Lark Rise to Candleford (52 page)

Then she told the whole story, how she had, as she said, made
a fool of herself with a soldier when she was thirty and ought to have known
better at that age, and how Elsie had been born in the Workhouse and how Aunt
Edith, then about to be married, had helped her to send the baby home to her
mother and advanced money from her future wages to get herself clothes, and
taken her into her new home as a maid.

Laura felt honoured, but also burdened, by such a confidence;
until one day, when they were speaking of Bertha, Molly said, 'Has she told you
about Elsie?' Laura must have looked confused, for her cousin smiled and went
on, 'I see she has. She's told me and Nellie, too, at different times. Poor old
Bertha, she's so proud of "our young Elsie" she must tell somebody or
burst.'

Except for these calls and a formal tea-drinking at Aunt
Edith's once or twice in every holiday, the children spent their time at Aunt
Ann's.

The class to which she and her husband belonged is now
extinct. Had Uncle Tom lived in these days, he would probably have been manager
of a branch of one of the chain stores, handling machine-made footwear he had
not seen until it came from the factory. Earning a good salary, perhaps, but
subject to several intermediary 'superiors' between himself and the head of the
firm and without personal responsibility for, or pride in, the goods he handled:
a craftsman turned into a salesman. But his day was still that of the small
business man who might work by his own methods at his own rate for his own
hours and, afterwards, enjoy the fruits of his labour and skill, both in the
way of satisfaction in having turned out good things, and in that of such
comforts for himself and his family as his profits could afford. What these
profits should be, his customers decided; if he could please them they came
again and again and sent others and that meant success. Except his own
conscience as a craftsman, he had nothing but his customers to consider. Twice
a year he went to Northampton to buy leather, choosing his own and knowing what
he chose was good because, owing no merchant a long bill, he was not tied to
any and could choose where he would. It was a simple life and one which many
might well envy in these days of competition and carking care.

His was a half-way house between the gorgeous establishment
of their other uncle and their own humble home. There was nothing pretentious.
Far from it, for pretentiousness was the one unpardonable sin in such homes.
But there was solid comfort and not too close a scrutiny of every shilling
spent. When Aunt Ann wrote out her grocery list, she did not have to cut out
and cut out items, as their mother had to do, and they never once heard from
her the familiar 'No, no. It can't be done' they were so used to hearing at
home.

There were other advantages. Water had not to be drawn up
from a well, but came from a bright brass tap over the kitchen sink, and the
sink was another novelty; at home the slops were put in a pail which, when
full, had to be carried out of doors and emptied on the garden. And the w.c.—a
real w.c.—although not actually indoors, was quite near, in a corner of the
yard, and reached by a covered pathway. Then there was no big washing-day to
fill the house with the steam of suds and leave behind a mass of wet clothes to
be dried indoors in bad weather, for a woman came every Monday morning and
carried the week's washing away, and when she brought it back clean at the end
of the week she stayed to scrub out the stone-floored kitchen and passage,
sluice down the courtyard and clean the windows.

The water was pumped up to a cistern in the roof every
morning by the boy who swept out the shop and carried the customers' parcels
and, in between, was supposed to be learning the trade, although, as Uncle Tom
told him, he would never make a good snob, his backside was too round—meaning
that he would never sit still long enough. Benny was a merry, good-natured lad
who performed all kinds of antics and made ridiculous jokes, which the children
relished greatly. Sometimes, as a great favour, he would let them take a turn
with the pump-handle. But he soon seized it again, for he could not stand still
a moment. He would jump on the pump-handle and ride it; or stand on his head,
or turn somersaults, or swarm up a water-pipe to an outhouse roof and sit,
grimacing like a monkey, on the ridge tiles. He never walked, but progressed by
hopping and skipping or galloping like a horse, and all this out of sheer
light-heartedness.

Poor Benny! he was then fourteen and had all the play of a
lifetime to crowd into a very few years. He was an orphan who had been brought
up in the Workhouse, where, as he told the children, 'em 'udn't let you speak
or laugh or move hardly,' and the recent release of his high spirits seemed to
have intoxicated him.

