breakfast, and the
midday meal was always a heavy one, with suet pudding following a cut
from a hot joint. Their bedrooms were poor according to modern
standards; but, sleeping in a large attic, shared with two or three
others, was not then looked upon as a hardship, provided they had a bed
each and their own chest of drawers and washstands. The maids had no
bathroom. Often their employers had none either. Some families had
installed one for their own use; others preferred the individual tub in
the bedroom. A hip-bath was part of the furniture of the maids' room.
Like the children of the family, they had no evenings out, unless they
had somewhere definite to go and obtained special leave. They had to go
to church on Sunday, whether they wanted to or not, and had to leave
their best hats with the red roses and ostrich tips in the boxes under
their beds and 'make frights of themselves' in funny little flat
bonnets. When the Princess of Wales, afterwards Queen Alexandra, set the
fashion of wearing the hair in a curled fringe over the forehead, and
the fashion spread until it became universal, a fringe was forbidden to
maids. They must wear their hair brushed straight back from their brows.
A great hardship.

The wages paid would amuse the young housekeepers of to-day. At her
petty place, a girl was paid from one to two shillings a week. A
grown-up servant in a tradesman's family received seven pounds a year,
and that was about the wage of a farm-house servant. The Rectory cook
had sixteen pounds a year; the Rectory house-maid twelve; both excellent
servants. The under servants in big houses began at seven pounds a year,
which was increased at each advancement, until, as head housemaid, they
might receive as much as thirty. A good cook could ask fifty, and even
obtain another five by threatening to leave. 'Everybody who was
anything,' as they used to say, kept a maid in those days--stud grooms'
wives, village schoolmasters' wives, and, of course, inn-keepers' and
shopkeepers' wives. Even the wives of carpenters and masons paid a girl
sixpence to clean the knives and boots and take out the children on
Saturday.

As soon as a mother had even one daughter in service, the strain upon
herself slackened a little. Not only was there one mouth less to feed,
one pair of feet less to be shod, and a tiny space left free in the
cramped sleeping quarters; but, every month, when the girl received her
wages, a shilling or more would be sent to 'our Mum', and, as the wages
increased, the mother's portion grew larger. In addition to presents,
some of the older girls undertook to pay their parents' rent; others to
give them a ton of coal for the winter; and all sent Christmas and
birthday presents and parcels of left-off clothing.

The unselfish generosity of these poor girls was astonishing. It was
said in the hamlet that some of them stripped themselves to help those
at home. One girl did so literally. She had come for her holidays in her
new best frock--a pale grey cashmere with white lace collar and cuffs.
It had been much admired and she had obviously enjoyed wearing it during
her fortnight at home; but when Laura said, 'I do like your new frock,
Clem,' she replied in what was meant for an off-hand tone, 'Oh, that!
I'm leaving that for our young Sally. She hasn't got hardly anything,
and it don't matter what I wear when I'm away. There's nobody I care
about to see it,' and Clem went back in her second-best navy serge and
Sally wore the pale grey to church the next Sunday.

Many of them must have kept themselves very short of money, for they
would send half or even more of their wages home. Laura's mother used to
say that she would rather have starved than allow a child of hers to be
placed at such a disadvantage among other girls at their places in
service, not to mention the temptations to which they might be exposed
through poverty. But the mothers were so poor, so barely able to feed
their families and keep out of debt, that it was only human of them to
take what their children sent and sometimes even pressed upon them.

Strange to say, although they were grateful to and fond of their
daughters, their boys, who were always at home and whose money barely
paid for their keep, seemed always to come first with them. If there was
any inconvenience, it must not fall on the boys; if there was a limited
quantity of anything, the boys must still have their full share; the
boys' best clothes must be brushed and put away for them; their shirts
must be specially well ironed, and tit-bits must always be saved for
their luncheon afield. No wonder the fathers were jealous at times and
exclaimed, 'Our Mum, she do make a reg'lar fool o' that boo-oy!'

A few of the girls were engaged to youths at home, and, after several
years of courtship, mostly conducted by letter, for they seldom met
except during the girl's summer holiday, they would marry and settle in
or near the hamlet. Others married and settled away. Butchers and
milkmen were favoured as husbands, perhaps because these were frequent
callers at the houses where the girls were employed. A hamlet girl would
marry a milkman or a butcher's roundsman in London, or some other
distant part of the country, and, after a few years, the couple would
acquire a business of their own and become quite prosperous. One married
a butler and with him set up an apartment house on the East Coast;
another married a shopkeeper and, with astonishing want of tact, brought
a nursemaid to help look after her children when she visited her
parents. The nursemaid was invited into most of the cottages and well
pumped for information about the home life; but Susie herself was eyed
coldly; she had departed from the normal. The girls who had married away
remained faithful to the old custom of spending a summer fortnight with
their parents, and the outward and visible signs of their prosperity
must have been trying to those who had married farm labourers and
returned to the old style of living.

With the girls away, the young men of the hamlet would have had a dull
time had there not been other girls from other homes in service within
walking distance. On Sunday afternoons, those who were free would be
off, dressed in their best, with their boots well polished and a flower
stuck in the band of their Sunday hats, to court the dairy-maids at
neighbouring farms or the under-servants at the big country houses.
Those who were pledged would go upstairs to write their weekly
love-letter, and a face might often be seen at an upper window, chewing
a pen-holder and gazing sadly out at what must have appeared an empty
world.

There were then no dances at village halls and no cinemas or cheap
excursions to lead to the picking up of casual acquaintances; but, from
time to time, one or other of the engaged youths would shock public
opinion by walking out with another girl while his sweetheart was away.
When taxed with not being 'true to Nell', he would declare it was only
friendship or only a bit of fun; but Nell's mother and his mother would
think otherwise and upbraid him until the meetings were dropped or grew
furtive.

But such sideslips were never mentioned when, at last, Nellie herself
came home for her holiday. Then, every evening, neighbours peeping from
behind window-curtains would see the couple come out of their respective
homes and stroll in the same direction, but not together as yet, for
that would have been thought too brazen. As soon as they were out of
sight of the windows, they would link up, arm in arm, and saunter along
field-paths between the ripening corn, or stand at stiles, whispering
and kissing and making love until the dusk deepened and it was time for
the girl to go home, for no respectable girl was supposed to be out
after ten. Only fourteen nights of such bliss, and all the other nights
of the year blank, and this not for one year, but for six or seven or
eight. Poor lovers!

Mistresses used to say--and probably those who are fortunate enough to
keep their maids from year to year still say--that the girls are sullen
and absent-minded for the first few days after they return to their
duties. No doubt they are, for their thoughts must still be with the
dear ones left behind and the coming months must stretch out, an endless
seeming blank, before they will see them again. That is the time for a
little extra patience and a little human sympathy to help them to adjust
themselves, and if this is forthcoming, as it still is in many homes, in
spite of newspaper correspondence, the young mind will soon turn from
memories of the past to hopes for the future.

The hamlet children saw little of such love-making. Had they attempted
to follow or watch such couples, the young man would have threatened
them with what he would have called 'a good sock on the ear'ole'; but
there was always a country courtship on view if they felt curious to
witness it. This was that of an elderly pair called Chokey and Bess, who
had at that time been walking out together for ten or twelve years and
still had another five or six to go before they were married. Bessie,
then about forty, was supposed not to be strong enough for service and
lived at home, doing the housework for her mother, who was the last of
the lacemakers. Chokey was a farm labourer, a great lumbering fellow who
could lift a sack of wheat with ease, but was supposed to be 'a bit soft
in the upper storey'. He lived in a neighbouring village and came over
every Sunday.

Bessie's mother sat at the window with her lace-pillow all day long; but
her earnings must have been small, for, although her husband received
the same wages as the men who had families and they had only Bess, they
were terribly poor. It was said that when the two women fried a rasher
for their midday meal, the father being away at work, they took it in
turn to have the rasher, the other one dipping her bread in the fat, day
and day about. When they went out, they wore clothes of a bygone
fashion, shawls and bonnets, instead of coats and hats, and short skirts
and white stockings, when the rest of the hamlet world wore black
stockings and skirts touching the ground. To see them set off to the
market town for their Saturday shopping always raised a smile among the
beholders; the mother carrying an old green gig umbrella and Bessie a
double-lidded marketing basket over her arm. They were both long-faced
and pale, and the mother lifted her feet high and touched earth with her
umbrella at every step, while Bess trailed along a little in the rear
with the point of her shawl dangling below her skirt at the back. 'For
all the world like an old white mare an' her foal,' as the hamlet funny
man said.

Every Sunday evening, Chokey and Bess would appear, he in his best pale
grey suit and pink tie, with a geranium, rose, or dahlia stuck in his
hat. She in her Paisley shawl and little black bonnet with velvet
strings tied in a bow under her chin. They were not shy. It was arm in
arm with them from the door, and often a pale grey arm round the Paisley
shawl before they were out of sight of the windows; although, to be
sure, nobody took the trouble to watch, the sight was too familiar.

They always made for the turnpike and strolled a certain distance along
it, then turned back and went to Bessie's home. They seldom walked
unattended; a little band of hamlet children usually accompanied them,
walking about a dozen paces behind, stopping when they stopped and
walking on when they walked on. 'Going with Chokey and Bess' was a
favourite Sunday evening diversion. As one batch of children grew up,
another took its place; though what amusement they found in following
them was a mystery, for the lovers would walk a mile without exchanging
a remark, and when they did it would only be: 'Seems to me there's rain
in the air', or 'My! ain't it hot!' They did not seem to resent being
followed. They would sometimes address a friendly remark to one of the
children, or Chokey would say as he shut the garden gate on setting out,
'Comin' our way to-night?'

At last came their funny little wedding, with Bess still in the Paisley
shawl, and only her father and mother to follow them on foot through the
allotments and over the stile to church. After a wedding breakfast of
sausages, they went to live in a funny little house with a thatched roof
and a magpie in a wicker cage hanging beside the door.

The up-to-date lovers asked more of life than did Chokey and his Bess.
More than their own parents had done.

There was a local saying, 'Nobody ever dies at Lark Rise and nobody goes
away.' Had this been exact, there would have been no new homes in the
hamlet; but, although no building had been done there for many years and
there was no migration of families, a few aged people died, and from
time to time a cottage was left vacant. It did not stand empty long, for
there was always at least one young man waiting to get married and the
joyful news of a house to let brought his bride-to-be home from service
as soon as the requisite month's notice to her employer had expired.

The homes of these newly married couples illustrated a new phase in the
hamlet's history. The furniture to be found in them might lack the
solidity and comeliness of that belonging to their grandparents; but it
showed a marked improvement on their parents' possessions.

It had become the custom for the bride to buy the bulk of the furniture
with her savings in service, while the bridegroom redecorated the
interior of the house, planted the vegetable garden, and put a pig, or a
couple of pigs, in the sty. When the bride bought the furniture, she
would try to obtain things as nearly as possible like those in the
houses in which she had been employed. Instead of the hard windsor
chairs of her childhood's home, she would have small 'parlour' chairs
with round backs and seats covered with horsehair or American cloth. The
deal centre table would be covered with a brightly coloured woollen
cloth between meals and cookery operations. On the chest of drawers
which served as a sideboard, her wedding presents from her employers and
fellow servants would be displayed--a best tea-service, a shaded lamp, a
case of silver tea-spoons with the lid propped open, or a pair of owl
pepper-boxes with green-glass eyes and holes at the top of the head for
the pepper to come through. Somewhere in the room would be seen a few
books and a vase or two of flowers. The two wicker arm-chairs by the
hearth would have cushions and antimacassars of the bride's own working.

Except in a few cases, and those growing fewer, where the first child of
a marriage followed immediately on the ceremony, the babies did not pour
so quickly into these new homes as into the older ones. Often more than
a year would elapse before the first child appeared, to be followed at
reasonable intervals by four or five more. Families were beginning to be
reckoned in half-dozens rather than dozens.

Those belonging to this new generation of housewives were well-trained
in household work. Many of them were highly skilled in one or other of
its branches. The young woman laying her own simple dinner table with
knives and forks only could have told just how many knives, forks,
spoons, and glasses were proper to each place at a dinner party and the
order in which they should be placed. Another, blowing on her
finger-tips to cool them as she unswathed the inevitable roly-poly, must
have thought of the seven-course dinners she had cooked and dished up in
other days. But, except for a few small innovations, such as a regular
Sunday joint, roasted before the fire if no oven were available, and an
Irish stew once in the week, they mostly reverted to the old hamlet
dishes and style of cooking them. The square of bacon was cut, the
roly-poly made, and the black cooking-pot was slung over the fire at
four o'clock; for wages still stood at ten shillings a week and they
knew that their mothers' way was the only way to nourish their husbands
and children on so small a sum.

In decorating their homes and managing their housework, they were able
to let themselves go a little more. There were fancy touches, hitherto
unknown in the hamlet. Cosy corners were built of old boxes and covered
with cretonne; gridirons were covered with pink wool and tinsel and hung
up to serve as letter racks; Japanese fans appeared above picture frames
and window curtains were tied back with ribbon bows. Blue or pink ribbon
bows figured largely in these new decorative schemes. There were bows on
the curtains, on the corners of cushion covers, on the cloth that
covered the chest of drawers, and sometimes even on photograph frames.
Some of the older men used to say that one bride, an outstanding example
of the new refinement, had actually put blue ribbon bows on the handle
of her bedroom utensil. Another joke concerned the vase of flowers the
same girl placed on her table at mealtimes. Her father-in-law, it was
said, being entertained to tea at the new home, exclaimed, 'Hemmed if
I've ever heard of eatin' flowers before!' and the mother-in-law passed
the vase to her son, saying, 'Here, Georgie. Have a mouthful of sweet
peas.' But the brides only laughed and tossed their heads at such
ignorance. The old hamlet ways were all very well, some of them; but
they had seen the world and knew how things were done. It was their day
now.

Changing ideas in the outer world were also reflected in the
relationship between husband and wife. Marriage was becoming more of a
partnership. The man of the house was no longer absolved of all further
responsibility when he had brought his week's wages home; he was made to
feel that he had an interest in the management of the home and the
bringing up of the children. A good, steady husband who could be
depended upon was encouraged to keep part of his wages, out of which he
paid the rent, bought the pig's food, and often the family footwear. He
would chop the wood, sweep the path and fetch water from the well.

'So you be takin' a turn at 'ooman's work?' the older men would say
teasingly, and the older women had plenty to say about the lazy,
good-for-nothing wenches of these days; but the good example was not
lost; the better-natured among the older men began to do odd jobs about
their homes, and though, at first, their wives would tell them to 'keep
out o' th' road', and say that they could do it themselves in half the
time, they soon learned to appreciate, then to expect it.

Then the young wives, unused to never having a penny of their own and
sorely tried by their straitened housekeeping, began to look round for
some way of adding to the family income. One, with the remains of her
savings, bought a few fowls and fowl-houses and sold the eggs to the
grocer in the market town. Another who was clever with her needle made
frocks for the servants at the neighbouring farm-houses; another left
her only child with her mother and did the Rectory charring twice a
week. The old country tradition of self-help was reviving; but, although
there was a little extra money and there were fewer mouths to feed, the
income was still woefully inadequate. Whichever way the young housewife
turned, she was, as she said, 'up against it'. 'If only we had more
money!' was still the cry.

Early in the 'nineties some measure of relief came, for then the weekly
wage was raised to fifteen shillings; but rising prices and new
requirements soon absorbed this rise and it took a world war to obtain
for them anything like a living wage.



                                   XI

                                _School_

School began at nine o'clock, but the hamlet children set out on their
mile-and-a-half walk there as soon as possible after their seven o'clock
breakfast, partly because they liked plenty of time to play on the road
and partly because their mothers wanted them out of the way before
house-cleaning began.

Up the long, straight road they straggled, in twos and threes and in
gangs, their flat, rush dinner-baskets over their shoulders and their
shabby little coats on their arms against rain. In cold weather some of
them carried two hot potatoes which had been in the oven, or in the
ashes, all night, to warm their hands on the way and to serve as a light
lunch on arrival.

They were strong, lusty children, let loose from control; and there was
plenty of shouting, quarrelling, and often fighting among them. In more
peaceful moments they would squat in the dust of the road and play
marbles, or sit on a stone heap and play dibs with pebbles, or climb
into the hedges after birds' nests or blackberries, or to pull long
trails of bryony to wreathe round their hats. In winter they would slide
on the ice on the puddles, or make snowballs--soft ones for their
friends, and hard ones with a stone inside for their enemies.

After the first mile or so the dinner-baskets would be raided; or they
would creep through the bars of the padlocked field gates for turnips to
pare with the teeth and munch, or for handfuls of green pea shucks, or
ears of wheat, to rub out the sweet, milky grain between the hands and
devour. In spring they ate the young green from the hawthorn hedges,
which they called 'bread and cheese', and sorrel leaves from the
wayside, which they called 'sour grass', and in autumn there was an
abundance of haws and blackberries and sloes and crabapples for them to
feast upon. There was always something to eat, and they ate, not so much
because they were hungry as from habit and relish of the wild food.

At that early hour there was little traffic upon the road. Sometimes, in
winter, the children would hear the pounding of galloping hoofs and a
string of hunters, blanketed up to the ears and ridden and led by
grooms, would loom up out of the mist and thunder past on the grass
verges. At other times the steady tramp and jingle of the teams going
afield would approach, and, as they passed, fathers would pretend to
flick their offspring with whips, saying, 'There! that's for that time
you deserved it an' didn't get it'; while elder brothers, themselves at
school only a few months before, would look patronizingly down from the
horses' backs and call: 'Get out o' th' way, you kids!'

Going home in the afternoon there was more to be seen. A farmer's gig,
on the way home from market, would stir up the dust; or the miller's van
or the brewer's dray, drawn by four immense, hairy-legged, satin-backed
carthorses. More exciting was the rare sight of Squire Harrison's
four-in-hand, with ladies in bright, summer dresses, like a garden of
flowers, on the top of the coach, and Squire himself, pink-cheeked and
white-hatted, handling the four greys. When the four-in-hand passed, the
children drew back and saluted, the Squire would gravely touch the brim
of his hat with his whip, and the ladies would lean from their high
seats to smile on the curtseying children.

A more familiar sight was the lady on a white horse who rode slowly on
the same grass verge in the same direction every Monday and Thursday. It
was whispered among the children that she was engaged to a farmer living
at a distance, and that they met half-way between their two homes. If
so, it must have been a long engagement, for she rode past at exactly
the same hour twice a week throughout Laura's schooldays, her face
getting whiter and her figure getting fuller and her old white horse
also putting on weight.

