Lark Rise to Candleford (56 page)

All kinds of horses came to the forge to be shod: heavy
cart-horses, standing quiet and patient; the baker's and grocer's and butcher's
van horses; poor old screws belonging to gipsies or fish-hawkers; and an
occasional hunter, either belonging to some visitor to the neighbourhood or one
from a local stable which had cast a shoe and could not wait until the regular
visiting day. There were a few donkeys in the neighbourhood, and they, too, had
to be shod; but always by the youngest shoeing smith, for it would have been
beneath the dignity of his seniors to become the butt for the wit of the
passers-by. 'He-haw! He-haw!' they would shout. 'Somebody tell me now, which is
topmost, man or beast, for danged if I can see any difference betwixt 'em?'

Most of the horses were very patient; but a few would plunge
and kick and rear when approached. These Matthew himself shod and, under his
skilful handling, they would quiet down immediately. He had only to put his
hand on the mane and whisper a few words in the ear. It was probably the hand
and voice which soothed them; but it was generally believed that he whispered
some charm which had power over them, and he rather encouraged this idea by
saying when questioned: 'I only speaks to 'em in their own language.'

The local horses were all known to the men and addressed by
them by name. Even the half-yearly bills were made out: 'To So-and-So, Esq. For
shoeing Violet, or Poppet, or Whitefoot, or The Grey Lady.' 'All round', or
'fore', or 'hind', as the case might demand. Strings of horseshoes, made in
quiet intervals, hung upon the shop walls, apparently ready to put on; but
there was usually some little alteration to be made on the anvil while the
horse waited. 'No two horses' feet are exactly alike,' Matthew told Laura.
'They have their little plagues and peculiarities, like you and me do.' And the
parting words from man to beast were often: 'There, old girl, that's better.
You'll be able to run ten miles without stopping with them shoes on your feet.'

Other items which figured in the bills were making hinges for
doors, flaps for drains, gates and railings and tools and household
requirements. On one occasion a bill was sent out for 'Pair of Park Gates to
your own design,
£
20', and Matthew said it should have been fifty, for
he had worked on them for months, staying in the shop hours after the outer
door was closed, and rising early to fit in another hour or two before the
ordinary work of the day began. But it was a labour of love, and, after they
were hung, he had his reward when he, who so seldom went out for pleasure,
dressed on a Sunday and took a walk that way in order to admire and enjoy his
own handicraft.

So the days went on, and, secure in the knowledge of their
own importance in the existing scheme of things, the blacksmiths boasted: 'Come
what may, a good smith'll never want for a job, for whatever may come of this
new cast-iron muck in other ways, the horses'll always have to be shod, and
they can't do that in a foundry!'

Yet, as iron will bend to different uses, so will the workers
in iron. Twenty years later the younger of that generation of smiths were
painting above their shop doors, 'Motor Repairs a Speciality', and, greatly
daring, taking mechanism to pieces which they had no idea how they were going
to put together again. They made many mistakes, which passed undetected because
the owners had no more knowledge than they had of the inside of 'the dratted
thing', and they soon learned by experiment sufficient to enable them to put on
a wise air of authority. Then the legend over the door was repainted, 'Motor
Expert', and expert many of them became in a surprisingly short time, for they
brought the endless patience and ingenuity of the craftsman to the new
mechanism, plus his adaptable skill.

But the holidays at Candleford only occupied a small part of
Laura's year. At the end of a month or so a letter would come saying that
school would begin on the following Monday and she had to return. Excepting the
arrival of a new baby or two, or the settling of a stray swarm of bees on
somebody's apple-tree, nothing ever seemed to have happened in the hamlet while
she had been away. The neighbours would still be discussing the same topics.
The crops were good, or 'but middling', according to the season. Someone had
nearly a half-bushel more corn from their gleanings than the rest of the
hamlet, and that was a mystery to others, who declared they had worked just as
hard and spent even more hours afield. '
A bit of rick-pulling there, I'll
warrant
.' After a dry summer the water in the wells would be dangerously
low, but it had not given out yet, and, 'Please God, us shall get a nice drop
of rain 'fore long. The time of year's getting on to when we may look for it.'
'Look for it! He! He! It'll come whether you looks for it or not. Nice weather
for young ducks and mud up to y'r knees when you goes round to the well,
you'll
see, before you knows where
you
are.'

