Lark Rise to Candleford (75 page)

And that was in the 'nineties, afterwards to be named—by a
presumably more innocent generation—the 'Naughty Nineties'. The clever, witty, but,
oh! so outrageous! books of the new writers of the day were, no doubt, read in
some of the large country houses around, and they may even have found their way
into rectories; but no whisper of the stir they were making in the outer world
of ideas had penetrated to the ordinary country home. A little later, the trial
of Oscar Wilde brought some measure of awareness, for was it not said that he
was 'one of these new poets'? and it just showed what a rotten lot they were.
Thank God, the speaker had always disliked poetry.

The tragedy of Oscar Wilde did nothing to lessen their
natural distrust of intellect, but it did enlighten the younger generation in a
less desirable manner. There were vices, then, in the world one had not hitherto
heard of—vices which, even now, were only hinted at darkly, never described.
Fathers for weeks kept the newspaper locked up with their account books.
Mothers, when appealed to for information, shuddered and said in horrified
accents: 'Never let me hear that name pass your lips again.'

Miss Lane, when asked outright what all this fuss was about,
said: 'All I know is that it's some law about two men living together, but you don't
want to bother your head about things like that!' 'But what about Old Ben and
Tom Ashley?' Laura persisted, and was told that those two innocent old comrades
had already had their windows broken with stones after dark. People thought,
after that, they would leave the village, but they did not. Whoever heard of
old soldiers running away? All that happened was that Tom, who had formerly
spent most of his time indoors, went out more, and that Ben's walk made him
look more than ever as if he had a ram-rod down his back. It was those who had
thrown the stones who slunk round corners when they saw Ben or Tom coming.

But although, until that time, not only out of the main
stream of ideas but unaware of its existence, before the decade was ended the
Candleford Greenites had a Yellow Book of their own in the form of the all-conquering
weekly periodical called
Answers
. Already its green counterpart,
Tit-Bits
,
was taken by almost every family, and the snippets of information culled from
its pages were taken very seriously indeed. Apparently it gave deep satisfaction
to the majority of the younger people to know how many years of an average life
were spent in bed and how many months of his life a man spent shaving and a
woman doing her hair. 'If all the sausages eaten at breakfast in this country on
one Sunday morning were stretched out singly, end to end, how many miles do you
suppose they would reach?' one neighbour, newly primed, would ask another. Or,
in lighter mood, 'What did the cyclist say to the farmer whose cockerel he had
run over?' and, only too often, the answer came pat, for the neighbour had just
read his copy of
Tit-Bits
. The title of
Tit-Bits
furnished a
catchword which could always be used with effect when an unfamiliar taste was
discovered or an unfamiliar opinion expressed. Then 'Don't try to be funny.
We've read about you in
Tit-Bits
!' said scathingly was, in the slang of
the day, 'absolutely the last word'.

The girls Laura saw most of at that time were tradesmen's
daughters, living at home, employed only in keeping their fathers' business
books or in helping their mothers with the lighter housework. These were known as
the 'home birds'; others belonging to the same families were away from home,
earning their own living as shop assistants in one of the big London stores, or
as school-teachers or nursery governesses. One was in training as a nursing
probationer in a London hospital and another was book-keeper and receptionist
at a boarding-house. Tradesmen's daughters no longer went into domestic
service, unless one, after an apprenticeship to dressmaking and a second
apprenticeship to hairdressing, became a lady's maid. Nor did they associate
much with the domestic staffs in the big houses, and this not because of
snobbishness, but because their lives and interests ran along different lines.
The village social system in which the first footman is paired off with the grocer's
daughter and the second footman with the postoffice girl as a matter of etiquette
belongs to the world of fiction.

The home birds were not all of them content with light
household duties and, for pleasure, the choir practices and tea-drinkings and
village concerts their mothers in their time had found sufficient amusement. A few
of the boldest among them were already beginning to talk about their right to
live their own lives as they wished. According to them, their parents'
old-fashioned ideas were their main obstacle. 'Pa's so old-fashioned. You'd
think he had been born in the year dot,' these would say. 'And Mama's not much
better. She'd like us to talk prunes and prisms and be indoors by ten o'clock
and never so much as look at a fellow before he had shown her a certificate of
good character.' Far from feeling under any obligation to those who had brought
them up and, as Laura in her inexperience thought, been so generous to them,
they seemed to think their parents existed chiefly to give them whatever they happened
to wish for most at the moment—one of the new safety bicycles, or a sealskin
coat, or an outing to London. The parents, on their side, preached circumspect
behaviour, obedience, and gratitude as a daughter's first duties, and many
clashes ensued.

'I didn't ask to be born, did I?' one girl reported herself
as saying to her father, and his retort, 'No; and if you had you wouldn't have
been if I had known as much about you as I do now,' was repeated by her as an instance
of the ignorance and brutality with which she had to contend.

'Straining at the leash, I am. Straining at the leash,' said
Alma dramatically when telling the story to Laura, and Laura, looking round the
pretty bedroom and at the new summer outfit, complete with white kid gloves and
a parasol, laid out on the bed for her admiring inspection, thought that, at
least, the leash was a handsome one. But she did not say so, for even she,
brought up in a harder school, could understand that it must be annoying to be
treated as a child at twenty, and to be forbidden to do this or do that because
it was 'not the thing', and have to depend for every little thing on a parent's
generosity.

But the rebellious daughter was the exception. Most of the
girls Laura knew were contented with their lot. They enjoyed helping in the
house and making Mama bring it up to date and giving tea-parties and playing the
piano. Some of these were of the type then called 'sunbeams in the home': good,
affectionate, home-loving girls, obviously created for marriage, and most of them
did marry and, there can be no doubt, made excellent wives for their own male
counterparts.

Laura cannot be said to have been really popular with any of
them. Her Candleford town connections vouched for her to some extent, but her
own personal antecedents were too humble and her dress and accomplishments fell
too short of their own standards for her to rank entirely as one of themselves.
Perhaps she was most valued by them as the possessor of a ready ear for
confidences and for what they called 'repartee'—a light, bantering form of
conversation then much in fashion. But Laura enjoyed their company, and it was
good for her. She no longer looked, as the neighbours at home had sometimes
said, as if she had all the weight of the world on her shoulders.

Those were the days of Miss Lotty Collins's all-conquering
dance and song, 'Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay!' and the words and tune swept the countryside
like an epidemic. The air that summer was alive with its strains. Ploughmen
bawled it at the plough-tail, harvesters sang it in the harvest field, workmen
in villages painted the outside of houses to its measure, errand boys whistled
it and schoolchildren yelled it. Even housewives caught the infection and would
attempt a tired little imitation of the high kick as they turned from the
clothes-lines in their gardens singing 'Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay'.

Early in the morning, while dew still roughened the turf of
the green, Laura's friend at the grocer's, dusting the drawing-room, at sight
of the keys of the open piano, would drop her duster, sink down on the music
stool, and from the open window the familiar strain would be wafted:

Such a nice young girl, you see, Just out in Society. Everything
I ought to be. Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay! A blushing bud of innocence, Pa declares a
great expense.

The old maids say I have no sense, But the boys agree I'm
just immense, Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay! Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay!

Then the madness would seize her and she would pirouette
about the room and come down with such weight from the high kick that her father,
honest tradesman, would call urgently to her from the foot of the stairs to
remember the drawing-room was immediately over the shop and customers might
come in any moment. But, even he, having worked off his annoyance, would go
back to his books or his scales humming between his teeth the prevailing tune.

During the day, when the master's back was turned and the
shop for the moment was clear of customers, the young men behind the counter
would gather up their white aprons in their hands and kick and dance a parody. Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay!
Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay! Were there such things as death and want and grief and
misery in that world? If so, youth possessed a charm to banish them from its
thoughts in 'Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay'.

It would seem that the silly, light-hearted words of the song
fitted the tune to perfection; but they were often 'improved' upon. One
version, sung by lounging youths beneath the chestnut tree on the green,
perhaps nearer the end of the long run of the song, went:

Lotty Collins has no drawers. Will you kindly lend her yours?
She is going far away To sing Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay!

But that was sung with the intention of annoying any girl who
might happen to be passing. And she would be annoyed. Shocked, too, to hear such
an intimate undergarment mentioned in public, and little think that the
garment, under that name at least, would pass with the song.

Laura enjoyed life at Candleford Green. In summer the sun
seemed to shine perpetually and the winter flew past before she had done half
the things she had saved for the long evenings. She was young and she had gay
new friends and nicer clothes than she had ever had before and was growing up
and could kick as high as anybody to the tune of 'Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay!'

But something within her remained unsatisfied. She had her
hours of freedom. Every other Sunday, if Miss Lane could spare her, which was
not always, she would dress with care and walk into Candleford town for tea with
her relatives. She was welcomed warmly, and the hours she spent with her favourite
uncle and aunt were pleasant hours, even though her cousins of her own age were
away. She enjoyed the Candleford Green village entertainments and the laughing,
high-spirited company of her village friends, and Miss Lane's garden was lovely
and green and secluded and she spent many happy hours there. But none of these pleasures
seemed entirely to satisfy her. She missed—missed badly and even pined for—her
old freedom of the fields.

Candleford Green was but a small village and there were
fields and meadows and woods all around it. As soon as Laura crossed the
doorstep, she could see some of these. But mere seeing from a distance did not satisfy
her; she longed to go alone far into the fields and hear the birds singing, the
brooks tinkling, and the wind rustling through the corn, as she had when a
child. To smell things and touch things, warm earth and flowers and grasses,
and to stand and gaze where no one could see her, drinking it all in.

She never spoke of this longing to any one. She accused
herself of discontent and told herself, 'You can't have everything,' but the craving
remained until, unexpectedly, it was gratified in fullest measure and in a way
which seemed to her to be wholly delightful, though, on this latter point, very
few of those she knew were inclined to agree.

One cold winter morning, when snow was on the ground and the
ponds were iced over, Laura, in mittens and a scarf, was sorting the early
morning mail and wishing that Zillah would hurry with the cup of tea she
usually brought her at that time. The hanging oil lamp above her head had scarcely
had time to thaw the atmosphere, and the one uniformed postman at a side bench,
sorting his letters for delivery, stopped to thump his chest with his arms and
exclaim that he'd be jiggered, but it was a fact that on such mornings as this
there was bound to be a letter for every house, even for those which did not
have one once in a blue moon. 'Does it on purpose, I s'pose,' he grumbled.

The two women letter-carriers, who had more reason than he to
complain, for his round was mostly by road and theirs were cross-country,
worked quietly at their bench. The elder, Mrs. Gubbins, had got herself up to face
the weather by tying a red knitted shawl over her head and wearing the bottoms
of a man's corduroy trouser-legs as gaiters. Mrs. Macey had brought out an old,
moth-eaten fur tippet which smelt strongly of camphor. As the daylight
increased, the window became a steely grey square with wads of snow at the
corners of the panes. From beyond it came the crunching sound of cart-wheels on
frozen snow. Laura turned back her mittens and rubbed her chilblains.

Then, suddenly, the everyday dullness of work before
breakfast was pierced by a low cry of distress from the younger postwoman. She
had an open letter in her hand and evidently it contained bad news, but all she
would say in answer to sympathetic inquiries was: 'I must go. I must go at
once. Now, immediately.' Go at once? Go where? And why? How could she go
anywhere but on her round? Or leave her letters half-sorted? were the shocked
questions the eyes of the other three asked each other. When Laura suggested
calling Miss Lane, Mrs. Macey exclaimed: 'No, don't call her here, please. I
must see her alone and in private. And I shan't be able to take out the letters
this morning. Oh, dear! Oh, dear! What's to be done?'