Lark Rise to Candleford (5 page)

'Yes, miss,' piped up a voice in a corner, 'me mother says
have you got a pair of your old boots you could give me, for I haven't got any
fit to go in.'

Alice got her boots on that occasion; but there was not a
confirmation every day. Still, boots were obtained somehow; nobody went
barefoot, even though some of the toes might sometimes stick out beyond the toe
of the boot.

To obtain clothes was an even more difficult matter. Mothers
of families sometimes said in despair that they supposed they would have to
black their own backsides and go naked. They never quite came to that; but it was
difficult to keep decently covered, and that was a pity because they did dearly
love what they called 'anything a bit dressy'. This taste was not encouraged by
the garments made by the girls in school from material given by the Rectory
people—roomy chemises and wide-legged drawers made of unbleached calico, beautifully
sewn, but without an inch of trimming; harsh, but strong flannel petticoats and
worsted stockings that would almost stand up with no legs in them—although
these were gratefully received and had their merits, for they wore for years
and the calico improved with washing.

For outer garments they had to depend upon daughters,
sisters, and aunts away in service, who all sent parcels, not only of their own
clothes, but also of those they could beg from their mistresses. These were
worn and altered and dyed and turned and ultimately patched and darned as long
as the shreds hung together.

But, in spite of their poverty and the worry and anxiety
attending it, they were not unhappy, and, though poor, there was nothing sordid
about their lives. 'The nearer the bone the sweeter the meat', they used to say,
and they were getting very near the bone from which their country ancestors had
fed. Their children and children's children would have to depend wholly upon
whatever was carved for them from the communal joint, and for their pleasure
upon the mass enjoyments of a new era. But for that generation there was still
a small picking left to supplement the weekly wage. They had their home-cured
bacon, their 'bit o' leazings', their small wheat or barley patch on the
allotment; their knowledge of herbs for their homely simples, and the wild
fruits and berries of the countryside for jam, jellies, and wine, and round
about them as part of their lives were the last relics of country customs and
the last echoes of country songs, ballads, and game rhymes. This last picking,
though meagre, was sweet.

Oxford was only nineteen miles distant. The children at the
end house knew that, for, while they were small, they were often taken by their
mother for a walk along the turnpike and would never pass the milestone until
the inscription had been read to them: OXFORD XIX MILES.

They often wondered what Oxford was like and asked questions
about it. One answer was that it was 'a gert big town' where a man might earn
as much as five and twenty shillings a week; but as he would have to pay 'pretty
near' half of it in house rent and have nowhere to keep a pig or to grow many
vegetables, he'd be a fool to go there.

One girl who had actually been there on a visit said you
could buy a long stick of pink-and-white rock for a penny and that one of her
aunt's young gentlemen lodgers had given her a whole shilling for cleaning his shoes.
Their mother said it was called a city because a bishop lived there, and that a
big fair was held there once a year, and that was all she seemed to know about
it. They did not ask their father, although he had lived there as a child, when
his parents had kept an hotel in the city (his relations spoke of it as an
hotel, but his wife once called it a pot-house, so probably it was an ordinary
public-house). They already had to be careful not to ask their father too many
questions, and when their mother said, 'Your father's cross again,' they found
it was better not to talk at all.

So, for some time, Oxford remained to them a dim blur of
bishops (they had seen a picture of one with big white sleeves, sitting in a high-backed
chair) and swings and shows and coconut shies (for they knew what a fair was
like) and little girls sucking pink-and-white rock and polishing shoes. To
imagine a place without pigsties and vegetable gardens was more difficult. With
no bacon or cabbage, what could people have to eat?

But the Oxford road with the milestone they had known as long
as they could remember. Round the Rise and up the narrow hamlet road they would
go until they came to the turning, their mother pushing the baby carriage
('pram' was a word of the future) with Edmund strapped in the high, slippery
seat or, later, little May, who was born when Edmund was five, and Laura
holding on at the side or darting hither and thither to pick flowers.

