Lark Rise to Candleford (43 page)

It was one of the children's treats to be invited into her
house to see her stuffed owl and other treasures, which included some pressed
flowers from the Holy Land in a frame made of olive wood from the Mount of
Olives. Another treasure was a fan made of long white ostrich feathers which
she would take out of its case and show them, then fan herself gently as she
reclined on her couch with her feet up. 'I've seen better times,' she would say
in her more talkative moods. 'Yes, I've seen better times, but I've never seen
a better husband than Amos, and I like this little house where I can shut the
door and do as I like. After all, a public's never your own. Anybody who's got
two pennies to rub together can come in and out as they like, without so much
as a knock at the door or a "by your leave", and what's grand
furniture as isn't your own, for you can't call it that when other people have
the use of it.' And she would curl up on her couch and shut her eyes, for,
although she was never known to get tipsy at home, her breath sometimes had a
queer, sweetish smell which an older person might have recognized as that of
gin. 'Now, run along,' she would say, opening one eye; 'and lock the door
behind you and put the key on the window-sill. I don't want any more visitors
and I'm not going out. This isn't one of my visiting days.'

Then there was a young married woman named Gertie who passed
as a beauty, entirely on the strength of a tiny waist and a simpering smile.
She was a great reader of novelettes and had romantic ideas. Before her
marriage she had been a housemaid at one of the country mansions where
men-servants were kept, and their company and compliments had spoiled her for
her kind, honest great cart-horse of a husband. She loved to talk about her
conquests, telling of the time Mr. Pratt, the butler, had danced with her four
times at the servants' ball, and how jealous her John had been. He had been invited
for her sake, but could not dance, and had sat there all the evening, like a
great gowk, in his light-grey Sunday suit, with his great red hands hanging
down between his knees, and a chrysanthemum in his buttonhole as big as a
pancake.

She had worn her white silk, the one she was afterwards
married in, and her hair had been curled by a real hairdresser—the maids had
dubbed together to pay for his attendance, and he had afterwards stayed for the
dancing and paid special attention to Gertrude. 'And you should've seen our
John, his eyes simply rolling with jealousy… .' But, if she managed to get so
far, she was then interrupted. No one wanted to hear about her conquests, but
they were willing to hear about the dresses. What did the cook wear? Black lace
over a red silk underslip. That sounded handsome. And the head housemaid and
the stillroom maid, and so on, down to the tweeny, who, it had to be confessed,
could afford nothing more exciting than her best frock of grey cloth.

Gertie was the only one of them all who discussed her
relations with her husband. 'I don't think our Johnny loves me any more,' she
would sigh, 'He went off to work this morning without kissing me.' Or, 'Our
John's getting a regular chawbacon. He went to sleep and snored in his chair after
tea last night. I felt that lonely I could have cried me eyes out.' And the
more robust characters would laugh and ask her what more she expected of a man
who had been at work in the fields all day, or say, 'Times is changed, my gal.
You ain't courtin' no longer.'

Gertie was a fool and the hamlet laughing-stock for a year or
so; then young John arrived and the white silk was cut up to make him a
christening robe and Gertie forgot her past triumphs in the more recent one of
producing such a paragon. 'Isn't he lovely?' she would say, exhibiting her red,
shapeless lump of a son, and those who had been most unsympathetic with her
former outpourings would be the first to declare him a marvellous boy. 'He's
the very spit of his dad; but he's got your eyes, Gertie. My word! He's going
to break some hearts when the time comes, you'll see.' As time went on, Gertie
grew red and lumpy herself. Gone were the wasp waist and the waxen pallor she
had thought so genteel. But she still managed to keep her romantic ideas, and
the last time Laura saw her, by that time a middle-aged woman, she assured her
that her daughter's recent marriage to a stable-boy was 'a regular romance in
real life', although, as far as her listener could gather, it was what the
hamlet people of the preceding generation would have called 'a pushed on, hugger-mugger
sort of affair'.

Laura did not like Gertie's face. Her features were not bad,
but she had protruding pale blue eyes of which the whites were always faintly
bloodshot, and her complexion was of a sickly yellowish shade. Even her small
mouth, so much admired by some of the hamlet judges of beauty, was repulsive to
a child. It was drawn up so close that the lips made tiny wrinkles, like
stitches round a buttonhole. 'A mouth like a hen's backside', one rude man said
of it.