It has been said that every child is born a little savage and has to be
civilized. The process of civilization had not gone very far with some
of the hamlet children; although one civilization had them in hand at
home and another at school, they were able to throw off both on the road
between the two places and revert to a state of Nature. A favourite
amusement with these was to fall in a body upon some unoffending
companion, usually a small girl in a clean frock, and to 'run her', as
they called it. This meant chasing her until they caught her, then
dragging her down and sitting upon her, tearing her clothes, smudging
her face, and tousling her hair in the process. She might scream and cry
and say she would 'tell on' them; they took no notice until, tiring of
the sport, they would run whooping off, leaving her sobbing and
exhausted.

The persecuted one never 'told on' them, even when reproved by the
schoolmistress for her dishevelled condition, for she knew that, if she
had, there would have been a worse 'running' to endure on the way home,
and one that went to the tune of:


          Tell-tale tit!
          Cut her tongue a-slit,
          And every little puppy-dog shall have a little bit!


It was no good telling the mothers either, for it was the rule of the
hamlet never to interfere in the children's quarrels. 'Let 'em fight it
out among theirselves,' the women would say; and if a child complained
the only response would be: 'You must've been doin' summat to them. If
you'd've left them alone, they'd've left you alone; so don't come
bringing your tales home to me!' It was harsh schooling; but the
majority seemed to thrive upon it, and the few quieter and more
sensitive children soon learned either to start early and get to school
first, or to linger behind, dipping under bushes and lurking inside
field gates until the main body had passed.

When Edmund was about to start school, Laura was afraid for him. He was
such a quiet, gentle little boy, inclined to sit gazing into space,
thinking his own thoughts and dreaming his own dreams. What would he do
among the rough, noisy crowd? In imagination she saw him struggling in
the dust with the runners sitting on his small, slender body, while she
stood by, powerless to help.

At first she took him to school by a field path, a mile or more round;
but bad weather and growing crops soon put an end to that and the day
came when they had to take the road with the other children. But, beyond
snatching his cap and flinging it into the hedge as they passed, the
bigger boys paid no attention to him, while the younger ones were
definitely friendly, especially when he invited them to have a blow each
on the whistle which hung on a white cord from the neck of his sailor
suit. They accepted him, in fact, as one of themselves, allowing him to
join in their games and saluting him with a grunted 'Hello, Ted,' when
they passed.

When the clash came at last and a quarrel arose, and Laura, looking
back, saw Edmund in the thick of a struggling group and heard his voice
shouting loudly and rudely, not gentle at all, 'I shan't! I won't! Stop
it, I tell you!' and rushed back, if not to rescue, to be near him, she
found Edmund, her gentle little Edmund, with face as red as a
turkey-cock, hitting out with clenched fists at such a rate that some of
the bigger boys, standing near, started applauding.

So Edmund was not a coward, like she was! Edmund could fight! Though
where and how he had learned to do so was a mystery. Perhaps, being a
boy, it came to him naturally. At any rate, fight he did, so often and
so well that soon no one near his own age risked offending him. His
elders gave him an occasional cuff, just to keep him in his place; but
in scuffles with others they took his part, perhaps because they knew he
was likely to win. So all was well with Edmund. He was accepted inside
the circle, and the only drawback, from Laura's point of view, was that
she was still outside.

Although they started to school so early, the hamlet children took so
much time on the way that the last quarter of a mile was always a race,
and they would rush, panting and dishevelled, into school just as the
bell stopped, and the other children, spick and span, fresh from their
mothers' hands, would eye them sourly. 'That gipsy lot from Lark Rise!'
they would murmur.

Fordlow National School was a small grey one-storied building, standing
at the cross-roads at the entrance to the village. The one large
classroom which served all purposes was well lighted with several
windows, including the large one which filled the end of the building
which faced the road. Beside, and joined on to the school, was a tiny
two-roomed cottage for the schoolmistress, and beyond that a playground
with birch trees and turf, bald in places, the whole being enclosed
within pointed, white-painted palings.

The only other building in sight was a row of model cottages occupied by
the shepherd, the blacksmith, and other superior farm-workers. The
school had probably been built at the same time as the houses and by the
same model landlord; for, though it would seem a hovel compared to a
modern council school, it must at that time have been fairly up-to-date.
It had a lobby with pegs for clothes, boys' and girls' earth-closets,
and a backyard with fixed wash-basins, although there was no water laid
on. The water supply was contained in a small bucket, filled every
morning by the old woman who cleaned the schoolroom, and every morning
she grumbled because the children had been so extravagant that she had
to 'fill 'un again'.

The average attendance was about forty-five. Ten or twelve of the
children lived near the school, a few others came from cottages in the
fields, and the rest were the Lark Rise children. Even then, to an
outsider, it would have appeared a quaint, old-fashioned little
gathering; the girls in their ankle-length frocks and long, straight
pinafores, with their hair strained back from their brows and secured on
their crowns by a ribbon or black tape or a bootlace; the bigger boys in
corduroys and hobnailed boots, and the smaller ones in home-made sailor
suits or, until they were six or seven, in petticoats.

Baptismal names were such as the children's parents and grandparents had
borne. The fashion in Christian names was changing; babies were being
christened Mabel and Gladys and Doreen and Percy and Stanley; but the
change was too recent to have affected the names of the older children.
Mary Ann, Sarah Ann, Eliza, Martha, Annie, Jane, Amy, and Rose were
favourite girls' names. There was a Mary Ann in almost every family, and
Eliza was nearly as popular. But none of them were called by their
proper names. Mary Ann and Sarah Ann were contracted to Mar'ann and
Sar'ann. Mary, apart from Ann, had, by stages, descended through Molly
and Polly to Poll. Eliza had become Liza, then Tiza, then Tize; Martha
was Mat or Pat; Jane was Jin; and every Amy had at least one 'Aim' in
life, of which she had constant reminder. The few more uncommon names
were also distorted. Two sisters named at the font Beatrice and Agnes,
went through life as Beat and Agg, Laura was Lor, or Low, and Edmund was
Ned or Ted.

Laura's mother disliked this cheapening of names and named her third
child May, thinking it would not lend itself to a diminutive. However,
while still in her cradle, the child became Mayie among the neighbours.

There was no Victoria in the school, nor was there a Miss Victoria or a
Lady Victoria in any of the farmhouses, rectories, or mansions in the
district, nor did Laura ever meet a Victoria in later life. That great
name was sacred to the Queen and was not copied by her subjects to the
extent imagined by period novelists of today.

The schoolmistress in charge of the Fordlow school at the beginning of
the 'eighties had held that position for fifteen years and seemed to her
pupils as much a fixture as the school building; but for most of that
time she had been engaged to the squire's head gardener and her long
reign was drawing to a close.

She was, at that time, about forty, and was a small, neat little body
with a pale, slightly pock-marked face, snaky black curls hanging down
to her shoulders, and eyebrows arched into a perpetual inquiry. She wore
in school stiffly starched, holland aprons with bibs, one embroidered
with red one week, and one with blue the next, and was seldom seen
without a posy of flowers pinned on her breast and another tucked into
her hair.

Every morning, when school had assembled, and Governess, with her
starched apron and bobbing curls appeared in the doorway, there was a
great rustling and scraping of curtseying and pulling of forelocks.
'Good morning, children,' 'Good morning, ma'am,' were the formal,
old-fashioned greetings. Then, under her determined fingers the
harmonium wheezed out 'Once in Royal', or 'We are but little children
weak', prayers followed, and the day's work began.

Reading, writing, and arithmetic were the principal subjects, with a
Scripture lesson every morning, and needlework every afternoon for the
girls. There was no assistant mistress; Governess taught all the classes
simultaneously, assisted only by two monitors--ex-scholars, aged about
twelve, who were paid a shilling a week each for their services.

Every morning at ten o'clock the Rector arrived to take the older
children for Scripture. He was a parson of the old school; a commanding
figure, tall and stout, with white hair, ruddy cheeks and an
aristocratically beaked nose, and he was as far as possible removed by
birth, education, and worldly circumstances from the lambs of his flock.
He spoke to them from a great height, physical, mental, and spiritual.
'To order myself lowly and reverently before my betters' was the clause
he underlined in the Church Catechism, for had he not been divinely
appointed pastor and master to those little rustics and was it not one
of his chief duties to teach them to realize this? As a man, he was
kindly disposed--a giver of blankets and coals at Christmas, and of soup
and milk puddings to the sick.

His lesson consisted of Bible reading, turn and turn about round the
class, of reciting from memory the names of the kings of Israel and
repeating the Church Catechism. After that, he would deliver a little
lecture on morals and behaviour. The children must not lie or steal or
be discontented or envious. God had placed them just where they were in
the social order and given them their own especial work to do; to envy
others or to try to change their own lot in life was a sin of which he
hoped they would never be guilty. From his lips the children heard
nothing of that God who is Truth and Beauty and Love; but they learned
for him and repeated to him long passages from the Authorized Version,
thus laying up treasure for themselves; so, the lessons, in spite of
much aridity, were valuable.

Scripture over and the Rector bowed and curtsied out of the door,
ordinary lessons began. Arithmetic was considered the most important of
the subjects taught, and those who were good at figures ranked high in
their classes. It was very simple arithmetic, extending only to the
first four rules, with the money sums, known as 'bills of parcels', for
the most advanced pupils.

The writing lesson consisted of the copying of copperplate maxims: 'A
fool and his money are soon parted'; 'Waste not, want not'; 'Count ten
before you speak', and so on. Once a week composition would be set,
usually in the form of writing a letter describing some recent event.
This was regarded chiefly as a spelling test.

History was not taught formally; but history readers were in use
containing such picturesque stories as those of King Alfred and the
cakes, King Canute commanding the waves, the loss of the White Ship, and
Raleigh spreading his cloak for Queen Elizabeth.

There were no geography readers, and, excepting what could be gleaned
from the descriptions of different parts of the world in the ordinary
readers, no geography was taught. But, for some reason or other, on the
walls of the schoolroom were hung splendid maps: The World, Europe,
North America, South America, England, Ireland, and Scotland. During
long waits in class for her turn to read, or to have her copy or sewing
examined, Laura would gaze on these maps until the shapes of the
countries with their islands and inlets became photographed on her
brain. Baffin Bay and the land around the poles were especially
fascinating to her.

Once a day, at whatever hour the poor, overworked mistress could find
time, a class would be called out to toe the chalked semicircle on the
floor for a reading lesson. This lesson, which should have been
pleasant, for the reading matter was good, was tedious in the extreme.
Many of the children read so slowly and haltingly that Laura, who was
impatient by nature, longed to take hold of their words and drag them
out of their mouths, and it often seemed to her that her own turn to
read would never come. As often as she could do so without being
detected, she would turn over and peep between the pages of her own
Royal Reader, and, studiously holding the book to her nose, pretend to
be following the lesson while she was pages ahead.

There was plenty there to enthral any child: 'The Skater Chased by
Wolves'; 'The Siege of Torquilstone', from _Ivanhoe_; Fenimore Cooper's
_Prairie on Fire_; and Washington Irving's _Capture of Wild Horses_.

Then there were fascinating descriptions of such far-apart places as
Greenland and the Amazon; of the Pacific Ocean with its fairy islands
and coral reefs; the snows of Hudson Bay Territory and the sterile
heights of the Andes. Best of all she loved the description of the
Himalayas, which began: 'Northward of the great plain of India, and
along its whole extent, towers the sublime mountain region of the
Himalayas, ascending gradually until it terminates in a long range of
summits wrapped in perpetual snow.'

Interspersed between the prose readings were poems: 'The Slave's Dream';
'Young Lochinvar'; 'The Parting of Douglas and Marmion'; Tennyson's
'Brook' and 'Ring out, Wild Bells'; Byron's 'Shipwreck'; Hogg's
'Skylark', and many more. 'Lochiel's Warning' was a favourite with
Edmund, who often, in bed at night, might be heard declaiming: 'Lochiel!
Lochiel! beware of the day!' while Laura, at any time, with or without
encouragement, was ready to 'look back into other years' with Henry
Glassford Bell, and recite his scenes from the life of Mary Queen of
Scots, reserving her most impressive tone for the concluding couplet:


      Lapped by a dog. Go think of it in silence and alone,
      Then weigh against a grain of sand the glories of a throne.


But long before their schooldays were over they knew every piece in the
books by heart and it was one of their greatest pleasures in life to
recite them to each other. By that time Edmund had appropriated Scott
and could repeat hundreds of lines, always showing a preference for
scenes of single combat between warrior chiefs. The selection in the
_Royal Readers_, then, was an education in itself for those who took to
it kindly; but the majority of the children would have none of it;
saying that the prose was 'dry old stuff' and that they hated 'portry'.

Those children who read fluently, and there were several of them in
every class, read in a monotonous sing-song, without expression, and
apparently without interest. Yet there were very few really stupid
children in the school, as is proved by the success of many of them in
after life, and though few were interested in their lessons, they nearly
all showed an intelligent interest in other things--the boys in field
work and crops and cattle and agricultural machinery; the girls in
dress, other people's love affairs and domestic details.

It is easy to imagine the education authorities of that day, when
drawing up the scheme for that simple but sound education, saying, 'Once
teach them to read and they will hold the key to all knowledge.' But the
scheme did not work out. If the children, by the time they left school,
could read well enough to read the newspaper and perhaps an occasional
book for amusement, and write well enough to write their own letters,
they had no wish to go farther. Their interest was not in books, but in
life, and especially the life that lay immediately about them. At school
they worked unwillingly, upon compulsion, and the life of the
schoolmistress was a hard one.

As Miss Holmes went from class to class, she carried the cane and laid
it upon the desk before her; not necessarily for use, but as a reminder,
for some of the bigger boys were very unruly. She punished by a smart
stroke on each hand. 'Put out your hand,' she would say, and some boys
would openly spit on each hand before proffering it. Others murmured and
muttered before and after a caning and threatened to 'tell me feyther';
but she remained calm and cool, and after the punishment had been
inflicted there was a marked improvement--for a time.

It must be remembered that in those days a boy of eleven was nearing the
end of his school life. Soon he would be at work; already he felt
himself nearly a man and too old for petticoat government. Moreover,
those were country boys, wild and rough, and many of them as tall as she
was. Those who had failed to pass Standard IV and so could not leave
school until they were eleven, looked upon that last year as a
punishment inflicted upon them by the school authorities and behaved
accordingly. In this they were encouraged by their parents, for a
certain section of these resented their boys being kept at school when
they might be earning. 'What do our young Alf want wi' a lot o'
book-larnin'?' they would say. 'He can read and write and add up as much
money as he's ever likely to get. What more do he want?' Then a
neighbour of more advanced views would tell them: 'A good education's
everything in these days. You can't get on in the world if you ain't had
one,' for they read their newspapers and new ideas were percolating,
though slowly. It was only the second generation to be forcibly fed with
the fruit of the tree of knowledge: what wonder if it did not always
agree with it.

Meanwhile, Miss Holmes carried her cane about with her. A poor method of
enforcing discipline, according to modern educational ideas; but it
served. It may be that she and her like all over the country at that
time were breaking up the ground that other, later comers to the field,
with a knowledge of child psychology and with tradition and experiment
behind them, might sow the good seed.

She seldom used the cane on the girls and still more seldom on the
infants. Standing in a corner with their hands on their heads was their
punishment. She gave little treats and encouragements, too, and,
although the children called her 'Susie' behind her back, they really
liked and respected her. Many times there came a knock at the door and a
smartly dressed girl on holidays, or a tall young soldier on leave, in
his scarlet tunic and pillbox cap, looked in 'to see Governess'.

That Laura could already read when she went to school was never
discovered. 'Do you know your A B C?' the mistress asked her on the
first morning. 'Come, let me hear you say it: A-B-C----'

'A--B--C----' Laura began; but when she got to F she stumbled, for she
had never memorized the letters in order. So she was placed in the class
known as 'the babies' and joined in chanting the alphabet from A to Z.
Alternately they recited it backward, and Laura soon had that version by
heart, for it rhymed:


                            Z-Y-X and W-V
                            U-T-S and R-Q-P
                            O-N-M and L-K-J
                            I-H-G and F-E-D
                            And C-B-A!


Once started, they were like a watch wound up, and went on alone for
hours. The mistress, with all the other classes on her hands, had no
time to teach the babies, although she always had a smile for them when
she passed and any disturbance or cessation of the chanting would bring
her down to them at once. Even the monitors were usually engaged in
giving out dictation to the older children, or in hearing tables or
spelling repeated; but, in the afternoon, one of the bigger girls,
usually the one who was the poorest needlewoman (it was always Laura in
later years) would come down from her own form to point to and name each
letter on a wall-sheet, the little ones repeating them after her. Then
she would teach them to form pot-hooks and hangers, and, afterwards,
letters, on their slates, and this went on for years, as it seemed to
Laura, but perhaps it was only one year.

At the end of that time the class was examined and those who knew and
could form their letters were moved up into the official 'Infants'.
Laura, who by this time was reading _Old St. Paul's_ at home, simply
romped through this Little-Go; but without credit, for it was said she
'gabbled' her letters, and her writing was certainly poor.

It was not until she reached Standard I that her troubles really began.
Arithmetic was the subject by which the pupils were placed, and as Laura
could not grasp the simplest rule with such small help as the mistress
had time to give, she did not even know how to begin working out the
sums and was permanently at the bottom of the class. At needlework in
the afternoon she was no better: The girls around her in class were
making pinafores for themselves, putting in tiny stitches and biting off
their cotton like grown women, while she was still struggling with her
first hemming strip. And a dingy, crumpled strip it was before she had
done with it, punctuated throughout its length with blood spots where
she had pricked her fingers.

'Oh, Laura! What a dunce you are!' Miss Holmes used to say every time
she examined it, and Laura really was the dunce of the school in those
two subjects. However, as time went on, she improved a little, and
managed to pass her standard every year with moderate success until she
came to Standard V and could go no farther, for that was the highest in
the school. By that time the other children she had worked with had
left, excepting one girl named Emily Rose, who was an only child and
lived in a lonely cottage far out in the fields. For two years Standard
V consisted of Laura and Emily Rose. They did few lessons and those few
mostly those they could learn from books by themselves, and much of
their time was spent in teaching the babies and assisting the
schoolmistress generally.

