Lark Rise to Candleford (18 page)

Old Sally said that some folks messed up their metheglin with
lemons, bay leaves, and suchlike; but all she could say was that folks who'd
add anything to honey didn't deserve to have bees to work for them.

Old metheglin was supposed to be the most intoxicating drink
on earth, and it was certainly potent, as a small girl once found when, staying
up to welcome home a soldier uncle from Egypt, she was invited to take a sip
from his glass and took a pull.

All the evening it had been 'Yes, please, Uncle Reuben', and
'Very well, thank you, Uncle Reuben' with her; but as she went upstairs to bed
she astonished every one by calling pertly: 'Uncle Reuby is a booby!' It was the
mead speaking, not her. There was a dash in her direction; but, fortunately for
her, it was stayed by Sergeant Reuben draining his glass, smacking his lips,
and declaring: 'Well, I've tasted some liquors in my time; but this beats all!'
and under cover of the fresh uncorking and pouring out, she tumbled sleepily
into bed with her white, starched finery still on her.

The hamlet people never invited each other to a meal; but
when it was necessary to offer tea to an important caller, or to friends from a
distance, the women had their resources. If, as often happened, there was no
butter in the house, a child would be sent to the shop at the inn for a quarter
of the best fresh, even if it had to 'go down on the book' until pay-day. Thin
bread and butter, cut and arranged as in their old days in service, with a pot
of homemade jam, which had been hidden away for such an occasion, and a dish of
lettuce, fresh from the garden and garnished with little rosy radishes, made an
attractive little meal, fit, as they said, to put before anybody.

In winter, salt butter would be sent for and toast would be
made and eaten with celery. Toast was a favourite dish for family consumption. 'I've
made 'em a stack o' toast as high as up to their knees', a mother would say on
a winter Sunday afternoon before her hungry brood came in from church. Another
dish upon which they prided themselves was thin slices of cold, boiled streaky
bacon on toast, a dish so delicious that it deserves to be more widely popular.

The few visitors from the outer world who came that way
enjoyed such simple food, with a cup of tea; and a glass of homemade wine at
their departure; and the women enjoyed entertaining them, and especially enjoyed
the feeling that they, themselves, were equal to the occasion. 'You don't want
to be poor and look poor, too,' they would say; and 'We've got our pride. Yes,
we've got our pride.'

Callers made a pleasant diversion in the hamlet women's day,
and there were more of these than might have been expected. The first to arrive
on Monday morning was old Jerry Parish with his cartload of fish and fruit. As
he served some of the big houses on his round, Jerry carried quite a large
stock; but the only goods he took round to the doors at Lark Rise were a box of
bloaters and a basket of small, sour oranges. The bloaters were sold at a penny
each and the oranges at three a penny. Even at these prices they were luxuries;
but, as it was still only Monday and a few coppers might remain in a few
purses, the women felt at liberty to crowd round his cart to examine and
criticize his wares, even if they bought nothing.

Two or three of them would be tempted to buy a bloater for
their midday meal, but it had to be a soft-roed one, for, in nearly every house
there were children under school age at home; so the bloater had to be shared, and
the soft roes spread upon bread for the smallest ones.

'Lor' blime me!' Jerry used to say. 'Never knowed such a lot
in me life for soft roes. Good job I ain't a soft-roed 'un or I should've got
aten up meself before now.' And he pinched the bloaters between his great red fingers,
pretended to consider the matter with his head on one side, then declared each
separate fish had the softest of soft roes, whether it had or not. 'Oozin',
simply oozin' with goodness, I tell ye!' and oozing it certainly was when released
from his grip. 'But what's the good of one bloater amongst the lot of ye? Tell
ye what I'll do,' he would urge. 'I'll put ye in these three whoppers for tuppence-ha'penny.'

It was no good. The twopence-halfpenny was never forthcoming;
even the penny could so ill be spared that the purchaser often felt selfish and
greedy after she had parted with it; but, after a morning at the washtub, she
needed a treat so badly, and a bloater made a tasty change from her usually
monotonous diet.

The oranges were tempting, too, for the children loved them.
It was one of their greatest treats to find oranges on the mantelshelf when
they came home from school in winter. Sour they might be and hard and skinny within;
but without how rich and glowing! and what a strange foreign scent pervaded the
room when their mother divided each one into quarters and distributed them.
Even when the pulp had been eaten, the peel remained, to be dried on the hob
and taken to school to chew in class or 'swopped' for conkers or string or some
other desirable object.

Jerry's cart had a great attraction for Laura. At the sound
of his wheels she would run out to feast her eyes on the lovely rich colours of
grapes and pears and peaches. She loved to see the fish, too, with their cool
colours and queer shapes, and would imagine them swimming about in the sea or
resting among the seaweed. 'What is that one called?' she asked one day,
pointing to a particularly queer-looking one.

'That's a John Dory, me dear. See them black marks? Look like
finger-marks, don't 'em? An' they do say that they be finger-marks.
He
made
'em, that night, ye know, when they was fishin', ye know, an'
He
took
some an' cooked 'em all ready for 'em, an' ever since, they say, that ivery
John Dory as comes out o' th' sea have got
His
finger-marks on 'un.'

Laura was puzzled, for Jerry had mentioned no name and he
was, moreover, a drinking, swearing old man, little likely, as she thought, to
repeat a sacred legend.

'Do you mean the Sea of Galilee?' she asked timidly.

'That's it, me dear. That's what they say, whether true or
not, of course, I
don't
know; but there be the finger-marks, right
enough, an' that's what they say in our trade.'

It was on Jerry's cart tomatoes first appeared in the hamlet.
They had not long been introduced into this country and were slowly making
their way into favour. The fruit was flatter in shape then than now and deeply grooved
and indented from the stem, giving it an almost starlike appearance. There were
bright yellow ones, too, as well as the scarlet; but, after a few years, the
yellow ones disappeared from the market and the red ones became rounder and
smoother, as we see them now.

At first sight, the basket of red and yellow fruit attracted
Laura's colour-loving eye. 'What are those?' she asked old Jerry.

'Love-apples, me dear. Love-apples, they be; though some
hignorant folks be a callin'.'em tommytoes. But you don't want any o' they—nasty
sour things, they be, as only gentry can eat. You have a nice sweet orange wi'
your penny.' But Laura felt she must taste the love-apples and insisted upon
having one.

Such daring created quite a sensation among the onlookers.
'Don't 'ee go tryin' to eat it, now,' one woman urged. 'It'll only make 'ee
sick. I know because I had one of the nasty horrid things at our Minnie's.' And
nasty, horrid things tomatoes remained in the popular estimation for years;
though most people to-day would prefer them as they were then, with the real
tomato flavour pronounced, to the watery insipidity of our larger, smoother tomato.

Mr. Wilkins, the baker, came three times a week. His long,
lank figure, girded by a white apron which always seemed about to slip down
over his hips, was a familiar one at the end house. He always stayed there for
a cup of tea, for which he propped himself up against the end of the dresser.
He would never sit down; he said he had not time, and that was why he did not
stop to change his flour-dusty bakehouse clothes before he started on his
round.

He was no ordinary baker, but a ship's carpenter by trade who
had come to the neighbouring village on a visit to relatives, met his present wife,
married her, and cast anchor inland. Her father was old, she was the only
child, and the family business had to be attended to; so, partly for love and
partly for future gain he had given up the sea, but he still remained a sailor
at heart.

He would stand in the doorway of Laura's home and look out at
the wheatfields billowing in the breeze and the white clouds hurrying over them,
and say: 'All very fine; but it seems a bit dead to me, right away from the
sea, like this.' And he would tell the children how the waves pile up in a
storm, 'like the wall of a house coming down on your ship', and about other
seas, calm and bright as a looking-glass, with little islands and palm
trees-but treacherous, too—and treacherous little men living in palm leaf huts,
'their faces as brown as your frock, Laura.' Once he had been shipwrecked and
spent nine days in an open boat, the last two without water. His tongue had
stuck to the roof of his mouth and he had spent weeks after rescue in hospital.

'And yet,' he would say, 'I'd dearly love just one more trip;
but my dear wife would cry her eyes out if I mentioned it, and the business, of
course, couldn't be left. No. I've swallowed the anchor, all right. I've swallowed
the anchor.'