The baby carriage was made of black wickerwork, something
like an old-fashioned bath-chair in shape, running on three wheels and pushed from
behind. It wobbled and creaked and rattled over the stones, for rubber tyres
were not yet invented and its springs, if springs it had, were of the most primitive
kind. Yet it was one of the most cherished of the family possessions, for there
was only one other baby carriage in the hamlet, the up-to-date new bassinet
which the young wife at the inn had recently purchased. The other mothers
carried their babies on one arm, tightly rolled in shawls, with only the face
showing.

As soon as the turning was passed, the flat, brown fields
were left behind and they were in a different world with a different atmosphere
and even different flowers. Up and down went the white main road between wide
grass margins, thick, berried hedgerows and overhanging trees. After the dark
mire of the hamlet ways, even the milky-white road surface pleased them, and
they would splash up the thin, pale mud, like uncooked batter, or drag their
feet through the smooth white dust until their mother got cross and slapped
them.

Although it was a main road, there was scarcely any traffic,
for the market town lay in the opposite direction along it, the next village
was five miles on, and with Oxford there was no road communication from that distant
point in those days of horse-drawn vehicles. To-day, past that same spot, a
first-class, tar-sprayed road, thronged with motor traffic, runs between low,
closely trimmed hedges. Last year a girl of eighteen was knocked down and
killed by a passing car at that very turning: at that time it was deserted for
hours together. Three miles away trains roared over a viaduct, carrying those
who would, had they lived a few years before or later, have used the turnpike.
People were saying that far too much money was being spent on keeping such
roads in repair, for their day was over; they were only needed now for people
going from village to village. Sometimes the children and their mother would
meet a tradesman's van, delivering goods from the market town at some country mansion,
or the doctor's tall gig, or the smart turn-out of a brewer's traveller; but
often they walked their mile along the turnpike and back without seeing
anything on wheels.

The white tails of rabbits bobbed in and out of the hedgerows;
stoats crossed the road in front of the children's feet—swift, silent, stealthy
creatures which made them shudder; there were squirrels in the oak-trees, and
once they even saw a fox curled up asleep in the ditch beneath thick
overhanging ivy. Bands of little blue butterflies flitted here and there or
poised themselves with quivering wings on the long grass bents; bees hummed in
the white clover blooms, and over all a deep silence brooded. It seemed as
though the road had been made ages before, then forgotten.

The children were allowed to run freely on the grass verges,
as wide as a small meadow in places. 'Keep to the grinsard,' their mother would
call. 'Don't go on the road. Keep to the grinsard!' and it was many years
before Laura realized that that name for the grass verges, in general use
there, was a worn survival of the old English 'greensward'.

It was no hardship to her to be obliged to keep to the
greensward, for flowers strange to the hamlet soil flourished there, eyebright
and harebell, sunset-coloured patches of lady's-glove, and succory with vivid
blue flowers and stems like black wire.

In one little roadside dell mushrooms might sometimes be
found, small button mushrooms with beaded moisture on their cold milk-white
skins. The dell was the farthest point of their walk; after searching the long grass
for mushrooms, in season and out of season—for they would not give up hope—they
turned back and never reached the second milestone.

Once or twice when they reached the dell they got a greater thrill
than even the discovery of a mushroom could give; for the gipsies were there, their
painted caravan drawn up, their poor old skeleton horse turned loose to graze,
and their fire with a cooking pot over it, as though the whole road belonged to
them. With men making pegs, women combing their hair or making cabbage nets,
and boys and girls and dogs sprawling around, the dell was full of dark, wild
life, foreign to the hamlet children and fascinating, yet terrifying.

When they saw the gipsies they drew back behind their mother
and the baby carriage, for there was a tradition that once, years before, a child
from a neighbouring village had been stolen by them. Even the cold ashes where
a gipsy's fire had been sent little squiggles of fear down Laura's spine, for
how could she know that they were not still lurking near with designs upon her
own person? Her mother laughed at her fears and said, 'Surely to goodness
they've got children enough of their own,' but Laura would not be reassured.
She never really enjoyed the game the hamlet children played going home from
school, when one of them went on before to hide and the others followed slowly,
hand in hand, singing:

'I hope we shan't meet any gipsies to-night! I hope we shan't
meet any gipsies to-night!'

And when the hiding-place was reached and the supposed gipsy
sprung out and grabbed the nearest, she always shrieked, although she knew it
was only a game.

But in those early days of the walks fear only gave spice to
excitement, for Mother was there, Mother in her pretty maize-coloured gown with
the rows and rows of narrow brown velvet sewn round the long skirt, which stuck
out like a bell, and her second-best hat with the honeysuckle. She was still in
her twenties and still very pretty, with her neat little figure, rose-leaf
complexion and hair which was brown in some lights and golden in others. When
her family grew larger and troubles crowded upon her and the rose-leaf
complexion had faded and the last of the pre-marriage wardrobe had worn out,
the walks were given up; but by that time Edmund and Laura were old enough to
go where they liked, and, though they usually preferred to go farther afield on
Saturdays and other school holidays, they would sometimes go to the turnpike to
jump over and over the milestone and scramble about in the hedges for blackberries
and crab-apples.

It was while they were still small they were walking there
one day with a visiting aunt; Edmund and Laura, both in clean, white, starched clothes,
holding on to a hand on either side. The children were a little shy, for they
did not remember seeing this aunt before. She was married to a master builder
in Yorkshire and only visited her brother and his family at long intervals. But
they liked her, although Laura had already sensed that their mother did not.
Jane was too dressy and 'set up' for her taste, she said. That morning, her
luggage being still at the railway station, she was wearing the clothes she had
travelled in, a long, pleated dove-coloured gown with an apron arrangement
drawn round and up and puffed over a bustle at the back, and, on her head, a
tiny toque made entirely of purple velvet pansies.

Swish, swish, swish
, went her long skirt over the
grass verges; but every time they crossed the road she would relinquish Laura's
hand to gather it up from the dust, thus revealing to the child's delighted
gaze a frilly purple petticoat. When she was grown up she would have a frock and
petticoat just like those, she decided.

But Edmund was not interested in clothes. Being a polite
little boy, he was trying to make conversation. He had already shown his aunt
the spot where they had found the dead hedgehog and the bush where the thrush
had built last spring and told her the distant rumble they heard was a train going
over the viaduct, when they came to the milestone.

'Aunt Jenny,' he said, 'what's Oxford like?'

'Well, it's all old buildings, churches and colleges where
rich people's sons go to school when they're grown up.'

'What do they learn there?' demanded Laura.

'Oh, Latin and Greek and suchlike, I suppose.'

'Do they all go there?' asked Edmund seriously.

'Well, no. Some go to Cambridge; there are colleges there as
well. Some go to one and some to the other,' said the aunt with a smile that
meant 'Whatever will these children want to know next?'

Four-year-old Edmund pondered a few moments, then said,
'Which college shall I go to when I am grown up, Oxford or Cambridge?' and his expression
of innocent good faith checked his aunt's inclination to laugh.

'There won't be any college for you, my poor little man,' she
explained. 'You'll have to go to work as soon as you leave school; but if I
could have
my
way, you should go to the very best college in Oxford,'
and, for the rest of the walk she entertained them with stories of her mother's
family, the Wallingtons.

She said one of her uncles had written a book and she thought
Edmund might turn out to be clever, like him. But when they told their mother what
she had said she tossed her head and said she had never heard about any book,
and what if he had, wasting his time. It was not as if he was like Shakespeare
or Miss Braddon or anybody like that. And she hoped Edmund would not turn out
to be clever. Brains were no good to a working man; they only made him
discontented and saucy and lose his jobs. She'd seen it happen again and again.