That mistress was not Miss Holmes. She had married her head gardener
while Laura was still in the Infants and gone to live in a pretty old
cottage which she had renamed 'Malvern Villa'. Immediately after her had
come a young teacher, fresh from her training college, with all the
latest educational ideas. She was a bright, breezy girl, keen on reform,
and anxious to be a friend as well as a teacher to her charges.

She came too early. The human material she had to work on was not ready
for such methods. On the first morning she began a little speech,
meaning to take the children into her confidence:

'Good morning, children. My name is Matilda Annie Higgs, and I want us
all to be friends----' A giggling murmur ran round the school. 'Matilda
Annie! Matilda Annie! Did she say Higgs or pigs?' The name made direct
appeal to their crude sense of humour, and, as to the offer of
friendship, they scented weakness in that, coming from one whose office
it was to rule. Thenceforth, Miss Higgs might drive her pigs in the
rhyme they shouted in her hearing; but she could neither drive nor lead
her pupils. They hid her cane, filled her inkpot with water, put young
frogs in her desk, and asked her silly, unnecessary questions about
their work. When she answered them, they all coughed in chorus.

The girls were as bad as the boys. Twenty times in one afternoon a hand
would shoot upward and it would be: 'Please, miss, can I have this or
that from the needlework box?' and poor Miss Higgs, trying to teach a
class at the other end of the room, would come and unlock and search the
box for something they had already and had hidden.

Several times she appealed to them to show more consideration. Once she
burst into tears before the whole school. She told the woman who cleaned
that she had never dreamed there were such children anywhere. They were
little savages.

One afternoon, when a pitched battle was raging among the big boys in
class and the mistress was calling imploringly for order, the Rector
appeared in the doorway.

'Silence!' he roared.

The silence was immediate and profound, for they knew he was not one to
be trifled with. Like Gulliver among the Lilliputians, he strode into
the midst of them, his face flushed with anger, his eyes flashing blue
fire. 'Now, what is the meaning of this disgraceful uproar?'

Some of the younger children began to cry; but one look in their
direction froze them into silence and they sat, wide-eyed and horrified,
while he had the whole class out and caned each boy soundly, including
those who had taken no part in the fray. Then, after a heated discourse
in which he reminded the children of their lowly position in life and
the twin duties of gratitude to and respect towards their superiors,
school was dismissed. Trembling hands seized coats and dinner-baskets
and frightened little figures made a dash for the gate. But the big boys
who had caused the trouble showed a different spirit. 'Who cares for
him?' they muttered, 'Who cares? Who cares? He's only an old parson!'
Then, when safely out of the playground, one voice shouted:


                   Old Charley-wag! Old Charley-wag!
                   Ate the pudden and gnawed the bag!


The other children expected the heavens to fall; for Mr. Ellison's
Christian name was Charles. The shout was meant for him and was one of
defiance. He did not recognize it as such. There were several Charleses
in the school, and it must have been inconceivable to him that his own
Christian name should be intended. Nothing happened, and, after a few
moments of tense silence, the rebels trooped off to get their own
account of the affair in first at home.

After that, it was not long before the station fly stood at the school
gate and Miss Higgs's trunk and bundles and easy-chair were hauled on
top. Back came the married Miss Holmes, now Mrs. Tenby. Girls curtsied
again and boys pulled their forelocks. It was 'Yes, ma'am', and 'No,
ma'am', and 'What did you please to say, ma'am?' once more. But either
she did not wish to teach again permanently or the education authorities
already had a rule against employing married-women teachers, for she
only remained a few weeks until a new mistress was engaged.

This turned out to be a sweet, frail-looking, grey-haired, elderly lady
named Miss Shepherd, and a gentle shepherd she proved to her flock.
Unfortunately, she was but a poor disciplinarian, and the struggle to
maintain some degree of order wore her almost to shreds: Again there was
always a buzz of whispering in class; stupid and unnecessary questions
were asked, and too long intervals elapsed between the word of command
and the response. But, unlike Miss Higgs, she did not give up. Perhaps
she could not afford to do so at her age and with an invalid sister
living with and dependent upon her. She ruled, if she can be said to
have ruled at all, by love and patience and ready forgiveness. In time,
even the blackest of her sheep realized this and kept within certain
limits; just sufficient order was maintained to avoid scandal, and the
school settled down under her mild rule for five or six years.

Perhaps these upheavals were a necessary part of the transition which
was going on. Under Miss Holmes, the children had been weaned from the
old free life; they had become accustomed to regular attendance, to
sitting at a desk and concentrating, however imperfectly. Although they
had not learned much, they had been learning to learn. But Miss Holmes's
ideas belonged to an age that was rapidly passing. She believed in the
established order of society, with clear divisions, and had done her
best to train the children to accept their lowly lot with gratitude to
and humility before their betters. She belonged to the past; the
children's lives lay in the future, and they needed a guide with at
least some inkling of the changing spirit of the times. The new
mistresses, who came from the outside world, brought something of this
spirit with them. Even the transient and unappreciated Miss Higgs,
having given as a subject for composition one day 'Write a letter to
Miss Ellison, telling her what you did at Christmas', when she read over
one girl's shoulder the hitherto conventional beginning 'Dear and
Honoured Miss', exclaimed 'Oh, no! That's a very old-fashioned
beginning. Why not say, "Dear Miss Ellison?"' An amendment which was
almost revolutionary.

Miss Shepherd went further. She taught the children that it was not what
a man or woman had, but what they were which mattered. That poor
people's souls are as valuable and that their hearts may be as good and
their minds as capable of cultivation as those of the rich. She even
hinted that on the material plane people need not necessarily remain
always upon one level. Some boys, born of poor parents, had struck out
for themselves and become great men, and everybody had respected them
for rising upon their own merits. She would read them the lives of some
of these so-called self-made men (there were no women, Laura noticed!)
and though their circumstances were too far removed from those of her
hearers for them to inspire the ambition she hoped to awaken, they must
have done something to widen their outlook on life.

Meanwhile the ordinary lessons went on. Reading, writing, arithmetic,
all a little less rather than more well taught and mastered than
formerly. In needlework there was a definite falling off. Miss Shepherd
was not a great needle-woman herself and was inclined to cut down the
sewing time to make way for other work. Infinitesimal stitches no longer
provoked delighted exclamations, but more often a 'Child! You will ruin
your eyes!' As the bigger girls left who in their time had won county
prizes, the standard of the output declined, until, from being known as
one of the first needlework schools in the district, Fordlow became one
of the last.



                                  XII

                       _Her Majesty's Inspector_

Her Majesty's Inspector of Schools came once a year on a date of which
previous notice had been given. There was no singing or quarrelling on
the way to school that morning. The children, in clean pinafores and
well blackened boots, walked deep in thought; or, with open spelling or
table books in hand, tried to make up in an hour for all their wasted
yesterdays.

Although the date of 'Inspector's' visit had been notified, the time had
not. Some years he would come to Fordlow in the morning; other years in
the afternoon, having examined another school earlier. So, after
prayers, copybooks were given out and the children settled down for a
long wait. A few of the more stolid, leaning forward with tongues
slightly protruding, would copy laboriously, 'Lightly on the up-strokes,
heavy on the down', but most of the children were too apprehensive even
to attempt to work and the mistress did not urge them, for she felt even
more apprehensive herself and did not want nervously executed copies to
witness against her.

Ten--eleven--the hands of the clock dragged on, and forty odd hearts
might almost be heard thumping when at last came the sound of wheels
crunching on gravel and two top hats and the top of a whip appeared
outside the upper panes of the large end window.

Her Majesty's Inspector was an elderly clergyman, a little man with an
immense paunch and tiny grey eyes like gimlets. He had the reputation of
being 'strict', but that was a mild way of describing his autocratic
demeanour and scathing judgement. His voice was an exasperated roar and
his criticism was a blend of outraged learning and sarcasm. Fortunately,
nine out of ten of his examinees were proof against the latter. He
looked at the rows of children as if he hated them and at the mistress
as if he despised her. The Assistant Inspector was also a clergyman, but
younger, and, in comparison, almost human. Black eyes and very red lips
shone through the bushiness of the whiskers which almost covered his
face. The children in the lower classes, which he examined, were
considered fortunate.

The mistress did not have to teach a class in front of the great man, as
later; her part was to put out the books required and to see that the
pupils had the pens and paper they needed. Most of the time she hovered
about the Inspector, replying in low tones to his scathing remarks, or,
with twitching lips, smiling encouragement at any child who happened to
catch her eye.

What kind of a man the Inspector really was it is impossible to say. He
may have been a great scholar, a good parish priest, and a good friend
and neighbour to people of his own class. One thing, however, is
certain, he did not care for or understand children, at least not
national school children. In homely language, he was the wrong man for
the job. The very sound of his voice scattered the few wits of the less
gifted, and even those who could have done better were too terrified in
his presence to be able to collect their thoughts or keep their hands
from trembling.

But, slowly as the hands of the clock seemed to move, the afternoon wore
on. Classes came out and toed the chalk line to read; other classes bent
over their sums, or wrote letters to grandmothers describing imaginary
summer holidays. Some wrote to the great man's dictation pieces full of
hard spelling words. One year he made the confusion of their minds
doubly confused by adopting the, to them, new method of giving out the
stops by name: 'Water-fowl and other aquatic birds dwell on their banks
semicolon while on the surface of the placid water float the
wide-spreading leaves of the _Victoria regia_ comma and other lilies and
water dash plants full stop.'

Of course, they all wrote the names of the stops, which, together with
their spelling, would have made their papers rich reading had there been
any one there capable of enjoying it.

The composition class made a sad hash of their letters. The children had
been told beforehand that they must fill at least one page, so they
wrote in a very large hand and spaced their lines well; but what to say
was the difficulty! One year the Inspector, observing a small boy
sitting bolt upright gazing before him, called savagely: 'Why are you
not writing--you at the end of the row? You have your pen and your
paper, have you not?'

'Yes, thank you, sir.'

'Then why are you idling?'

'Please, sir, I was only thinking what to say.'

A grunt was the only answer. What other was possible from one who must
have known well that pen, ink, and paper were no good without at least a
little thinking.

Once he gave out to Laura's class two verses of _The Ancient Mariner_,
reading them through first, then dictating them very slowly, with an air
of aloof disdain, and yet rolling the lines on his tongue as if he
relished them:

'All in a hot and copper sky,' he bawled. Then his voice softened. So
perhaps there was another side to his nature.

At last the ordeal was over. No one would know who had passed and who
had not for a fortnight; but that did not trouble the children at all.
They crept like mice from the presence, and then, what shouting and
skipping and tumbling each other in the dust as soon as they were out of
sight and hearing!

When the papers arrived and the examination results were read out it was
surprising to find what a number had passed. The standard must have been
very low, for the children had never been taught some of the work set,
and in what they had learned nervous dread had prevented them from
reaching their usual poor level.

Another Inspector, also a clergyman, came to examine the school in
Scripture. But that was a different matter. On those days the Rector was
present, and the mistress, in her best frock, had nothing to do beyond
presiding at the harmonium for hymn singing. The examination consisted
of Scripture questions, put to a class as a whole and answered by any
one who was able to shoot up a hand to show they had the requisite
knowledge; of portions of the Church Catechism, repeated from memory in
order round the class; and of a written paper on some set Biblical
subject. There was little nervous tension on that day, for 'Scripture
Inspector' beamed upon and encouraged the children, even to the extent
of prompting those who were not word-perfect. While the writing was
going on, he and the Rector talked in undertones, laughing aloud at the
doings of 'old So-and-So', and, at one point, the mistress slipped away
into her cottage and brought them cups of tea on a tray.

The children did reasonably well, for Scripture was the one subject they
were thoroughly taught; even the dullest knew most of the Church
Catechism by heart. The written paper was the stumbling-block to many;
but this was Laura and Edmund's best subject and both succeeded in
different years in carrying off the large, calf-bound, gilt-edged 'Book
of Common Prayer' which was given as a prize--the only prize given at
that school.

Laura won hers by means of a minor miracle. That day, for the first and
last time in her life, the gift of words descended upon her. The subject
set was 'The Life of Moses', and although up to that moment she had felt
no special affection for the great law-giver, a sudden wave of
hero-worship surged over her. While her classmates were still wrinkling
their brows and biting their pens, she was well away with the baby in
the bulrushes scene. Her pen flew over her paper as she filled sheet
after sheet, and she had got the Children of Israel through the Red Sea,
across the desert, and was well in sight of Pisgah when the little bell
on the mistress's table tinkled that time was up.

The Inspector, who had been watching her, was much amused by her
verbosity and began reading her paper at once, although, as a rule, he
carried the essay away to read. After three or four pages he laughingly
declared that he must have more tea as 'that desert' made him feel
thirsty.

Such inspiration never visited her again. She returned to her usual
pedestrian style of essay writing, in which there were so many
alterations and erasures that, although she wrote a fair amount, she got
no more marks than those who got stuck at 'My dear Grandmother'.

There was a good deal of jealousy and unkindness among the parents over
the passes and still more over the one annual prize for Scripture. Those
whose children had not done well in examinations would never believe
that the success of others was due to merit. The successful ones were
spoken of as 'favourites' and disliked. 'You ain't a-goin' to tell me
that that young So-and-So did any better n'r our Jim,' some disappointed
mother would say. 'Stands to reason that what he could do our Jimmy
could do, _and_ better, too. Examinations are all a lot of humbug, if
you asks me.' The parents of those who had passed were almost
apologetic. ''Tis all luck,' they would say. 'Our Tize happened to hit
it this time; next year it'll be your Alice's turn.' They showed no
pleasure in any small success their own children might have. Indeed, it
is doubtful if they felt any, except in the case of a boy who, having
passed the fourth standard, could leave school and start work. Their
ideal for themselves and their children was to keep to the level of the
normal. To them outstanding ability was no better than outstanding
stupidity.

Boys who had been morose or rebellious during their later schooldays
were often transformed when they got upon a horse's back or were
promoted to driving a dungcart afield. For the first time in their
lives, they felt themselves persons of importance. They bandied lively
words with the men and gave themselves manly airs at home with their
younger brothers and sisters. Sometimes, when two or three boys were
working together, they were too lively, and very little work was done.
'One boy's a boy; two boys be half a boy, and three boys be no boy at
all', ran the old country saying. 'Little gallasses', the men called
them when vexed; and, in more indulgent moods, 'young dogs'. 'Ain't he a
regular young dog?' a fond parent would ask, when a boy, just starting
work, would set his cap at an angle, cut himself an ash stick, and try
to walk like a man.

They were lovable little fellows, in their stiff new corduroys and
hobnailed boots, with their broad, childish faces, powdered with
freckles and ready to break into dimples at a word. For a few years they
were happy enough, for they loved their work and did not, as yet, feel
the pinch of their poverty. The pity of it was that the calling they
were entering should have been so unappreciated and underpaid. There was
nothing the matter with the work, as work, the men agreed. It was a
man's life, and they laughed scornfully at the occupations of some who
looked down upon them; but the wages were ridiculously low and the farm
labourer was so looked down upon and slighted that the day was soon to
come when a country boy leaving school would look for any other way of
earning a living than on the land.

At that time boys of a roving disposition who wanted to see a bit of the
world before settling down went into the Army. Nearly every family in
the hamlet had its soldier son or uncle or cousin, and it was a common
sight to see a scarlet coat going round the Rise. After their Army
service, most of the hamlet-bred young men returned and took up the old
life on the land; but a few settled in other parts of the country. One
was a policeman in Birmingham, another kept a public house, and a third
was said to be a foreman in a brewery in Staffordshire. A few other boys
left the hamlet to become farm servants in the North of England. To
obtain such situations, they went to Banbury Fair and stood in the
Market to be hired by an agent. They were engaged for a year and during
that time were lodged and fed with the farmer's family, but received
little or no money until the year was up, when they were paid in a lump
sum. They were usually well treated, especially in the matter of food;
but were glad to return at the end of the year from what was, to them, a
foreign country where, at first, they could barely understand the
speech.

At 'the hiring' the different grades of farm workers stood in groups,
according to their occupations--the shepherds with their crooks, the
carters with whips and tufts of horsehair in their hats, and the
maid-servants relying upon their sex to distinguish them. The young
boys, not as yet specialists, were easily picked out by their youth and
their innocent, wondering faces. The maids who secured situations by
hiring themselves out at the Fair were farm-house servants of the
rougher kind. None of the hamlet girls attended the Fair for that
purpose.

Squire at the Manor House, known as 'our Squire', not out of any
particular affection or respect, but in contradistinction to the richer
and more important squire in a neighbouring parish, was at that time
unmarried, though verging on middle age, and his mother still reigned as
Lady of the Manor. Two or three times a year she called at the school to
examine the needlework, a tall, haughty, and still handsome old dame in
a long, flowing, pale-grey silk dustcloak and small, close-fitting,
black bonnet, with two tiny King Charles's spaniels on a leash.

It would be almost impossible for any one born in this century to
imagine the pride and importance of such small country gentlepeople in
the 'eighties. As far as was known, the Bracewells were connected with
no noble family; they had but little land, kept up but a small
establishment, and were said in the village and hamlet to be 'poor as
crows'. Yet, by virtue of having been born into a particular caste and
of living in the 'big house' of the parish, they expected to reign over
their poorer neighbours and to be treated by them with the deference due
to royalty. Like royalty, too, they could be charming to those who
pleased them. Those who did not had to beware.

A good many of the cottagers still played up to them, the women
curtseying to the ground when their carriage passed and speaking in awed
tones in their presence. Others, conscious of their own
independence--for none of the hamlet people worked on their land or
occupied their cottages--and having breathed the new free air of
democracy, which was then beginning to percolate even into such remote
places, were inclined to laugh at their pretensions. 'We don't want
nothin' from they,' they would say, 'and us shouldn't get it if us did.
Let the old gal stay at home and see that her own tea-caddy's kept
locked up, not come nosing round here axin' how many spoonsful we puts
in ours.'

Mrs. Bracewell knew nothing of such speeches. If she had, she would
probably have thought the world--her world--was coming to an end. Which
it was. In her girlhood under the Regency, she had been taught her duty
towards the cottagers, and that included reproving them for their
wasteful habits. It also included certain charities. She was generous
out of all proportion to her small means; keeping two aged women
pensioners, doling out soup in the winter to those she called 'the
deserving poor', and entertaining the school-children to a tea and a
magic-lantern entertainment every Christmas.