He did not live in the house, but had been put out to board
with an elderly couple, and Aunt Ann was so afraid that they would forget he
was a growing boy that she seldom saw him without giving him food. A cup of milk
and a doorstep of bread and jam rewarded him for the pumping every morning and
he never returned from an errand for her but she put an apple or a bun or a
slice of something into his hand. No baking was complete without a turnover of
the oddments being made for Benny.

All, excepting the poorest, kept house extravagantly in those
days of low prices. Food had to be of the best quality and not only sufficient,
but 'a-plenty', as they expressed their abundance. 'Do try to eat this last
little morsel. You can surely find room for that and it's a pity to waste it,'
they would say to each other at table and some one or other would make room for
the superfluous plateful; or, if no human accommodation could be found, there
were the dogs and cats or a poorer neighbour at hand.

Many of the great eaters grew very stout in later life; but
this caused them no uneasiness; they regarded their expanding girth as proper
to middle age. Thin people were not admired. However cheerful and energetic
they might appear, they were suspected of 'fretting away their fat' and warned
that they were fast becoming 'walking miseries'.

Although Laura's Aunt Ann happened to be exceptionally thin
and her uncle was no more than comfortable of figure, the usual abundance
existed in their home. There were large, local-grown joints of beef or lamb,
roasted in front of the fire to preserve the juices; an abundance of milk and
butter and eggs, and cakes and pies made at a huge baking once or twice a week.
People used to say then, 'I'd think no more of doing it than of cracking an
egg,' little dreaming, dear innocents, that eggs one day would be sixpence
each. A penny each for eggs round about Christmas was then thought an
exorbitant price. For her big sponge cake, a speciality of hers, Aunt Ann would
crack half a dozen. The mixture had to be beaten for half an hour and the
children were allowed to take turns at her new patent egg-beater with its
handle and revolving wheels. Another wonder of her kitchen was the long fish
kettle which stood under the dresser. That explained what was meant by 'a
pretty kettle of fish'. Laura had always imagined live fish swimming round and
round in a tea kettle.

Before they had been at Candleford a week a letter came from
their father to say they had a new little sister, and Laura felt so relieved at
this news that she wanted to stand on her head, like Benny. Although no hint
had been dropped by her elders, she had known what was about to happen. Edmund
had known, too, for several times when they had been alone together he had said
anxiously, 'I hope our mother's all right.' Now she was all right and they
could fully enjoy their holiday.

Ordinary mothers of that day would put themselves to any
inconvenience and employ any subterfuge to prevent their children suspecting the
advent of a new arrival. The hint of a stork's probable visit or the addition
of a clause to a child's prayers asking God to send them a new little brother
or sister were devices of a few advanced young parents in more educated
circles; but even the most daring of these never thought of telling a child
straightforwardly what to expect. Even girls of fifteen were supposed to be
deaf and blind at such times and if they accidentally let drop a remark which
showed they were aware of the situation they were thought disagreeably
'knowing'. Laura's schoolmistress during Bible reading one day became
embarrassed over the Annunciation. She had mentioned the period of nine months;
then, with blushing cheeks and downcast eyes, said hastily: 'I think nine
months is the time a mother has to pray to God to give her a baby before her
prayer is answered.' Nobody smiled or spoke, but hard, cold eyes looked at her
from the front row where her elder pupils sat, eyes which said as plainly as
words, 'You must think we're a lot of softies.'

After the baby's arrival, if the younger children of the
family asked where it had come from, they were told from under a gooseberry
bush, or that the midwife had brought it in her basket, or the doctor in his
black bag. Laura's mother was more sensible than most parents. When asked the
question by her children when very small she replied: 'Wait until you get
older. You're too young to understand, and I'm sure I'm not clever enough to
tell you.' Which perhaps was better than confusing their young minds with
textbook talk about pollen and hazel catkins and bird's eggs, and certainly
better than a conversation between a mother and child on the subject which
figured in a recent novel. It ran something like this:

'Mother, where did Auntie Ruth get her baby?'

