Lark Rise to Candleford (35 page)

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.