Lark Rise to Candleford (14 page)

Laura's grandfather was a tall old man with snow-white hair
and beard and the bluest eyes imaginable. He must at that time have been well
on in the seventies, for her mother had been his youngest child and a latecomer.
One of her outstanding distinctions in the eyes of her own children was that
she had been born an aunt, and, as soon as she could talk, had insisted upon
her two nieces, both older than herself, addressing her as 'Aunt Emma'.

Before he retired from active life, the grandfather had
followed the old country calling of an eggler, travelling the countryside with
a little horse and trap, buying up eggs from farms and cottages and selling
them at markets and to shopkeepers. At the back of the round house stood the little
lean-to stable in which his pony Dobbin had lived. The children loved to lie in
the manger and climb about among the rafters. The death of Dobbin of old age
had put an end to his master's eggling, for he had no capital with which to buy
another horse. Far from it. Moreover, by that time he was himself suffering
from Dobbin's complaint; so he settled down to doing what he could in his
garden and making a private daily round on his own feet, from his home to the
end house, from the end house to church, and back home again.

At the church he not only attended every service, Sunday and
weekday, but, when there was no service, he would go there alone to pray and meditate,
for he was a deeply religious man. At one time he had been a local preacher,
and had walked miles on Sunday evenings to conduct, in turn with others, the
services at the cottage meeting houses in the different villages. In old age he
had returned to the Church of England, not because of any change of opinion,
for creeds did not trouble him—his feet were too firmly planted on the Rock
upon which they are all founded—but because the parish church was near enough
for him to attend its services, was always open for his private devotions, and
the music there, poor as it was, was all the music left to him.

Some members of his old meeting-house congregations still
remembered what they considered his inspired preaching 'of the Word'. 'You did ought
to be a better gal, wi' such a gran'fer,' said a Methodist woman to Laura one
day when she saw her crawl through a gap in a hedge and tear her new pinafore.
But Laura was not old enough to appreciate her grandfather, for he died when
she was ten, and his loving care for her mother, his youngest and dearest
child, led to many lectures and reproofs. Had he seen the torn pinafore, it
would certainly have provoked both. However, she had just sufficient discrimination
to know he was better than most people.

As has already been mentioned, he had at one time played the
violin in one of the last instrumental church choirs in the district. He had
also played it at gatherings at home and in neighbours' houses and, in his earlier,
unregenerate days, at weddings and feasts and fairs. Laura, happening to think
of this one day, said to her mother, 'Why doesn't Grandfather ever play his
fiddle now! What's he done with it?'

'Oh,' said her mother in a matter-of-fact tone. 'He hasn't
got it any longer. He sold it once when Granny was ill and they were a bit
short of money. It was a good fiddle and he got five pounds for it.'

She spoke as though there was no more in selling your fiddle
than in selling half a pig or a spare sack of potatoes in an emergency; but Laura,
though so much younger, felt differently about it. Though devoid of the most
rudimentary musical instinct herself, she had imagination enough to know that
to a musician his musical instrument must be a most precious possession. So,
when she was alone with her grandfather one day, she said, 'Didn't you miss
your fiddle, Granda?'

The old man gave her a quick, searching look, then smiled
sadly. 'I did, my maid, more than anything I've ever had to part with, and
that's not a little, and I miss it still and always shall. But it went for a
good cause, and we can't have everything we want in this world. It wouldn't be
good for us.' But Laura did not agree. She thought it would have been good for
him to have his dear old fiddle. That wretched money, or rather the lack of it,
seemed the cause of everybody's troubles.

The fiddle was not the only thing he had had to give up. He
had given up smoking when he retired and they had to live on their tiny savings
and the small allowance from a brother who had prospered as a coal-merchant. Perhaps
what he felt most keenly of all was that he had had to give up giving, for he
loved to give.

One of Laura's earliest memories was of her grandfather
coming through the gate and up the end house garden in his old-fashioned
close-fitting black overcoat and bowler hat, his beard nicely trimmed and
shining, with a huge vegetable marrow under his arm. He came every morning and seldom
came empty-handed. He would bring a little basket of early raspberries or green
peas, already shelled, or a tight little bunch of sweet williams and moss
rosebuds, or a baby rabbit, which some one else had given him—always something.
He would come indoors, and if anything in the house was broken, he would mend
it, or he would take a stocking out of his pocket and sit down and knit, and
all the time he was working he would talk in a kind, gentle voice to his
daughter, calling her 'Emmie'. Sometimes she would cry as she told him of her
troubles, and he would get up and smooth her hair and wipe her eyes and say,
'That's better! That's better! Now you're going to be my own brave little
wench! And remember, my dear, there's One above who knows what's best for us, though
we may not see it ourselves at the time.'

By the middle of the 'eighties the daily visits had ceased,
for the chronic rheumatism against which he had fought was getting the better
of him. First, the church was too far for him; then the end house; then his own
garden across the road, and at last his world narrowed down to the bed upon
which he was lying. That bed was not the four-poster with the silk-and-satin patchwork
quilt in rich shades of red and brown and orange which stood in the best
downstairs bedroom, but the plain white bed beneath the sloping ceiling in the
little whitewashed room under the roof. He had slept there for years, leaving
his wife the downstair room, that she might not be disturbed by his fevered
tossing during his rheumatic attacks, and also because, like many old people,
he woke early, and liked to get up and light the fire and read his Bible before
his wife was ready for her cup of tea to be taken to her.

Gradually, his limbs became so locked he could not turn over
in bed without help. Giving to and doing for others was over for him. He would lie
upon his back for hours, his tired old blue eyes fixed upon the picture nailed
on the wall at the foot of his bed. It was the only coloured thing in the room;
the rest was bare whiteness. It was of the Crucifixion, and, printed above the
crown of thorns were the words:

This have I done for thee.

And underneath the pierced and bleeding feet:

What hast thou done for me?

His, two years' uncomplaining endurance of excruciating pain
answered for him.

When her husband was asleep, or lying, washed and tended,
gazing at his picture, Laura's grandmother would sit among her feather cushions
downstairs reading
Bow Bells
or the
Princess Novelettes
or the
Family
Herald
. Except when engaged in housework, she was never seen without a book
in her hand. It was always a novelette, and she had a large assortment of these
which she kept tied up in flat parcels, ready to exchange with other novelette
readers.

She had been very pretty when she was young. 'The Belle of
Hornton', they had called her in her native village, and she often told Laura
of the time when her hair had reached down to her knees, like a great yellow
cape, she said, which covered her. Another of her favourite stories was of the
day when she had danced with a real lord. It was at his coming-of-age
celebrations, and a great honour, for he had passed over his own friends and
the daughters of his tenants in favour of one who was but a gamekeeper's
daughter. Before the evening was over he had whispered in her ear that she was
the prettiest girl in the county, and she had cherished the compliment all her
life. There were no further developments. My Lord was My Lord, and Hannah
Pollard was Hannah Pollard, a poor girl, but the daughter of decent parents. No
further developments were possible in real life, though such affairs ended differently
in her novelettes. Perhaps that was why she enjoyed them.

It was difficult for Laura to connect the long, yellow hair
and the white frock with blue ribbons worn at the coming-of-age fête with her grandmother,
for she saw her only as a thin, frail old woman who wore her grey hair parted
like curtains and looped at the ears with little combs. Still, there was something
which made her worth looking at. Laura's mother said it was because her
features were good. 'My mother,' she would say, 'will look handsome in her
coffin. Colour goes and the hair turns grey, but the framework lasts.'

Laura's mother was greatly disappointed in her little
daughter's looks. Her own mother had been an acknowledged belle, she herself
had been charmingly pretty, and she naturally expected her children to carry on
the tradition. But Laura was a plain, thin child: 'Like a moll heron, all legs
and wings,' she was told in the hamlet, and her dark eyes and wide mouth looked
too large for her small face. The only compliment ever paid her in childhood
was that of a curate who said she was 'intelligent looking'. Those around her
would have preferred curly hair and a rosebud mouth to all the intelligence in
the world.

Laura's grandmother had never tramped ten miles on a Sunday
night to hear her husband preach in a village chapel. She had gone to church
once every Sunday, unless it rained or was too hot, or she had a cold, or some
article of her attire was too shabby. She was particular about her clothes and
liked to have everything handsome about her. In her bedroom there were pictures
and ornaments, as well as the feather cushions and silk patchwork quilt.

When she came to the end house, the best chair was placed by
the fire for her and the best possible tea put on the table, and Laura's mother
did not whisper her troubles to her as she did to her father. If some little
thing did leak out, she would only say, 'All men need a bit of humouring.'

Some women, too, thought Laura, for she could see that her
grandmother had always been the one to be indulged and spared all trouble and unpleasantness.
If the fiddle had belonged to her, it would never have been sold; the whole
family would have combined to buy a handsome new case for it.

After her husband died, she went away to live with her eldest
son, and the round house shared the fate of Sally's. Where it stood is now a ploughed
field. The husband's sacrifices, the wife's romance, are as though they had
never been—'melted into air, into thin air'.

Those were a few of the old men and women to whom the Rector
referred as 'our old folks' and visiting townsmen lumped together as 'a lot of
old yokels'. There were a few other homes of old people in the hamlet; that of
Master Ashley, for instance, who, like Sally, had descended from one of the
original squatters and still owned the ancestral cottage and strip of land. He
must have been one of the last people to use a breast-plough, a primitive
implement consisting of a ploughshare at one end of a stout stick and a
cross-piece of shaped wood at the other which the user pressed to his breast to
drive the share through the soil. On his land stood the only surviving specimen
of the old furze and daub building which had once been common in the
neighbourhood. The walls were of furze branches closely pressed together and
daubed with a mixture of mud and mortar. It was said that the first settlers
built their cottages of these materials with their own hands.

Then there were one or two poorer couples, just holding on to
their homes, but in daily fear of the workhouse. The Poor Law authorities allowed
old people past work a small weekly sum as outdoor relief; but it was not
sufficient to live upon, and, unless they had more than usually prosperous
children to help support them, there came a time when the home had to be broken
up. When, twenty years later, the Old Age Pensions began, life was transformed
for such aged cottagers. They were relieved of anxiety. They were suddenly
rich. Independent for life! At first when they went to the Post Office to draw
it, tears of gratitude would run down the cheeks of some, and they would say as
they picked up their money, 'God bless that Lord George! [for they could not
believe one so powerful and munificent could be a plain 'Mr.'] and God bless
you
,
miss!' and there were flowers from their gardens and apples from their trees
for the girl who merely handed them the money.

To Laura, as a child, the hamlet once appeared as a fortress.
She was coming home alone from school one wild, grey, March afternoon, and, looking
up from her battling against the wind, got a swift new impression of the
cluster of stark walls and slated roofs on the Rise, with rooks tumbling and
clouds hurrying overhead, smoke beating down from the chimneys, and clothes on
clothes-lines straining away in the wind.

'It's a fort! It's a fort!' she cried, and she went on up the
road, singing in her flat, tuneless little voice the Salvation Army hymn of the
day, 'Hold the fort, for I am coming'.

There was a deeper likeness than that of her childish vision.
The hamlet was indeed in a state of siege, and its chief assailant was Want.
Yet, like other citizens during a long, but not too desperate siege, its inhabitants
had become accustomed to their hard conditions and were able to snatch at any
small passing pleasure and even at times to turn their very straits to laughter.