She found the hamlet unchanged every year; but, beyond the
houses, everything had altered, for it was still summer when she went away and
when she returned it was autumn. Along the hedgerows hips and haws and
crab-apples were ripe and the ivory parchment flowers of the traveller's joy
had become silver and silky. The last of the harvest had been carried and
already the pale stubble was greening over. Soon the sheep would be turned into
the fields to graze, then the ploughs would come and turn the earth brown once
more.

At home, the plums on the front wall of the house were ripe
and the warm, fruity smell of boiling jam drew all the wasps in the
neighbourhood. Other jams, jellies, and pickles already stood on the pantry
shelves. Big yellow vegetable marrows dangled from hooks, and ropes of onions
and bunches of drying thyme and sage. The faggot pile was being replenished and
the lamp was again lighted soon after tea.

For the first few days after her return the house would seem
small and the hamlet bare, and she was inclined to give herself the airs of a
returned traveller when telling of the places she had seen and the people she
had met on her holiday. But that soon wore off and she slipped back into her
own place again. The visits to Candleford were very pleasant and the
conveniences of her cousins' home and their way of life had the charm of
novelty; but the plain spotlessness of her own home, with few ornaments and no
padding to obscure the homely outline, was good, too. She felt she belonged
there.

Her freedom of the fields grew less every year, however, for,
by the time her last year at school approached, her mother had five children.
One little sister shared her bed and another slept in the same room; she had to
go to bed very quietly in the dark, not to awaken them. In the day-time, out of
school hours, the latest baby, a boy, had to be nursed indoors or taken out for
his airing. These things, in themselves, were no hardship, for she adored the
baby, and the little sisters, who held on, one on each side of the
baby-carriage, were dears, one with brown eyes and a mop of golden curls, and
the other a fat, solemn child with brown hair cut in a straight fringe across
her forehead. But Laura could no longer read much indoors or roam where she
would when out, for the baby-carriage had to be kept more or less to the roads
and be pushed back punctually at baby's feeding-time. Her mother's bedtime
stories were still a joy, although no longer told to Edmund and her, but to the
younger children, for Laura loved to listen and to observe the effect each
story had on her little sisters. She was also rather fond of correcting her
mother when her memory went astray in telling the old familiar true stories, which
did not add to her popularity, of which she had little enough already. She had
come to what the hamlet called 'an ok'ard age, neither 'ooman nor child, when
they oughter be shut up in a box for a year or two'.

At school about this time she made her first girl friend and
wearied her mother by saying, 'Emily Rose does this,' 'Emily Rose does that,'
and 'That is what Emily Rose says,' until she said she was sick of the sound of
Emily Rose's name, and could not Laura talk about somebody else for a change.

Emily Rose was the only child of elderly parents who lived on
the other side of the parish in a cottage like a picture on a Christmas card.
It had the same diamond-paned windows and pointed thatched roof and the same
mass of old-fashioned flowers around the doorway. There was even a winding
footpath leading across a meadow to its rustic gate. Laura often wished she
lived in such a house, away from interfering neighbours, and sometimes almost
wished she was an only child like Emily Rose.

Emily Rose was a strong, sturdy little girl with faintly pink
cheeks, wide blue eyes and a flaxen pigtail. Some pigtails in the school were
as thin as rats' tails and others stuck out at an angle behind the head of the
wearer, but Emily Rose's pigtail was thick as a rope and hung heavily to her
waist, where it was finished off with a neat ribbon bow and a fluff of little
loose curls. She had a way of drawing it up over her shoulder and stroking her
cheek with this soft end, which Laura thought very captivating.

