Lark Rise to Candleford (62 page)

For some time Laura hoped one of the Miss Rapleys would
marry; but neither of them showed the least disposition to oblige her in that manner,
and gradually her hopes of a Candleford vacancy faded. And no other offered
which it was possible for her to accept. This is no success story. She remained
what was officially known as an assistant throughout her brief official career.
But there were compensations, which might not have appealed to everybody, but
appealed to her.

The telegraph instrument had been installed in the parlour,
where its scientific-looking white dials and brass trimmings looked strikingly modern
against Miss Lane's old rosewood and mahogany furniture. It was what was known
as the 'ABC' type of instrument, now long superseded even in such small offices
by the telephone. But it served very well in its day, being easy to learn and
reliable in working. Larger and busier offices had Sounder and Single Needle
instruments, worked by the Morse code and read by sound. The ABC was read by
sight. A handle, like that of a coffee mill, guided a pointer from letter to
letter on a dial which had the alphabet printed around it, clockwise, and this
came out and was read on a smaller dial at the other end of the circuit.
Surrounding the operating dial were brass studs, or keys, one for each letter,
and the operator, turning the handle with one hand, depressed the keys with the
fingers of the other, and by so doing spelt out the words of a telegram. A
smaller dial above, known as the 'receiver', recorded incoming messages.

For a few days Laura, with a book propped open before her to supply
the words, practised sending. Round and round went the handle and
blick,
blick, blick
, went the keys, slowly and jerkily at first, then more smoothly
and quickly. Sometimes a bell attached to the instrument would ring and a real
telegram come through, which Miss Lane would take off while Laura tried hard to
follow the pointer on the smaller, upper dial. It whirled round so madly that
she feared her eyes would never be able to follow it, but, gradually, they
became accustomed to note its brief pauses and in about a week she was able to
take charge of the simple apparatus.

How to get the telegrams delivered promptly was one of Miss
Lane's problems. A girl named Minnie, who lived in one of the cottages near, could
usually be depended upon to do this if she happened to be at home; but although
there were only about a dozen incoming telegrams a day on the average, they
were apt to come in rushes with long intervals between, and often Minnie had
barely had time to get out of hailing distance before another telegram arrived.
Then there was running to and fro to find another messenger, or Zillah or the
apprentice from the blacksmith's shop would be pressed into the service.
Neither of these went willingly, and often they could ill be spared from their
work, but it was a strict rule of the establishment that no telegram must be delayed.
Another worrying thing about the delivery of telegrams was that even when two
came fairly close together they were bound to be for addresses in opposite
directions. Many were for farms or for country houses two or even three miles
distant, and Minnie trailed many miles about the countryside in a day.

Trailing is the only way to describe her method of progress,
for she had an apparently slow, languid walk, which was, in fact, deceptive, as
she managed to cover long distances and usually be back to time. She was a pretty,
doll-faced country girl of fifteen, with wide, rather vacant-looking blue eyes
and a great love of finery. She usually appeared at the office in a very clean,
if sometimes old, print frock and a flower-wreathed hat. One very hot day in a
very hot summer, Miss Lane brought forth from her hoard an old white silk parasol
with a deep cream lace frill and presented it to Minnie. Her face as she went
off beneath it to deliver her telegram wore an expression Laura never forgot.
It was one of utter felicity.

Miss Lane's parlour door opened out into the public portion
of the office and it sometimes happened that after attending to the telegraph instrument
Laura found herself cut off from the inner side of the counter by what appeared
to be a private and confidential conversation between Miss Lane and a customer.
Then she would close the door softly and go straight to the bookcase. A few
books, such as
Cooking and Household Management
,
The Complete Farrier
,
and Dr. Johnson's
Dictionary
, were kept on one of the kitchen
window-seats, but all the best books were kept behind glass doors above the
bureau in the parlour. When one of these was lent to Laura, it had first to be
fitted with a brown-paper jacket, for Miss Lane was very particular about her
books, most of which had belonged to her father.