But there was one visiting neighbour Laura loved to look at,
for her face reminded her of that on the cameo brooch her mother used to pin
her lace collar on Sundays, and her black hair rippled down from its centre
parting as though that also was carved. Her fine head had a slight droop that
showed up the line of her neck and shoulders and, although her clothes were no
better than those of other people, they looked better on her. She was always in
black, for no sooner was the year and a half mourning up for one great-uncle or
first or second cousin than another died. Or, failing an actual death, she
decided it would not be worth while to 'bring out her colours' with some
distant relative over eighty or 'just at the last'. If she knew that black
suited her, she was too wise to mention that fact. People would have thought
her vain, or peculiar, to wear black for choice, whereas mourning there was no
gainsaying.

'Mother,' said Laura one day after this neighbour had gone,
'doesn't Mrs. Merton look lovely?'

Her mother laughed. 'Lovely? No. Though some might think her
good-looking. She's too pale and melancholy for my taste and her nose is too
long.'

Mrs. Merton, as Laura remembered her in after years, might
have sat for a picture as the Tragic Muse. She was of a melancholy nature.
'I've supped sorrow with a spoon,' she was never tired of saying. 'I've supped
sorrow with a spoon and sorrow will always be my lot.' Yet, as the children's
mother reminded her, she had little to complain of. She had a good husband and
not too large a family. As well as the distant relations, some of whom she had
never seen, she had lost one child in infancy and her father had recently died
of old age, and the loss of her pig from swine fever two years before was
admittedly a serious affliction; but these were losses such as any one might
experience. Many had, and yet managed to get over them without talking about
supping sorrow.

Does melancholy attract misfortune? Or is it true that past,
present and future are one, only divided by our time sense? Mrs. Merton was
fated to become in her old age the tragic figure she had looked when young. Her
husband was already dead when her only son and two grandsons were killed in the
1914-18 War and she was left practically alone in the world.

By that time she had gone to live in another village, and
Laura's mother, herself bereaved by the War, walked over to see her and
sympathize. She found her a sad but resigned old woman. There was no longer any
talk about supping sorrow, no mourning her own woes, but a quiet acceptance of
the world as it then was and a resolute attempt at cheerfulness.

It was spring and her room had flowers in pots and vases. The
air was rather faint with the scent of them, her visitor noticed; then, looking
more closely, she found they were not garden flowers. Every pot and jug and
vase was filled with hawthorn blossom.

She was rather shocked at this, for, although less
superstitious than many countrywomen, she herself would not have brought may
blossom indoors. It might be unlucky, or it might not, but there was no sense
in running unnecessary risks.

'Aren't you afraid all this may'll bring you bad luck?' she
asked Mrs. Merton as they sipped their tea.

Mrs. Merton smiled, and a smile from her was almost as
unusual as to see may indoors. 'How can it?' she said. 'I've got nobody else to
lose. I've always been fond of those flowers. So I thought I'd bring some of
them in and enjoy them. My thread's spun as far as luck's concerned.'

Politics were seldom mentioned by the women. If they did come
up it was usually by way of comment on some husband's excessive zeal. 'Why
can't he leave such things alone? 'Tis no business of his'n,' some wife would
say. 'What does it matter to him who governs? Whoever 'tis they won't give us
nothing, and they can't take nothing away from us, for you can't get blood from
a stone.'

Some would discriminate and say it was a pity the men had
taken up with these Liberal notions. 'If they've got to vote, why not vote Tory
and keep in with the gentry? You never hear of Liberals giving the poor a bit
of coal or a blanket at Christmas.' As, indeed, you did not, for there was no
Liberal in the parish but bought his own coals by the hundredweight and might
think himself lucky if his wife had a blanket for each bed.

A few of the older men were equally poor-spirited. One
election day the children, coming home from school, met an old, semi-bedridden
neighbour, riding, propped up with cushions, in a luxurious carriage to the
polling station. A few days afterwards, when Laura had taken him some small
delicacy from her mother, he whispered to her at parting: 'Tell y're dad I
voted Liberal. He! He! They took th' poor old hoss to th' water, but he didn't
drink out o' their trough. Not he!'

When Laura gave her father the message he did not seem as
pleased as their neighbour had expected. He said he thought it was 'a bit low
down to roll up in anybody's carriage to vote against them'; but her mother
laughed and said: 'Serves 'em right for dragging the poor old hunks out of bed
in that weather.'

Apart from politics, the hamlet people's attitude towards
those they called 'the gentry' was peculiar. They took a pride in their rich
and powerful country-house neighbours, especially when titled. The old Earl in
the next parish was spoken of as 'our Earl' and when the flag, flown from the
tower of his mansion to show he was in residence, could be seen floating above
tree-tops they would say: 'I see our family's at home again.'

They sometimes saw him pass through the hamlet in his
carriage, an old, old man, sunk deep in cushions and half-buried in rugs, often
too comatose to be aware of, or acknowledge, their curtsies. He had never
spoken to them or given them anything, for they did not live in his cottages,
and in the way of Christmas coals and blankets he had his own parish to attend
to; but the men worked on his land, though not directly employed by him, and by
some inherited instinct they felt he belonged to them. For wealth without rank
or birth they had small respect. When a rich retired hatter bought a
neighbouring estate and set up as a country gentleman, the hamlet was
scandalized. 'Whoo's he?' they said. 'Only a shopkeeper pretending to be
gentry. I 'udn't work for him, no, not if he paid me in gold!' One man who had
been sent to clean out a well in his stable-yard and had seen him, said: 'I'd a
good mind to ask him to sell me a hat'; and that was repeated for weeks as a
great joke. Laura was told in after years that their better-educated neighbours
were almost as prejudiced; they did not call on the newly rich family. That was
before the days when a golden key could open any door.

Landowners of established rank and stern or kindly J.P.s and
their ladies were respected. Some of the sons or grandsons of local families
were said to be 'wild young devils' and were looked upon with a kind of
horrified admiration. The traditions of the Hell-Fire Club had not entirely
faded, and one young nobleman was reputed to have 'gambled away' one of his
family estates at one sitting. There were hints of more lurid orgies in which a
bunch of good-looking country girls were supposed to figure, and a saintly
curate, an old white-haired man, went to admonish the young spark, at that time
living alone in a wing of the otherwise deserted family mansion. There was no
record of the conversation, but the result was known. The older man was pushed
or kicked down the front door flight of steps and the door was banged and
bolted against him. Then, the story went, he raised himself to his knees and
prayed aloud for 'the poor sinful child' within. The gardener, greatly daring,
supported him to his cottage and made him rest before attempting to walk home.

But the great majority of the country gentlepeople lived
decent, if, according to hamlet standards, not particularly useful lives. In
summer the carriage was at the door at three o'clock in the afternoon to take
the lady of the house and her grown-up daughters, if any, to pay calls. If they
found no one in, they left cards, turned down at the corner, or not turned
down, according to etiquette. Or they stayed at home to receive their own
callers and played croquet and drank tea under spreading cedars on exquisitely
kept lawns. In winter they hunted with the local pack; and, summer and winter,
they never failed to attend Sunday morning service at their parish church. They
had always a smile and a nod for their poorer neighbours who saluted them, with
more substantial favours for those who lived in the cottages on their estates.
As to their inner lives, the commonalty knew no more than the Britons knew of
the Romans who inhabited the villas dotted about the countryside; and it is
doubtful if the county families knew more of their poorer neighbours than the
Romans did of theirs, in spite of speaking the same language.

Here and there the barrier of caste was overstepped. Perhaps
by some young man or girl who, in advance of their time, realized that the
population beyond their park gates were less 'the poor' in a lump than
individual men and women who happened to have been born to poverty. Of such it
was sometimes said: 'He's different, Master Raymond is; you can say anything to
him, he's more like one of ourselves than one of the gentry. Makes you split
your sides, he does, with some of his tales, and he's got a feeling heart, too,
and don't button his pockets too tight. Good thing if there were more like
him.' Or: 'Miss Dorothy, now, she's different. No asking questions and
questions when she comes to see anybody; but she sets her down and if you've a
mind to tell her anything, you can and know it won't go no further. I udn't
mind seeing her come in when I was in the godspeed of washday, and that's
saying something.'