Lark Rise to Candleford (16 page)

This devotion to fashion gave a spice to life and helped to
make bearable the underlying poverty. But the poverty was there; one might have
a velvet tippet and no shoes worth mentioning; or a smart frock, but no coat;
and the same applied to the children's clothes and the sheets and towels and
cups and saucepans. There was never enough of anything, except food.

Monday was washing-day, and then the place fairly hummed with
activity. 'What d'ye think of the weather?' 'Shall we get 'em dry?' were the questions
shouted across gardens, or asked as the women met going to and from the well
for water. There was no gossiping at corners that morning. It was before the
days of patent soaps and washing powders, and much hard rubbing was involved.
There were no washing coppers, and the clothes had to be boiled in the big
cooking pots over the fire. Often these inadequate vessels would boil over and
fill the house with ashes and steam. The small children would hang round their
mothers' skirts and hinder them, and tempers grew short and nerves frayed long
before the clothes, well blued, were hung on the lines or spread on the hedges.
In wet weather they had to be dried indoors, and no one who has not experienced
it can imagine the misery of living for several days with a firmament of drying
clothes on lines overhead.

After their meagre midday meal, the women allowed themselves
a little leisure. In summer, some of them would take out their sewing and do it
in company with others in the shade of one of the houses. Others would sew or
read indoors, or carry their babies out in the garden for an airing. A few who
had no very young children liked to have what they called 'a bit of a lay down'
on the bed. With their doors locked and window-blinds drawn, they, at least,
escaped the gossips, who began to get busy at this hour.

One of the most dreaded of these was Mrs. Mullins, a thin,
pale, elderly woman who wore her iron-grey hair thrust into a black chenille
net at the back of her head and wore a little black shawl over her shoulders, summer
and winter alike. She was one of the most common sights of the hamlet, going
round the Rise in her pattens, with her door-key dangling from her fingers.

That door-key was looked upon as a bad sign, for she only
locked her door when she intended to be away some time. 'Where's she a prowlin'
off to?' one woman would ask another as they rested with their water-buckets at
a corner. 'God knows, an' He won't tell us,' was likely to be the reply. 'But,
thanks be, she won't be a goin' to our place now she's seen me here.'

She visited every cottage in turn, knocking at the door and
asking the correct time, or for the loan of a few matches, or the gift of a pin—anything
to make an opening. Some housewives only opened the door a crack, hoping to get
rid of her, but she usually managed to cross the threshold, and, once within,
would stand just inside the door, twisting her door-key and talking.

She talked no scandal. Had she done so, her visits might have
been less unwelcome. She just babbled on, about the weather, or her sons' last letters,
or her pig, or something she had read in the Sunday newspaper. There was a
saying in the hamlet: 'Standing gossipers stay longest', and Mrs. Mullins was a
standing example of this. 'Won't you sit down, Mrs. Mullins?' Laura's mother
would say if she happened herself to be seated. But it was always, 'No, oh no,
thankee. I mustn't stop a minute'; but her minutes always mounted up to an hour
or more, and at last her unwilling hostess would say, 'Excuse me, I must just
run round to the well,' or 'I'd nearly forgotten that I'd got to fetch a
cabbage from the allotment,' and, even then, the chances were that Mrs. Mullins
would insist upon accompanying her, talking them both to a standstill every few
yards.

Poor Mrs. Mullins! With her children all out in the world,
her home must have seemed to her unbearably silent, and, having no resources of
her own and a great longing to hear her own voice, she was forced out in search
of company. Nobody wanted her, for she had nothing interesting to say, and yet
talked too much to allow her listener a fair share of the conversation. She was
that worst of all bores, a melancholy bore, and at the sight of her door-key
and little black shawl the pleasantest of little gossiping groups would
scatter.

