Lark Rise to Candleford (71 page)

At the time now recorded there were perhaps a dozen of these Saturday-evening
clients. None of the older men among them could write, and when Laura first
knew them these would bring their letters to their wives in Ireland already
written by one of their younger workmates. But soon she had these illiterates
coming stealthily alone. 'Would ye be an angel, Missie darlint, an' write just
a few little words for me on this sheet of paper I've brought?' they would
whisper, and Laura would write to their dictation such letters as the
following:

'MY DEAR WIFE,—Thanks be to God, our Blessed Lady and the
saints, this leaves me in the best of health, with work in plenty and money
coming in to give us all a better winter than last year, please God.'

Then, after inquiries about the health of 'herself' and the
children, the old father and mother, Uncle Doolan, Cousin Bridget, and each neighbour
by name, the real reason for getting the letter written surreptitiously would
emerge. The wife would be told to 'pay off at the shop', or to ask such and
such a price for something they had to sell, or not to forget to 'lay by a bit
in the stocking'; but she was not to deny herself anything she fancied; she
should live like a queen if the sender of the letter had his way, and he
remained her loving husband.

Laura noticed that when these letters were dictated there
were none of the long pauses usual when she was writing a letter for one of her
own old countrymen, as she sometimes did. Words came freely to the Irishman, and
there were rich, warm phrases in his letters that sounded like poetry. What
Englishman of his class would think of wishing his wife could live like a
queen? 'Take care of yourself' would be the fondest expression she would find
in his letters. The Irishman, too, had better manners than the Englishman. He
took off his hat when he came in at the door, said 'please', or, rather,
'plaze', more frequently, and was almost effusive in his thanks for some small
service. The younger men were inclined to pay compliments, but they did so in
such charming words that no one could have felt offended.

Many gipsies frequented the neighbourhood, where there were
certain roadside dells which they used as camping-grounds. These, for weeks together,
would be silent and deserted, with only circles of black ash to show where
fires had been and scraps of coloured rag fluttering from bushes. Then one day,
towards evening, tents would be raised and fires lighted, horses would be
hobbled and turned out to graze, and men with lurchers at their heels would
explore the field hedgerows (not after rabbits. Oh, no! Only to cut a nice ash
stick with which to make their old pony go), while the women and children around
the cooking pots in the dell shouted and squabbled and called out to the men in
a different language from that they used for business purposes at cottage
doors.

'There's them ole gipos back again,' the villagers would say
when they saw blue smoke drifting over the treetops. 'Time they was routed out
o' them places, the ole stinkin' lot of 'em. If a poor man so much as looks at
a rabbit he soon finds hisself in quod, but their pot's never empty. Says they
eat hedgehogs! Hedgehogs! He! He! Hedgehogs wi' soft prickles!'

Laura liked the gipsies, though she did sometimes wish they
would not push with their baskets into the office, three or four at a time. If
a village woman happened to be there before them she would sidle out of the
door holding her nose, and their atmosphere was, indeed, overpowering, though
charged as much with the odours of wood-smoke and wet earth as with that of
actual uncleanliness.

There was no delivery of letters at their tents or caravans.
For those they had to call at the Post Office. 'Any letters for Maria Lee?' or
for Mrs. Eli Stanley, or for Christina Boswell, they would say, and, if there
were none, and there very often were not, they would say: 'Are you quite sure
now, dearie? Do just look again. I've left my youngest in Oxford Infirmary,' or
'My daughter's expecting an increase,' or 'My boy's walking up from Winchester
to join us, and he ought to be here by now.'

All this seemed surprisingly human to Laura, who had hitherto
looked upon gipsies as outcasts, robbers of henroosts, stealers of children, and
wheedlers of pennies from pockets even poorer than their own. Now she met them
on a business footing, and they never begged from her and very seldom tried to
sell her a comb or a length of lace from their baskets, but one day an old
woman for whom she had written a letter offered to tell her fortune. She was
perhaps the most striking-looking person Laura ever saw in her life: tall for a
gipsy, with flashing black eyes and black hair without a fleck of grey in it,
although her cheeks were deeply wrinkled and leathery. Some one had given her a
man's brightly-coloured paisley-patterned dressing-gown, which she wore as an outdoor
garment with a soft billy-cock hat. Her name was Cinderella Doe and her letters
came so addressed, without a prefix.

The fortune was pleasing. Whoever heard of one that was not?
There was no fair man or dark man or enemy to beware of in it, and though she promised
Laura love, it was not love of the usual kind. 'You're going to be loved,' she
said; 'loved by people you've never seen and never will see.' A graceful way of
thanking one for writing a letter.

