Lark Rise to Candleford (79 page)

The verdict of others varied. The old order had changed and,
in changing, had gone somewhat ahead of the times in the depth of the country.
Some complained that his 'Hail fellow, well met!' attitude to everybody annoyed
them. All men were brothers in church, of course, but outside they thought a
clergyman ought to 'hold on to his dignity'. 'Look at poor old Mr. Coulsdon! He
was a gentleman, if ever there was one!' Others liked Mr. Delafield because he
was 'not proud and stuck up', like some parsons they could name. By the
majority, judgement was suspended. 'You've got to summer and winter a man
before you can pretend to know him' was an old country maxim much quoted at
that time. On one point all churchgoers agreed; the new Vicar was a good
preacher. He had a surprisingly deep, rich voice for one of his boyish
appearance, and he used this to advantage in the pulpit.

Pride was certainly not one of Mr. Delafield's failings. He
had a charming way of relieving any old woman he met of any burden she was carrying.
Once Laura saw him crossing the green with a faggot of sticks on his shoulder,
and, on another occasion, he helped to carry home a clothes-basket of washing.

On leaving the Post Office, he would vault over the railings
of the green to bowl for small boys playing cricket with an old tin for wicket.
But that was in his early days; before he had been there long, Candleford Green
cricket was put upon a proper footing, with an eleven of young men and practice
nights for boys. On Saturday afternoons in summer he himself played with the
eleven, and soon other local teams were challenged and the white flannels of
such players as possessed them enlivened the pleasant, summery scene on the
greensward.

Before long he had got together a club for boys which met in
the schoolroom on winter evenings. The noise the boys made, said those who lived
near, made life pretty well unbearable; but the boys' parents were pleased to
have them kept out of mischief, and those who lived near their former winter
evening haunts were not sorry. Then a timely Confirmation ceremony brought
together the nucleus of a Girls' Guild which had its headquarters in the now
disused servants' hall at the vicarage. Mrs. Delafield was Lady President of
this, but as she had two children and kept but one young maid in a house where
there had formerly been four, she had little time for the supervision of the
weekly meetings, and help had to be obtained from the ladies of the congregation.
The Pratts,
Miss
Ruby and
Miss
Pearl, as the Vicar and his wife
were careful to insist upon when naming them to the girls, saw and seized here
their opportunity, and soon what they did not know about the vicarage household
could easily, as people said, have been written on a threepenny bit.

The Delafields were poor. Soon after their arrival they gave
out that, as the living was but a poor one and they had no private means, the charities
of the former Vicar would have to be discontinued. 'I know myself what it is to
be poor,' the Vicar would say frankly when sympathizing with one of the
cottagers, and, although his hearer might smile incredulously as she mentally
compared his idea of poverty with her own, his frankness would please her.

After a time, the tradesmen hinted that the new vicarage
family was long-winded in paying its bills. 'But,' they would add, 'so far
they've always paid up in the end, and they don't go running to another shop with
their bit of ready money as soon as they owe you a few pounds, and they aren't
extravagant,' which, from a shopkeeper's point of view, was not altogether a
bad character to give a customer.

The Delafields had a succession of untrained young maids, of
whom they expected trained service, and, in consequence, they were as often without
a maid as with one. And they fared little better with the women brought in 'to
oblige'. One excellent charwoman in her own line of washing and scrubbing was
so taken aback on her first appearance at the vicarage by having a written list
of the dishes she was expected to cook for dinner thrust into her hand that she
seized her coarse apron and basket and bolted.

But what struck the Miss Pratts more than the scrappy meals
and undusted rooms at the vicarage was what they called Mrs. Delafield's 'singularity'.
Her style of dress was what Miss Ruby called 'arty'. She wore long, loose
frocks, usually terracotta or sage green, which trailed on the floor behind her
and had low necks which exposed the throat when other women were whaleboned up
to the ears.

For church on Sundays the Delafield children wore white kid
slippers and openwork socks, but at all other times they ran about barefoot,
which shocked the villagers and could not have been very comfortable for themselves,
although they appeared to enjoy scrabbling with their toes in the dust or
taking impressions of their own footprints in mud. Their ordinary everyday
dress was a short brown holland smock, elaborately embroidered, which for
comfort and beauty would have compared favourably with the more formal attire
of other children of their class had it not invariably been grubby.

'Those awful children!' some people called them, but to
others their intelligence and good looks made up for their lack of manners.
And, 'Thank heaven,' somebody said, 'we ain't expected to "Miss"
them!' It was something of a privilege to be able to say 'Elaine' or 'Olivia'
when speaking to or of them, at a time when other quality children were 'Master'
or 'Miss' in their cradles. The village had taken its lead in this matter from
the Vicar, who always spoke to them of his children by their plain Christian
names. Other parents added the prefix, often emphasizing it. One child Laura
knew who, being the youngest of her family, retained the name and status of
baby while a toddler, was spoken of by her parents to the servants and estate
workers as 'Miss Baby'.

The change at the vicarage did as much as anything to hasten
the decline of the old servile attitude of the poorer villagers. With all his failings,
or what they considered failings, Mr. Delafield did at least meet them on a
purely human footing and speak to them as one man to another, not as one
bending down from a pedestal. The country gentlemen around still loomed larger
than life-size upon their horizon, but the Vicar lived amongst them, they saw
him and spoke to him daily, and his example and influence were greater. Some
still sighed for the fleshpots and blankets of the old régime, others regretted
its passing from love of the stately old order, but a far larger number
rejoiced, if insensibly, in the new democratic atmosphere of parochial life.
The parish was soon to be proud of its Vicar.

From the first Mr. Delafield's sermons had been praised by
his congregation. 'Keeps you awake, he do', said some who had formerly been in
the habit of nodding in sermon time. Their duty towards their neighbour and the
importance of honesty and truthfulness had been topics too familiar to keep
their eyes open, but when a sermon began: 'The other day I heard a man in this
parish say——' or 'You may have read in your newspapers last week——' they sat up
and listened.

Quite often the thing heard or read was amusing, and,
although, of course, there could be no laughter in church, a slight stir of
smiling appreciation would lighten the atmosphere and prepare the congregation to
settle down happily to listen to the lesson or moral to be drawn. It was never
a severe one. Hell was never mentioned, nor, for the matter of that, heaven,
and earth was depicted as not as bad a place, after all, if people bore one
another's burdens and pulled together. If, sometimes, the deep, melodious voice
in the pulpit preached repentance, it was not so much repentance of the sins
common in country villages as those of the world in general. No one present
could ever feel hurt or offended by anything he said in his sermons. Indeed, a
member of his congregation was heard to say in the churchyard one Sunday
morning: 'A sermon like that makes you feel two inches taller.'

Those comfortable words, that eloquent voice, and the telling
pauses when, leaning far over the edge of his pulpit, he searched the faces and
seemed to look into the very hearts of his congregation, soon won for him the
reputation of being the best preacher in the neighbourhood—some said in the
county. People from surrounding parishes and even from Candleford town itself
were soon coming to hear him preach. On summer Sunday evenings the church was
often so well filled that latecomers had to stand in the aisle. Even Miss Lane,
who was not a frequent churchgoer, attended a service. Back at home her only
comment was: 'All very pleasant! But pass me my Darwin, please. Like the birds,
I need a little grit in my food.' But the lack of enthusiasm shown by one
crusty old woman was but as a grain of sand on the seashore compared to the rising
tide of the new Vicar's popularity as a preacher, which reached its highwater
mark on Harvest Thanksgiving Sunday, when the
Candleford News
sent a
reporter to take down the Vicar's sermon verbatim. Copies of the issue
containing the sermon were bought in great numbers to be posted to sons and
daughters in London, in the North of England, or out in the Colonies. 'Just to
show them,' their parents said, 'that Candleford Green's no longer the poor
little stick-in-the-mud spot they may be thinking.'

As Mr. Delafield's popularity as a preacher increased and
brought renown to the village, his small unconventionalities were accepted as
the little, amusing, lovable peculiarities of genius. His wife had no longer difficulties
with her maids and charwomen, for an elderly farmer's daughter proposed herself
and was accepted as mother's help. By the time Laura left Candleford Green, the
ladies of the congregation were almost fighting over decorating the church and
the turns they had agreed to take at relieving Mrs. Delafield of the family
mending. So many pairs of carpet slippers were worked for Mr. Delafield that
only a centipede could have worn out all of them, and Elaine and Olivia were so
frequently asked out to tea, and so feasted when there, that, had they not been
sent away to a boarding school, their digestions would have been ruined. By his
poorer parishioners, though not perhaps as respected as Mr. Coulsdon had been,
the new Vicar was more beloved, because more human.

Mr. Delafield's cure of souls at Candleford Green was but
brief. A year or two after Laura had left there she was told in a letter that
he had accepted a London living and was to hold a special service in his new church
for the Candleford Green Mothers' Meeting on its annual outing. But he left his
mark on the village, not only by the spiritual comfort he had been able to
bring to many, but also by breaking down prejudices.

Then, about that time, came a rise in wages. Agricultural
workers were given fifteen instead of ten or twelve shillings a week, and
skilled craftsmen were paid an agreed rate per hour, instead of the former weekly
wage irrespective of the time put in, and although at the same time prices were
rising, they had not as yet risen in proportion. The Boer War, when it came,
sent prices soaring, but that was still several years in the future.

Meanwhile, Queen Victoria had her Diamond Jubilee and 'Peace
and Plenty' was the country's watchword. Rural councils were established and
some of the progressive Candleford Green villagers were able to voice their improvement
schemes and to get a few of them carried out. There were rumours of
scholarships for village schoolchildren; the County Council sent a cookery
expert to lecture in the schoolroom; and there were evening classes, no longer
called 'night school', for the older boys. Housing was still left to private
enterprise, but the demand for more modern homes did not go unregarded.

When one of the Candleford Green villagers had a stroke of
good luck in the way of a better job or higher wages, his wife's reaction to
the good news would usually be to exclaim: 'Now we can go to live in one of the
villas!' Sometimes her ambition was realized and they exchanged their old,
inconvenient, though thick-walled and warm old cottage with its large, fertile
garden for one of a row of small houses on the newly-opened building estate on
the Candleford Road.

The new house might prove to be damp and draughty, for the
walls were thin and the woodwork ill-fitted, and the garden at the back of the house,
formerly part of a damp, tussocky meadow, left in the rough by the builder,
would certainly turn out what her husband would call 'a heartache'; but, as
compensation, she would enjoy the distinction conferred by owning a smart front
door with a brass knocker, a bay window in the parlour, and water laid on to
the kitchen sink. Plus the
éclat
of living in one of the villas.

Although the speculative builder had left the making of the
back garden to his tenant, he had finished the small plot in front by laying a
few feet of turf round a small centre flower bed. Ornate iron railings enclosed
this small space and a red-and-blue-tiled path led up to the front door.
Outside, at the edge of the sidewalk, young trees had been planted, of which
some had already died and others were pining, but, lining the favourite and
most built-up road, a sufficient number survived to give colour to its name of
Chestnut Avenue.

In Laura's time, a few of the villas were occupied by
ambitious Candleford Green families which had migrated; more had been taken by clerks
and shopmen from Candleford town who fancied a country life or wished to reduce
their rent. Six shillings a week for a five-roomed villa was certainly not
excessive, but no doubt it repaid the builder-owner well enough for his outlay.
Laura's uncle, who was also a builder in Candleford, declared that the villas
were run up of old oddments of second-hand stuff, without proper foundations,
and that the first high wind would blow half of them down; but his pessimism
may have been due to professional rivalry, though, to do him justice, it must
be said that he spoke the truth when he frowned and shook his head and declared:
'Never touch a cheap job. Not my line.'