Her parents were in somewhat more comfortable circumstances
than the hamlet folk; for not only had they but one child to keep, instead of
the usual half-dozen or more, but her father, being a shepherd, had slightly
higher wages and her mother took in needlework. So Emily Rose had pretty
clothes to set off her flaxen pigtail, a pleasant, comfortable home, and the
undivided affection of both parents. But, although she had the self-confidence
of one who was seldom thwarted, Emily Rose was not a spoilt child. Nothing
could have spoiled one of her calm, well-balanced, straightforward disposition.
Hers was one of those natures which are good all through, good-tempered,
good-natured, and thorough in all they do; a little obstinate, perhaps, but, as
they are usually obstinate with good cause, that also counts as a virtue.

Laura thought Emily Rose's bedroom was worthy of a princess,
with its white walls scattered with tiny pink rosebuds, little white bed and
frilly white window-curtains tied up with pink bows. There were no babies for
her to nurse, and apparently no household tasks were expected of her. She could
have read all day and in bed at night, if she had cared to, for her room was
well apart from that of her parents. But she did not want to read; her delight
was in needlework, at which she excelled, and in wading through brooks and climbing
trees. Her way home from school skirted a wood, and she boasted that she had
climbed every tree by the pathway at some time or other and this for her own
pleasure, without spectators, not because she had been dared to do it.

At home she was petted and made much of. She was asked what
she would like to eat, instead of being given whatever was on the table, and if
the food she fancied were not forthcoming her mother was quite apologetic. But there
were delicious things to eat at Cold Harbour. Once, when Laura called for Emily
Rose during school holidays they had sponge fingers and cowslip wine, which
Emily Rose poured out herself into real wineglasses. On another of Laura's
visits there was lambs' tail pie. The tails in the pie were those of still living
lambs which had been cut off while their owners were still very young, because,
Laura was told, if sheep were allowed to have long tails they would, in wet
weather, become heavy with wet and mud and injure or irritate them. So the
shepherd docked them and took the tails home to be made into a pie, or gave
bundles of them to friends as a great favour. Laura did not like the idea of
eating the tails of live lambs; but it had to be done, for she had been told it
was rude to leave anything at all, excepting bones or fruitstones, on one's
plate.

At school, that last year, Emily Rose and Laura were known as
Class I and had several advantages, although these did not include much
education. They were trusted with the
Key
containing the answers to
their sums and heard each other's spellings, or anything else that had to be
committed to memory. This was partly because the schoolmistress, with all the
other classes in the school on hand, had no time at all to devote to them; but
also as a mark of her confidence. 'I know I can trust my big girls,' she would
say. There were but the two of them and no boys at all in Class I. Most of the
children who had been with Laura in the lower classes had by that time left school
for work, or, having failed to pass their examinations, were being kept back in
Standard IV to make another attempt at the next examination.

In summer the two 'big girls' were allowed to take out their
lessons and do them under the lilac tree in the mistress's garden, and, in
winter, they sat cosily by the fire in her cottage living-room, the condition
attached to this latter privilege being that they kept up the fire and put on
the potatoes to cook for her dinner at the appropriate time. Laura owed these
advantages to Emily Rose. She was the show pupil of the school; good at every
subject and exceptionally good at needlework. She was so good a needlewoman
that she was trusted to make garments for the mistress's own wear, and perhaps
that was the chief reason for their being given the freedom of the
sitting-room, for Laura remembered her sitting with her feet on a hassock with
yards, and yards of white nainsook around her, putting thousands of tiny
stitches into the nightdress she was feather-stitching, while Laura herself
knelt before the fire toasting a kipper for the mistress's tea.

That picture remained with her because it was the day after
St. Valentine's Day, and Emily Rose was telling her about the valentine she had
found awaiting her when she reached home the evening before. She had brought it
to show Laura, pressed between cardboard and wrapped in layers of notepaper,
all silver lace and silk-embroidered flowers, with the words: