Lark Rise to Candleford (12 page)

A continual subject for speculation was as to how Dick and
Sally managed to live so comfortably with no visible means of support beyond
their garden and beehives and the few shillings their two soldier sons might be
supposed to send them, and Sally in her black silk on Sundays and Dick never
without a few ha'pence for garden seeds or to fill his tobacco pouch. 'Wish
they'd tell me how 'tis done,' somebody would grumble. 'I could do wi' a leaf
out o' their book.'

But Dick and Sally did not talk about their affairs. All that
was known of them was that the house belonged to Sally, and that it had been
built by her grandfather before the open heath had been cut up into fenced fields
and the newer houses had been built to accommodate the labourers who came to
work in them. It was only when Laura was old enough to write their letters for
them that she learned more. They could both read and Dick could write well
enough to exchange letters with their own children; but one day they received a
business letter that puzzled them, and Laura was called in, sworn to secrecy,
and consulted. It was one of the nicest things that happened to her as a child,
to be chosen out of the whole hamlet for their confidence and to know that Dick
and Sally liked her, though so few other people did. After that, at twelve
years old, she became their little woman of business, writing letters to seedsmen
and fetching postal orders from the market town to put in them and helping Dick
to calculate the interest due on their savings bank account. From them she learned
a great deal about the past life of the hamlet.

Sally could just remember the Rise when it still stood in a
wide expanse of open heath, with juniper bushes and furze thickets and close, springy,
rabbit-bitten turf. There were only six houses then and they stood in a ring
round an open green, all with large gardens and fruit trees and faggot piles.
Laura could pick out most of the houses, still in a ring, but lost to sight of
each other among the newer, meaner dwellings that had sprung up around and between
them. Some of the houses had been built on and made into two, others had lost
their lean-tos and outbuildings. Only Sally's remained the same, and Sally was
eighty. Laura in her lifetime was to see a ploughed field where Sally's stood; but
had she been told that she would not have believed it.

Country people had not been so poor when Sally was a girl, or
their prospects so hopeless. Sally's father had kept a cow, geese, poultry, pigs,
and a donkey-cart to carry his produce to the market town. He could do this
because he had commoners' rights and could turn his animals out to graze, and
cut furze for firing and even turf to make a lawn for one of his customers. Her
mother made butter, for themselves and to sell, baked their own bread, and made
candles for lighting. Not much of a light, Sally said, but it cost next to
nothing, and, of course, they went to bed early.

Sometimes her father would do a day's work for wages,
thatching a rick, cutting and laying a hedge, or helping with the shearing or
the harvest. This provided them with ready money for boots and clothes; for
food they relied almost entirely on home produce. Tea was a luxury seldom
indulged in, for it cost five shillings a pound. But country people then had
not acquired the taste for tea; they preferred home-brewed.

Everybody worked; the father and mother from daybreak to
dark. Sally's job was to mind the cow and drive the geese to the best grass
patches. It was strange to picture Sally, a little girl, running with her
switch after the great hissing birds on the common, especially as both common and
geese had vanished as completely as though they never had been.

Sally had never been to school, for, when she was a child,
there was no dame school near enough for her to attend; but her brother had gone
to a night school run by the vicar of an adjoining parish, walking the three miles
each way after his day's work was done, and he had taught Sally to spell out a
few words in her mother's Bible. After that, she had been left to tread the
path of learning alone and had only managed to reach the point where she could
write her own name and read the Bible or newspaper by skipping words of more
than two syllables. Dick was a little more advanced, for he had had the benefit
of the night-school education at first hand.

It was surprising to find how many of the old people in the
hamlet who had had no regular schooling could yet read a little. A parent had taught
some; others had attended a dame school or the night school, and a few had made
their own children teach them in later life. Statistics of illiteracy of that period
are often misleading, for many who could read and write sufficiently well for
their own humble needs would modestly disclaim any pretensions to being what
they called 'scholards'. Some who could write their own name quite well would
make a cross as signature to a document out of nervousness or modesty.

After Sally's mother died, she became her father's right
hand, indoors and out. When the old man became feeble, Dick used to come
sometimes to do a bit of hard digging or to farm out the pigsties, and Sally
had many tales to tell of the fun they had had carting their bit of hay or hunting
for eggs in the loft. When, at a great age, the father died, he left the house
and furniture and his seventy-five pounds in the savings bank to Sally, for, by
that time, both her brothers were thriving and needed no share. So Dick and
Sally were married and had lived there together for nearly sixty years. It had
been a hard, frugal, but happy life. For most of the time Dick had worked as a
farm labourer while Sally saw to things about home, for the cow, geese and
other stock had long gone the way of the common. But when Dick retired from
wage-earning the seventy-five pounds was not only intact, but had been added to.
It had been their rule, Sally said, to save something every week, if only a penny
or twopence, and the result of their hard work and self-denial was their
present comfortable circumstances. 'But us couldn't've done it if us'd gone
havin' a great tribe o' children,' Sally would say. 'I didn't never hold wi'
havin' a lot o' poor brats and nothin' to put into their bellies. Took us all
our time to bring up our two.' She was very bitter about the huge families
around her and no doubt would have said more had she been talking to one of
maturer age.

They had their little capital reckoned up and allotted; they
could manage on so much a year in addition to the earnings of their garden, fowls,
and beehives, and that much, and no more, was drawn every year from the bank.
'Reckon it'll about last our time,' they used to say, and it did, although both
lived well on into the eighties.

After they had gone, their house stood empty for years. The
population of the hamlet was falling and none of the young newly married couples
cared for the thatched roof and stone floors. People who lived near used the
well; it saved them many a journey. And many were not above taking the railings
or the beehive bench or anything made of wood for firing, or gathering the
apples or using the poor tattered remnant of the flower garden as a nursery.
But nobody wanted to live there.

When Laura visited the hamlet just before the War, the roof
had fallen in, the yew hedge had run wild and the flowers were gone, excepting
one pink rose which was shedding its petals over the ruin. To-day, all has gone,
and only the limy whiteness of the soil in a corner of a ploughed field is left
to show that a cottage once stood there.

Sally and Dick were survivals from the earliest hamlet days.
Queenie represented another phase of its life which had also ended and been forgotten
by most people. She lived in a tiny, thatched cottage at the back of the end
house, which, although it was not in line, was always spoken of as 'next door'.
She seemed very old to the children, for she was a little, wrinkled,
yellow-faced old woman in a sunbonnet; but she cannot have been nearly as old
as Sally. Queenie and her husband were not in such comfortable circumstances as
Sally and Dick; but old Master Macey, commonly called 'Twister', was still able
to work part of the time, and they managed to keep their home going.

It was a pleasant home, though bare, for Queenie kept it
spotless, scrubbing her deal table and whitening her floor with hearthstone
every morning and keeping the two brass candlesticks on her mantelpiece polished
till they looked like gold. The cottage faced south and, in summer, the window
and door stood open all day to the sunshine. When the children from the end
house passed close by her doorway, as they had to do every time they went
beyond their own garden, they would pause a moment to listen to Queenie's old
sheep's-head clock ticking. There was no other sound; for, after she had
finished her housework, Queenie was never indoors while the sun shone. If the
children had a message for her, they were told to go round to the beehives, and
there they would find her, sitting on a low stool with her lace-pillow on her
lap, sometimes working and sometimes dozing with her lilac sunbonnet drawn down
over her face to shield it from the sun.

Every fine day, throughout the summer, she sat there
'watching the bees'. She was combining duty and pleasure, for, if they swarmed,
she was making sure of not losing the swarm; and, if they did not, it was still,
as she said, 'a trate' to sit there, feeling the warmth of the sun, smelling
the flowers, and watching 'the craturs' go in and out of the hives.

When, at last, the long-looked-for swarm rose into the air,
Queenie would seize her coal shovel and iron spoon and follow it over cabbage beds
and down pea-stick alleys, her own or, if necessary, other peoples', tanging
the spoon on the shovel:
Tang-tang-tangety-tang!

She said it was the law that, if they were not tanged, and
they settled beyond her own garden bounds, she would have no further claim to
them. Where they settled, they belonged. That would have been a serious loss, especially
in early summer, for, as she reminded the children:

A swarm in May's worth a rick of hay;

And a swarm in June's worth a silver spoon;

While a swarm in July isn't worth a fly.

So she would follow and leave her shovel to mark her claim,
then go back home for the straw skep and her long, green veil and sheepskin
gloves to protect her face and hands while she hived her swarm.

In winter she fed her bees with a mixture of sugar and water
and might often have been seen at that time of the year with her ear pressed to
one of the red pan roofs of the hives, listening. 'The craturs! The poor little
craturs,' she would say, 'they must be a'most frozed. If I could have my way
I'd take 'em all indoors and set 'em in rows in front of a good fire.'

Queenie at her lace-making was a constant attraction to the
children. They loved to see the bobbins tossed hither and thither, at random it
seemed to them, every bobbin weighted with its bunch of bright beads and every
bunch with its own story, which they had heard so many times that they knew it
by heart, how this bunch had been part of a blue bead necklace worn by her
little sister who had died at five years old, and this other one had belonged
to her mother, and that black one had been found, after she was dead, in a
work-box belonging to a woman who was reputed to have been a witch.

There had been a time, it appeared, when lace-making was a
regular industry in the hamlet. Queenie, in her childhood, had been 'brought up
to the pillow', sitting among the women at eight years old and learning to
fling her bobbins with the best of them. They would gather in one cottage in
winter for warmth, she said, each one bringing her faggot or shovel of coals
for the fire, and there they would sit all day, working, gossiping, singing old
songs, and telling old tales till it was time to run home and put on the pots
for their husbands' suppers. These were the older women and the young unmarried
girls; the women with little children did what lace-making they could at home.
In very cold winter weather the lace-makers would have a small earthen pot with
a lid, called a 'pipkin', containing hot embers, at which they warmed their hands
and feet and sometimes sat upon.

In the summer they would sit in the shade behind one of the
'housen', and, as they gossiped, the bobbins flew and the lovely, delicate
pattern lengthened until the piece was completed and wrapped in blue paper and stored
away to await the great day when the year's work was taken to Banbury Fair and
sold to the dealer.

'Them wer' the days!' she would sigh. 'Money to spend.' And
she would tell of the bargains she had bought with her earnings. Good brown
calico and linsey-woolsey, and a certain chocolate print sprigged with white, her
favourite gown, of which she could still show a pattern in her big patchwork
quilt. Then there was a fairing to be bought for those at home—pipes and
packets of shag tobacco for the men, rag dolls and ginger-bread for the 'little
'uns', and snuff for the old grannies. And the homecoming, loaded with
treasure, and money in the pocket besides. Tripe. They always bought tripe; it
was the only time in the year they could get it, and it was soon heated up,
with onions and a nice bit of thickening; and after supper there was hot,
spiced elderberry wine, and so to bed, everybody happy.

Now, of course, things were different. She didn't know what
the world was coming to. This nasty machine-made stuff had killed the lace-making;
the dealer had not been to the Fair for the last ten years; nobody knew a bit
of good stuff when they saw it. Said they liked the Nottingham lace better; it
was wider and had more pattern to it! She still did a bit to keep her hand in.
One or two old ladies still used it to trim their shifts, and it was handy to
give as presents to such as the children's mother; but, as for living by it,
no, those days were over. So it emerged from her talk that there had been a
second period in the hamlet more prosperous than the present. Perhaps the
women's earnings at lace-making had helped to tide them over the Hungry
'Forties, for no one seemed to remember that time of general hardship in
country villages; but memories were short there, and it may have been that life
had always been such a struggle they had noticed no difference in those lean
years.