Lark Rise to Candleford (10 page)

Fordlow might boast of its church, its school, its annual
concert, and its quarterly penny reading, but the hamlet did not envy it these amenities,
for it had its own social centre, warmer, more human, and altogether preferable
in the taproom of the 'Wagon and Horses'.

There the adult male population gathered every evening, to
sip its half-pints, drop by drop, to make them last, and to discuss local events,
wrangle over politics or farming methods, or to sing a few songs 'to oblige'.

It was an innocent gathering. None of them got drunk; they
had not money enough, even with beer, and good beer, at twopence a pint. Yet
the parson preached from the pulpit against it, going so far on one occasion as
to call it a den of iniquity. ''Tis a great pity he can't come an' see what
it's like for his own self,' said one of the older men on the way home from
church. 'Pity he can't mind his own business,' retorted a younger one. While
one of the ancients put in pacifically, 'Well, 'tis his business, come to think
on't. The man's paid to preach, an' he's got to find summat to preach against,
stands to reason.'

Only about half a dozen men held aloof from the circle and
those were either known to 'have religion', or suspected of being 'close wi'
their ha'pence'.

The others went as a matter of course, appropriating their
own special seats on settle or bench. It was as much their home as their own cottages,
and far more homelike than many of them, with its roaring fire, red window
curtains, and well-scoured pewter.

To spend their evenings there was, indeed, as the men argued,
a saving, for, with no man in the house, the fire at home could be let die down
and the rest of the family could go to bed when the room got cold. So the men's
spending money was fixed at a shilling a week, sevenpence for the nightly
half-pint and the balance for other expenses. An ounce of tobacco, Nigger Head brand,
was bought for them by their wives with the groceries.

It was exclusively a men's gathering. Their wives never
accompanied them; though sometimes a woman who had got her family off hand, and
so had a few halfpence to spend on herself, would knock at the back door with a
bottle or jug and perhaps linger a little, herself unseen, to listen to what
was going on within. Children also knocked at the back door to buy candles or
treacle or cheese, for the innkeeper ran a small shop at the back of his premises,
and the children, too, liked to hear what was going on. Indoors, the
innkeeper's children would steal out of bed and sit on the stairs in their nightgowns.
The stairs went up from the taproom, with only the back of the settle between,
and it gave the men a bit of a shock one night when what looked at first sight
like a big white bird came flopping down among them. It was little Florrie, who
had gone to sleep on the stairs and fallen. They nursed her on their knees,
held her feet to the fire, and soon dried her tears, for she was not hurt, only
frightened.

The children heard no bad language beyond an occasional 'b——'
or 'd——', for their mother was greatly respected and the merest hint of anything
stronger was hushed by nudges and whispers of, 'Don't forget Landlady', or
'Mind! 'Ooman present'. Nor were the smutty songs and stories of the fields
ever repeated there; they were kept for their own time and place.

Politics was a favourite topic, for, under the recently
extended franchise, every householder was a voter, and they took their new responsibility
seriously. A mild Liberalism prevailed, a Liberalism that would be regarded as
hide-bound Toryism now, but was daring enough in those days. One man who had
been to work in Northampton proclaimed himself a Radical; but he was cancelled
out by the landlord, who called himself a 'true blue'. With the collaboration
of this Left and Right, questions of the moment were thrashed out and settled
to the satisfaction of the majority.

'Three Acres and a Cow', 'The Secret Ballot', 'The Parnell
Commission and Crime', 'Disestablishment of the Church', were catchwords that
flew about freely. Sometimes a speech by Gladstone, or some other leader would
be read aloud from a newspaper and punctuated by the fervent 'Hear! Hear' of
the company. Or Sam, the man with advanced opinions, would relate with reverent
pride the story of his meeting and shaking hands with Joseph Arch, the
farm-worker's champion. 'Joseph Arch!' he would cry. 'Joseph Arch is the man
for the farm labourer!' and knock on the table and wave aloft his pewter mug,
very carefully, for every drop was precious.