Meanwhile, as the old servants in and about her house died or were
pensioned off, they were not replaced. By the middle of the 'eighties
only a cook and a house-parlourmaid sat down to meals in the vast
servants' hall where a large staff had formerly feasted. Grass grew
between the flagstones in the stable yard where generations of grooms
and coachmen had hissed over the grooming of hunters and carriage
horses, and the one old mare which drew her wagonette when she paid
calls took a turn at drawing the lawn-mower, or even the plough,
betweenwhiles.

As she got poorer, she got prouder, more overbearing in manner and more
acid in tone, and the girls trembled when she came into school.
especially Laura, who knew that her sewing would never pass that eagle
eye without stern criticism. She would work slowly along the form,
examining each garment, and exclaiming that the sewing was so badly done
that she did not know what the world was coming to. Stitches were much
too large; the wrong side of the work was not as well finished as the
right side; buttonholes were bungled and tapes sewn on askew; and the
feather-stitching looked as though a spider had crawled over the piece
of work. But when she came to examine the work of one of the prize
sewers her face would light up. 'Very neat! Exquisitely sewn!' she would
say, and have the stitching passed round the class as an example.

The schoolmistress attended at her elbow, overawed, like the children,
but trying to appear at her ease. Miss Holmes, in her day, had called
Mrs. Bracewell 'ma'am' and sketched a slight curtsey as she held open
the door for her. The later mistresses called her 'Mrs. Bracewell', but
not very frequently or with conviction.

At that time the position of a village schoolmistress was a trying one
socially. Perhaps it is still trying in some places, for it is not many
years ago that the President of a Women's Institute wrote: 'We are very
democratic here. Our Committee consists of three ladies, three women,
and the village schoolmistress.' That mistress, though neither lady nor
woman, was still placed. In the 'eighties the schoolmistress was so
nearly a new institution that a vicar's wife, in a real dilemma, said:
'I should like to ask Miss So-and-So to tea; but do I ask her to kitchen
or dining-room tea?'

Miss Holmes had settled that question herself when she became engaged to
the squire's gardener. Miss Shepherd was more ambitious socially.
Indeed, democratic as she was in theory, the dear soul was in practice a
little snobbish. She courted the notice of the betters, though, she was
wont to declare, they were only betters when they were better men and
women. An invitation to tea at the Rectory was, to her, something to be
fished for before and talked about afterwards, and when the daughter of
a poor, but aristocratic local family set up as a music teacher, Miss
Shepherd at once decided to learn the violin.


Laura was once the delighted witness of a funny little display of this
weakness. It was the day of the school treat at the Manor House, and the
children had met at the school and were being marched, two and two,
through garden and shrubbery paths to the back door. Other guests, such
as the curate, the doctor's widow, and the daughters of the rich farmer,
who were to have tea in the drawing-room while the children feasted in
the servants' hall, were going to the front door.

Now, Miss Holmes had always marched right in with her pupils and sipped
her own tea and nibbled her cake between attending to their wants; but
Miss Shepherd was more ambitious. When the procession reached a point
where the shrubbery path crossed the main drive which led to the front
door, she paused and considered; then said, 'I think I will go to the
front door, dears. I want to see how well you can behave without me,'
and off she branched up the drive in her best brown frock, tight little
velvet hip-length jacket, and long fur boa wound like a snake round her
neck, followed by at least one pair of cynically smiling little eyes.

She had the satisfaction of ringing the front-door bell and drinking tea
in the drawing-room; but it was a short-lived triumph. In a very few
minutes she was out in the servants' hall, passing bread and butter to
her charges and whispering to one of her monitors that 'Dear Mrs.
Bracewell gave me my tea first, because, as she said, she knew I was
anxious to get back to my children.'

Squire himself called at the school once a year; but nobody felt nervous
when his red, jovial face appeared in the doorway, and smiles broke out
all around when he told his errand. He was arranging a concert, to take
place in the schoolroom, and would like some of the children to sing. He
took his responsibilities less seriously than his mother did hers;
spending most of his days roaming the fields, and spinneys with a gun
under his arm and a brace of spaniels at his heels, leaving her to
manage house and gardens and what was left of the family estate, as well
as to support the family dignity. His one indoor accomplishment was
playing the banjo and singing Negro songs. He had trained a few of the
village youths to support him in his Negro Minstrel Troupe, which always
formed the backbone of the annual concert programme. A few other items
were contributed by his and his mother's friends and the gaps were
filled up by the school-children.

So, after his visit, the school became animated. What should be sung and
who should sing it were the questions of the moment. Finally, it was
arranged that everybody should sing something. Even Laura, who had
neither voice nor ear for music, was to join in the communal songs.

They sang, very badly, mildly pretty spring and Nature songs from the
_School Song Book_, such as they had sung the year before and the year
before that, some of them actually the same songs. One year Miss
Shepherd thought it 'would be nice' to sing a Primrose League song to
'please Squire'. One verse ran:


                 O come, ye Tories, all unite
                 To bear the Primrose badge with might,
                 And work and hope and strive and fight
                 And pray may God defend the right.


When Laura's father heard this, he wrote a stiffly polite little note to
the mistress, saying that, as a Liberal of pronounced views, he could
not allow a child of his to sing such a song. Laura did not tell him she
had already been asked to sing very softly, not to put the other singers
out of tune. 'Just move your lips, dear,' the mistress had said. Laura,
in fact, was to have gone on to help dress the stage, where all the
girls who were taking part in the programme sat in a row throughout the
performance, forming a background for the soloists. That year she had
the pleasure of sitting among the audience and hearing the criticism, as
well as seeing the stage and listening to the programme. A good
three-pennyworth ('children, half-price').

When the great night came, the whole population of the neighbourhood
assembled, for it was the only public entertainment of the year. Squire
and his Negro Minstrel Troupe was the great attraction. They went on,
dressed in red and blue, their hands and faces blackened with burnt
cork, and rattled their bones and cracked their jokes and sang such
songs as:


                 A friend of Darwin's came to me,
                 A million years ago said he
                 You had a tail and no great toe.
                 I answered him, 'That may be so,
                 But I've one now, I'll let you know--
                 G-r-r-r-r-r out!'


Very few in the audience had heard of Darwin or his theory; but they all
knew what 'G-r-r-r-r-r out!' meant, especially when emphasised by a kick
on Tom Binns's backside by Squire's boot. The schoolroom rocked. 'I
pretty well busted me sides wi' laughin',' they said afterwards.

After the applause had died down, a little bell would ring and a robust
curate from a neighbouring village would announce the next item. Most of
these were piano pieces, played singly, or as duets, by young ladies in
white evening frocks, cut in a modest V at the neck, and white kid
gloves reaching to the elbow. As their contributions to the programme
were announced, they would rise from the front seat in the audience; a
gentleman--two gentlemen--would spring forward, and between them hand
the fair performer up the three shallow steps which led to the platform
and hand her over to yet another gentleman, who led her to the piano and
held her gloves and fan and turned her music pages.

'Tinkle, tinkle, tinkle', went the piano, and 'Warble, warble, warble'
went the voices, as the performers worked their conscientious way
through the show piano pieces and popular drawing-room ballads of the
moment. Each performer was greeted and dismissed with a round of
applause, which served the double purpose of encouraging the singer and
relieving the boredom of the audience. Youths and young men in the back
seats would sometimes carry this too far, drowning the programme with
their stamping and shouting until they had to be reprimanded, when they
would subside sulkily, complaining, 'Us've paid our sixpences, ain't
we?'

Once, when the athletic curate sang 'You should see Me dance the Polka'
he accompanied the song with such violent action that he polked part of
the platform down and left the double row of schoolgirls hanging in the
air on the backmost planks while he finished his song on the floor:


                 You should see me dance the polka,
                   You should see me cover the ground,
                 You should see my coat tails flying
                   As I dance my way around.


Edmund and Laura had the words and actions by heart, if not the tune,
and polked that night in their mother's bedroom until they woke up the
baby and were slapped. A sad ending to an evening of pure bliss.

When the school-children on the platform rose and came forward to sing
they, also, were applauded; but their performance and those of the young
ladies were but the lettuce in the salad; all the flavour was in the
comic items.

Now, Miss Shepherd was a poet, and had several times turned out a neat
verse to supplement those of a song she considered too short. One year
she took the National Anthem in hand and added a verse. It ran:


                 May every village school
                 Uphold Victoria's rule,
                 To Church and State be true,
                 God save the Queen.


Which pleased Squire so much that he talked of sending it to the
newspapers.

Going home with lanterns swinging down the long dark road, the groups
would discuss the evening's entertainment. Squire's Minstrels and the
curate's songs were always unreservedly praised and the young ladies'
performances were tolerated, although, often, a man would complain, 'I
don't know if I be goin' deaf, or what; but I couldn't hear a dommed
word any of 'em said.' As to the school-children's efforts, criticism
was applied more to how they looked than to their musical performance.
Those who had scuffled or giggled, or even blushed, heard of it from
their parents, while such remarks were frequent as: 'Got up to kill,
that young Mary Ann Parish was!' or 'I declare I could see the hem o'
young Rose Mitchell's breeches showin',' or 'That Em Tuffrey made a poor
show. Whatever wer' her mother a thinkin' on?' Taken all in all, they
enjoyed the concert almost as much as their grandchildren enjoy the
cinema.



                                  XIII

                               _May Day_

After the excitement of the concert came the long winter months, when
snowstorms left patches on the ploughed fields, like scrapings of sauce
on left-over pieces of Christmas pudding, until the rains came and
washed them away and the children, carrying old umbrellas to school, had
them turned inside out by the wind, and cottage chimneys smoked and
washing had to be dried indoors. But at last came spring and spring
brought May Day, the greatest day in the year from the children's point
of view.

The May garland was all that survived there of the old May Day
festivities. The maypole and the May games and May dances in which whole
parishes had joined had long been forgotten. Beyond giving flowers for
the garland and pointing out how things should be done and telling how
they had been done in their own young days, the older people took no
part in the revels.

For the children as the day approached all hardships were forgotten and
troubles melted away. The only thing that mattered was the weather.
'Will it be fine?' was the constant question, and many an'aged eye was
turned skyward in response to read the signs of wind and cloud.
Fortunately, it was always reasonably fine. Showers there were, of
course, at that season, but never a May Day of hopelessly drenching
rain, and the May garland was carried in procession every year
throughout the 'eighties.

The garland was made, or 'dressed', in the schoolroom. Formerly it had
been dressed out of doors, or in one of the cottages, or in some one's
barn; but dressed it had been and probably in much the same fashion for
countless generations.

The foundation of the garland was a light wooden framework of uprights
supporting graduated hoops, forming a bell-shaped structure about four
feet high. This frame was covered with flowers, bunched and set closely,
after the manner of wreath-making.

On the last morning of April the children would come to school with
bunches, baskets, arms and pinafores full of flowers--every blossom they
could find in the fields and hedges or beg from parents and neighbours.
On the previous Sunday some of the bigger boys would have walked six or
eight miles to a distant wood where primroses grew. These, with violets
from the hedgerows, cowslips from the meadows, and wallflowers, oxlips,
and sprays of pale red flowering currant from the cottage gardens formed
the main supply. A sweetbriar hedge in the schoolmistress's garden
furnished unlimited greenery.

Piled on desks, table, and floor, this supply appeared inexhaustible;
but the garland was large, and as the work of dressing it proceeded, it
soon became plain that the present stock wouldn't 'hardly go nowheres',
as the children said. So foraging parties were sent out, one to the
Rectory, another to Squire's, and others to outlying farm-houses and
cottages. All returned loaded, for even the most miserly and
garden-proud gave liberally to the garland. In time the wooden frame was
covered, even if there had to be solid greenery to fill up at the back,
out of sight. Then the 'Top-knot', consisting of a bunch of crown
imperial, yellow and brown, was added to crown the whole, and the
fragrant, bowery structure was springled with water and set aside for
the night.

While the garland was being dressed, an older girl, perhaps the May
Queen herself, would be busy in a corner making the crown. This always
had to be a daisy crown; but, meadow daisies being considered too
common, and also possessing insufficient staying power, garden daisies,
white and red, were used, with a background of dark, glossy, evergreen
leaves.

The May Queen had been chosen weeks beforehand. She was supposed to be
either the prettiest or the most popular girl in the parish; but it was
more often a case of self-election by the strongest willed or of taking
turns: 'You choose me this year and I'll choose you next.' However
elected, the queens had a strong resemblance to each other, being
stout-limbed, rosy-checked maidens of ten or eleven, with great manes of
dark hair frizzed out to support the crown becomingly.

The final touches were given the garland when the children assembled at
six o'clock on May Day morning. Then a large china doll in a blue frock
was brought forth from the depths of the school needlework chest and
arranged in a sitting position on a little ledge in the centre front of
the garland. This doll was known as 'the lady', and a doll of some kind
was considered essential. Even in those parishes where the garland had
degenerated into a shabby nosegay carried aloft at the top of a stick,
some dollish image was mixed in with the flowers. The attitude of the
children to the lady is interesting. It was understood that the garland
was her garland, carried in her honour. The lady must never be roughly
handled. If the garland turned turtle, as it was apt to do later in the
day, when the road was rough and the bearers were growing weary, the
first question was always, 'Is the lady all right?' (Is it possible that
the lady was once 'Our Lady', she having in her turn, perhaps, replaced
an earlier effigy of some pagan spirit of the newly decked earth?)

The lady comfortably settled in front of the garland, a large white
muslin veil or skirt, obviously borrowed from a Victorian
dressing-table, was draped over the whole to act as drop-scene and
sunshade combined. Then a broomstick was inserted between the hoops for
carrying purposes.

All the children in the parish between the ages of seven and eleven were
by this time assembled, those girls who possessed them wearing white or
light coloured frocks, irrespective of the temperature, and girls and
boys alike decked out with bright ribbon knots and bows and sashes,
those of the boys worn crosswise over one shoulder. The queen wore her
daisy crown with a white veil thrown over it, and the other girls who
could procure them also wore white veils. White gloves were traditional,
but could seldom be obtained. A pair would sometimes be found for the
queen, always many sizes too large; but the empty finger-ends came in
handy to suck in a bashful mood when, later on, the kissing began.

The procession then formed. It was as follows:


  Boy with flag.                                Girl with money box.
                     THE GARLAND with two bearers.
                             King and queen.
                          Two maids of honour.
                             Lord and lady.
                          Two maids of honour.
                      Footman and footman's lady.
                    Rank and file, walking in twos.
  Girl known as 'Mother'.                       Boy called 'Ragman'.


The 'Mother' was one of the most dependable of the older girls, who was
made responsible for the behaviour of the garlanders. She carried a
large, old-fashioned, double-lidded marketing basket over her arm,
containing the lunches of the principal actors. The boy called 'Ragman'
carried the coats, brought in case of rain, but seldom worn, even during
a shower, lest by their poverty and shabbiness they should disgrace the
festive attire.

The procession stepped out briskly. Mothers waved and implored their
offspring to behave well; some of the little ones left behind lifted up
their voices and wept; old people came to cottage gates and said that,
though well enough, this year's procession was poor compared to some
they had seen. But the garlanders paid no heed; they had their feet on
the road at last and vowed they would not turn back now, 'not if it
rained cats and dogs'.

The first stop was at the Rectory, where the garland was planted before
the front door and the shrill little voices struck up, shyly at first,
but gathering confidence as they went on:


              A bunch of may I have brought you
                And at your door it stands.
              It is but a sprout, but It's well put about
                By the Lord Almighty's hands.

              God bless the master of this house
                God bless the mistress too,
              And all the little children
                That round the table go.

              And now I've sung my short little song
                I must no longer stay.
              God bless you all, both great and small,
                And send you a happy May Day.


During the singing of this the Rector's face, wearing its mildest
expression, and bedaubed with shaving lather, for it was only as yet
seven o'clock, would appear at an upper window and nod approval and
admiration of the garland. His daughter would be down and at the door,
and for her the veil was lifted and the glory of the garland revealed.
She would look, touch and smell, then slip a silver coin into the
money-box, and the procession would move on towards Squire's.

There, the lady of the house would bow haughty approval and if there
were visiting grandchildren the lady would be detached from the garland
and held up to their nursery window to be admired. Then Squire himself
would appear in the stable doorway with a brace of sniffing, suspicious
spaniels at his heels. 'How many are there of you?' he would call.
'Twenty-seven? Well, here's a five-bob bit for you. Don't quarrel over
it. Now let's have a song.'

'Not "A Bunch of May,"' the girl called Mother would whisper, impressed
by the-five-shilling piece; 'not that old-fashioned thing. Something
newer,' and something newer, though still not very new, would be
selected. Perhaps it would be:


         All hail gentle spring
           With thy sunshine and showers,
         And welcome the sweet buds
           That burst in the bowers;
         Again we rejoice as thy light step and free
         Brings leaves to the woodland and flowers to the bee,
         Bounding, bounding, bounding, bounding,
           Joyful and gay,
         Light and airy, like a fairy,
           Come, come away.


Or it might be:


          Come see our new garland, so green and so gay;
          'Tis the firstfruits of spring and the glory of May.
          Here are cowslips and daisies and hyacinths blue,
          Here are buttercups bright and anemones too.


During the singing of the latter song, as each flower was mentioned, a
specimen bloom would be pointed to in the garland. It was always a point
of honour to have at least one of each named in the several verses;
though the hawthorn was always a difficulty, for in the south midlands
May's own flower seldom opens before the middle of that month. However,
there was always at least one knot of tight green flower buds.

After becoming duty had been paid to the Rectory and Big House, the
farm-house and cottages were visited; then the little procession set out
along narrow, winding country roads, with tall hedges of blackthorn and
bursting leaf-buds on either side, to make its seven-mile circuit. In
those days there were no motors to dodge and there was very little other
traffic; just a farm cart here and there, or the baker's white-tilted
van, or a governess car with nurses and children out for their airing.
Sometimes the garlanders would forsake the road for stiles and footpaths
across buttercup meadows, or go through parks and gardens to call at
some big house or secluded farmstead.

In the ordinary course, country children of that day seldom went beyond
their own parish bounds, and this long trek opened up new country to
most of them. There was a delightful element of exploration about it.
New short cuts would be tried, one year through a wood, another past the
fishponds, or across such and such a paddock, where there might, or
might not, be a bull. On one pond they passed sailed a solitary swan; on
the terrace before one mansion peacocks spread their tails in the sun;
the ram which pumped the water to one house mystified them with its
subterranean thudding. There were often showers, and to Laura, looking
back after fifty years, the whole scene would melt into a blur of wet
greenery, with rainbows and cuckoo-calls and, overpowering all other
impressions, the wet wallflower and primrose scent of the May garland.

