Lark Rise to Candleford (6 page)

Yet she had brains of her own and her education had been
above the average in her station in life. She had been born and brought up in a
cottage standing in the churchyard of a neighbouring village, 'just like the
little girl in
We are Seven
', she used to tell her own children. At the
time when she was a small girl in the churchyard cottage the incumbent of the
parish had been an old man and with him had lived his still more aged sister.
This lady, whose name was Miss Lowe, had become very fond of the pretty,
fair-haired little girl at the churchyard cottage and had had her at the
Rectory every day out of school hours. Little Emma had a sweet voice and she
was supposed to go there for singing lessons; but she had learned other things,
too, including old-world manners and to write a beautiful antique hand with
delicate, open-looped pointed letters and long 's's', such as her instructress
and other young ladies had been taught in the last quarter of the eighteenth century.

Miss Lowe was then nearly eighty, and had long been dead when
Laura, at two and a half years old, had been taken by her mother to see the by then
very aged Rector. The visit was one of her earliest memories, which survived as
an indistinct impression of twilight in a room with dark green walls and the
branch of a tree against the outside of the window; and, more distinctly, a
pair of trembling, veiny hands putting something smooth and cold and round into
her own. The smooth cold roundness was accounted for afterwards. The old
gentleman, it appeared, had given her a china mug which had been his sister's
in her nursery days. It had stood on the mantelpiece at the end house for
years, a beautiful old piece with a design of heavy green foliage on a ground
of translucent whiteness. Afterwards it got broken, which was strange in that
careful home; but Laura carried the design in her mind's eye for the rest of
her life and would sometimes wonder if it accounted for her lifelong love of green
and white in conjunction.

Their mother would often tell the children about the Rectory
and her own home in the churchyard, and how the choir, in which her father
played the violin, would bring their instruments and practise there in the evening.
But she liked better to tell of that other rectory where she had been nurse to
the children. The living was small and the Rector was poor, but three maids had
been possible in those days, a cook-general, a young housemaid, and Nurse Emma.
They must have been needed in that large, rambling old house, in which lived
the Rector and his wife, their nine children, three maids, and often three or
four young men pupils. They had all had such jolly, happy times she said; all
of them, family and maids and pupils, singing glees and part songs in the drawing-room
in the evening. But what thrilled Laura most was that she herself had had a
narrow escape from never having been born at all. Some relatives of the family
who had settled in New South Wales had come to England on a visit and nearly
persuaded Nurse Emma to go back with them. Indeed, it was all settled when, one
night, they began talking about snakes, which, according to their account,
infested their Australian bungalow and garden. 'Then,' said Emma, 'I shan't go,
for I can't abear the horrid creatures,' and she did not go, but got married instead
and became the mother of Edmund and Laura. But it seems that the call was genuine,
that Australia had something for, or required something of, her descendants; for
of the next generation her own second son became a fruit-farmer in Queensland,
and of the next a son of Laura's is now an engineer in Brisbane.

The little Johnstones were always held up as an example to
the end house children. They were always kind to each other and obedient to
their elders, never grubby or rowdy or inconsiderate. Perhaps they deteriorated
after Nurse Emma left, for Laura remembered being taken to see them before they
left the neighbourhood for good, when one of the big boys pulled her hair and
made faces at her and buried her doll beneath a tree in the orchard, with one
of the cook's aprons tied round his neck by way of a surplice.

The eldest girl, Miss Lily, then about nineteen, walked miles
of the way back home with them and returned alone in the twilight (so Victorian
young ladies were not always as carefully guarded as they are now supposed to
have been!). Laura remembered the low murmur of conversation behind her as she
rode for a lift on the front of the baby carriage with her heels dangling over
the front wheel. Both a Sir George and a Mr. Looker, it appeared, were paying
Miss Lily 'particular attention' at the time, and their rival advantages were
under discussion. Every now and then Miss Lily would protest, 'But, Emma, Sir
George paid me
particular attention
. Many remarked upon it to Mamma,'
and Emma would say, 'But, Miss Lily, my dear, do you think he is serious?'
Perhaps he was, for Miss Lily was a lovely girl; but it was as Mrs. Looker she
became a kind of fairy godmother to the end house family. A Christmas parcel of
books and toys came from her regularly, and although she never saw her old nurse
again, they were still writing to each other in the nineteen-twenties.

Around the hamlet cottages played many little children, too
young to go to school. Every morning they were bundled into a piece of old
shawl crossed on the chest and tied in a hard knot at the back, a slice of food
was thrust into their hands and they were told to 'go play' while their mothers
got on with the housework. In winter, their little limbs purple-mottled with
cold, they would stamp around playing horses or engines. In summer they would
make mud pies in the dust, moistening them from their own most intimate water
supply. If they fell down or hurt themselves in any other way, they did not run
indoors for comfort, for they knew that all they would get would be 'Sarves ye
right. You should've looked where you wer' a-goin'!'

They were like little foals turned out to grass, and received
about as much attention. They might, and often did, have running noses and chilblains
on hands, feet and ear-tips; but they hardly ever were ill enough to have to
stay indoors, and grew sturdy and strong, so the system must have suited them.
'Makes 'em hardy,' their mothers said, and hardy, indeed, they became, just as
the men and women and older boys and girls of the hamlet were hardy, in body
and spirit.

Sometimes Laura and Edmund would go out to play with the
other children. Their father did not like this; he said they were little
savages already. But their mother maintained that, as they would have to go to school
soon, it was better for them to fall in at once with the hamlet ways.
'Besides,' she would say, 'why shouldn't they? There's nothing the matter with
Lark Rise folks but poverty, and that's no crime. If it was, we should likely
be hung ourselves.'

So the children went out to play and often had happy times,
outlining houses with scraps of broken crockery and furnishing them with moss
and stones; or lying on their stomachs in the dust to peer down into the deep
cracks dry weather always produced in that stiff, clayey soil; or making snow
men or sliding on puddles in winter.

Other times were not so pleasant, for a quarrel would arise
and kicks and blows would fly freely, and how hard those little two-year-old
fists could hit out! To say that a child was as broad as it was long was considered
a compliment by the hamlet mothers, and some of those toddlers in their knotted
woollen wrappings were as near square as anything human can be. One little girl
named Rosie Phillips fascinated Laura. She was plump and hard and as
rosy-cheeked as an apple, with the deepest of dimples and hair like bronze
wire. No matter how hard the other children bumped into her in the games, she
stood four-square, as firm as a little rock. She was a very hard hitter and had
little, pointed, white teeth that bit. The two tamer children always came out worst
in these conflicts. Then they would make a dash on their long stalky legs for
their own garden gate, followed by stones and cries of 'Long-shanks! Cowardy,
cowardy custards!'

During those early years at the end house plans were always
being made and discussed. Edmund must be apprenticed to a good trade—a carpenter's,
perhaps—for if a man had a good trade in his hands he was always sure of a
living. Laura might become a school-teacher, or, if that proved impossible, a
children's nurse in a good family. But, first and foremost, the family must
move from Lark Rise to a house in the market town. It had always been the
parents' intention to leave. When he met and married his wife the father was a
stranger in the neighbourhood, working for a few months on the restoration of
the church in a neighbouring parish and the end house had been taken as a
temporary home. Then the children had come and other things had happened to
delay the removal. They could not give notice until Michaelmas Day, or another baby
was coming, or they must wait until the pig was killed or the allotment crops
were brought in; there was always some obstacle, and at the end of seven years
they were still at the end house and still talking almost daily about leaving
it. Fifty years later the father had died there and the mother was living there
alone.

When Laura approached school-going age the discussions became
more urgent. Her father did not want the children to go to school with the hamlet
children and for once her mother agreed with him. Not because, as he said, they
ought to have a better education than they could get at Lark Rise; but because
she feared they would tear their clothes and catch cold and get dirty heads
going the mile and a half to and from the school in the mother village. So
vacant cottages in the market town were inspected and often it seemed that the
next week or the next month they would be leaving Lark Rise for ever; but, again,
each time something would happen to prevent the removal, and, gradually, a new
idea arose. To gain time, their father would teach the two eldest children to
read and write, so that, if approached by the School Attendance Office, their mother
could say they were leaving the hamlet shortly and, in the meantime, were being
taught at home.

So their father brought home two copies of Mavor's First
Reader and taught them the alphabet; but just as Laura was beginning on words
of one syllable, he was sent away to work on a distant job, only coming home at
week-ends. Laura, left at the 'C-a-t s-i-t-s on the m-a-t' stage, had then to
carry her book round after her mother as she went about her housework, asking:
'Please, Mother, what does h-o-u-s-e spell?' or 'W-a-l-k, Mother, what is
that?' Often when her mother was too busy or too irritated to attend to her,
she would sit and gaze on a page that might as well have been printed in Hebrew
for all she could make of it, frowning and poring over the print as though she
would wring out the meaning by force of concentration.

After weeks of this, there came a day when, quite suddenly,
as it seemed to her, the printed characters took on a meaning. There were still
many words, even in the first pages of that simple primer, she could not decipher;
but she could skip those and yet make sense of the whole. 'I'm reading! I'm reading!'
she cried aloud. 'Oh, Mother! Oh, Edmund! I'm reading!'

There were not many books in the house, although in this
respect the family was better off than its neighbours; for, in addition to
'Father's books', mostly unreadable as yet, and Mother's Bible and
Pilgrim's
Progress
, there were a few children's books which the Johnstones had turned
out from their nursery when they left the neighbourhood. So, in time, she was
able to read Grimms'
Fairy Tales
,
Gulliver's Travels
,
The
Daisy Chain
, and Mrs. Molesworth's
Cuckoo Clock
and
Carrots
.

As she was seldom seen without an open book in her hand, it
was not long before the neighbours knew she could read. They did not approve of
this at all. None of their children had learned to read before they went to school,
and then only under compulsion, and they thought that Laura, by doing so, had
stolen a march on them. So they attacked her mother about it, her father conveniently
being away. 'He'd no business to teach the child himself,' they said. 'Schools
be the places for teaching, and you'll likely get wrong for him doing it when
governess finds out.' Others, more kindly disposed, said Laura was trying her
eyes and begged her mother to put an end to her studies; but, as fast as one
book was hidden away from her, she found another, for anything in print drew
her eyes as a magnet draws steel.

Edmund did not learn to read quite so early; but when he did,
he learned more thoroughly. No skipping unknown words for him and guessing what
they meant by the context; he mastered every page before he turned over, and
his mother was more patient with his inquiries, for Edmund was her darling.

If the two children could have gone on as they were doing,
and have had access to suitable books as they advanced, they would probably
have learnt more than they did during their brief schooldays. But that happy time
of discovery did not last. A woman, the frequent absences from school of whose
child had brought the dreaded Attendance Officer to her door, informed him of
the end house scandal, and he went there and threatened Laura's mother with all
manner of penalties if Laura was not in school at nine o'clock the next Monday
morning.

So there was to be no Oxford or Cambridge for Edmund. No
school other than the National School for either. They would have to pick up
what learning they could like chickens pecking for grain—a little at school, more
from books, and some by dipping into the store of others.

Sometimes, later, when they read about children whose lives
were very different from their own, children who had nurseries with
rocking-horses and went to parties and for sea-side holidays and were
encouraged to do and praised for doing just those things they themselves were
thought odd for, they wondered why they had alighted at birth upon such an unpromising
spot as Lark Rise.