Then the landlord, standing back to the fireplace with legs
astride, would say with the authority of one in his own house, 'It's no good
you chaps think'n you're goin' against the gentry. They've got the land and they've
got the money,
an
' they'll keep it. Where'd
you
be without them
to give you work an' pay your wages, I'd like to know?' and this, as yet, unanswerable
question would cast a chill over the company until some one conjured it away
with the name of Gladstone. Gladstone! The Grand Old Man! The People's William!
Their faith in his power was touching, and all voices would join in singing:

God bless the people's William,

Long may he lead the van

Of Liberty and Freedom,

God bless the Grand Old Man.

But the children, listening, without and within, liked better
the evenings of tale-telling; when, with curdling blood and creeping spine, they
would hear about the turnpike ghost, which, only a mile away from the spot
where they stood, had been seen in the form of a lighted lantern, bobbing up
and down in the path of a solitary wayfarer, the bearer, if any, invisible. And
the man in a neighbouring village who, on his six-mile walk in the dark to
fetch medicine for his sick wife, met a huge black dog with eyes of fire—the
devil, evidently. Or perhaps the talk would turn to the old sheep-stealing days
and the ghost which was said still to haunt the spot where the gibbet had
stood; or the lady dressed in white and riding a white horse, but minus her
head, who, every night as the clock struck twelve, rode over a bridge on the
way to the market town.

One cold winter night, as this tale was being told, the
doctor, an old man of eighty, who still attended the sick in the villages for
miles around, stopped his dogcart at the inn gate and came in for hot brandy and
water.

'You, sir, now,' said one of the men. 'You've been over Lady
Bridge at midnight many's the time, I'll warrant. Can you say as you've ever
seen anything?'

The doctor shook his head. 'No,' he replied, 'I can't say
that I have. But,' and he paused to weigh his words, 'well, it's rather a
curious thing. During the fifty years I've been amongst you I've had many horses,
as you know, and not one of them have I got over that bridge at night without
urging. Whether they can see more than we can see, of course, I don't know; but
there it is for what it is worth. Good night, men.'

In addition to these public and well-known ghost stories,
there were family tales of death warnings, or of a father, mother, or wife who
had appeared after death to warn, counsel, or accuse. But it was all entertainment;
nobody really believed in ghosts, though few would have chosen to go at night
to haunted spots, and it all ended in: 'Well, well, if the livin' don't hurt
us, the dead can't. The good wouldn't want to come back, an' the bad wouldn't
be let to.'

The newspapers furnished other tales of dread. Jack the
Ripper was stalking the streets of East London by night, and one poor wretched woman
after another was found murdered and butchered. These crimes were discussed for
hours together in the hamlet and everybody had some theory as to the identity
and motive of the elusive murderer. To the children the name was indeed one of
dread and the cause of much anguished sleeplessness. Father might be hammering
away in the shed and Mother quietly busy with her sewing downstairs; but the
Ripper! the Ripper! he might be nearer still, for he might have crept in during
the day and be hiding in the cupboard on the landing!

One curious tale had to do with natural phenomena. Some years
before, the people in the hamlet had seen a regiment of soldiers marching in
the sky, all complete with drum and fife band. Upon inquiry it had been found
that such a regiment had been passing at the time along a road near Bicester,
six miles away, and it was concluded that the apparition in the sky must have
been a freak reflection.

Some of the tales related practical jokes, often cruel ones,
for even in the 'eighties the sense of humour there was not over-refined, and
it had, in past times, been cruder still. It was still the practice there to
annoy certain people by shouting after them a nickname or a catchword, and one
old and very harmless woman was known as 'Thick and thin'. One winter night,
years before, when the snowdrifts were knee-high and it was still snowing, a
party of thoughtless youths had knocked at her cottage door and got her and her
husband out of bed by telling them that their daughter, married and living three
miles away, was brought to bed and had sent for her mother.

