Lark Rise to Candleford (39 page)

Both Engineers and Artillery looked down a little on the
county regiment, and that, in its turn, looked down on the Militia. No doubt
the Militiamen had their standards, too; probably they looked down upon the
unenterprising youths left at home, 'chaps as hadn't the sprawl to go
a-soldiering'. Those who timidly ventured to join the Militia seldom remained
in it long. Almost always, before their first season's training was over, they
wrote to their parents to say that they found soldiering such a fine life they
had decided to transfer to 'the Regulars'. Then they came home on furlough in
their scarlet tunics and pill-box caps and strolled around the hamlet twirling
their canes and caressing their new moustaches before disappearing overseas to
India or Egypt. For those left at home there was little excitement. Christmas,
the Harvest Home and the Village Feast were the only holidays. No cinemas, no
wireless, no excursions or motor coaches or dances in village halls in those
days! A few of the youths and younger men played cricket in the summer. One
young man was considered a good bowler locally and he would sometimes get up a
team to play one of the neighbouring villages. This once led to a curious
little conversation on his doorstep. A lady had alighted from her carriage to
ask or, rather, command him to get up a team to play 'the young gentlemen',
meaning her sons, on holidays from school, and a few of their friends.
Naturally, Frank wanted to know the strength of the team he was to be up
against. 'You'd want me to bring a good team, I suppose, ma'am?' he asked
respectfully.

'Well, yes,' said the lady. 'The young gentlemen would enjoy
a good game. But don't bring too good a team. They wouldn't want to be beaten.'

'That's what she calls cricket,' said Frank, grinning broadly
at her retreating figure.

This country scene is only a little over fifty years distant
from us in time; but in manners, customs and conditions of life, it is
centuries away. Except that slates were superseding thatch for roofing and the
old open hearth was giving place to the built-in grate, the cottages were as
the dwellings of the poor had been for generations. The people still ate the
old country fare, preferring it, so far, to such of the new factory-made
products as had come their way. The smock frock was still worn by the older
men, who declared that one well-made smock would outlast twenty of the new
machine-made suits the younger men were buying. The smock, with its elaborately
stitched yoke and snow-white home laundering, was certainly more artistic than
the coarse, badly-fitting 'reach-me-downs', as they were sometimes called.

The women were more fashion-minded than the men, but their
efforts to keep up-to-date were confined to the 'Sunday best' which they seldom
took from their boxes upstairs. For everyday wear, they contented themselves
with a large, well-ironed white apron to cover their patches and darns. To go
to the well, or from house to house in the hamlet, they threw a plaid woollen
shawl over their shoulders, or, in bad weather, drew it up to cover their
heads. Then, with a strong pair of pattens under their feet, they were ready
for anything.

They were still much as their forefathers had been; but
change was creeping in, if slowly. A weekly newspaper came into every house,
either by purchase or borrowing, and although these were still written by
educated men for the educated, and our hamlet intellects had sometimes to reach
up a little for their ideas, ideas were slowly percolating.

Having to reach up for ideas came naturally to a generation
brought up on the Bible. Their fathers had looked upon 'the Word' as their one
unfailing guide in life's difficulties. It was their story book, their treasury
of words and sayings, and, for those who could appreciate it, their one book of
poetry. Many of the older people still believed every word in the Bible to be
literally true. Others were not so sure; that tale of Jonah and the whale, for
instance, took a good deal of swallowing. But the newspaper everybody believed
in. 'I seed it in the paper, so it must be true' was a saying calculated to
clinch any argument.

Laura arrived on this scene on a cold December morning when
snow lay in deep drifts over the fields and blocked the roads. There were no
fireplaces in cottage bedrooms such as her mother's was, and the relays of hot
bricks, baked in the oven and swathed in flannel, lost their warmth coming
upstairs. 'Oh, we were so cold, so cold,' her mother would say when telling the
story, and Laura liked that 'we'. It showed that even a tiny baby who had never
been outside the room in which she was born was already a person.

Her parents' life was not quite so hard as that of most of
their neighbours, for her father was a stonemason and earned more money than
the farm-workers, although in the eighteen-eighties a skilled craftsman, such
as he was, received little more in wages than to-day's unemployment pay.

He was not a native of those parts, but had been brought
there a few years earlier by a firm of builders engaged in the restoration of
some of the churches of the countryside. He was an expert workman and loved his
craft. It was said that he would copy some crumbling detail of carving and fit
it in in such a way that the original carver could not have detected the
substitution. He did carving at home, too, in the little workshop he had built
at the side of their cottage. A few of his attempts stood about as ornaments in
the house, a lion, lilies of the valley growing at the base of a tree trunk,
and a baby's head, perhaps Edmund's or Laura's. Whether these were well done or
not Laura never knew, for before she was old enough to discriminate they had
become grimy and been swept off to the rubbish heap; but it pleased her to know
that he had at least the impulse to create and the skill to execute, however
imperfectly.

By the time the restoration work was finished he had married
and had two children and, though he never cared for the hamlet or became one
with the little community there, as his wife and children did, he stayed behind
when his workmates left and settled down to work as an ordinary stonemason.

There was still a good deal of building in stone going on in
that part of the country. One country house had been burnt down and had to be
rebuilt; another had a new wing added, and, afterwards, he would make a
tombstone, build a cottage or wall, set a grate, or lay a few bricks as
required. Workmen were expected to turn their hands to anything within the
limits of their trade, and he who could do most was considered the better
workman. The day of the specialist was in the future. Each workman must keep to
his trade, however. Laura remembered that once, when frost prevented him from
working, he happened to say to her mother that the carpenters had plenty to do,
and when her mother, knowing that he had been through all the shops, as was the
custom with builders' sons at that time, asked why he could not ask to be
allowed to do some carpentering, he laughed and said: 'The carpenters would
have something to say about that! They would say I was poaching, and tell me to
keep to my own trade.'

For thirty-five years he was employed by a firm of builders
in the market town, walking the three miles, night and morning, at first;
cycling later. His hours were from six in the morning to five in the afternoon,
and to reach his work in time he had for the greater part of the year to leave
home before daylight.

As Laura first remembered him he was a slim, upright young
man in the late twenties, with dark, fiery eyes and raven-black hair, but fair,
fresh-coloured complexion. On account of the dusty-white nature of his work, he
usually wore clothes of some strong light-grey worsted material. Years after he
had died, an old and embittered man, she could see him, a white apron rolled up
around his middle, a basket of tools slung over his shoulder and a black
billycock hat set at an angle on his head, swinging along on the crown of the
road on his way home from work, looking, as the hamlet people said, 'as if he
had bought all the land on one side of the road and was thinking of buying that
on the other side'.

Even in darkness his step could be distinguished, for it was
lighter and sharper than that of the other men. His mind moved more quickly,
too, and his tongue was readier, for he belonged to another breed and had been
brought up in another environment.

Some of the neighbours thought him proud and 'set up with
himself', but he was tolerated for his wife's sake and his relations with the
neighbours were at least outwardly friendly—especially at Election time, when
he mounted a plank supported by two beer-barrels and expounded the Gladstonian
programme, while Laura, her eyes on a level with his best buttoned boots,
quaked inwardly lest he should be laughed at.

His audience of twenty or so laughed quite a lot, but with
him, not at him, for he was an amusing speaker. None of them knew and probably
he himself had not begun to suspect that they were listening to a lost and
thwarted man, one who had strayed into a life to which he did not belong and
one whose own weakness would keep him there for the rest of his days.

Already he was beginning to keep irregular hours. Their
mother, telling them a bedtime story, would glance up at the clock and say:
'Wherever has Daddy got to?' or, later in the evening, more severely, 'Your
father's staying late again', and when he came in his face would be flushed and
he would be more than usually talkative. But that was only the beginning of his
downfall. Things went well, or fairly well, for several years after that.

Their cottage belonged to a Mrs. Herring. She and her husband
had lived there for some time before Laura's parents had rented it, but, as he
was an ex-stud groom with a pension and she prided herself on her superiority, they
had never been happy or popular there. Her superiority might have been borne,
or even played up to, for 'you've got to hold a candle to the fire', as some of
the neighbours said, but it was accompanied by the to them intolerable vice of
meanness. Not only had she kept herself to herself, as she boasted, but she had
also kept her belongings to herself, down to the last shred of 'scratchings'
when she boiled down her lard and the last cabbage-stalk from her garden. 'She
wer' that near she 'udn't give away enough to make a pair of leggings for a
skylark' was the reputation she left behind her.

She, on her side, had complained that the hamlet people were
a rough, unmannerly lot. There was nobody fit to ask in for a game of cards and
she did so like a bit of society, and she had long wanted to go to live nearer
her married daughter, when, one Saturday afternoon, the children's father came,
looking for a cottage not too far from his work. She made a great favour of
getting out quickly, but her new tenants were not impressed, for she was asking
a high rent, half a crown a week, more than anyone else in the hamlet paid. The
neighbours had thought she would never let her house, for who could afford to
pay that sum?

Laura's parents, with more knowledge of town prices, thought
the house was well worth the rent, for it was two small thatched cottages made
into one, with two bedrooms and a good garden. Of course, as they said, it had
not the conveniences of a town house. Until they themselves had bought an oven
grate and put it in the second cottage downstairs room, known as 'the
wash-house', there was nowhere to bake the Sunday joint, and it was tiresome to
have to draw water up from a well and irritating in wet weather to have to walk
under an umbrella half way down the garden to the earth closet. But the cottage
living-room was a pleasant place, with its well-polished furniture, shelves of
bright crockery, and red-and-black rugs laid down to 'take the tread' on the
raddled tile floor.

In summer the window stood permanently open and hollyhocks
and other tall flowers would push their way in and mingle with the geraniums
and fuchsias on the window-sill.

This room was the children's nursery. Their mother called it
that sometimes when they had been cutting out pictures and left scraps of paper
on the floor. 'This room's nothing but a nursery,' she would say, forgetting
for the moment that the nurseries she had presided over in her pre-marriage
days were usually held up by her as patterns of neatness.

The room had one advantage over most nurseries. The door
opened straight out on to the garden path and in fine weather the children were
allowed to run in and out as they would. Even when it rained and a board was
slipped, country fashion, into grooves in the doorposts to keep them in, they
could still lean out over it and feel the rain splash on their hands and see
the birds flicking their wings in the puddles and smell the flowers and wet
earth while they sang: 'Rain, rain, go away, Come again another day.'

They had more garden than they needed at that time and one
corner was given up to a tangle of currant and gooseberry bushes and raspberry
canes surrounding an old apple tree. This jungle, as their father called it,
was only a few feet square, but a child of five or seven could hide there and
pretend it was lost, or hollow out a cave in the greenery and call it its
house. Their father kept saying that he must get busy and lop the old
unproductive apple tree and cut down the bushes to let in the light and air,
but he was so seldom at home in daylight that for a long time nothing was done
about it and they still had their hidy-houses and could still swing themselves
up and ride astride on the low-hanging limb of the apple tree.

From there they could see the house and their mother going in
and out, banging mats and rattling pails and whitening the flagstones around
the doorway. Sometimes, when she went to the well, they would run after her and
she would hold them tight and let them look down to where, framed in the
green-slimy stones, the water reflected their faces, very small and far down.