Lark Rise to Candleford (67 page)

In those early days there had been no merry-go-round, but for
the children, they said, there was Old Hickman's whirligig, apparently the parent'
of the modern merry-go-round. It was made entirely of wood, with an outside
circle of plain wooden seats which revolved by means of a hand-turned device in
the centre. It was a one-man show. When Old Hickman grew tired, a boy bystander
was invited to take his place at the handle, the promised reward being a ride
for every twenty minutes' labour. While the old men were still boys, this
primitive merry-go-round collapsed and they made a rhyme about it, which ran:

Old Jim Hickman's whirligig broke down, Broke and let the
wenches down. If that'd been made of ash or oak, I'll be blowed if that'd have
broke.

Old Hickman's whirligig had broken down and gone to the
bonfire fifty years before, and only Laura cared to hear about it. That, she
was told, was because she was 'one of the quiet, old-fashioned sort'. But
'still waters run deep', they would remind her, and there were plenty of sweethearts
to go round and suit all.

There were plenty of sweethearts on the green on Feast
Monday, pairs and pairs and pairs of them, the girls in their best summer
frocks, with flowers or feathers in their hats, and the young men in their
Sunday suits, with pink or blue ties. With arms round each other's waists, they
strolled from one sight to the next, eating sweets or sections of coconut; or
took turns on the merry-go-round or in the swingboats. All day the roundabout organ
ground out its repertoire of popular tunes, in competition with the brass band
playing a different tune at the other end of the green. Swingboats appeared and
disappeared over the canvas roofs of the booths, and the occupants, now head
upwards, now feet upwards, shrieked with excitement and cheered each other on
to go higher and still higher, while, below, on the trampled turf, people of
all ages threaded the narrow passages between the shows, laughing and shouting and
eating—always eating.

'What crowds!' people cried. 'It's the best Feast we've ever
had. If the green could only always look like this! And I do dearly love a bit
of good music.'

The noise was deafening. The few quiet people who stayed
indoors put cotton-wool in their ears. One year when a poor woman was dying on Feast
Monday in a cottage near the green her friends went out and begged that the
band would stop playing for an hour. The band, of course, could not stop
playing, but the bandsmen offered to muffle the drumsticks, and, for the rest
of the afternoon the drum's
dum, dum, dum
sounded a
memento mori
amidst the rejoicings. Very few noticed it, the other noises were too many and
too loud, and by teatime its resonance was restored, for the woman had died.

Every year, among the cottagers and show folk and maid-servants
and farm-hands at the Feast, there was one aristocratic figure. It was that of
a young man, the eldest son of a peer, who for years frequented all the feasts
and fairs and club-walkings of the countryside. Laura knew him well by sight,
for his ancestral mansion was not far from her own home. From her window at
Candleford Green Post Office she once saw him, leaning languidly against the
pay-box of a coconut shy, surrounded by a bevy of girls who were having 'tries'
at the coconuts at his expense. His dress was that of a country gentleman of
his time, tweed Norfolk suit and deerstalker cap, and that, and his air of
ironic detachment, set him apart from the crowd and helped out his Childe
Harold pose.

All day he was surrounded by village girls, waiting to be
treated to the different shows, and from these he would select one favourite
with whom to dance the evening through. His group was a centre of interest.
'Have 'ee seen Lord So-and-So?' people would ask, just as they might have asked,
'Have 'ee seen the fat lady?' or 'the peep-show?' and they openly pointed him
out to each other as one of the sights of the Feast.

The heroine of a modern novel would have seized such an
opportunity to go out into the throng and learn a little at first-hand about
life; but this is a true story, and Laura was not of the stuff of which
heroines are made. A born looker-on, she preferred to watch from her window, excepting
one year when her brother Edmund came and took her out and knocked off so many
coconuts from the 'shy' that its proprietor refused his penny for another go,
saying in aggrieved tones: 'I know your sort. You bin practising.'

Early in the evening the merry-go-round packed up and
departed. It had only stopped there to put in a day on its way to a larger and
more remunerative fair in the locality. After its organ had gone, the strains of
the band music could be heard and the number of dancers increased. Shop girls
and their swains arrived from Candleford town, farm workers from out-lying
villages came, arm in arm with their girls; men- and maidservants from the
great houses stole out for an hour, and an occasional passer-by, attracted by
the sounds of revelry, came forward and found a partner.

Stalls and booths were taken down and their owners departed;
tired family parties trailed home through the dust and unattached men retired to
the public-houses, but for many there the fun was only beginning. The music
went on and the pale summer frocks of the girl dancers glimmered on in the
twilight.

In the early 'nineties the change which had for some time
been going on in the outer world had reached Candleford Green. A few
old-fashioned country homes, such as that of Miss Lane, might still be seen
there, especially among those of the farming class, and long-established family
businesses still existed, side by side with those newly-established or brought
up to date; but, as the older householders died and the proprietors of the
old-fashioned businesses died or retired, the old gave place to the new.

Tastes and ideas were changing. Quality was less in demand
than it had been. The old solid, hand-made productions, into which good
materials and many hours of patient skilled craftsmanship had been put, were comparatively
costly. The new machine-made goods cost less and had the further attraction of
a meretricious smartness. Also they were fashionable, and most people preferred
them on that account.

'Time, like an ever-rolling stream, bears all its sons away,'
and its daughters, too, and the tastes and ideas of each generation, together with
its ideals and conventions, go rolling downstream with it like so much debris.
But, because the generations overlap, the change is gradual. In the country at
the time now recorded, the day of the old skilled master-craftsman, though
waning, was not over.

Across the green, almost opposite to the post office, stood a
substantial cottage, end to end with a carpenters' shop. In most weathers the
big double door of the workshop stood open and white-aproned workmen with their
feet ankle-deep in shavings could be seen sawing and planing and shaping at the
benches, with, behind them, a window framing a glimpse of a garden with
old-fashioned flowers and a grape-vine draping a grey wall.

There lived and worked the three Williams, father, son, and
grandson. With the help of a couple of journeymen, they not only did all the carpentry
and joinery of the district at a time when no doors or mantelpieces or
window-frames came ready made from abroad, but they also made and mended
furniture for the use of the living and made coffins for the dead. There was no
rival shop. The elder William was the carpenter of the village, just as Miss
Lane was the postmistress and Mr. Coulsdon the vicar.

Although less popular than the smithy as a gathering place,
the carpenters' shop had also its habitués: older and graver men, as a rule, especially
choirmen, for the eldest William played the organ in church and the middle
William was choirmaster. Old Mr. Stokes not only played the organ, but he had
built it with his own hands, and these services to the Church and to music had
given him a unique local standing. But he was almost as much valued for his
great experience and his known wisdom. To him the villagers went in trouble or
difficulty, and he was never known to fail them. He had been Miss Lane's
father's close and intimate friend and was then her own.

At the time Laura knew him he was nearly eighty and much
troubled by asthma, but he still worked at his trade occasionally, with his
long, lean form swathed in a white apron and his full white beard buttoned into
his waistcoat; and, on summer evenings, when the rolling peal of the organ came
from the open door of the church, passers-by would say: 'That's old Mr. Stokes
playing, I'll lay! And he's playing his own music, too, I shouldn't wonder.'
Sometimes he
was
playing his own music, for he would improvise for
hours, but he loved more to play for his own pleasure the music of the masters.

The second William was unlike his father in appearance, being
short and thick of figure while his father was as straight and almost as thin
as a lath. His face resembled that of Dante Gabriel Rossetti so closely that Laura,
on seeing the portrait of that poet-painter in later years, exclaimed, 'Mr.
William!' For, of course, he was called 'Mr. William'. His father was always
spoken of respectfully as 'Mr. Stokes', and his nephew as 'Young Willie'.

Like his father, Mr. William was both musician and craftsman
of the old school, and it was naturally expected that as a matter of course
these gifts would descend to the third William. It had been a proud day for old
Mr. Stokes when young Willie's indentures were signed, for he thought he saw in
them an assured future for the old family business. When he was at rest, and
his son, there would still be a William Stokes, Carpenter and Joiner, of
Candleford Green, and, after that, perhaps, still another William to follow.

But Willie himself was not so sure. He had been legally
apprenticed to his grandfather's business, as was the custom in family establishments
in those days, rather because it was the line laid down for him than because he
desired to become a carpenter. His work in the shop was to him but work, not a
fine art or a religion, and for the music so sacred to his elders he had but a
moderate taste.

He was a tall, slim boy of sixteen, with beautiful hazel eyes
and a fair—too fair—pink-and-white complexion. Had his mother or his grandmother
been alive, his alternating fits of lassitude and devil-may-care high spirits
would have been recognized as a sign that he was outgrowing his strength and
that his health needed care. But the only woman in his grandfather's house was
a middle-aged cousin of the middle William, who acted as housekeeper: a hard,
gaunt, sour-looking woman whose thoughts and energies were centred upon keeping
the house spotless. When the front door of their house was opened upon the
small bare hall, with its grandfather's clock and oilcloth floor-covering patterned
with lilies, an intruding nose was met by the clean, cold smell of soap and
furniture polish. Everything in that house which could be scrubbed was scrubbed
to a snowy whiteness; not a chair or a rug or a picture-frame was ever a
hairbreadth out of place; horsehair chair and sofa coverings were polished to a
cold slipperiness, tabletops might have served as mirrors, and an air of
comfortless order pervaded the whole place. It was indeed a model house in the
matter of cleanliness, but as a home for a delicate, warm-hearted orphan boy it
fell short.

The kitchen was the only inhabited room. There the three
generations of Williams took their meals, and there they carefully removed
their shoes before retiring to the bedrooms which were sleeping-places only. To
come home with wet clothes on a rainy day was accounted a crime. The drying of
them 'messed up the place', so Willie, who was the only one of the three to be
out in such weather, would change surreptitiously and leave his clothes to dry
as they might, or not dry. His frequent colds left him with a cough that
lingered every year into the spring. 'A churchyard cough,' the older villagers
said, and shook their heads knowingly. But his grandfather did not appear to
notice this. Although he loved him tenderly, he had too many other interests to
be able to keep a close watch over his grandson's physical well-being. He left
that to the cousin, who was absorbed in her housework and already felt it a
hardship to have what she called 'a great hulking hobble-de-hoy' in the house
to mess up her floors and rugs and made enough cooking and washing up for a regiment.

Willie did not care for the music his grandfather and uncle
loved. He preferred the banjo and such popular songs as 'Oh, dem Golden
Slippers' and 'Two Lovely Black Eyes' to organ fugues—except in church, where
he sometimes sang the anthem, looking like an angel in his white surplice.

Yet, in other ways, he had a great love of and craving for
beauty. 'I do like deep, rich colours—violet and crimson and the blue of those delphiniums—don't
you?' he said to Laura in Miss Lane's garden one day. Laura loved those
colours, too. She was almost ashamed to answer the questions in the Confession
Books of her more fashionable friends:
Favourite colours?
Purple and
crimson.
Favourite flowers?
The red rose.
Favourite poet?
Shakespeare.
The answers made her appear so unoriginal. She almost envied previous writers
in the books their preferences when she read:
Favourite flower?
Petunia,
orchid, or sweet-pea; but she had not as yet the social wit to say, 'Favourite flower?
After the rose, of course?' or to pay mere lip service to Shakespeare, so she
was obliged to appear obvious.

Willie was fond of reading, too, and did not object to
poetry. Somehow he had got possession of an old shattered copy of an anthology
called
A Thousand and One Gems
, and when he came to tea with Miss Lane,
who had known his mother and had a special affection for him, he would bring this
book, and after office hours Laura and he would sit among the nut-trees at the
bottom of the garden and take turns at reading aloud from it.