Lark Rise to Candleford (69 page)

The Candleford Green workers lived in better cottages and
many of them were better paid than the Lark Rise people. They were not all of
them farm labourers; there were skilled craftsmen amongst them, and some were employed
to drive vans by the tradesmen there and in Candleford town. But wages for all
kinds of work were low and life for most of them must have been a struggle.

The length of raised sidewalk before the temptingly dressed
windows of the Stores was the favourite afternoon promenade of the women, with
or without perambulators. There
The Rage
or
The Latest
, so
ticketed, might be seen free of charge, and the purchase of a reel of cotton or
a paper of pins gave the right of entry to a further display of fashions. On
Sundays the two Misses Pratt displayed the cream of their stock upon their own
persons in church. They were tall, thin young women with frizzy Alexandra
fringes of straw-coloured hair, high cheek-bones and anaemic complexions which
they touched up with rouge.

At the font they had been given the pretty, old-fashioned
names of Prudence and Ruth, but for business purposes, as they explained, they had
exchanged them for the more high-sounding and up-to-date ones of Pearl and
Ruby. The new names passed into currency sooner than might have been expected,
for few of their customers cared to offend them. They might have retaliated by
passing off on the offender an unbecoming hat or by skimping the sleeves of a
new Sunday gown. So, to their faces, they were 'Miss Pearl' and 'Miss Ruby',
while, behind their backs, as often as not, it would be 'That Ruby Pratt, as
she calls herself', or 'Pearl as ought to be Prudence'.

Miss Ruby ran the dressmaking department and Miss Pearl
reigned in the millinery showroom. Both were accepted authorities upon what was
being worn and the correct manner of wearing it. If any one in the village was planning
a new summer outfit and was not sure of the style, she would say, 'I must ask
the Miss Pratts,' and although some of the resulting creations might have
astonished leaders of fashion elsewhere, they were accepted by their customers
as models. In Laura's time the Pratts' customers included the whole feminine
population of the village, excepting those rich enough to buy elsewhere and
those too poor to buy at all at first-hand.

They were good enough girls, enterprising, hard-working, and
clever, and if Laura thought them conceited, that may have been because she had
been told that Miss Pearl had said to a customer in the showroom that she wondered
that Miss Lane had not been able to find some one more genteel than that little
country girl to assist her in her office.

At the time of her marriage, it was said, their mother had
been looked upon as an heiress, having not only inherited the Stores, then a
plain draper's shop with rolls of calico and red flannel in the window, but also
cottages and grazing land, bringing in rent, so it may be supposed she felt
justified in marrying where her fancy led her. It led her to marriage with a
smart young commercial traveller whose round had brought him to the shop periodically,
and together they had introduced modern improvements.

When the new plate-glass windows had been put in, the
dressmaking and millinery departments established, and the shop re-named 'The
Stores', the husband's efforts had ended, and for the rest of his life he had felt
himself entitled to spend most of his waking hours in the bar parlour of the
'Golden Lion' laying down the law to other commercial gentlemen who had not
done so well for themselves. 'There goes that old Pratt again, shaking like a
leaf and as thin as a hurdle,' Miss Lane would say when taking her morning
survey of the green from her window, and Laura, glancing up from her work,
would see the thin figure in loud tweeds and white bowler hat making for the
door of the inn and know, without looking at the clock, that it was exactly
eleven. Some time during the day he would go home for a meal, then return to
his own special seat in the bar parlour, where he would remain until closing time.

At home his wife grew old and shrivelled and complaining,
while the girls grew up and shouldered the business, just in time to stop its decline.
At the time Laura knew them their 'Ma', as her daughters called her, had become
an invalid on whom they lavished the tenderest care, obtaining far-fetched
dainties to tempt her appetite, filling her room with flowers, and staging
there a private show of their latest novelties before they were displayed to
the public. 'No. Not that one, please, Mrs. Perkins,' Miss Pearl said to a
customer in Laura's hearing one day. 'I'm ever so sorry, but it's the new
fashion, only just come in, and Ma's not seen it yet. I'd take it upstairs now
to show her, but she takes her little siesta at this hour. Well, if you really
don't
mind
stepping round again in the morning… .'

If, through absent-mindedness or a lost sense of direction,
Pa wandered in his hat and coat into the showroom, he was gently but firmly led
out by a seemingly playful daughter. 'Dear Papa!' Miss Pearl would exclaim. 'He
does take such an interest. But come along, darling. Come with your own little
Pearlie. Mind the step, now! Gently does it. What you want is a nice strong cup
of tea.'

No wonder the Pratt girls looked, as some people said, as if
they had the weight of the world on their shoulders. They must in reality have carried
a biggish burden of trouble, and if they tried to hide it with a show of high
spirits and simpering smiles, plus a little harmless pretension, that should
have been put down to their credit. Human nature being what it is, their shifts
and pretences only served to provoke a little mild amusement. But, by the time
Laura went to live at Candleford Green the Pratts' was an old story, until, one
summer morning, a first-class sensation was provided for the villagers by the
news that Mr. Pratt had disappeared.

He had left the inn at the usual time, closing time, but had
never reached home. His daughters had sat up for him, gone after midnight to the
'Golden Lion' to inquire, and then headed the search in the lanes in the early
dawn, but there was still no trace, and the police were about, asking questions
of early workmen. Would they circulate his photograph? Would there be a reward?
And, above all, what had become of the man? 'Thin as he was, he couldn't have
fallen down a crack, like!'

The search went on for days. Stationmasters were questioned,
woods were searched foot by foot, wells and ponds were dragged, but no trace
could be found of Mr. Pratt, dead or alive.

Ruby and Pearl, their first grief abating, took counsel with
friends as to whether or not to wear mourning. But, no, they decided. Poor Pa
might yet return, and they compromised by appearing in church in lavender frocks
with touches of mauve, half, or perhaps quarter, mourning. As time went on, the
back door, which, so far, had been left on the latch at night in case of the
return of the prodigal father, was again locked, and perhaps, when alone with
Ma, they admitted with a sigh that all might be for the best.

But they had not heard the last of poor Pa. One morning,
nearly a year later, when Miss Ruby had got up very early and, the maid still
being in bed, had herself gone to the wood-shed for sticks to boil a kettle to make
tea, she found her father peacefully sleeping on a bed of brushwood. Where he
had been all those months he could not or would not say. He thought, or
pretended to think, that there had been no interval of time, that he had come
home as usual from the 'Golden Lion' the night before he was found and, finding
the door locked and not liking to disturb the household, had retired to the
woodshed. The one and only clue to the mystery, and that did not solve it, was
that in the early dawn of the day before that of his reappearance a cyclist on
the Oxford road, a few miles out of that city, had passed on the road a tall,
thin elderly man in a deerstalker cap walking with his head bent and sobbing.

Where he had been and how he had managed to live while he was
away was never found out. He resumed his visits to the 'Golden Lion' and his daughters
shouldered their burden again. By them the episode was always afterwards
referred to as 'Poor Pa's loss of memory'.

The grocer's business next door to the Pratts was also a
thriving and long-established one. From a business point of view, 'Tarman's'
had one advantage over the Stores, for while the draper's depended chiefly on the
middle state of village society, the poor not being able to afford to buy their
models and the gentry despising them, the grocer catered for all. At that time
the more important village people, such as the doctor and clergyman, bought
their provisions at the village shops as a matter of principle. They would have
thought it mean to go further afield for the sake of saving a few shillings,
and even the rich who spent only part of the year at their country houses or
their hunting boxes believed it to be their duty to give the local tradesmen a
turn. If there happened to be more businesses than one of a kind in a village, orders
were placed with each alternately. Even Miss Lane had two bakers, one calling
one week and the other the next, but in her case it may have been more a matter
of business than of principle, as both bakers had horses to be shod.

This custom of local dealing benefited all the inhabitants.
The shopkeeper was able to keep more varieties of goods in stock and often of a
better quality than he would otherwise have done, his cheerful, well-lighted
shop brightened the village street, and he himself made enough money in the way
of profit to enable him to live in substantial comfort. A grocer had to be a
grocer then, for his goods did not come to him in packets, ready to be handed
over the counter, but had to be selected and blended and weighed out by
himself, and for quality he was directly responsible to his customers. The
butcher, too, received no stiff, shrouded carcasses by rail, but had to be able
to recognize the points in the living animal at the local market sufficiently
quickly and well to be able to guarantee the succulent joints and the
old-fashioned chops and steaks would melt in the mouth. Even his scrag ends of
mutton and sixpen'orth of pieces of beef which he sold to the poor were tasty and
rich with juices which the refrigerator seems to have destroyed in present-day
meat. However, we cannot have it all ways, and most villagers would agree that
the attractions of films and wireless and dances and buses to town, plus more
money in the pocket, outweigh the few poor creature comforts of their
grandparents.

Above the grocer's shop, in their large, comfortable rooms,
lived the grocer, his wife, and their growing-up family. This family was not
liked by all; some said they had ideas above their station in life, chiefly because
the children were sent to boarding-school; but practically every one dealt at
their shop, for not only was it the only grocery establishment of any size in
the place, but the goods sold there could be relied upon.

Mr. Tarman was a burly giant in a very white apron. When he
leaned forward and rested his hands on the counter to speak to a customer, the solid
mahogany seemed to bend beneath the strain. His wife was what was called there
'a little pennicking bit of a woman', small and fair and, by that time, a
little worn, though still priding herself upon her complexion, which she
touched with nothing but warm rain water. In spite of the fine lines round her
mouth and eyes, which the rain water had not been able to prevent, the effect
justified her faith in its efficiency, for her cheeks were as fresh and
delicately tinted as those of a child. She was a generous, open-handed creature
who gave liberally to every good cause. The poor had cause to bless her, for
their credit there in bad times was unlimited, and many families had a standing
debt on her books that both debtor and creditor knew could never be paid. Many
a cooked ham-bone with good picking still left on it and many a hock-end of
bacon were slipped by her into the shopping baskets of poor mothers of
families, and the clothes of her children when new were viewed by appraising
eyes by those who hoped to inherit them when outgrown.

By neighbours of her own class she was said to be
extravagant, and perhaps she was. Laura ate strawberries and cream for the
first time at her table, and her own clothes and those of her girls were
certainly not bought at the Miss Pratts'.

The baker and his wife were chiefly remarkable for their
regularity in adding a new unit to their family every eighteen months. They
already had eight children and the entire energies of the mother and any margin
the father might have left after earning their living were devoted to nursing
the younger and keeping in order the elder members of their brood. But theirs
was a cheerful, happy-go-lucky household. The only dig ill-natured neighbours
could get in at Mrs. Brett was the old one then often heard by young mothers:
'Ah! You wait! They makes your arms ache now, but they'll make your heart ache
when they get older.'

The parents were too old and too otherwise engaged and the
children were too young to be friends for Laura, and she never heard what
became of them; but it would not be surprising to learn that those healthy, intelligent,
if somewhat unmanageable Brett children all turned out well.

There were a few other, lesser shops around the green,
including the one which was really a cottage where an old dame sold penny
plates of cooked prunes and rice to the village boys in the evening. She also
made what was known as sticky toffee, so soft it could be pulled out in
lengths, like elastic. She took snuff so freely that no one over twelve years
of age would eat this.

But we must return to the Post Office, where Laura in the
course of her duties was to come to know almost every one.