The old couple huddled on all the clothes they possessed,
lighted their lantern, and set out, the practical jokers shadowing them. They struggled
through the snowdrifts for some distance, but the road was all but impassable,
and the old man was for turning back. Not so the mother. Determined to reach
her child in her hour of need, she struggled onward, encouraging her husband
the while by coaxing, 'Come on John. Through thick and thin!' and 'Thick and
thin' she was ever after.

But tastes were changing, if slowly, by the 'eighties, and
such a story, though it might be still current, no longer produced the loud
guffaws it had formerly done. A few sniggers, perhaps, then silence; or 'I
calls it a shame, sarvin' poor old people like that. Now let's have a song to te-ake
the taste of it out of our mouths.'

All times are times of transition; but the eighteen-eighties
were so in a special sense, for the world was at the beginning of a new era,
the era of machinery and scientific discovery. Values and conditions of life were
changing everywhere. Even to simple country people the change was apparent. The
railways had brought distant parts of the country nearer; newspapers were
coming into every home; machinery was superseding hand labour, even on the
farms to some extent; food bought at shops, much of it from distant countries,
was replacing the home-made and home-grown. Horizons were widening; a stranger
from a village five miles away was no longer looked upon as 'a furriner'.

But, side by side with these changes, the old country
civilization lingered. Traditions and customs which had lasted for centuries
did not die out in a moment. State-educated children still played the old country
rhyme games; women still went leazing, although the field had been cut by the
mechanical reaper; and men and boys still sang the old country ballads and
songs, as well as the latest music-hall successes. So, when a few songs were
called for at the 'Wagon and Horses', the programme was apt to be a curious
mixture of old and new.

While the talking was going on, the few younger men,
'boy-chaps', as they were called until they were married, would not have taken
a great part in it. Had they shown any inclination to do so, they would have been
checked, for the age of youthful dominance was still to come; and, as the women
used to say, 'The old cocks don't like it when the young cocks begin to crow'.
But, when singing began they came into their own, for they represented the
novel.

They usually had first innings with such songs of the day as
had percolated so far. 'Over the Garden Wall', with its many parodies, 'Tommy,
Make Room for Your Uncle', 'Two Lovely Black Eyes', and other 'comic' or
'sentimental' songs of the moment. The most popular of these would have arrived
complete with tune from the outer world; others, culled from the penny
song-book they most of them carried, would have to have a tune fitted to them
by the singer. They had good lusty voices and bawled them out with spirit.
There were no crooners in those days.

The men of middle age inclined more to long and usually
mournful stories in verse, of thwarted lovers, children buried in snowdrifts,
dead maidens, and motherless homes. Sometimes they would vary these with songs
of a high moral tone, such as:

Waste not, want not,

Some maxim I would teach;

Let your watchword be never despair

And practise what you preach.

Do not let your chances like the sunbeams pass you by,

For you'll never miss the water till the well runs dry.

But this dolorous singing was not allowed to continue long.
'Now, then, all together, boys,' some one would shout, and the company would
revert to old favourites. Of these, one was 'The Barleymow'. Trolled out in chorus,
the first verse went:

Oh, when we drink out of our noggins, my boys.

We'll drink to the barleymow.

We'll drink to the barleymow, my boys,

We'll drink to the barleymow.

So knock your pint on the settle's back;

Fill again, in again, Hannah Brown,

We'll drink to the barleymow, my boys,

We'll drink now the barley's mown.

So they went on, increasing the measure in each stanza, from
noggins to half-pints, pints, quarts, gallons, barrels, hogsheads, brooks,
ponds, rivers, seas, and oceans. That song could be made to last a whole evening,
or it could be dropped as soon as they got tired of it.

Another favourite for singing in chorus was 'King Arthur',
which was also a favourite for outdoor singing and was often heard to the accompaniment
of the jingling of harness and cracking of whips as the teams went afield. It
was also sung by solitary wayfarers to keep up their spirits on dark nights. It
ran: