Lark Rise to Candleford (38 page)

One who had helped a neighbour to solve some knotty problem
would quote the old proverb: 'Two heads be better n'r one,' and the other would
retort, 'That's why fools get married,' or, if materially minded, 'Aye,
specially if 'um be sheep's heads.' A proverb always had to be capped. No one
could say, 'There's more ways of killing a dog than hanging it' without being
reminded, 'nor of choking it with a pound of fresh butter', and any reference
to money as the root of all evil would be followed by, 'Same time, I 'udn't say
no to anybody as offered me a slip off that root.'

The discussion of their own and their neighbours' affairs
took the place occupied by books and films in the modern outlook. Nothing of
outside importance ever happened there and their lives were as unlike as
possible the modern conception of country life, for Lark Rise was neither a
little hotbed of vice nor a garden of all the Arcadian virtues. But the lives
of all human beings, however narrow, have room for complications for themselves
and entertainment for the onlooker, and many a satisfying little drama was
played out on that ten-foot stage.

In their daily life they had none of the conveniences now
looked upon as necessities: no water nearer than the communal well, no
sanitation beyond the garden closet, and no light but candles and paraffin
lamps. It was a hard life, but the hamlet folks did not pity themselves. They
kept their pity for those they thought really poor.

The children brought home from the Sunday School Lending
Library books about the London slums which their mothers also read. This was
then a favourite subject with writers of that class of fiction; their object
apparently being not so much to arouse indignation at the terrible conditions
as to provide a striking background for some ministering lady or child. Many
tears were shed in the hamlet over
Christie's Old Organ
and
Froggy's
Little Brother
, and everybody wished they could have brought those poor
neglected slum children there and shared with them the best they had of
everything. 'Poor little mite. If we could have got him here, he could have
slept with our young Sammy and this air'd have set him up in no time,' one
woman said of Froggy's poor dying little brother, forgetting that he was, as
she would have said at another time, 'just somebody in a book'.

But, saddening as it was to read about the poor things, it
was also enjoyable, for it gave one a cheering sense of superiority. Thank God,
the reader had a whole house to herself with an upstairs and downstairs and did
not have to 'pig it' in one room; and real beds, and clean ones, not bundles of
rags in corners, to sleep on.

To them, as to the two children learning to live among them,
the hamlet life was the normal life. On one side of that norm were the real
poor, living in slums, and, on the other, 'the gentry'. They recognized no
other division of classes; although, of course, they knew there were a few
'bettermost people' between. The visiting clergyman and that kind friend of
them all, the doctor in the market town, had more money and better houses than
theirs, and though they were both 'gentlemen born' they did not belong to the
aristocracy inhabiting the great country houses or visiting the hunting boxes
around. But these were, indulgently, 'th' ole parson', and, affectionately,
'our doctor'; they were not thought of as belonging to any particular class of
society.

The gentry flitted across the scene like kingfishers crossing
a flock of hedgerow sparrows. They saw them sweeping through the hamlet in
their carriages, the ladies billowing in silks and satins, with tiny
chenille-fringed parasols held at an angle to protect their complexions. Or
riding to hounds in winter, the men in immaculate pink, the women sitting their
side-saddles with hour-glass figures encased in skin-tight black habits. '
Looks
for all the world as if she'd been melted and poured into it, now don't she?
'
On raw, misty mornings they would trot their horses through on their way to the
Meet, calling to each other in high-pitched voices it was fun to imitate.

Later in the day they would often be seen galloping
full-stretch over the fields and then the men at work there would drop their
tools and climb on the five-barred gates for a better view, or stop their teams
and straighten their backs at the plough-tail to cup their hands to their
mouths and shout: 'Tally-ho: A-gallop, a-gallop, a-lye, a-lye, Tally-ho.'