Mrs. Andrews was an even greater talker; but, although most
people objected to her visits on principle, they did not glance at the clock every
two minutes while she was there or invent errands for themselves in order to
get rid of her. Like Mrs. Mullins, she had got her family off hand and so had
unlimited leisure; but, unlike her, she had always something of interest to
relate. If nothing had happened in the hamlet since her last call, she was
quite capable of inventing something. More often, she would take up some stray,
unimportant fact, blow it up like a balloon, tie it neatly with circumstantial
detail and present it to her listener, ready to be launched on the air of the
hamlet. She would watch the clothesline of some expectant mother, and if no
small garments appeared on it in what she considered due time, it would be:
'There's that Mrs. Wren, only a month from her time, and not a stitch put into
a rag yet.' If she saw a well-dressed stranger call at one of the cottages, she
would know 'for a fac'' that he was the bailiff with a County Court summons, or
that he had been to tell the parents that 'their young Jim', who was working
up-country, had got into trouble with the police over some money. She 'sized
up' every girl at home on holiday and thought that most of them looked
pregnant. She took care to say 'thought' and 'looked' in those cases, because
she knew that in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred time would prove her
suspicions to have been groundless.

Sometimes she would widen her field and tell of the doings in
high society. She 'knew for a fac'' that the then Prince of Wales had given one
of his ladies a necklace with pearls the size of pigeon's eggs, and that the
poor old Queen, with her crown on her head and tears streaming down her cheeks,
had gone down on her knees to beg him to turn the whole lot of saucy hussies
out of Windsor Castle. It was said in the hamlet that, when Mrs. Andrews spoke,
you could see the lies coming out of her mouth like steam, and nobody believed
a word she said, even when, occasionally, she spoke the truth. Yet most of the
women enjoyed a chat with her. As they said, it 'made a bit of a change'.
Laura's mother was too hard on her when she called her a pest, or interrupted
one of her stories at a crucial point to ask, 'Are you sure that is right, Mrs.
Andrews?' In a community without cinemas or wireless and with very little
reading matter, she had her uses.

Borrowers were another nuisance. Most of the women borrowed
at some time, and a few families lived entirely on borrowing the day before pay-day.
There would come a shy, low-down, little knock at the door, and when it was
opened, a child's voice would say, 'Oh, please Mrs. So-and-So, could you oblige
me mother with a spoonful of tea [or a cup of sugar, or half a loaf] till me
Dad gets his money?' If the required article could not be spared at the first
house, she would go from door to door repeating her request until she got what
she wanted, for such were her instructions.

The borrowings were usually repaid, or there would soon have
been nowhere to borrow from; but often an insufficient quantity or an inferior
quality were returned, and the result was a smouldering resentment against the
habitual borrowers. But no word of direct complaint was uttered. Had it been,
the borrower might have taken offence, and the women wished above all things to
be on good terms with their neighbours.

Laura's mother detested the borrowing habit. She said that
when she had first set up housekeeping she had made it her rule when a borrower
came to the door to say, 'Tell your mother I never borrow myself and I never lend.
But here's the tea. I don't want it back again. Tell your mother she's welcome
to it.' The plan did not work. The same borrower came again and again, until
she had to say, 'Tell your mother I must have it back this time.' Again the
plan did not work. Laura once heard her mother say to Queenie, 'Here's half a
loaf, Queenie, if it's any good to you. But I won't deceive you about it; it's
one that Mrs. Knowles sent back that she'd borrowed from me, and I can't fancy
it myself, out of her house. If you don't have it, it'll have to go in the
pig-tub.'

'That's all right, me dear,' was Queenie's smiling response.
'It'll do fine for our Tom's tea. He won't know where it's been, an' 'ould'nt
care if he did. All he cares about's a full belly.'

However, there were other friends and neighbours to whom it
was a pleasure to lend, or to give on the rare occasions when that was possible.
They seldom asked directly for a loan, but would say, 'My poor old tea-caddy's
empty,' or 'I ain't got a mossel o' bread till the baker comes.' They spoke of
this kind of approach as 'a nint' and said that if anybody liked to take it
they could; if not, no harm was done, for they hadn't demeaned themselves by
asking.

As well as the noted gossips, there were in Lark Rise, as
elsewhere, women who, by means of a dropped hint or a subtle suggestion, could poison
another's mind, and others who wished no harm to anybody, yet loved to discuss
their neighbours' affairs and were apt to babble confidences. But, though few
of the women were averse to a little scandal at times, most of them grew
restive when it passed a certain point. 'Let's give it a rest,' they would say,
or 'Well, I think we've plucked enough feathers out of her wings for one day,'
and they would change the subject and talk about their children, or the rising
prices, or the servant problem—from the maid's standpoint.