Sometimes on the road a similar procession from another village came
into view; but never one with so magnificent a garland. Some of them,
indeed, had nothing worth calling a garland at all; only nosegays tied
mopwise on sticks. No lord and lady, no king and queen; only a rabble
begging with money-boxes. Were the Fordlow and Lark Rise folks sorry for
them? No. They stuck out their tongues, and, forgetting their pretty May
songs, yelled:


                  Old Hardwick skags!
                  Come to Fordlow to pick up rags
                  To mend their mothers' pudding-bags,
                  Yah!Yah!


and the rival troop retaliated in the same strain.

At the front-door calls, the queen and her retinue stood demurely behind
the garland and helped with the singing, unless Her Majesty was called
forward to have her crown inspected and admired. It was at the back
doors of large houses that the fun began. In country houses at that date
troops of servants were kept, and the May Day procession would find the
courtyard crowded with house-maids and kitchen-maids, dairy-maids and
laundry-maids, footmen, grooms, coachmen, and gardeners. The songs were
sung, the garland was admired; then, to a chorus of laughter, teasing
and urging, one Maid of Honour snatched the cap from the King's head,
the other raised the Queen's veil, and a shy, sheepish boy pecked at his
companion's rosy cheek, to the huge delight of the beholders.

'Again! Again!' a dozen voices would cry and the kissing was repeated
until the royal couple turned sulky and refused to kiss any more, even
when offered a penny a kiss. Then the lord saluted his lady and the
footman the footman's lady (this couple had probably been introduced in
compliment to such patrons), and the money-box was handed round and
began to grow heavy with pence.

The menservants, with their respectable side-whiskers, the maids in
their little flat caps like crocheted mats on their smoothly parted
hair, and their long, billowing lilac or pink print gowns, and the
children in their ribbon-decked poverty, alike belong to a bygone order
of things. The boys pulled forelocks and the girls dropped curtseys to
the upper servants, for they came next in importance to 'the gentry'.
Some of them really belonged to a class which would not be found in
service to-day; for at that time there was little hospital nursing,
teaching, typing, or shop work to engage the daughters of small farmers,
small shopkeepers, innkeepers, and farm bailiffs. Most of them had
either to go out to service or remain at home.

After the mansion, there were the steward's, the head gardener's and the
stud-groom's houses to visit with the garland; then on through gardens
and park and woods and fields to the next stopping-place. Things did not
always go smoothly. Feet got tired, especially when boots did not fit
properly or were worn thin. Squabbles broke out among the boys and
sometimes had to be settled by a fight. Often a heavy shower would send
the whole party packing under trees for shelter, with the unveiled
garland freshening outside in the rain; or some irate gamekeeper would
turn the procession back from a short cut, adding miles to the way. But
these were slight drawbacks to happiness on a day as near to perfection
as anything can be in human life.

There came a point in the circuit when faces were turned towards home,
instead of away from it; and at last, at long last, the lights in the
Lark Hill windows shone clear through the spring twilight. The great day
was over, for ever, as it seemed, for at ten years old a year seems as
long as a century. Still, there was the May money to be shared out in
school the next morning, and the lady to be stroked before being put
back in her box, and the flowers which had survived to be put in water:
even to-morrow would not be quite a common day. So the last waking
thoughts blended with dreams of swans and peacocks and footmen and sore
feet and fat cooks with pink faces wearing daisy crowns which turned
into pure gold, then melted away.



                                  XIV

                         _To Church on Sunday_

If the Lark Rise people had been asked their religion, the answer of
nine out of ten would have been 'Church of England', for practically all
of them were christened, married, and buried as such, although, in adult
life, few went to church between the baptisms of their offspring. The
children were shepherded there after Sunday school and about a dozen of
their elders attended regularly; the rest stayed at home, the women
cooking and nursing, and the men, after an elaborate Sunday toilet,
which included shaving and cutting each other's hair and much puffing
and splashing with buckets of water, but stopped short before lacing up
boots or putting on a collar and tie, spent the rest of the day eating,
sleeping, reading the newspaper, and strolling round to see how their
neighbours' pigs and gardens were looking.

There were a few keener spirits. The family at the inn was Catholic and
was up and off to early Mass in the next village before others had
turned over in bed for an extra Sunday morning snooze. There were also
three Methodist families which met in one of their cottages on Sunday
evenings for prayer and praise; but most of these attended church as
well, thus earning for themselves the name of 'Devil dodgers'.

Every Sunday, morning and afternoon, the two cracked, flat-toned bells
at the church in the mother village called the faithful to worship.
_Ding-dong, Ding-dong, Ding-dong_, they went, and, when they heard them,
the hamlet churchgoers hurried across fields and over stiles, for the
Parish Clerk was always threatening to lock the church door when the
bells stopped and those outside might stop outside for all he cared.

With the Fordlow cottagers, the Squire's and farmer's families and
maids, the Rectory people and the hamlet contingent, the congregation
averaged about thirty. Even with this small number, the church was
fairly well filled, for it was a tiny place, about the size of a barn,
with nave and chancel only, no side aisles. The interior was almost as
bare as a barn, with its grey, roughcast walls, plain-glass windows, and
flagstone floor. The cold, damp, earthy odour common to old and unheated
churches pervaded the atmosphere, with occasional whiffs of a more
unpleasant nature said to proceed from the stacks of mouldering bones in
the vault beneath. Who had been buried there, or when, was unknown, for,
excepting one ancient and mutilated brass in the wall by the font, there
were but two memorial tablets, both of comparatively recent date. The
church, like the village, was old and forgotten, and those buried in the
vault, who must have once been people of importance, had not left even a
name. Only the stained glass window over the altar, glowing jewel-like
amidst the cold greyness, the broken piscina within the altar rails, and
a tall broken shaft of what had been a cross in the churchyard, remained
to witness mutely to what once had been.

The Squire's and clergyman's families had pews in the chancel, with
backs to the wall on either side, and between them stood two long
benches for the school-children, well under the eyes of authority. Below
the steps down into the nave stood the harmonium, played by the
clergyman's daughter, and round it was ranged the choir of small
school-girls. Then came the rank and file of the congregation, nicely
graded, with the farmer's family in the front row, then the Squire's
gardener and coachman, the schoolmistress, the maidservants, and the
cottagers, with the Parish Clerk at the back to keep order.

'Clerk Tom', as he was called, was an important man in the parish. Not
only did he dig the graves, record the banns of marriage, take the chill
off the water for winter baptisms, and stoke the coke stove which stood
in the nave at the end of his seat; but he also took an active and
official part in the services. It was his duty to lead the congregation
in the responses and to intone the 'Amens'. The psalms were not sung or
chanted, but read, verse and verse about, by the Rector and people, and
in these especially Tom's voice so drowned the subdued murmur of his
fellow worshippers that it sounded like a duet between him and the
clergyman--a duet in which Tom won easily, for his much louder voice
would often trip up the Rector before he had quite finished his portion,
while he prolonged his own final syllables at will.

The afternoon service, with not a prayer left out or a creed spared,
seemed to the children everlasting. The school-children, under the stern
eye of the Manor House, dared not so much as wriggle; they sat in their
stiff, stuffy, best clothes, their stomachs lined with heavy Sunday
dinner, in a kind of waking doze, through which Tom's 'Amens' rang like
a bell and the Rector's voice buzzed beelike. Only on the rare occasions
when a bat fluttered down from the roof, or a butterfly drifted in at a
window, or the Rector's little fox terrier looked in at the door and
sidled up the nave, was the tedium lightened.

Edmund and Laura, alone in their grandfather's seat, modestly situated
exactly half-way down the nave, were more fortunate, for they sat
opposite the church door and, in summer, when it was left open, they
could at least watch the birds and the bees and the butterflies crossing
the opening and the breezes shaking the boughs of the trees and ruffling
the long grass on the graves. It was interesting, too, to observe some
woman in the congregation fussing with her back hair, or a man easing
his tight collar, or old Dave Pridham, who had a bad bunion, shuffling
off a shoe before the sermon began, with one eye all the time upon the
clergyman; or to note how closely together some newly married couple
were sitting, or to see Clerk Tom's young wife suckling her baby. She
wore a fur tippet in winter and her breast hung like a white heather
bell between the soft blackness until it was covered up with a white
handkerchief, 'for modesty'.

Mr. Ellison in the pulpit was the Mr. Ellison of the Scripture lessons,
plus a white surplice. To him, his congregation were but children of a
larger growth, and he preached as he taught. A favourite theme was the
duty of regular churchgoing. He would hammer away at that for forty-five
minutes, never seeming to realize that he was preaching to the absent,
that all those present were regular attendants, and that the stray sheep
of his flock were snoring upon their beds a mile and a half away.

Another favourite subject was the supreme rightness of the social order
as it then existed. God, in His infinite wisdom, had appointed a place
for every man, woman, and child on this earth and it was their bounden
duty to remain contentedly in their niches. A gentleman might seem to
some of his listeners to have a pleasant, easy life, compared to theirs
at field labour; but he had his duties and responsibilities, which would
be far beyond their capabilities. He had to pay taxes, sit on the Bench
of Magistrates, oversee his estate, and keep up his position by
entertaining. Could they do these things? No. Of course they could not;
and he did not suppose that a gentleman could cut as straight a furrow
or mow or thatch a rick as expertly as they could. So let them be
thankful and rejoice in their physical strength and the bounty of the
farmer, who found them work on his land and paid them wages with his
money.

Less frequently, he would preach eternal punishment for sin, and touch,
more lightly, upon the bliss reserved for those who worked hard, were
contented with their lot and showed proper respect to their superiors.
The Holy Name was seldom mentioned, nor were human griefs or joys, or
the kindly human feelings which bind man to man. It was not religion he
preached, but a narrow code of ethics, imposed from above upon the lower
orders, which, even in those days, was out of date.

Once and once only did inspiration move him. It was the Sunday after the
polling for the General Election of 1886, and he had begun preaching one
of his usual sermons on the duty to social superiors, when, suddenly
something, perhaps the memory of the events of the past week, seemed to
boil up within him. Flushed with anger--'righteous anger', he would have
called it--and his frosty blue eyes flashing like swords, he cast
himself forward across the ledge of his pulpit and roared: 'There are
some among you who have lately forgotten that duty, and we know the
cause, the bloody cause!'

Laura shivered. Bad language in church! and from the Rector! But, later
in life, she liked to think that she had lived early enough to have
heard a mild and orthodox Liberalism denounced from the pulpit as 'a
bloody cause'. It lent her the dignity of an historical survival.

The sermon over, the people sprang to their feet like Jacks-in-a-box.
With what gusto they sang the evening hymn, and how their lungs expanded
and their tongues wagged as they poured out of the churchyard! Not that
they resented anything that was said in the Rector's sermons. They did
not listen to them. After the Bloody Cause sermon Laura tried to find
out how her elders had reacted to it; but all she could learn was: 'I
seems to have lost the thread just then,' or, more frankly, 'I must've
been nodding'; the most she could get was one woman's, 'My! didn't th'
old parson get worked up today!'

Some of them went to church to show off their best clothes and to see
and criticize those of their neighbours; some because they loved to hear
their own voices raised in the hymns, or because churchgoing qualified
them for the Christmas blankets and coals; and a few to worship. There
was at least one saint and mystic in that parish and there were several
good Christian men and women, but the majority regarded religion as
something proper to extreme old age, for which they themselves had as
yet no use.

'About time he wer' thinkin' about his latter end,' they would say of
one who showed levity when his head and beard were white, or of anybody
who was ill or afflicted. Once a hunchback from another village came to
a pig feast and distinguished himself by getting drunk and using bad
language, and, because he was a cripple, his conduct was looked upon
with horror. Laura's mother was distressed when she heard about it. 'To
think of a poor afflicted creature like that cursing and swearing,' she
sighed. 'Terrible! Terrible!' and when Edmund, then about ten, looked up
from his book and said calmly, 'I should think if anybody's got a right
to swear it's a man with a back like that,' she told him he was nearly
as bad to say such a thing.

The Catholic minority at the inn was treated with respect, for a
landlord could do no wrong, especially the landlord of a free house
where such excellent beer was on tap. On Catholicism at large, the Lark
Rise people looked with contemptuous intolerance, for they regarded it
as a kind of heathenism, and what excuse could there be for that in a
Christian country? When, early in life, the end house children asked
what Roman Catholics were, they were told they were 'folks as prays to
images', and further inquiries elicited the information that they also
worshipped the Pope, a bad old man, some said in league with the Devil.
Their genuflexions in church and their 'playin' wi' beads' were
described as 'monkey tricks'. People who openly said they had no use for
religion themselves became quite heated when the Catholics were
mentioned. Yet the children's grandfather, when the sound of the Angelus
bell was borne on the wind from the chapel in the next village, would
take off his hat and, after a moment's silence, murmur, 'In my Father's
house are many mansions.' It was all very puzzling.

Later on, when they came to associate more with the other children, on
the way to Sunday school they would see horses and traps loaded with
families from many miles around on their way to the Catholic church in
the next village. 'There go the old Catholics!' the children would cry,
and run after the vehicles shouting: 'Old Catholics! Old lick the cats!'
until they had to fall behind for want of breath. Sometimes a lady in
one of the high dogcarts would smile at them forbearingly, otherwise no
notice was taken.

The horses and traps were followed at a distance by the young men and
big boys of the families on foot. Always late in starting, yet always in
time for the service, how they legged it! The children took good care
not to call out after them, for they knew, whatever their haste, the boy
Catholics would have time to turn back and cuff them. It had happened
before. So they let them get on for quite a distance before they started
to mock their gait and recite in a snuffling sing-song:


               'O dear Father, I've come to confess.'
               'Well, my child, and what have you done?'
               'O dear Father. I've killed the cat.'
               'Well, my child, and what about that?'
               'O dear Father, what shall I do?'
               'You kiss me and I'll kiss you.'


a gem which had probably a political origin, for the seeds of their
ignorant bigotry must have been sown at some time. Yet, strange to say,
some of those very children still said by way of a prayer when they went
to bed:


                  Matthew, Mark, Luke and John,
                  Bless the bed where I lie on.
                  Four corners have I to my bed;
                  At them four angels nightly spread.
                  One to watch and one to pray
                  And one to take my soul away.


At that time many words, phrases, and shreds of customs persisted which
faded out before the end of the century. When Laura was a child, some of
the older mothers and the grandmothers still threatened naughty children
with the name of Cromwell. 'If you ain't a good gal, old Oliver
Crummell'll have 'ee!' they would say, or 'Here comes old Crummell!'
just as the mothers of southern England threatened their children with
Napoleon. Napoleon was forgotten there; being far from the sea-coast,
such places had never known the fear of invasion. But the armies of the
Civil War had fought ten miles to the eastward, and the name still
lingered.

The Methodists were a class apart. Provided they did not attempt to
convert others, religion in them was tolerated. Every Sunday evening
they held a service in one of their cottages, and, whenever she could
obtain permission at home, it was Laura's delight to attend. This was
not because the service appealed to her; she really preferred the church
service; but because Sunday evening at home was a trying time, with the
whole family huddled round the fire and Father reading and no one
allowed to speak and barely to move.

Permission was hard to get, for her father did not approve of 'the
ranters'; nor did he like Laura to be out after dark. But one time out
of four or five when she asked, he would grunt and nod, and she would
dash off before her mother could raise any objection. Sometimes Edmund
would follow her, and they would seat themselves on one of the hard,
white-scrubbed benches in the meeting house, prepared to hear all that
was to be heard and see all that was to be seen.

The first thing that would have struck any one less accustomed to the
place was its marvellous cleanliness. The cottage walls were whitewashed
and always fresh and clean. The everyday furniture had been carried out
to the barn to make way for the long white wooden benches, and before
the window with its drawn white blind stood a table covered with a linen
cloth, on which were the lamp, a large Bible, and a glass of water for
the visiting preacher, whose seat was behind it. Only the clock and a
pair of red china dogs on the mantelpiece remained to show that on other
days people lived and cooked and ate in the room. A bright fire always
glowed in the grate and there was a smell compounded of lavender,
lamp-oil, and packed humanity.

The man of the house stood in the doorway to welcome each arrival with a
handshake and a whispered 'God bless you!' His wife, a small woman with
a slight spinal curvature which thrust her head forward and gave her a
resemblance to an amiable-looking frog, smiled her welcome from her seat
near the fire-place. In twos and threes, the brethren filed in and took
their accustomed places on the hard, backless benches. With them came a
few neighbours, not of their community, but glad to have somewhere to
go, especially on wet or cold Sundays.

In the dim lamplight dark Sunday suits and sad-coloured Sunday gowns
massed together in a dark huddle against the speckless background, and
out of it here and there eyes and cheeks caught the light as the
brethren smiled their greetings to each other.

If the visiting preacher happened to be late, which he often was with a
long distance to cover on foot, the host would give out a hymn from
Sankey and Moody's Hymn-Book, which would be sung without musical
accompaniment to one of the droning, long-drawn-out tunes peculiar to
the community. At other times one of the brethren would break into
extempore prayer, in the course of which he would retail the week's news
so far as it affected the gathering, prefacing each statement with 'Thou
knowest', or 'As thou knowest, Lord'. It amused Laura and Edmund to hear
old Mr. Barker telling God that it had not rained for a fortnight and
that his carrot bed was getting 'mortal dry'; or that swine fever had
broken out at a farm four miles away and that his own pig didn't seem
'no great shakes'; or that somebody had mangled his wrist in a turnip
cutter and had come out of hospital, but found it still stiff; for, as
they said to each other afterwards, God must know already, as He knew
everything. But these one-sided conversations with the Deity were
conducted in a spirit of simple faith. 'Cast your care upon Him' was a
text they loved and took literally. To them God was a loving Father who
loved to listen to His children's confidences. No trouble was too small
to bring to 'the Mercy Seat'.

