Lark Rise to Candleford (48 page)

That journey to Candleford marked the end of Laura's
childhood. Soon afterwards her schooldays began and she passed in one day from
a protected home life to one where those who could had to fight for a place and
maintain it by fighting.

The National School for the parish had been built in the
mother village, a mile and a half from the hamlet. Only about a dozen children
lived there and more than three times that number lived at Lark Rise; but, as
the Church was there and the Rectory and the Manor House, it far outweighed the
hamlet in importance. Up and down the long, straight road between the two
places, the hamlet children travelled in bands. No straggling was allowed. An
inclination to walk alone, or in twos or threes, was looked upon as an
unpleasant eccentricity.

Most of the children were clean and at least moderately tidy
when they left home, although garments might be too large or too small or much
patched. 'Patch upon patch is better'n holes' was one of the hamlet mothers'
maxims. The girls wore large white or coloured print pinafores over their
ankle-length frocks, and their hair was worn scraped back from the brow and
tied on the crown or plaited into a tight pigtail. Laura appeared on the first
morning with her hair pushed back with an Alice in Wonderland comb under a porkpie
hat which had belonged to one of her cousins, but this style of headgear caused
so much mirth that she begged that evening to be allowed to wear 'a real hat'
and to have her hair plaited.

Her companions were strong, well-grown children between the
ages of four and eleven. They ran and shouted and wrestled the whole way, or
pushed each other over stoneheaps or into ditches, or stopped to climb into the
hedges, or to make sorties into fields for turnips or blackberries, or to chase
the sheep, if the shepherd was not handy.

Every one of the stoneheaps which dotted the grass margins at
intervals for road-mending was somebody's castle. 'I'm the king of the castle.
Get down, you dirty rascal!' was the cry of the first to reach and mount it,
and he, or she, would hold it against all comers with kicks and blows. Loud cries
of 'You're a liar!' 'You're another!' 'You daren't!' 'Yes, I dare, then!'
'Let's see you do it!' punctuated even their most peaceful games. There was no
'Sez you', or 'O.K., Chief', for the 'pictures' had not been invented, and the
more civilizing wireless, with its Children's Hour, was still farther in the
future. Even compulsory education was comparatively new. They were an undiluted
native product.

There were times when they walked quietly, the elder ones
talking like little old men and women, while the younger ones enlarged their
knowledge of life by listening. Perhaps they would discuss the story of the
snake, as thick as a man's thigh and yards long, which the shepherd had seen
crossing that same road a few feet in front of him as he came home in the early
morning from his lambing fold. Rather a puzzle to older people, that snake, for
snakes are not usually abroad at lambing time, so it could not have been an
English grass snake, magnified. Yet David was a sober, middle-aged man,
unlikely to have invented the story. He must have seen something. Or perhaps
the children would discuss their own and each other's chances of passing the
next school examination. The shadow of a coming exam might account for their
sedate behaviour. Or some one would relate how such-and-such a man had treated
the foreman when he had 'tried to come it over him'; or the news would go round
that So-and-So's mother was 'like to have another', much to the embarrassment
of poor So-and-So. They talked about procreation and birth as soberly as little
judges. 'What's the good of having a lot of brats you can't afford to feed,'
one would say. 'When I'm married I shall only have one, or maybe two, in case
one of 'em dies.'

The morning after a death in the hamlet would see them with
serious faces discussing the signs which were supposed to have foretold it: the
ticking of a deathwatch spider, the unexplained stopping of a clock, the
falling of a picture from the wall, or the beating of a bird's wings against
the window. The formalities of the death chamber fascinated them. They knew why
and in what manner the chin was tied up, of the plate of salt placed on the
breast of a corpse, and the new pennies used to weight down the eyelids. This
led naturally to ghost stories, and the smaller children on the edge of the
group would cease whispering among themselves and press tightly in to the main
throng for protection.

They did not mean to be cruel; but they were strong, hardy
children, without much imagination, and overflowing with energy and high
spirits which had to find an outlet. There was some bullying and a great deal
of boisterous teasing.

Once, on their way home from school, they overtook an old
man. So old that, as he dragged slowly along, his head was bent to the level of
the top of the stick which supported his footsteps. He was a stranger, or the
children would never have dared to mock, mob, and insult him as they did. They
knew that their parents and the schoolmistress were unlikely to hear of it.

They did not actually strike him, but they hustled and pushed
him from behind, shouting: 'Old Benbow! Old Benbow!' Why 'Benbow', nobody knew,
unless it was because his back was so bent. At first he pretended to laugh at
their attentions as a joke; but, soon, growing tired of the pace they were forcing
on him, he stood still with them all about him, looked upward, shook his stick
at them and muttered a curse. At that they fell off, laughing, and ran.

It was a grey winter afternoon and, to Laura's eyes, the
ancient, solitary figure of the old man stood for a type of extreme desolation.
He had been young once, she thought, and strong; they would not have dared to
molest him then. Indeed, they were afraid of able-bodied tramps and would run
and hide from them. Now he was old and poor and weak, and homeless, perhaps.
Nobody cared for him any more. What was the use of living at all if it was to
end like this, thought little eight-year-old, and spent the rest of the time
going home in making up a story in which he figured as a rich, handsome young
man, until ruined by a bank failure (bank failures were frequent in juvenile
fiction just then) and his lovely young wife died of smallpox and his only son
was drowned at sea.

During her first year or two at school Laura came in for a
good deal of teasing which she shared with two or three others whose looks,
voices, parents or clothes did not please the majority. Not that there was
anything objectionable about them, according to outside standards; it was only
that they were a little different in some way from the accepted school pattern.

For instance, long frocks down to the ankles were still the
hamlet wear for girls of all ages, while, in the outer world, the fashion had
changed and little girls' frocks were worn extremely short. As Laura was
fortunate, or unfortunate, enough to have the reversion of her cousins'
wardrobes, she was put into short frocks prematurely. She was a little pleased
and proud when she started off for school one morning in a cream cotton frock
patterned with red dots that just touched her knees, especially as her mother,
at the last moment, had found and ironed out a red hair-ribbon to go with it.
But her pride had a fall when she was greeted with laughter and cries of
'Hamfrill!' and 'Longshanks!' and was told seriously by a girl who was usually
friendly that she wondered that a nice woman like Laura's mother could allow
her to go out like that.

She arrived home that evening a deplorable sight, for she had
been tripped up and rolled in the dust and had cried so much that her face was
streaked, and her mother—sympathetic for once, although she did not fail to
remind her that 'sticks and stones break your bones, but calling names hurts
nobody'—set to work upon the short frock and lengthened it sufficiently to
reach to the calves of her legs. After which, if she stooped a little when any
one looked directly at her, it passed muster.

There was one girl named Ethel Parker who at this time made
Laura's life a misery to her. She professed friendship and would call for her
every morning. 'So nice of Ethel,' Laura's mother said. Then, as soon as they
were out of sight of the windows, she would either betray her to the gang—once
by telling them Laura was wearing a red flannel petticoat—or force her to
follow her through thorn hedges and over ploughed fields for some supposed
short cut, or pull her hair, or wrench her arms, 'to try her strength', as she
told her.

At the age of ten she was as tall and much stronger than most
girls of fourteen. 'Our young Et's as strong as a young bullifant,' her father
would say proudly. She was a fair-haired girl with a round, plump face and
greenish eyes, the shape and almost the colour of a gooseberry. She had for
cold weather a scarlet cloak, a survival of a fashion of some years before, and
in this she must have looked a magnificent specimen of country childhood.

One of her pleasures was to make Laura gaze steadily at her.
'Now, see if you can stare me out,' she would say, and Laura would gaze
slavishly into those hard, green eyes until her own fell before them. The penalty
for flinching was a pinch.