When the carriages passed through, many of the women would
set down the buckets they were carrying and curtsy, and the boys would pull
their forelocks and the girls bob their knees, as they had been taught to do at
school. This was an awkward moment for Laura, because her father had said,
while he had no objection to Edmund saluting any lady—though he hoped, for
heaven's sake, he would not do it by pulling his own hair, like pulling a
bell-rope—he was determined that no daughter of his should bow the knee,
excepting at 'The Name' in church or to Queen Victoria, if ever she happened to
pass that way. Their mother laughed. 'When at Rome do as the Romans do,' she
said.

'This is not Rome,' their father retorted. 'It's Lark
Rise—the spot God made with the left-overs when He'd finished creating the rest
of the earth.'

At that their mother tossed her head and clicked her tongue
against the roof of her mouth. She had, as she said, no patience with some of
his ideas.

Apart from the occasional carriages and the carrier's cart
twice a week, there was little traffic on that road beyond the baker's van and
the farm carts and wagons. Sometimes a woman from a neighbouring village or
hamlet would pass through on foot, shopping basket on arm, on her way to the
market town. It was thought nothing of then to walk six or seven miles to
purchase a reel of cotton or a packet of tea, or sixpen'orth of pieces from the
butcher to make a meat pudding for Sunday. Excepting the carrier's cart, which
only came on certain days, there was no other way of travelling. It was thought
quite dashing to ride with Old Jimmy, but frightfully extravagant, for the fare
was sixpence. Most people preferred to go on foot and keep the sixpence to
spend when they got there.

But, although it was not yet realized, the revolution in
transport had begun. The first high 'penny-farthing' bicycles were already on
the roads, darting and swerving like swallows heralding the summer of the buses
and cars and motor cycles which were soon to transform country life. But how
fast those new bicycles travelled and how dangerous they looked! Pedestrians
backed almost into the hedges when they met one of them, for was there not
almost every week in the Sunday newspaper the story of some one being knocked
down and killed by a bicycle, and letters from readers saying cyclists ought
not to be allowed to use the roads, which, as everybody knew, were provided for
people to walk on or to drive on behind horses. 'Bicyclists ought to have roads
to themselves, like railway trains' was the general opinion.

Yet it was thrilling to see a man hurtling through space on
one high wheel, with another tiny wheel wobbling helplessly behind. You
wondered how they managed to keep their balance. No wonder they wore an anxious
air. 'Bicyclist's face', the expression was called, and the newspapers foretold
a hunchbacked and tortured-faced future generation as a result of the pastime.

Cycling was looked upon as a passing craze and the cyclists
in their tight navy knickerbocker suits and pillbox caps with the badge of
their club in front were regarded as figures of fun. None of those in the
hamlet who rushed out to their gates to see one pass, half hoping for and half
fearing a spill, would have believed, if they had been told, that in a few
years there would be at least one bicycle in every one of their houses, that
the men would ride to work on them and the younger women, when their housework
was done, would lightly mount 'the old bike' and pedal away to the market town
to see the shops. They would have been still more incredulous had they been
told that many of them would live to see every child of school age in the
hamlet provided by a kind County Council with a bicycle on which they would
ride to school, 'all free, gratis, and for nothing', as they would have said.

In the outer world men were running up tall factory chimneys
and covering the green fields for miles with rows of mean little houses to
house the workers. Towns which were already towns were throwing out roads and
roads of suburban villas. New churches and chapels and railway stations and
schools and public houses were being built to meet the needs of a fast-growing
population. But the hamlet people saw none of these changes. They were far from
the industrial districts and their surroundings remained as they had been from
the time of their birth. No cottage had been added to the little group in the
fields for many years, and, as it turned out, none were to be added for at
least a half century; perhaps never, for the hamlet stands to-day unchanged in
its outward appearance.

Queen Victoria was on the throne. She had been well
established there before either of Laura's parents were born, and it seemed to
her and her brother that she had always been Queen and always would be. But
plenty of elderly people could remember her Coronation and could tell them what
church bells had pealed all day in the different villages and what oxen had
been roasted whole and what bonfires had been lighted at night.