Sometimes a brother or a sister would stand up to 'testify', and then
the children opened their eyes and ears, for a misspent youth was the
conventional prelude to conversion and who knew what exciting
transgressions might not be revealed. Most of them did not amount to
much. One would say that before he 'found the Lord' he had been 'a
regular beastly drunkard'; but it turned out that he had only taken a
pint too much once or twice at a village feast; another claimed to have
been a desperate poacher, 'a wild, lawless sort o' chap'; he had snared
an occasional rabbit. A sister confessed that in her youth she had not
only taken a delight in decking out her vile body, forgetting that it
was only the worm that perishes; but, worse still, she had imperilled
her immortal soul by dancing on the green at feasts and club outings,
keeping it up on one occasion until midnight.

Such mild sins were not in themselves exciting, for plenty of people
were still doing such things and they could be observed at first hand;
but they were described with such a wealth of detail and with such
self-condemnation that the listener was for the moment persuaded that he
or she was gazing on the chief of sinners. One man, especially, claimed
that pre-eminence. 'I wer' the chief of sinners,' he would cry; 'a real
bad lot, a Devil's disciple. Cursing and swearing, drinking and
drabbing, there were nothing bad as I didn't do. Why, would you believe
it, in my sinful pride, I sinned against the Holy Ghost. Aye, that I
did,' and the awed silence would be broken by the groans and 'God have
mercy's of his hearers while he looked round to observe the effect of
his confession before relating how he 'came to the Lord'.

No doubt the second part of his discourse was more edifying than the
first, but the children never listened to it; they were too engrossed in
speculations as to the exact nature of his sin against the Holy Ghost,
and wondering if he were really as thoroughly saved as he thought
himself; for, after all, was not that sin unpardonable? He might yet
burn in hell. Terrible yet fascinating thought!

But the chief interest centred in the travelling preacher, especially if
he were a stranger who had not been there before. Would he preach the
Word, or would he be one of those who rambled on for an hour or more,
yet said nothing? Most of these men, who gave up their Sunday rest and
walked miles to preach at the village meeting houses, were farm
labourers or small shopkeepers. With a very few exceptions they were
poor, uneducated men. 'The blind leading the blind,' Laura's father said
of them. They may have been unenlightened in some respects, but some of
them had gifts no education could have given. There was something fine
about their discourses, as they raised their voices in rustic eloquence
and testified to the cleansing power of 'the Blood', forgetting
themselves and their own imperfections of speech in their ardour.

Others were less sincere, and some merely self-seeking _poseurs_ who
took to preaching as the only means of getting a little limelight shed
on their undistinguished lives. One such was a young shop assistant from
the market town, who came, stylishly dressed, with a bunch of violets in
his buttonhole, smoothing his well-oiled hair with his hand and shaking
clouds of scent from his large white handkerchief. He emphatically did
not preach the Word. His perfume and buttonhole and pseudo-cultured
accent so worked upon the brethren that, after he had gone, they for
once forgot their rule of no criticism and exclaimed: 'Did you ever see
such a la-de-da in all your draggings-up?'

Then there was the elderly man who chose for his text: 'I will sweep
them off the face of the earth with the besom of destruction', and
proceeded to take each word of his text as a heading. '_I_ will sweep
them off the face of the earth. I _will_ sweep them off the face of the
earth. I will _sweep_ them off the face of the earth', and so on. By the
time he had finished he had expounded the nature of God and justified
His ways to man to his own satisfaction; but he made such a sad mess of
it that the children's ears burned with shame for him.

Some managed to be sincere Christians and yet quicker of wit and lighter
of hand. The host keeping the door one night was greeted by the arriving
minister with 'I would rather be a doorkeeper in the house of my God,'
and capped it with 'than dwell in the tents of the ungodly.'

Methodism, as known and practised there, was a poor people's religion,
simple and crude; but its adherents brought to it more fervour than was
shown by the church congregation, and appeared to obtain more comfort
and support from it than the church could give. Their lives were
exemplary.

Many in the hamlet who attended neither church nor chapel and said they
had no use for religion, guided their lives by the light of a few homely
precepts, such as 'Pay your way and fear nobody'; 'Right's right and
wrong's no man's right'; 'Tell the truth and shame the devil', and
'Honesty is the best policy'.

Strict honesty was the policy of most of them; although there were a few
who were said to 'find anything before 'tis lost' and to whom findings
were keepings. Children were taught to 'Know it's a sin to steal a pin',
and when they brought home some doubtful finding, saying they did not
think it belonged to anybody, their mothers would say severely, 'You
knowed it didn't belong to you, and what don't belong to you belongs to
somebody else. So go and put it back where you found it, before I gets
the stick to you.'

Liars were more detested than thieves. 'A liar did ought to have a good
memory,' they would say, or, more witheringly, 'You can lock up from a
thief, but you can't from a liar.' Any statement which departed in the
least degree from plain fact was a lie; any one who ate a plum from an
overhanging bough belonging to a neighbour's tree was a thief. It was a
stark code in which black was black and white was white; there were no
intermediate shades.

For the afflicted or bereaved there was ready sympathy. Had the custom
of sending wreaths to funerals been general then, as it is to-day, they
would certainly have subscribed their last halfpenny for the purpose.
But, at that time, the coffins of the country poor went flowerless to
the grave, and all they could do to mark their respect was to gather
outside the house of mourning and watch the clean-scrubbed farm wagon
which served as a hearse set out on its slow journey up the long,
straight road, with the mourners following on foot behind. At such times
the tears of the women spectators flowed freely, little children howled
aloud in sympathy, and any man who happened to be near broke into
extravagant praise of the departed. 'Never speak ill of the dead' was
one of their maxims and they carried it to excess.

In illness or trouble they were ready to help and to give, to the small
extent possible. Men who had been working all day would give up their
night's rest to sit up with the ill or dying, and women would carry big
bundles of bed-linen home to wash with their own.

They carried out St. Paul's injunction to weep with those who weep; but
when it came to rejoicing with those who rejoiced they were less ready.
There was nothing they disliked more than seeing one of their number
doing better or having more of anything than themselves. A mother whose
child was awarded a prize at school, or whose daughter was doing better
than ordinary in service, had to bear many pin-pricks of sarcasm, and if
a specially devoted young married couple was mentioned, some one was
bound to quote, 'My dear to-day'll be my devil to-morrow.' They were, in
fact, poor fallible human beings.

The Rector visited each cottage in turn, working his way conscientiously
round the hamlet from door to door, so that by the end of the year he
had called upon everybody. When he tapped with his gold-headed cane at a
cottage door there would come a sound of scuffling within, as unseemly
objects were hustled out of sight, for the whisper would have gone round
that he had been seen getting over the stile and his knock would have
been recognized.

The women received him with respectful tolerance. A chair was dusted
with an apron and the doing of housework or cooking was suspended while
his hostess, seated uncomfortably on the edge of one of her own chairs,
waited for him to open the conversation. When the weather had been
discussed, the health of the inmates and absent children inquired about,
and the progress of the pig and the prospect of the allotment crops,
there came an awkward pause, during which both racked their brains to
find something to talk about. There was nothing. The Rector never
mentioned religion. That was looked upon in the parish as one of his
chief virtues, but it limited the possible topics of conversation. Apart
from his autocratic ideas, he was a kindly man, and he had come to pay a
friendly call, hoping, no doubt, to get to know and to understand his
parishioners better. But the gulf between them was too wide; neither he
nor his hostess could bridge it. The kindly inquiries made and answered,
they had nothing more to say to each other, and, after much 'ah-ing' and
'er-ing', he would rise from his seat, and be shown out with alacrity.

His daughter visited the hamlet more frequently. Any fine afternoon she
might have been seen, gathering up her long, full skirts to mount the
stile and tripping daintily between the allotment plots. As a widowed
clergyman's only daughter, parochial visiting was, to her, a sacred
duty; but she did not come in any district-visiting spirit, to criticize
household management, or give unasked advice on the bringing up of
children; hers, like her father's, were intended to be friendly calls.
Considering her many kindnesses to the women, she might have been
expected to be more popular than she was. None of them welcomed her
visits. Some would lock their doors and pretend to be out; others would
rattle their teacups when they saw her coming, hoping she would say, as
she sometimes did, 'I hear you are at tea, so I won't come in.'

The only spoken complaint about her was that she talked too much. 'That
Miss Ellison; she'd fair talk a donkey's hind leg off,' they would say;
but that was a failing they tolerated in others, and one to which they
were not averse in her, once she was installed in their best chair and
some item of local gossip was being discussed.

Perhaps at the root of their unease in her presence was the subconscious
feeling of contrast between her lot and theirs. Her neat little figure,
well corseted in; her dear, high-pitched voice, good clothes, and faint
scent of lily-of-the-valley perfume put them, in their workaday garb and
all blowsed from their cooking or water-fetching, at a disadvantage.

She never suspected she was unwanted. On the contrary, she was most
careful to visit each cottage in rotation, lest jealousy should arise.
She would inquire about every member of the family in turn, listen to
extracts from letters of daughters in service, sympathize with those who
had tales of woe to tell, discuss everything that had happened since her
last visit, and insist upon nursing the baby the while, and only smile
good-naturedly when it wetted the front of her frock.

Her last visit of the day was always to the end house, where, over a cup
of tea, she would become quite confidential. She and Laura's mother were
'Miss Margaret' and 'Emma' to each other, for they had known each other
from birth, including the time when Emma was nurse to Miss Margaret's
young friends at the neighbouring rectory.

Laura, supposed to be deep in her book, but really all ears, learnt
that, surprisingly, Miss Ellison, the great Miss Ellison, had her
troubles. She had a brother, reputed 'wild' in the parish, whom her
father had forbidden the house, and much of their talk was about 'my
brother Robert', or 'Master Bobbie', and the length of time since his
last letter, and whether he had gone to Brazil, as he had said he
should, or whether he was still in London. 'What I feel, Emma, is that
he is such a boy, and you know what the world is--what perils----' Then
Emma's cheerful rejoinder: 'Don't you worry yourself, Miss Margaret. He
can look after himself all right, Master Bob can.'

Sometimes Emma would venture to admire something Miss Margaret was
wearing. 'Excuse me, Miss Margaret, but that mauve muslin really does
become you'; and Miss Ellison would look pleased. She had probably few
compliments, for one of her type was not likely to be admired in those
days of pink and white dollishness, although her clear, healthy pallor,
with only the faintest flush of pink, her broad white brow, grey eyes,
and dark hair waving back to the knot at her nape were at least
distinguished looking. And she could not at that time have been more
than thirty, although to Laura she seemed quite old, and the hamlet
women called her an old maid.

Such a life as hers must have been is almost unimaginable now. Between
playing the harmonium in church, teaching in Sunday school, ordering her
father's meals and overseeing the maids, she must have spent hours doing
needlework. Coarse, unattractive needlework, too, cross-over shawls and
flannel petticoats for the old women, flannel shirts and long, thick
knitted stockings for the old men, these, as well as the babies' print
frocks, were all made by her own hands. Excepting a fortnight's visit a
year to relatives, the only outing she was known to have was a weekly
drive to the market town, shopping, in her father's high, yellow-wheeled
dogcart, with the fat fox-terrier, Beppo, panting behind.

Half-way through the decade, the Rector began to feel the weight of his
seventy odd years, and a succession of curates came to share his work
and to provide new subjects of conversation for his parishioners.
Several appeared and vanished without leaving any definite impression,
beyond those of a new voice in church and an extraordinary bashfulness
before the hamlet housewives; but two or three stayed longer and became,
for a time, part of the life of the parish. There was Mr. Dallas, who
was said to be 'in a decline'. A pale, thin wraith of a man, who, in
foggy weather wore a respirator, which looked like a heavy black
moustache. Laura remembered him chiefly because when she was awarded the
prize for Scripture he congratulated her--the first time she was ever
congratulated upon anything in her life. On his next visit to her home
he asked to see the prize prayerbook, and when she brought it, said:
'The binding is calf--my favourite binding--but it is very susceptible
to damp. You must keep it in a room with a fire.' He was talking a
language foreign to the children, who knew nothing of bindings or
editions, a book to them being simply a book; but his expression and the
gentle caressing way in which he turned the pages, told Laura that he,
too, was a book-lover.

After he had left came Mr. Alport; a big, fat-faced young man, who had
been a medical student. He kept a small dispensary at his lodgings and
it was his delight to doctor any one who was ailing, both advice and
medicine being gratis. As usual, supply created demand. Before he came,
illness had been rare in the hamlet; now, suddenly, nearly every one had
something the matter with them. 'My pink pills', 'my little tablets',
'my mixture', and 'my lotion' became as common in conversation as
potatoes or pig's food. People asked each other how their So-and-So was
when they met, and, barely waiting for an answer, plunged into a
description of their own symptoms.

Mr. Alport complained to the children's father that the hamlet people
were ignorant, and some of them certainly were, on the subjects in which
he was enlightened. One woman particularly. On a visit to her house he
noticed that one of her children, a tall, thin, girl of eleven or twelve
was looking rather pale. 'She is growing too fast, I expect,' he
remarked. 'I must give her a tonic'; which he did. But she was not
allowed to take it. 'No, she ain't a goin' to take that stuff,' her
mother told the neighbours. 'He said she was growin' too tall, an' it's
summat to stunt her. I shan't let a child o' mine be stunted. Oh, no!'

When he left the place and the supply of physic failed, all the invalids
forgot their ailments. But he left one lasting memorial. Before his
coming, the road round the Rise in winter had been a quagmire. 'Mud up
to the hocks, and splashes up to the neck,' as they said. Mr. Alport,
after a few weeks' experience of mud-caked boots and mud-stained
trouser-ends, decided to do something. So, perhaps in imitation of
Ruskin's road-making at Oxford, he begged cartloads of stones from the
farmer and, assisted by the hamlet youths and boys, began, on light
evenings, to work with his own hands building a raised foot-path. Laura
always remembered him best breaking stones and shovelling mud in his
beautifully white shirt-sleeves and red braces, his clerical coat and
collar hung on a bush, his big, smooth face damp with perspiration and
his spectacles gleaming, as he urged on his fellow workers.

Neither of the curates mentioned ever spoke of religion out of church.
Mr. Dallas was far too shy, and Mr. Alport was too busy ministering to
peoples' bodies to have time to spare for their souls. Mr. Marley, who
came next, considered their souls his special care.

He was surely as strange a curate as ever came to a remote agricultural
parish. An old man with a long, grey beard which he buttoned inside his
long, close-fitting, black overcoat. Fervour and many fast days had worn
away his flesh, and he had hollow cheeks and deep-set, dark eyes which
glowed with the flame of fanaticism. He was a fanatic where his Church
and his creed were concerned; otherwise he was the kindest and most
gentle of men. Too good for this world, some of the women said when they
came to know him.

He was what is now known as an Anglo-Catholic. Sunday after Sunday he
preached 'One Catholic Apostolic Church' and 'our Holy Religion' to his
congregation of rustics. But he did not stop at that: he dealt often
with the underlying truths of religion, preaching the gospel of love and
forgiveness of sins and the brotherhood of man. He was a wonderful
preacher. No listener nodded or 'lost the thread' when he was in the
pulpit, and though most of his congregation might not be able to grasp
or agree with his doctrine, all responded to the love, sympathy, and
sincerity of the preacher and every eye was upon him from his first word
to his last. How such a preacher came to be in old age but a curate in a
remote country parish is a mystery. His eloquence and fervour would have
filled a city church.

The Rector by that time was bedridden, and a scholarly, easy-going,
middle-aged son was deputizing for him; otherwise Mr. Marley would have
had less freedom in the church and parish. When officiating, he openly
genuflected to the altar, made the sign of the cross before and after
his own silent devotions, made known his willingness to hear
confessions, and instituted daily services and weekly instead of monthly
Communion.

This in many parishes would have caused scandal; I but the Fordlow
people rather enjoyed the change, excepting the Methodists, who, quite
rightly according to their tenets, left off going to church, and a few
other extremists who said he was 'a Pope's man'. He even made a few
converts. Miss Ellison was one, and two others, oddly enough, were a
navvy and his wife who had recently settled near the hamlet. The latter
had formerly been a rowdy couple and it was strange to see them, all
cleaned up and dressed in their best on a week-day evening, quietly
crossing the allotments on their way to confession.

Of course, Laura's father said they were 'after what they could get out
of the poor old fool'. That couple almost certainly were not; but others
may have been, for he was a most generous man, who gave with both hands,
'_and_ running over', as the hamlet people said. Not only to the sick
and needy, although those were his first care, but to anybody he thought
wanted or wished for a thing or who would be pleased with it. He gave
the schoolboys two handsome footballs and the girls a skipping-rope
each--fine affairs with painted handles and little bells, such as they
had never seen in their lives before. When winter came he bought three
of the poorest girls warm, grey ulsters, such as were then fashionable,
to go to church in. When he found Edmund loved Scott's poems, but only
knew extracts from them, he bought him the _Complete Poetical Works_,
and, that Laura might not feel neglected, presented her at the same time
with _The Imitation of Christ_, daintily bound in blue and silver. These
were only a few of his known kindnesses; there were signs and rumours of
dozens of others, and no doubt many more were quite unknown except to
himself and the recipient.

He once gave the very shoes off his feet to a woman who had pleaded that
she could not go to church for want of a pair, and had added, meaningly,
that she took a large size and that a man's pair of light shoes would do
very well. He gave her the better of the two pairs he possessed, which
he happened to be wearing, stipulating that he should be allowed to walk
home in them. The wearing of them home was a concession to convention,
for he would have enjoyed walking barefoot over the flints as a follower
of his beloved St. Francis of Assisi, towards whom he had a special
devotion twenty years before the cult of the Little Poor Man became
popular. He gave away so much that he could only have kept just enough
to keep himself in bare necessaries. His black overcoat, which he wore
in all weathers, was threadbare, and the old cassock he wore indoors was
green and falling to pieces.

Laura's mother, whose religion was as plain and wholesome as the food
she cooked, had little sympathy with his 'bowings and crossings'; but
she was genuinely fond of the old man and persuaded him to look in for a
cup of tea whenever he visited the hamlet. Over this simple meal he
would tell the children about his own childhood. He had been the bad boy
of the nursery, he said, selfish and self-willed and given to fits of
passionate anger. Once he had hurled a plate at his sister (here the
children's mother frowned and shook her head at him and that story
trailed off lamely); but on another day he told them of his famous ride,
which ever after ranked with them beside Dick Turpin's.

The children of his family had a pony which they were supposed to ride
in turn; but, in time, he so monopolized it that it was known as his
Moppet, and once, when his elders had insisted that another brother
should ride that day, he had waited until the party had gone, then taken
his mother's riding horse out of the stable, mounted it with the help of
a stable boy who had believed him when he said he had permission to do
so, and gone careering across country, giving the horse its head, for he
had no control over it. They went like the wind, over rough grass and
under trees, where any low-hanging bough might have killed him, and, at
that point in the story, the teller leaned forward with such a flush on
his cheek and such a light in his eye that, for one moment, Laura could
almost see in the ageing man the boy he had once been. The ride ended in
broken knees for the horse and a broken crown for the rider. 'And a
mercy 'twas nothing worse,' the children's mother commented.

The moral of this story was the danger of selfish recklessness; but he
told it with such relish and so much fascinating detail that had the end
house children had access to anybody's stable they would have tried to
imitate him. Edmund suggested they should try to mount Polly, the
innkeeper's old pony, and they even went to the place where she was
pegged out to reconnoitre; but Polly had only to rattle her tethering
chain to convince them they were not cut out for Dick Turpins.

All was going well and Mr. Marley was talking of teaching Edmund Latin,
when, in an unfortunate moment, finding the children's father at home,
he taxed him with neglect of his religious duties. The father, who never
went to church at all and spoke of himself as an agnostic, resented this
and a quarrel arose, which ended in Mr. Marley being told never to
darken that door again. So there were no more of those pleasant teas and
talks, although he still remained a kind friend and would sometimes come
to the cottage door to speak to the mother, scrupulously remaining
outside on the doorstep. Then, in a few months, the Rector died, there
were changes, and Mr. Marley left the parish.

Five or six years afterwards, when Edmund and Laura were both out in the
world, their mother, sitting by her fire one gloomy winter afternoon,
heard a knock at her door and opened it to find Mr. Marley on her
doorstep. Ignoring the old quarrel, she brought him in and insisted upon
making tea for him. He was by that time very old and she thought he
looked very frail; but in spite of that he had walked many miles across
country from the parish where he was doing temporary duty. He sat by the
fire while she made toast and they talked of the absent two and of her
other children and of neighbours and friends. He stayed a long time,
partly because they had so much to say to each other and partly because
he was very tired and, as she thought, ill.

Presently the children's father came in from his work and there was a
strained moment which ended, to her great relief, in a polite handclasp.
The old feud was either forgotten or repented of.

The father could see at once that the old man was not in a fit state to
walk seven or eight miles at night in that weather and begged him not to
think of doing so. But what was to be done? They were far from a railway
station, even had there been a convenient train, and there was no
vehicle for hire within three miles. Then some one suggested that Master
Ashley's donkey-cart would be better than nothing, and the father
departed to borrow it. He brought it to the garden gate, for he had to
drive it himself, and this, surprisingly, he was ready to do although he
had just come in tired and damp from his work and had had no proper
meal.

With his knees wrapped round in an old fur coat that had once belonged
to the children's grandmother and a hot brick at his feet, the visitor
was about to say 'Farewell,' when the mother, Martha like, exclaimed:
'I'm sorry it's such a poor turn-out for a gentleman like you to ride
in.'

'Poor!' he exclaimed. 'I'm proud of it and shall always remember this
day. My Master rode through Jerusalem on one of these dear patient
beasts, you know!'

A fortnight afterwards she read in the local paper that the Rev. Alfred
Augustus Peregrine Marley, who was relieving the Vicar of Such-and-such
a parish, had collapsed and died at the altar while administering Holy
Communion.



                                   XV

                             _Harvest Home_

If one of the women was accused of hoarding her best clothes instead of
wearing them, she would laugh and say: 'Ah! I be savin' they for high
days an' holidays an' bonfire nights.' If she had, they would have
lasted a long time, for there were very few holidays and scarcely any
which called for a special toilet.

Christmas Day passed very quietly. The men had a holiday from work and
the children from school and the churchgoers attended special Christmas
services. Mothers who had young children would buy them an orange each
and a handful of nuts; but, except at the end house and the inn, there
was no hanging up of stockings, and those who had no kind elder sister
or aunt in service to send them parcels got no Christmas presents.

Still, they did manage to make a little festival of it. Every year the
farmer killed an ox for the purpose and gave each of his men a joint of
beef, which duly appeared on the Christmas dinner-table together with
plum pudding--not Christmas pudding, but suet duff with a good
sprinkling of raisins. Ivy and other evergreens (it was not a holly
country) were hung from the ceiling and over the pictures; a bottle of
home-made wine was uncorked, a good fire was made up, and, with doors
and windows closed against the keen, wintry weather, they all settled
down by their own firesides for a kind of super-Sunday. There was little
visiting of neighbours and there were no family reunions, for the girls
in service could not be spared at that season, and the few boys who had
gone out in the world were mostly serving abroad in the Army.

There were still bands of mummers in some of the larger villages, and
village choirs went carol-singing about the country-side; but none of
these came to the hamlet, for they knew the collection to be expected
there would not make it worth their while. A few families, sitting by
their own firesides, would sing carols and songs; that, and more and
better food and a better fire than usual, made up their Christmas cheer.

The Sunday of the Feast was more exciting. Then strangers, as well as
friends, came from far and near to throng the houses and inn and to
promenade on the stretch of road which ran through the hamlet. On that
day the big ovens were heated and nearly every family managed to have a
joint of beef and a Yorkshire pudding for dinner. The men wore their
best suits, complete with collar and tie, and the women brought out
their treasured finery and wore it, for, even if no relatives from a
distance were expected, some one might be 'popping in', if not to
dinner, to tea or supper. Half a crown, at least, had been saved from
the harvest money for spending at the inn, and the jugs and beer-cans
went merrily round the Rise. 'Arter all, 'tis the Feast,' they said;
'an't only comes once a year,' and they enjoyed the extra food and drink
and the excitement of seeing so many people about, never dreaming that
they were celebrating the dedication five hundred years before of the
little old church in the mother village which so few of them attended.

Those of the Fordlow people who liked to see life had on that day to go
to Lark Rise, for, beyond the extra food, there was no celebration in
the mother village. Some time early in that century the scene of the
Feast had shifted from the site of the church to that of the only inn in
the parish.

At least a hundred people, friends and strangers, came from the market
town and surrounding villages; not that there was anything to do at Lark
Rise, or much to see; but because it was Fordlow Feast and a pleasant
walk with a drink at the end was a good way of spending a fine September
Sunday evening.

The Monday of the Feast--for it lasted two days--was kept by women and
children only, the men being at work. It was a great day for tea
parties; mothers and sisters and aunts and cousins coming in droves from
about the neighbourhood. The chief delicacy at these teas was 'baker's
cake', a rich, fruity, spicy dough cake, obtained in the following
manner. The housewife provided all the ingredients excepting the dough,
putting raisins and currants, lard, sugar, and spice in a basin which
she gave to the baker, who added the dough, made and baked the cake, and
returned it, beautifully browned in his big oven. The charge was the
same as that for a loaf of bread the same size, and the result was
delicious. 'There's only one fault wi' these 'ere baker's cakes,' the
women used to say; 'they won't keep!' And they would not; they were too
good and there were too many children about.

The women made their houses very clean and neat for Feast Monday, and,
with hollyhocks nodding in at the open windows and a sight of the clean,
yellow stubble of the cleared fields beyond, and the hum of friendly
talk and laughter within, the tea parties were very pleasant.

At the beginning of the 'eighties the outside world remembered Fordlow
Feast to the extent of sending one old woman with a gingerbread stall.
On it were gingerbread babies with currants for eyes, brown-and-white
striped peppermint humbugs, sticks of pink-and-white rock, and a few
boxes and bottles of other sweets. Even there, on that little old stall
with its canvas awning, the first sign of changing taste might have been
seen, for, one year, side by side with the gingerbread babies, stood a
box filled with thin, dark brown slabs packed in pink paper. 'What is
that brown sweet?' asked Laura, spelling out the word 'Chocolate'. A
visiting cousin, being fairly well educated and a great reader, already
knew it by name. 'Oh, that's chocolate,' he said off-handedly. 'But
don't buy any; it's for drinking. They have it for breakfast in France.'
A year or two later, chocolate was a favourite sweet even in a place as
remote as the hamlet; but it could no longer be bought from the
gingerbread stall, for the old woman no longer brought it to the Feast.
Perhaps she had died. Except for the tea-drinkings, Feast Monday had
died, too, as a holiday.

The younger hamlet people still went occasionally to feasts and club
walkings in other villages. In larger places these were like small
fairs, with roundabouts, swings, and coconut shies. At the club walkings
there were brass bands and processions of the club members, all wearing
their club colours in the shape of rosettes and wide sashes worn across
the breast. There was dancing on the green to the strains of the band,
and country people came from miles around to the village where the feast
or club walking was being held.

Palm Sunday, known locally as Fig Sunday, was a minor hamlet festival.
Sprays of soft gold and silver willow catkins, called 'palm' in that
part of the country, were brought indoors to decorate the houses and be
worn as buttonholes for church-going. The children at the end house
loved fetching in the palm and putting it in pots and vases and hanging
it over the picture frames. Better still, they loved the old custom of
eating figs on Palm Sunday. The week before, the innkeeper's wife would
get in a stock to be sold in pennyworths in her small grocery store.
Some of the more expert cooks among the women would use these to make
fig puddings for dinner and the children bought pennyworths and ate them
out of screws of blue sugar paper on their way to Sunday school.

The gathering of the palm branches must have been a survival from old
Catholic days, when, in many English churches, the willow served for
palm to be blessed on Palm Sunday. The original significance of eating
figs on that day had long been forgotten; but it was regarded as an
important duty, and children ordinarily selfish would give one of their
figs, or at least a bite out of one, to the few unfortunates who had
been given no penny.

No such mystery surrounded the making of a bonfire on November 5th.
Parents would tell inquiring children all about the Gunpowder Plot and
'that unked ole Guy Fawkes in his black mask', as though it had all
happened recently; and, the night before, the boys and youths of the
hamlet would go round knocking at all but the poorest doors and
chanting:


               Remember, remember, the fifth of November,
                 The gunpowder treason and plot.
               A stick or a stake, for King James's sake
                 Will you please to give us a faggot?
               If you won't give us one, we'll take two!
                 The better for us and the worse for you.


The few housewives who possessed faggot stacks (cut from the undergrowth
of woods in the autumn and sold at one and sixpence a score) would give
them a bundle or two; others would give them hedge-trimmings, or a piece
of old line-post, or anything else that was handy, and, altogether, they
managed to collect enough wood to make a modest bonfire which they lit
on one of the open spaces and capered and shouted around and roasted
potatoes and chestnuts in the ashes, after the manner of boys
everywhere.

Harvest time was a natural holiday. 'A hemmed hard-worked 'un,' the men
would have said; but they all enjoyed the stir and excitement of getting
in the crops and their own importance as skilled and trusted workers,
with extra beer at the farmer's expense and extra harvest money to
follow.

The 'eighties brought a succession of hot summers and, day after day, as
harvest time approached, the children at the end house would wake to the
dewy, pearly pink of a fine summer dawn and the _swizzh, swizzh_ of the
early morning breeze rustling through the ripe corn beyond their
doorstep.

Then, very early one morning, the men would come out of their houses,
pulling on coats and lighting pipes as they hurried and calling to each
other with skyward glances: 'Think weather's a-gooin' to hold?' For
three weeks or more during harvest the hamlet was astir before dawn and
the homely odours of bacon frying, wood fires and tobacco smoke
overpowered the pure, damp, earthy scent of the fields. It would be
school holidays then and the children at the end house always wanted to
get up hours before their time. There were mushrooms in the meadows
around Fordlow and they were sometimes allowed to go picking them to fry
for their breakfast. More often they were not; for the dew-soaked grass
was bad for their boots. 'Six shillingsworth of good shoe-leather gone
for sixpen'orth of mushrooms!' their mother would cry despairingly. But
some years old boots had been kept for the purpose and they would dress
and creep silently downstairs, not to disturb the younger children, and
with hunks of bread and butter in their hands steal out into the dewy,
morning world.

Against the billowing gold of the fields the hedges stood dark, solid
and dew-sleeked; dewdrops beaded the gossamer webs, and the children's
feet left long, dark trails on the dewy turf. There were night scents of
wheat-straw and flowers and moist earth on the air and the sky was
fleeced with pink clouds.

For a few days or a week or a fortnight, the fields stood 'ripe unto
harvest'. It was the one perfect period in the hamlet year. The human
eye loves to rest upon wide expanses of pure colour: the moors in the
purple heyday of the heather, miles of green downland, and the sea when
it lies calm and blue and boundless, all delight it; but to some none of
these, lovely though they all are, can give the same satisfaction of
spirit as acres upon acres of golden corn. There is both beauty and
bread and the seeds of bread for future generations.

Awed, yet uplifted by the silence and clean-washed loveliness of the
dawn, the children would pass along the narrow field paths with rustling
wheat on each side. Or Laura would make little dashes into the corn for
poppies, or pull trails of the lesser bindweed with its pink-striped
trumpets, like clean cotton frocks, to trim her hat and girdle her
waist, while Edmund would stump on, red-faced with indignation at her
carelessness in making trails in the standing corn.

In the fields where the harvest had begun all was bustle and activity.
At that time the mechanical reaper with long, red, revolving arms like
windmill sails had already appeared in the locality; but it was looked
upon by the men as an auxiliary, a farmers' toy; the scythe still did
most of the work and they did not dream it would ever be superseded. So
while the red sails revolved in one field and the youth on the driver's
seat of the machine called cheerily to his horses and women followed
behind to bind the corn into sheaves, in the next field a band of men
would be whetting their scythes and mowing by hand as their fathers had
done before them.

With no idea that they were at the end of a long tradition, they still
kept up the old country custom of choosing as their leader the tallest
and most highly skilled man amongst them, who was then called 'King of
the Mowers'. For several harvests in the 'eighties they were led by the
man known as Boamer. He had served in the Army and was still a fine,
well-set-up young fellow with flashing white teeth and a skin darkened
by fiercer than English suns.

With a wreath of poppies and green bindweed trails around his wide,
rush-plaited hat, he led the band down the swathes as they mowed and
decreed when and for how long they should halt for 'a breather' and what
drinks should be had from the yellow stone jar they kept under the hedge
in a shady corner of the field. They did not rest often or long; for
every morning they set themselves to accomplish an amount of work in the
day that they knew would tax all their powers till long after sunset.
'Set yourself more than you can do and you'll do it' was one of their
maxims, and some of their feats in the harvest field astonished
themselves as well as the onlooker.

Old Monday, the bailiff, went riding from field to field on his
long-tailed, grey pony. Not at that season to criticize, but rather to
encourage, and to carry strung to his saddle the hooped and handled
miniature barrel of beer provided by the farmer.

One of the smaller fields was always reserved for any of the women who
cared to go reaping. Formerly all the able-bodied women not otherwise
occupied had gone as a matter of course; but, by the 'eighties, there
were only three or four, beside the regular field women, who could
handle the sickle. Often the Irish harvesters had to be called in to
finish the field.

Patrick, Dominick, James (never called Jim), Big Mike and Little Mike,
and Mr. O'Hara seemed to the children as much a part of the harvest
scene as the corn itself. They came over from Ireland every year to help
with the harvest and slept in the farmer's barn, doing their own cooking
and washing at a little fire in the open. They were a wild-looking lot,
dressed in odd clothes and speaking a brogue so thick that the natives
could only catch a word here and there. When not at work, they went
about in a band, talking loudly and usually all together, with the
purchases they had made at the inn bundled in blue-and-white check
handkerchiefs which they carried over their shoulders at the end of a
stick. 'Here comes they jabberin' old Irish,' the country people would
say, and some of the women pretended to be afraid of them. They could
not have been serious, for the Irishmen showed no disposition to harm
any one. All they desired was to earn as much money as possible to send
home to their wives, to have enough left for themselves to get drunk on
a Saturday night, and to be in time for Mass on a Sunday morning. All
these aims were fulfilled; for, as the other men confessed, they were
'gluttons for work' and more work meant more money at that season; there
was an excellent inn handy, and a Catholic church within three miles.

After the mowing and reaping and binding came the carrying, the busiest
time of all. Every man and boy put his best foot forward then, for, when
the corn was cut and dried it was imperative to get it stacked and
thatched before the weather broke. All day and far into the twilight the
yellow-and-blue painted farm wagons passed and repassed along the roads
between the field and the stack-yard. Big cart-horses returning with an
empty wagon were made to gallop like two-year-olds. Straws hung on the
roadside hedges and many a gatepost was knocked down through hasty
driving. In the fields men pitchforked the sheaves to the one who was
building the load on the wagon, and the air resounded with _Hold tights_
and _Wert ups_ and _Who-o-oas_. The _Hold tight!_ was no empty cry;
sometimes, in the past, the man on top of the load had not held tight or
not tight enough. There were tales of fathers and grandfathers whose
necks or backs had been broken by a fall from a load, and of other fatal
accidents afield, bad cuts from scythes, pitchforks passing through
feet, to be followed by lockjaw, and of sunstroke; but, happily, nothing
of this kind happened on that particular farm in the 'eighties.

At last, in the cool dusk of an August evening, the last load was
brought in, with a nest of merry boys' faces among the sheaves on the
top, and the men walking alongside with pitchforks on shoulders. As they
passed along the roads they shouted:


                   Harvest home! Harvest home!
                   Merry, merry, merry harvest home!


and women came to their cottage gates and waved, and the few passers-by
looked up and smiled their congratulations. The joy and pleasure of the
labourers in their task well done was pathetic, considering their very
small share in the gain. But it was genuine enough; for they still loved
the soil and rejoiced in their own work and skill in bringing forth the
fruits of the soil, and harvest home put the crown on their year's work.

As they approached the farm-house their song changed to:


             Harvest home! Harvest home!
             Merry, merry, merry harvest home!
             Our bottles are empty, our barrels won't run,
             And we think it's a very dry harvest home.


and the farmer came out, followed by his daughters and maids with jugs
and bottles and mugs, and drinks were handed round amidst general
congratulations. Then the farmer invited the men to his harvest home
dinner, to be held in a few days' time, and the adult workers dispersed
to add up their harvest money and to rest their weary bones. The boys
and youths, who could never have too much of a good thing, spent the
rest of the evening circling the hamlet and shouting 'Merry, merry,
merry harvest home!' until the stars came out and at last silence fell
upon the fat rickyard and the stripped fields.

On the morning of the harvest home dinner everybody prepared themselves
for a tremendous feast, some to the extent of going without breakfast,
that the appetite might not be impaired. And what a feast it was! Such a
bustling in the farm-house kitchen for days beforehand; such boiling of
hams and roasting of sirloins; such a stacking of plum puddings, made by
the Christmas recipe; such a tapping of eighteen-gallon casks and baking
of plum loaves would astonish those accustomed to the appetites of
to-day. By noon the whole parish had assembled, the workers and their
wives and children to feast and the sprinkling of the better-to-do to
help with the serving. The only ones absent were the aged bedridden and
their attendants, and to them, the next day, portions, carefully graded
in daintiness according to their social standing, were carried by the
children from the remnants of the feast. A plum pudding was considered a
delicate compliment to an equal of the farmer; slices of beef or ham
went to the 'better-most poor'; and a ham-bone with plenty of meat left
upon it or part of a pudding or a can of soup to the commonalty.

Long tables were laid out of doors in the shade of a barn, and soon
after twelve o'clock the cottagers sat down to the good cheer, with the
farmer carving at the principal table, his wife with her tea urn at
another, the daughters of the house and their friends circling the
tables with vegetable dishes and beer jugs, and the grandchildren, in
their stiff, white, embroidered frocks, dashing hither and thither to
see that everybody had what they required. As a background there was the
rickyard with its new yellow stacks and, over all, the mellow sunshine
of late summer.

Passers-by on the road stopped their gigs and high dog-carts to wave
greetings and shout congratulations on the weather. If a tramp looked
wistfully in, he was beckoned to a seat on the straw beneath a rick and
a full plate was placed on his knees. It was a picture of plenty and
goodwill.

It did not do to look beneath the surface. Laura's father, who did not
come into the picture, being a 'tradesman' and so not invited, used to
say that the farmer paid his men starvation wages all the year and
thought he made it up to them by giving that one good meal. The farmer
did not think so, because he did not think at all, and the men did not
think either on that day; they were too busy enjoying the food and the
fun.

After the dinner there were sports and games, then dancing in the home
paddock until twilight, and when, at the end of the day, the farmer,
carving indoors for the family supper, paused with knife poised to
listen to the last distant 'Hooray!' and exclaimed, 'A lot of good
chaps! A lot of good chaps, God bless 'em!' both he and the cheering men
were sincere, however mistaken.

But these modest festivals which had figured every year in everybody's
life for generations were eclipsed in 1887 by Queen Victoria's Golden
Jubilee.

Up to the middle of the 'eighties the hamlet had taken little interest
in the Royal House. The Queen and the Prince and Princess of Wales were
sometimes mentioned, but with little respect and no affection. 'The old
Queen', as she was called, was supposed to have shut herself up in
Balmoral Castle with a favourite servant named John Brown and to have
refused to open Parliament when Mr. Gladstone begged her to. The Prince
was said to be leading a gay life, and the dear, beautiful Princess,
afterwards Queen Alexandra, was celebrated only for her supposed
make-up.

By the middle of the decade a new spirit was abroad and had percolated
to the hamlet. The Queen, it appeared, had reigned fifty years. She had
been a good queen, a wonderful queen, she was soon to celebrate her
jubilee, and, still more exciting, they were going to celebrate it, too,
for there was going to be a big 'do' in which three villages would join
for tea and sports and dancing and fireworks in the park of a local
magnate. Nothing like it had ever been known before.

As the time drew nearer, the Queen and her jubilee became the chief
topic of conversation. The tradesmen gave lovely coloured portraits of
her in her crown and garter ribbon on their almanacks, most of which
were framed at home and hung up in the cottages. Jam could be bought in
glass jugs adorned with her profile in hobnails and inscribed '1837 to
1887. Victoria the Good', and, underneath, the national catchword of the
moment: 'Peace and Plenty.' The newspapers were full of the great
achievements of her reign: railway travel, the telegraph, Free Trade,
exports, progress, prosperity, Peace: all these blessings, it appeared,
were due to her inspiration.

Of most of these advantages the hamlet enjoyed but Esau's share; but, as
no one reflected upon this, it did not damp the general enthusiasm.
'Fancy her reigning fifty years, the old dear, her!' they said, and
bought paper banners inscribed 'Fifty Years, Mother, Wife, and Queen' to
put inside their window panes. 'God Bless Her. Victoria the Good. The
Mother of Her People.'

Laura was lucky enough to be given a bound volume of _Good Words_--or
was it _Home Words_?--in which the Queen's own journal, _Leaves From Her
Majesty's Life in the Highlands_, ran as a serial. She galloped through
all the instalments immediately to pick out the places mentioned by her
dear Sir Walter Scott. Afterwards the journal was re-read many times, as
everything was re-read in that home of few books. Laura liked the
journal, for although the Queen kept to the level of meals and drives
and seasickness and the 'civility' of her hosts and hostesses, and only
mentioned the scenery (Scott's scenery!) to repeat what 'Albert said'
about it--and he always compared it to some foreign scene--there was a
forthright sincerity about the writing which revealed a human being
behind all the glitter and fuss.

By the end of May everybody was talking about the weather. Would it be
fine for the great drive through London; and, still more important,
would it be fine for the doings in Skeldon Park? Of course it would be
fine, said the more optimistic. Providence knew what He was about. It
was going to be a glorious June. Queen's weather, they called it. Hadn't
the listener heard that the sun always shone when the Queen drove out?

Then there were rumours of a subscription fund. The women of England
were going to give the Queen a jubilee present, and, wonder of wonders,
the amount given was not to exceed one penny. 'Of course we shall give,'
they said proudly. 'It'll be our duty an' our pleasure.' And when the
time came for the collection to be made they had all of them their
pennies ready. Bright new ones in most cases, for, although they knew
the coins were to be converted into a piece of plate before reaching Her
Majesty, they felt that only new money was worthy of the occasion.

The ever-faithful, ever-useful clergyman's daughter collected the pence.
Thinking, perhaps, that the day after pay-day would be most convenient,
she visited Lark Rise on a Saturday, and Laura, at home from school, was
clipping the garden hedge when she heard one neighbour say to another:
'I want a bucket of water, but I can't run round to the well till Miss
Ellison's been for the penny.'

'Lordy, dear!' ejaculated the other. 'Why, she's been an' gone this
quarter of an hour. She's a-been to my place. Didn't she come to yourn?'

The first speaker flushed to the roots of her hair. She was a woman
whose husband had recently had an accident afield and was still in
hospital. There were no Insurance benefits then, and it was known she
was having a hard struggle to keep her home going; but she had her penny
ready and was hurt, terribly hurt, by the suspicion that she had been
purposely passed over.

'I s'pose, because I be down on me luck, she thinks I ain't worth a
penny,' she cried, and went in and banged the door.

'There's temper for you!' the other woman exclaimed to the world at
large and went about her own business. But Laura was distressed. She had
seen Mrs. Parker's expression and could imagine how her pride was hurt.
She, herself, hated to be pitied. But what could she do about it?

She went to the gate. Miss Ellison had finished collecting and was
crossing the allotments on her way home. Laura would just have time to
run the other way round and meet her at the stile. After a struggle with
her own inward shrinking which lasted about two minutes, but was
ridiculously intense, she ran off on her long, thin legs, and popped up,
like a little jack-in-the-box, on the other side of the stile which the
lady was gathering up her long frilly skirts to mount.

'Oh, please, Miss Ellison, you haven't been to Mrs. Parker's, and she's
got her penny all ready and she wants the Queen to have it so much.'

'But, Laura,' said the lady loftily, surprised at such interference, 'I
did not intend to call upon Mrs. Parker to-day. With her husband in
hospital, I know she has no penny to spare, poor soul.'

But, although somewhat quelled, Laura persisted: 'But she's got it all
polished up and wrapped in tissue paper, Miss Ellison, and 'twill hurt
her feelings most awful if you don't go for it, Miss Ellison.'

At that, Miss Ellison grasped the situation and retraced her steps,
keeping Laura by her side and talking to her as to another grown-up
person.

'Our dear Queen,' she was saying as they passed Twister's turnip patch,
'our dear, good Queen, Laura, is noted for her perfect tact. Once, and I
have this on good authority, some church workers were invited to visit
her at Osborne. Tea was served in a magnificent drawing-room, the Queen
actually partaking of a cup with them, and this, I am told, is very
unusual--a great honour, in fact; but no doubt she did it to put them at
their ease. But in her confusion, one poor lady, unaccustomed to taking
tea with royalty, had the misfortune to drop her slice of cake on the
floor. Imagine that, Laura, a slice of cake on the Queen's beautiful
carpet; you can understand how the poor lady must have felt, can't you
dear? One of the ladies-in-waiting smiled at her discomfiture, which
made her still more nervous and trembling; but our dear Queen--she has
sharp eyes, God bless her!--saw at once how matters stood. She asked for
a slice of cake, then purposely dropped it, and commanded the lady who
had smiled to pick up both pieces at once. Which she did quickly, you
may be sure, Laura, and there were no more smiles. What a lesson! What a
lesson, Laura!'

Cynical little Laura wondered for whom the lesson was intended; but she
only said meekly: 'Yes, indeed, Miss Ellison,' and this brought them to
Mrs. Parker's door, where she had the satisfaction of hearing Miss
Ellison say: 'Oh, dear, Mrs. Parker, I nearly overlooked your house. I
have come for your contribution to the Queen's jubilee present.'

The great day dawned at last and most of the hamlet people were up in
time to see the sun burst in dazzling splendour from the pearly pink
east and mount into a sky unflecked by the smallest cloud. Queen's
weather, indeed! Arid as the day began it continued. It was very hot;
but nobody minded that, for the best hats could be worn without fear of
showers, and those who had sunshades put by for just such an occasion
could bring them forth in all their glory of deep lace or long,
knotted, silk fringe.

By noon all the hamlet children had been scrubbed with soap and water
and arrayed in their best clothes. 'Every bit clean, right through to
the skin,' as their mothers proudly declared. Then, after a snack,
calculated to sustain the family during the walk to the park, but not to
spoil the appetite for tea, the mothers went upstairs to take out their
own curl papers and don their best clothes. A strong scent of camphor
and lavender and closely shut boxes pervaded the atmosphere around them
for the rest of the day. The colours and styles did not harmonize too
well with the midsummer country scene, and many might have preferred to
see them in print frocks and sunbonnets; but they dressed to please
themselves, not to please the artistic taste of others, and they were
all the happier for it.

Before they started there was much running from house to house and
asking: 'Now, _should_ you put on another bow just here!' or 'Do you
think that ostrich tip our young Em sent me'd improve my hat, or do you
think the red roses and black lace is enough?' or 'Now, tell me true, do
you like my hair done this way?'

The men and boys with shining faces and in Sunday suits had gone on
before to have dinner at the farm before meeting their families at the
cross-roads. They would be having cuts off great sirloins and Christmas
pudding washed down with beer, just as they did at the harvest home
dinner.

The little party from the end house walked alone in the straggling
procession; the mother, still rather pale from her recent confinement,
pushing the baby carriage with little May and baby Elizabeth; Laura and
Edmund, on tiptoe with excitement, helping to shove the carriage over
the rough turf of the park. Their father had not come. He did not care
for 'do's', and had gone to work at his bench at the shop alone while
his workmates held high holiday. There were as yet no trade union laws
to forbid such singularity.

There were more people in the park than the children had ever seen
together, and the roundabouts, swings, and coconut shies were doing a
roaring trade. Tea was partaken of in a huge marquee in relays, one
parish at a time, and the sound of the brass band, roundabout
hurdy-gurdy, coconut thwacks, and showmen's shouting surged round the
frail, canvas walls like a roaring sea.

Within, the mingled scents of hot tea, dough cake, tobacco smoke, and
trampled grass lent a holiday savour to a simple menu. But if the
provisions were simple in quality, the quantity was prodigious. Clothes
baskets of bread and butter and jam cut in thick slices and watering
cans of tea, already milked and sugared, were handed round and
disappeared in a twinkling. 'God bless my soul,' one old clergyman
exclaimed. 'Where on earth do they put it all!' They put three-fourths
of it in the same handy receptacle he himself used for his four-course
dinners; but the fourth part went into their pockets. That was their
little weakness--not to be satisfied with a bellyful, but to manage
somehow to secure a portion to take home for next day.

After tea there were sports, with races, high jumps, dipping heads into
tubs of water to retrieve sixpences with the teeth, grinning through
horse-collars, the prize going to the one making the most gtotesque
face, and, to crown all, climbing the greased pole for the prize leg of
mutton. This was a tough job, as the pole was as tall and slender as a
telephone post and extremely slippery. Prudent wives would not allow
their husbands to attempt it on account of spoiling their clothes, so
the competition was left to the ragamuffins and a few experts who had
had the foresight to bring with them a pair of old trousers. This
competition must have run concurrently with the other events, for all
the afternoon there was a crowd around it, and first one, then another,
would 'have a go'. It was painful to watch the climbers, shinning up a
few inches, then slipping back again, and, as one retired, another
taking his place, until, late in the afternoon, the champion arrived,
climbed slowly but steadily to the top and threw down the joint, which,
by the way, must have been already roasted after four or five hours in
the burning sun. It was whispered around that he had carried a bag of
ashes and sprinkled them on the greasy surface as he ascended.

The local gentlepeople promenaded the ground in parties: stout,
red-faced squires, raising their straw hats to mop their foreheads;
hunting ladies, incongruously garbed in silks and ostrich-feather boas;
young girls in embroidered white muslin and boys in Eton suits. They had
kind words for everybody, especially for the poor and lonely, and, from
time to time, they would pause before some sight and try to enter into
the spirit of the other beholders; but everywhere their arrival hushed
the mirth, and there was a sigh of relief when they moved on. After
dancing the first dance they disappeared, and 'now we can have some
fun', the people said.

All this time Edmund and Laura, with about two hundred other children,
had been let loose in the crowd to spend their pennies and watch the
fun. They rode on the wooden horses, swung in the swing-boats, pried
around coconut shies and shooting booths munching coconut or rock or
long strips of black liquorice, until their hands were sticky and their
faces grimed.

Laura, who hated crowds and noise, was soon tired of it and looked
longingly at the shady trees and woods and spinneys around the big open
space where the fair was held. But before she escaped a new and
wonderful experience awaited her. Before one of the booths a man was
beating a drum and before him two girls were posturing and pirouetting.
'Walk up! Walk up!' he was shouting. 'Walk up and see the tightrope
dancing! Only one penny admission. Walk up! Walk up!' Laura paid her
penny and walked up, as did about a dozen others, the man and girls came
inside, the flap of the tent was drawn, and the show began.

Laura had never heard of tightrope dancing before and she was not sure
she was not dreaming it then. The outer tumult beat against the frail
walls of the tent, but within was a magic circle of quiet. As she
crossed to take her place with the other spectators, her feet sank deep
into sawdust; and, in the subdued light which filtered through the
canvas, the broad, white, pock-marked face of the man in his faded red
satin and the tinsel crowns and tights of the girls seemed as unreal as
a dream.

The girl who did the tightrope dancing was a fair, delicate-looking
child with grey eyes and fat, pale-brown ringlets, a great contrast to
her dark, bouncing gipsy-looking sister, and when she mounted to the
rope stretched between two poles and did a few dance steps as she swayed
gracefully along it, Laura gazed and gazed, speechless with admiration.
To the simple country-bred child the performance was marvellous. It came
to an end all too soon for her; for not much could be done to entertain
a house which only brought a shilling or so to the box office; but the
impression remained with her as a glimpse into a new and fascinating
world. There were few five-barred gates in the vicinity of Laura's home
on which she did not attempt a little pirouetting along the top bar
during the next year or two.

The tightrope dancing was her outstanding memory of the great Queen's
Jubilee; but the merrymaking went on for hours after that. All the way
home in the twilight, the end house party could hear the popping of
fireworks behind them and, turning, see rockets and showers of golden
rain above the dark tree-tops. At last, standing at their own garden
gate, they heard the roaring of cheers from hundreds of throats and the
band playing 'God save the Queen'.

They were first home and the hamlet was in darkness, but the twilight
was luminous over the fields and the sky right round to the north was
still faintly pink. A cat rubbed itself against their legs and mewed;
the pig in the sty woke and grunted a protest against the long day's
neglect. A light breeze rustled through the green corn and shivered the
garden bushes, releasing the scent of stocks and roses and sunbaked
grass and the grosser smells of cabbage beds and pigsties. It had been a
great day--the greatest day they were ever likely to see, however long
they lived, they were told; but it was over and they were home and home
was best.

After the jubilee nothing ever seemed quite the same. The old Rector
died and the farmer, who had seemed immovable excepting by death, had to
retire to make way for the heir of the landowning nobleman who intended
to farm the family estates himself. He brought with him the new
self-binding reaping machine and women were no longer required in the
harvest field. At the hamlet several new brides took possession of
houses previously occupied by elderly people and brought new ideas into
the place. The last of the bustles disappeared and leg-o'-mutton sleeves
were 'all the go'. The new Rector's wife took her Mothers' Meeting women
for a trip to London. Babies were christened new names; Wanda was one,
Gwendolin another. The innkeeper's wife got in cases of tinned salmon
and Australian rabbit. The Sanitary Inspector appeared for the first
time at the hamlet and shook his head over the pigsties and privies.
Wages rose, prices soared, and new needs multiplied. People began to
speak of 'before the jubilee' much as we in the nineteen-twenties spoke
of 'before the war', either as a golden time or as one of exploded
ideas, according to the age of the speaker.

And all the time boys were being born or growing up in the parish,
expecting to follow the plough all their lives, or, at most, to do a
little mild soldiering or go to work in a town. Gallipoli? Kut? Vimy
Ridge? Ypres? What did they know of such places? But they were to know
them, and when the time came they did not flinch. Eleven out of that
tiny community never came back again. A brass plate on the wall of the
church immediately over the old end house seat is engraved with their
names. A double column, five names long, then, last and alone, the name
of Edmund.




Transcriber's note:

The edition used as base for this book contained the
following errors, which have been corrected.  These
corrections are the readings found in the 1945 edition
of the trilogy:

Page 85 (Chapter V "Survivals"):
She dozed and woke again. it was still there.
=> She dozed and woke again. It was still there.

Page 245 (Chapter XIV "To Church on Sunday"):
No listener nooded or 'lost the thread' when he was in the pulpit
=> No listener nodded or 'lost the thread' when he was in the pulpit




[End of _Lark Rise_ by Flora Thompson]