The collection was an unusual one to be found in a
tradesman's parlour at that time; but her father had been an unusual man, a
lover of poetry, especially of Shakespeare, and a student of history and
astronomy.

There were
The Works of William Shakespeare
in two
large, flat volumes, and Hume's
History of England
in at least a dozen
small fat ones, Scott's
Poetical Works
and a number of the Waverley
Novels, Cowper's poems and Campbell's and Gray's, Thomson's
Seasons
and
many other such books. Any of these, she was told, she might borrow; with one exception.
That was Byron's
Don Juan
, a terrible book, she was told, and most unfit
for her reading. 'I don't know why I haven't destroyed it long ago,' said Miss
Lane. 'Next time there's a bonfire in the garden, I must see about it.'

Laura knew she ought to be, and was, ashamed of herself when,
at every opportunity, she stood before the bookcase with goggling eyes and many
a guilty glance at the door, devouring another half-canto of
Don Juan
. She
slipped the book into her pocket one night and took it to read in bed and
narrowly escaped detection when Miss Lane came suddenly into her room to give
some instruction about the next morning's mail. She saved herself by tucking
the book down into the bed beside her, but the feel of its sharp edges against
her side made her so incoherent that Miss Lane glanced round suspiciously. 'No
reading in bed, now,' she said. 'You've got no need to wear out your eyesight,
and I'm sure I don't fancy being burnt to death in my sleep.' And Laura replied
in a small, meek voice, 'No, Miss Lane.'

But she went on reading. She could not help it. How
fascinating the book was! She felt she simply had to know what came next, and
the blue skies and seas of those foreign shores and the seaside caves and
golden sands and the wit of the author and the felicity of his language and the
dexterity of his rhymes enchanted her. She was shocked by some of the hero's
adventures, but more often thrilled. Laura learned quite a lot by reading
Don
Juan
.

When she had finished eating that forbidden fruit, she turned
to Shakespeare. Miss Lane said Shakespeare was the greatest poet who ever lived
and vowed that when she had time she would re-read every one of the plays
herself. But she never did. She had read them all at some time, probably to
please her father, and still remembered the stories and a few lines here and
there of the poetry. Sometimes, when she was in a good mood, Laura would begin:
'Good morrow, Father,' and she would reply, 'Benedicite. What early tongue so
sweet saluteth me?' and go on being the Friar to Laura's Romeo. But much more
often, in their off-duty hours, she was deep in
The Origin of Species
,
or one of the hooks on human psychology she had bought at a doctor's sale of
furniture. Such books as those and the leading articles in
The Times
were the kind of reading she liked. But, because of her father, she could
understand Laura's love of quite other literature.

When Laura had read most of the parlour books, Miss Lane
suggested that, as she was fond of reading, she should take out a library
ticket at the Mechanics' Institute in Candleford town. Laura took out the
ticket and, within a year, she had read and laughed and cried over the works of
Charles Dickens, read such of the Waverley Novels as had not before come her
way, and made the acquaintance of many other writers hitherto unknown to her.
Barchester
Towers
and
Pride and Prejudice
gave her a taste for the work of
Trollope and Jane Austen which was to be a precious possession for life.

The caretaker at the Institute acted as librarian during the
day. He was a one-legged man named Hussey, and his manners and qualifications
bore no resemblance to those of librarians to-day. He seemed to bear a positive
grudge against frequent borrowers. 'Carn't y'make up y'r mind?' he would growl
at some lingerer at the shelves. 'Te-ak th' first one y'comes to. It won't be
no fuller o' lies than tothers,' and, if that admonition failed, he would bring
his broom and sweep close around the borrower's feet, not sparing toes or
heels. Laura sometimes wondered if his surname was inherited from some virago
of a maternal ancestor.

But there was no dearth of books. After she left home, Laura
never suffered in that way. Modern writers who speak of the booklessness of the
poor at that time must mean books as possessions; there were always books to
borrow.

In Laura's time Candleford Green was still a village, and, in
spite of its nearness to a small country town which was afterwards to annex it,
the life lived there was still village life. And this, she soon discovered, was
as distinct from that of a hamlet, such as that in which she had been bred, as
the life of a country town was from that of a city.

In the hamlet there lived only one class of people; all did
similar work, all were poor and all equal. The population of Candleford Green was
more varied. It had a clergyman of its own and doctor and independent
gentlewomen who lived in superior cottages with stabling attached, and artisans
and labourers who lived in smaller and poorer ones, though none so small and
poor as those of the hamlet. Then there were shopkeepers and the schoolmaster
and a master builder and the villa people who lived on the new building estate
outside the village, most of whom worked in Candleford town, a couple of miles
away. The village was a little world in itself; the hamlet was but a segment.

In the large country houses around lived squires and baronets
and lords who employed armies of indoor servants, gardeners, and estate
workers. The village was their village, too: they attended its church,
patronized its shops, and had influence upon its affairs. Their ladies might be
seen, in mellow tweeds and squashed hats, going in and out of the shops in the
morning, or bringing flowers with which to decorate the church for some
festival, or popping into the village school to see that all was going on there
as they thought it should be. In the afternoon the same ladies in silks and
satins and huge feather boas would pass through the village in their carriages,
smiling and bowing to all they met, for it was part of their duty, as they
conceived it, to know every inhabitant. Some of the older village women still
curtsied in acknowledgement, but that pretty, old-fashioned if somewhat servile
custom was declining, and with the younger, or more enlightened, or slightly
higher socially, smiles and a jerk of the head by way of a bow had become the
usual response.

Every member of the community knew his or her place and few
wished to change it. The poor, of course, wished for higher wages, the
shopkeepers for larger shops and quicker turnovers, and the rich may have
wished for higher rank and more extensive estates, but few wished to overstep
the boundaries of class. Those at the top had no reason to wish for change and
by others the social order was so generally accepted that there was no sense of
injustice.

If the squire and his lady were charitable to the poor,
affable to the tradesmen, and generous when writing out a cheque for some local
improvement, they were supposed to have justified the existence of their class.
If the shopkeeper gave good value and weight and reasonable credit in hard
times, and the skilled workman had served his apprenticeship and turned out
good work, no one grudged them their profits or higher wages. As to the labouring
class, that was the most conservative of all. 'I know my place and I keep it,'
some man or woman would say with a touch of pride in the voice, and if one of
the younger and more spirited among them had ambition, those of their own
family would often be the first to ridicule and discourage them.

The edifice of society as it then stood, apparently sound but
already undermined, had served its purpose in the past. It could not survive in
a changing world where machines were already doing what had been men's work and
what had formerly been the luxuries of the few were becoming necessities of the
many; but in its old age it had some pleasant aspects and not everything about
it was despicable.

Along one side of the large oblong stretch of greensward
which gave the village its name ran the road into Candleford town, a pleasant
two miles, with its raised footpath and shady avenue of beech trees. Facing the
road and the green on that side, shops and houses and garden walls were strung
closely enough together to form a one-sided street. This was known as 'the best
side of the green' and many who lived there complained of the Post Office
having been established on the opposite, quieter side 'so out of the way and
ill-convenient'. The Post Office side of the green was known as 'the dull
side', but Miss Lane did not find it dull, for, from the vantage point of her
windows, she had a good view of the more populous road and of all that was
going on there.

The quieter road had only the Post Office and the smithy and
one tall old red-brick Georgian farmhouse where, judging by its size and appearance,
people of importance must once have lived, but where then only an old cowman
and his wife occupied one corner. The windows of their rooms had white lace
curtains and pot plants; the other windows stared blankly in long rows out on
the green. Rumour said that on certain nights of the year ghostly lights might
be seen passing from window to window of the upper storey, for the house was
supposed to be haunted, as all unoccupied or partly occupied large houses were
supposed to be at that date. But old Cowman Jollife and his wife laughed at these
stories and declared that they were too cosy in their own rooms on winter
nights to go looking for ghosts in the attics. 'Us knows when we be well off,'
John would say, 'wi' three good rooms rent-free, an' milk an' taties found; we
ain't such fools as to go ferritin' round for that which might fritten us
away!'