'Uncle Ralph and she made it.'

'Will they make some more?'

'I don't think so. Not for some time at any rate. You see, it
is a very messy business and frightfully expensive.'

That would not have passed with a generation which knew its
Catechism and could repeat firmly: 'God made me and all the world.'

What impressed Laura most about Candleford, on that first
holiday there, was that, every day, there was something new to see or do or
find out and new people to see and talk to and new places to visit, and this
gave a colour and richness to life to which she was unaccustomed. At home,
things went on day after day much in the same manner; the same people, all of
whom she knew, did the same things at the same time from weekend to week-end.
There you knew that, while you were having your breakfast, you would hear Mrs.
Massey clattering by on her pattens to the well, and that Mrs. Watts would have
her washing out first on the line and Mrs. Broadway second every Monday
morning, and that the fish-hawker would come on Monday and the coalman on
Friday and the baker three times a week, and that no one else was likely to
come nearer than the turning into the main road.

Of course, there were the changes of the seasons. It was
delightful on some sunny morning in February, one of those days which older
people called 'weather-breeders', to see the hazel catkins plumping out against
the blue sky and to smell the first breath of spring in the air. Delightful,
too, when spring was nearer, to search the hedgerows for violets, and to see
the cowslips and bluebells again and the may, and the fields turning green,
then golden. But all these delights you expected; they could not fail, for had
not God Himself said that seedtime and harvest, summer and winter, should
endure as long as the world lasted? That was His promise when He painted the
first rainbow and set it in the sky as a sign.

But at Candleford these things did not seem so important to
Laura as they did at home. You had to be alone to enjoy them properly; while
games and fun and pretty clothes and delicious food demanded company. For about
a week of her visit Laura wished she had been born at Candleford; that she was
Aunt Ann's child and had lots of nice things and was never scolded. Then, as
the week or two for which they had been invited drew out to nearly a month, she
began to long for her home; to wonder how her garden was looking and what the
new baby was like and if her mother had missed her.

The last day of their holiday was wet and one of the cousins
suggested they should go and play in the attic, so they went up the bare, steep
stairs, Laura and Ann and Amy and the two little boys, while the two elder
girls were having a lesson in pastry-making. The attic, Laura found, was a
storehouse of old, discarded things, much like the collection Mrs. Herring had
stored in the clothes closet at home. But these things did not belong to a
landlady; they were family possessions with which the children might do as they
liked. They spent the morning dressing up for charades, an amusement Laura had
not heard of before, but now found entrancing. Dressed in apron and shawl, the
point of the latter trailing on the ground behind her, she gave her best
imitation of Queenie, an old neighbour at home who began most of her speeches
with 'Lawks-a-mussy!' Then, draped in an old lace curtain for veil, with a
feather duster for bouquet, she became a bride. Less realistically, no doubt,
for she had never seen a bride in conventional attire—the girls at home wore
their new Sunday frock to be married—but her cousins said she did it well and
she became very pleased with herself and full of ideas for illustrating words
which she kept to herself for future use at home, for she felt too much of a
novice to venture suggestions.

All the morning, first one cousin then another had been
running down to the kitchen to ask for suggestions for the charades. They
always came back munching, or wiping crumbs from their mouths, and once or
twice they brought tit-bits for the whole party. At last they all disappeared,
Edmund included, and Laura was left alone in her bridal finery, which she took
the opportunity of examining in a tall, cracked mirror which leaned against one
wall. But her own reflection did not hold her more than a moment, for she saw
in the glass a recess she had not noticed before packed with books. Books on
shelves, books in piles on the floor, and still other books in heaps,
higgledy-piggledy, as though they had been turned out of sacks. Which they had,
no doubt, for she was told afterwards that the collection was the unsaleable
remains of a library from one of the large houses in the district. Her uncle,
who was known to be a great reader, had been at the sale of furniture and been
told that he might have what books were left if he cared to cart them away. A
few of the more presentable bindings had already been taken downstairs; but the
bulk of the collection still awaited the time when he should not be too busy to
look through them.