Those of the younger set who were what they called 'folks
together', meaning friendly, would sometimes meet in the afternoon in one of
their cottages to sip strong, sweet, milkless tea and talk things over. These tea-drinkings
were never premeditated. One neighbour would drop in, then another, and another
would be beckoned to from the doorway or fetched in to settle some disputed
point. Then some one would say, 'How about a cup o' tay?' and they would all
run home to fetch a spoonful, with a few leaves over to help make up the
spoonful for the pot.

Those who assembled thus were those under forty. The older
women did not care for little tea-parties, nor for light, pleasant chit-chat;
there was more of the salt of the earth in their conversation and they were apt
to express things in terms which the others, who had all been in good service,
considered coarse and countrified.

As they settled around the room to enjoy their cup of tea,
some would have babies at the breast or toddlers playing 'bo-peep' with their aprons,
and others would have sewing or knitting in their hands. They were pleasant to
look at, with their large clean white aprons and smoothly plaited hair, parted
in the middle. The best clothes were kept folded away in their boxes from
Sunday to Sunday, and a clean apron was full dress on week-days.

It was not a countryside noted for feminine good looks and
there were plenty of wide mouths, high cheekbones, and snub noses among them;
but they nearly all had the country-bred woman's clear eyes, strong, white teeth
and fresh colour. Their height was above that of the average working-class
townswoman, and, when not obscured by pregnancy, their figures were straight
and supple, though inclining to thickness.

This tea-drinking time was the women's hour. Soon the
children would be rushing in from school; then would come the men, with their
loud voices and coarse jokes and corduroys reeking of earth and sweat. In the meantime,
the wives and mothers were free to crook their little fingers genteely as they
sipped from their teacups and talked about the, to them, latest fashion, or
discussed the serial then running in the novelette they were reading.

Most of the younger women and some of the older ones were
fond of what they called 'a bit of a read', and their mental fare consisted
almost exclusively of the novelette. Several of the hamlet women took in one of
these weekly, as published, for the price was but one penny, and these were
handed round until the pages were thin and frayed with use. Copies of others
found their way there from neighbouring villages, or from daughters in service,
and there was always quite a library of them in circulation.

The novelette of the 'eighties was a romantic love story, in
which the poor governess always married the duke, or the lady of title the gamekeeper,
who always turned out to be a duke or an earl in disguise. Midway through the story
there had to be a description of a ball, at which the heroine in her simple
white gown attracted all the men in the room; or the gamekeeper, commandeered
to help serve, made love to the daughter of the house in the conservatory. The
stories were often prettily written and as innocent as sugared milk and water;
but, although they devoured them, the women looked upon novelette reading as a
vice, to be hidden from their menfolk and only discussed with fellow devotees.

The novelettes were as carefully kept out of the children's
way as the advanced modern novel is, or should be, to-day; but children who
wanted to read them knew where to find them, on the top shelf of the cupboard or
under the bed, and managed to read them in secret. An ordinarily intelligent
child of eight or nine found them cloying; but they did the women good, for, as
they said, they took them out of themselves.

There had been a time when the hamlet readers had fed on
stronger food, and Biblical words and imagery still coloured the speech of some
of the older people. Though unread, every well-kept cottage had still its little
row of books, neatly arranged on the side table with the lamp, the clothes
brush and the family photographs. Some of these collections consisted solely of
the family Bible and a prayer-book or two; others had a few extra volumes which
had either belonged to parents or been bought with other oddments for a few
pence at a sale—
The Pilgrim's Progress, Drelincourt on Death
,
Richardson's
Pamela, Anna Lee: The Maiden Wife and Mother
, and old books
of travel and sermons. Laura's greatest find was a battered old copy of
Belzoni's
Travels
propping open somebody's pantry window. When she asked
for the loan of it, it was generously given to her, and she had the, to her,
intense pleasure of exploring the burial chambers of the pyramids with her author.