Lark Rise to Candleford (31 page)

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.

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.