Mr. Wilkins brought the image of the real living sea to the
end house; otherwise the children would have only known it in pictures. True,
their mother in her nursing days had been to the seaside with her charges and had
many pleasant stories to tell of walks on piers, digging on sands, gathering seaweed,
and shrimping with nets. But the seaside was different—delightful in its way,
no doubt, but nothing like the wide tumbling ocean with ships on it.

The only portion of the sea which came their way was
contained in a medicine bottle which a hamlet girl in service at Brighton
brought home as a curiosity. In time the bottle of sea-water became the
property of a younger sister, a school-fellow of Laura's, who was persuaded to
barter it for a hunch of cake and a blue-bead necklace. Laura treasured it for years.

Many casual callers passed through the hamlet. Travelling
tinkers with their barrows, braziers, and twirling grindstones turned aside
from the main road and came singing:

Any razors or scissors to grind? Or anything else in the
tinker's line? Any old pots or kettles to mend?

After squinting into any leaking vessel against the light, or
trying the edges of razors or scissors upon the hard skin of their palms, they would
squat by the side of the road to work, or start their emery wheel whizzing, to
the delight of the hamlet children, who always formed a ring around any such operations.

Gipsy women with cabbage-nets and clothes-pegs to sell were
more frequent callers for they had a camping-place only a mile away and no place
was too poor to yield them a harvest. When a door was opened to them, if the
housewife appeared to be under forty, they would ask in a wheedling voice: 'Is
your mother at home, my dear?' Then, when the position was explained, they
would exclaim in astonished tones: 'You don't mean to tell me you be the
mother? Look at that, now. I shouldn't have taken you to be a day over twenty.'

No matter how often repeated, this compliment was swallowed
whole, and made a favourable opening for a long conversation, in the course of which
the wily 'Egyptian' not only learned the full history of the woman's own
family, but also a good deal about those of her neighbours, which was duly
noted for future use. Then would come a request for 'handful of little 'taters,
or an onion or two for the pot', and, if these were given, as they usually
were, 'My pretty lady' would be asked for an old shift of her own or an old
shirt of her husband's, or anything that the children might have left off, and,
poverty-stricken though the hamlet was, a few worn-out garments would be
secured to swell the size of the bundle which, afterwards, would be sold to the
rag merchant.

Sometimes the gipsies would offer to tell fortunes; but this
offer was always refused, not out of scepticism or lack of curiosity about the future,
but because the necessary silver coin was not available. 'No, thank 'ee,' the
women would say. 'I don't want nothink of that sort. My fortune's already
told.'

'Ah, my lady! you med think so; but them as has got childern
never knows. You be born, but you ain't dead yet, an' you may dress in silks and
ride in your own carriage yet. You wait till that fine strappin' boy o' yourn
gets rich. He won't forget his mother, I'll bet!' and after this free
prognostication, they would trail off to the next house, leaving behind a scent
as strong as a vixen's.

The gipsies paid in entertainment for what they received.
Their calls made a welcome break in the day. Those of the tramps only harrowed the
feelings and left the depressed in spirit even more depressed.

There must have been hundreds of tramps on the roads at that
time. It was a common sight, when out for a walk, to see a dirty, unshaven man,
his rags topped with a battered bowler, lighting a fire of sticks by the roadside
to boil his tea-can. Sometimes he would have a poor bedraggled woman with him
and she would be lighting the fire while he lolled at ease on the turf or
picked out the best pieces from the bag of food they had collected at their
last place of call.

Some of them carried small, worthless things to sell—matches,
shoe-laces, or dried lavender bags. The children's mother often bought from
these out of pity; but never from the man who sold oranges, for they had seen
him on one of their walks, spitting on his oranges and polishing them with a
filthy rag. Then there was the woman who, very early one morning, knocked at
the door with small slabs of tree-bark in her apron. She was cleaner and
better-dressed than the ordinary tramp and brought with her a strong scent of
lavender. The bark appeared to be such as could have been hacked with a
clasp-knife from the nearest pine tree; but she claimed for it a very different
origin. It was the famous lavender bark, she said, brought from foreign parts
by her sailor son. One fragment kept among clothes was not only an everlasting
perfume, but it was also death to moths. 'You just smell it, my dears,' she
said, handing pieces to the mother and the children, who had crowded to the door.