'Our little English rose', the Rector said had then been her
subjects' name for her, and Laura often thought of that when she studied the
portrait which hung, framed and glazed, in the place of honour in many of the
cottages. It was that of a stout, middle-aged, rather cross-looking lady with a
bright blue Garter ribbon across her breast and a crown on her head so tiny
that it made her face look large.

'How does she keep it on?' asked Laura, for it looked as if
the slightest movement would send it toppling.

'Don't you worry about that,' said her mother comfortably,
'she'll manage to keep that on for a good many more years, you'll see'; and she
did, for another twenty.

To the country at large, the Queen was no longer 'Our little
English rose'. She had become 'The Queen-Empress' or 'Victoria the Good, the
mother of her people'. To the hamlet she was 'th' old Queen', or, sometimes
'th' poor old Queen', for was she not a widow? And it was said she was having
none too easy a time with that son of hers, either. But they all agreed she was
a good Queen, and when asked why, would reply, 'Because she's brought the price
of the quartern loaf down' or 'Well, we have got peace under her, haven't we?'

Peace? Of course there was peace. War was something you read
about in books, something rather exciting, if only the poor soldiers had not
had to be killed, but all long ago and far away, something that could not
possibly happen in our time.

But there had been a war not so very long ago, their father
told them. He himself had been born on the day of the Battle of Alma. We had
been fighting the Russians then, a hard and cruel lot who had thought might was
right, but had found themselves mistaken. They couldn't make slaves of a free
people.

Then there was the old man who came round every few months
playing a penny whistle and begging. He was known as 'One-eyed Peg-leg' because
he had lost an eye and part of a leg fighting before Sevastopol. His trouser
leg was cut short at the knee, which was supported by what was then called a
'wooden leg', although it did not resemble a human leg very closely, being but
a plain wooden stump, tapering slightly at the bottom, where it was finished
off by a ferrule. 'Dot and carry one', they called the sound he made when
walking.

Laura once heard old Peg-leg telling a neighbour about the
loss of his living member. After a hit with a cannon-ball he had lain for
twenty-four hours unattended on the battlefield. Then a surgeon had come and,
without more ado, had sawn off the shattered portion. 'And didn't I just
holler,' he said; ''specially when he dipped the stump into a bucket of boiling
tar. That was afore th' nusses come.'

Before the nurses came. Laura knew what that meant, for there
was a picture of Florence Nightingale in a book she had and her mother had read
to her about 'the Lady with the Lamp', whose shadow was kissed by the wounded.

But these rumours of the war in the Crimea did not seem to
the children to bring it any nearer to their own lifetime, and when, later,
they read in their old-fashioned story books of families of good children
helping their mothers to knit and roll bandages for the soldiers in Russia, it
still seemed as unreal as any fairy tale.

The soldiers who had their homes in the hamlet were not
looked upon as fighting men, but as young adventurers who had enlisted as the
only way of seeing the world before they settled down to marriage and the
plough-tail. Judging from their letters, often read aloud to groups at cottage
doors, the only enemies they had to face were sand-storms, mosquitoes, heat
stroke, or ague.

The children's Uncle Edmund's trials were of a different
nature, because he was in Nova Scotia, where noses got frozen. But he, of
course, was in the Royal Engineers, as all the soldiers on their father's side
of the family were, for had they not got a trade in their hands? The family was
a bit snobbish about this. In those simple days a man whose parents had
apprenticed him to a trade was looked upon as established for life. 'Put a
trade in his hands and he'll always be sure of a good living,' people would say
of a promising boy. They had yet to learn the full meaning of such words as
'depression' and 'unemployment'. So it was always the
Royal
Engineers,
even with the mother at the end house. Her own family favoured the Field
Artillery, which, to be sure, was Royal, too, although this was not insisted
upon.