As they grew older she used less physical violence, though
she would still handle Laura pretty roughly under the pretence of play. She was
what they called there 'an early-ripe' and, as she grew up, Laura's mother did
not like her so much and told Laura to have as little to do with her as
possible, adding, 'But don't offend her, mind. You can't afford to offend
anybody in a place like this.' Then Ethel went away to a place in service and,
a year or two later, Laura also left home and did not expect to see Ethel
again.

But, fifteen years after, when living in Bournemouth, Laura,
walking on the West Cliff one afternoon, a little out of her usual beat on some
errand or other, saw coming towards her a large, fair young woman in a
smartly-tailored suit with a toy dog under one arm and a pack of tradesmen's
books in her hand. It was Ethel, by that time a cook-housekeeper, and out
paying the household accounts and giving the family dog an airing.

She was delighted to see Laura, 'such an old friend and
playmate'. What splendid times they had had and what scrapes they had got into
together! Ah! There were no days like childhood's days and no friends like the
old friends. Didn't Laura think so?

She was so enthusiastic and had so obviously forgotten
everything unpleasant in their former association that Laura was almost
persuaded that they really had been happy together, and was just going to ask
Ethel to come to tea with her when the little dog under her arm began to fidget
and she gave him a nip in the neck which quieted him. Laura knew that nip which
made his eyes bulge, for she herself had felt it many times, and she knew that,
beneath the smart clothes and improved manners, there was still the old Ethel.
That was the last Laura ever saw of her; but she heard afterwards that she had
married an ex-butler and opened a boarding-house. It is to be hoped that her
guests were all people of strong character, for it is easy to imagine weaker
ones quailing before those gooseberry eyes if they dared to make a request.

But the girls were not all like Ethel. Except when in contact
with her and others of her kind, many were friendly, and Laura soon found out
that her special mission in life was to listen to confidences. 'You are such a
quiet little thing,' they would say, 'I know you won't tell anybody'; and,
afterwards: 'We've had such a nice talk,' although they had done every bit of
the talking themselves, Laura's part in the conversation being limited to 'Yes'
and 'No' and other sympathetic monosyllables.

Those girls who had sweethearts would talk about them by the
hour. Did Laura not think Alfie good-looking? And he was strong, so strong that
his father said he could carry a sack of potatoes that he himself could scarce
lift, and his mother said he ate twice as much as his brothers; and, although
you might not think it, he could be very agreeable when he chose. Only
'Saturday was a week' he had allowed the speaker to pick up and hold his catapult
while he climbed down from a tree; 'that one in the corner of the meadow where
the blacksmith's shop is, you know, Laura; there's nobody else in the school
could climb it. That'll show you!' The remarkable thing about these love
affairs was that the boys involved were usually unaware of them. A girl picked
out a boy to be her sweetheart and sang his praises (to Laura, at least) and
dreamed about him at night (or so she said) and treasured some worthless
article which had belonged to him, and the utmost the boy did in return was to
say 'Hullo!' when they met.

Sometimes it was difficult to decide upon a sweetheart. Then
an ash leaf with nine leaflets had to be searched for, and, when found, placed
in the seeker's bosom with the incantation:

Here's an ash leaf with nine leaves on. Take it and press it
to your heart And the first chap you meet'll be your sweetheart. If he's
married let him pass by. If he's single, let him draw nigh,

and that usually did the trick, as there was but one side to
that bargain.

Confidences about quarrels with other girls were even more frequent.
What 'she said' and what 'I said', and how long it was since they had spoken to
each other. But nearly every one had something to tell, if only what they had
had for dinner on Sunday, or about the new frock they hoped to wear to church
on Easter Day. This usually began as a red or blue velvet and ended by being
'that one of our young Nell's, turned and made shorter'. Laura would try to get
in a word edgeways here, for she was fond of planning clothes. Her ideal frock
at that time was a pale blue silk trimmed with white lace, and she always
imagined herself riding in the station fly in it, as one of her aunts had
ridden from the station when she came to them on a visit.