Friends and acquaintances who came to the Post Office used
often to say to Laura: 'How dull it must be for you here.' But although she
sometimes agreed mildly for the sake of not appearing peculiar, Laura did not
find life at the Post Office at all dull. She was so young and new to life that
small things which older people might not have noticed surprised and pleased
her. All day interesting people were coming in—interesting to her, at least—and
if there were intervals between these callers, there was always something
waiting to be done. Sometimes, in a few spare moments, Miss Lane would come in
and find her reading a book from the parlour or the Mechanics' Institute.
Although she had not actually forbidden reading for pleasure on duty, she did
not altogether approve of it, for she thought it looked unbusinesslike. So she
would say, rather acidly: 'Are you sure you can learn nothing more from the
Rule Book?' and Laura would once more take down from its shelf the large, cream,
cardboard-bound tome she had already studied until she knew many of the rules
word for word. From even that dry-as-dust reading she extracted some pleasure.
On one page, for instance, set in a paragraph composed of stiff, official
phrases, was the word 'mignonette'. It referred only to the colour of a form,
or something of that kind, but to Laura it seemed like a pressed flower, still
faintly scented.

And, although such callers as the gipsies and the Irish
harvesters appealed to her imagination because they were out of the ordinary,
she was even more interested in the ordinary country people, because she knew
them better and knew more of their stories. She knew the girl in love with her
sister's husband, whose hands trembled while she tore open her letters from
him; and the old mother who had not heard for three years from her son in
Australia, but still came every day to the Post Office, hoping; and the rough
working man who, when told for the first time, ten years after marriage, that
his wife had an illegitimate daughter of sixteen and that that daughter was
stricken with tuberculosis, said: 'You go and fetch her home at once and look
after her. Your child's my child and your home's her home'; and she knew families
which put more money in the Savings Bank every week than they received in
wages, and other families which were being dunned for the payment of bills, and
what shop in London supplied Mrs. Fashionable with clothes, and who posted the
box containing a dead mouse to Mrs. Meddlesome. But those were stories she
would never be at liberty to tell in full, because of the Declaration she had
signed before Sir Timothy.

And she had her own personal experiences: her moments of
ecstasy in the contemplation of beauty; her periods of religious doubt and
hours of religious faith; her bitter disillusionments on finding some people
were not what she had thought them, and her stings of conscience over her own shortcomings.
She grieved often for the sorrows of others and sometimes for her own. A sudden
chance glimpse of animal corruption caused her to dwell for weeks on the fate
of the human body. She fell into hero-worship of an elderly nobleman and
thought it was love. If he noticed her at all, he must have thought her most
attentive and obliging over his post-office business. She never saw him outside
the office. She learned to ride a bicycle, took an interest in dress, formed
her own taste in reading, and wrote a good deal of bad verse which she called 'poetry'.

But the reactions to life of a sensitive, imaginative
adolescent have been so many times described in print that it is not proposed
to give yet one more description in this book. Laura's mental and spiritual development
can only be interesting in that it shows that those of a similar type develop
in much the same way, however different the environment.

A number of customers rode up to the Post Office door on
horseback. A mounting-block by the doorstep, with an iron hook in the wall
above to secure the reins, had been provided for these. But the hook was seldom
used out of school hours, for, if boys were playing on the green, half a dozen
of them would rush forward, calling: 'Hold your 'oss, sir?' 'Let me, sir.' 'Let
me!' and, unless the horse was of the temper called 'froxy', one of the tallest
and stoutest of the boys would be chosen and afterwards rewarded with a penny
for his pains. This arrangement entailed frequent dashes to the door by the
customer to see what 'that young devil' was 'up to', and a worrying haste with
the business within, but no horseman thought of refusing the job to a boy who
asked for it, because it was the custom. The boys claimed the job and the
reward of one penny as their right.

The gentlemen farmers to whom most of the horses belonged,
had fresh, ruddy faces and breezy manners and wore smartly cut riding breeches
and coats. Some of them were hunting men with lady wives, and children away at
boarding schools. Their farmhouses were comfortably furnished and their tables
well covered with the best of food and drink, for everybody seemed in those
days to do well on the land, except the farm labourer. Occasionally the rider
would be a stud groom from one of the hunting stables. Then, after doing what
little business he had, he would ask for Miss Lane, pass through to the
kitchen, from which the chinking sound of glasses would soon proceed. Bottles
of brandy and whisky were kept for these in a cupboard called 'the stud-grooms'
cupboard'. No one in the house ever touched these drinks, but they had to be
provided in the way of business. It was the custom.

The sound of a bicycle being propped against the wall outside
was less frequent than that of a horse's hoofs; but there were already a few cyclists,
and the number of these increased rapidly when the new low safety bicycle
superseded the old penny-farthing type. Then, sometimes, on a Saturday
afternoon, the call of a bugle would be heard, followed by the scuffling of
dismounting feet, and a stream of laughing, jostling young men would press into
the tiny office to send facetious telegrams. These members of the earliest
cycling clubs had a great sense of their own importance, and dressed up to
their part in a uniform composed of a tight navy knickerbocker suit with red or
yellow braided coat and a small navy pill-box cap embroidered with their club
badge. The leader carried a bugle suspended on a coloured cord from his
shoulder. Cycling was considered such a dangerous pastime that they telegraphed
home news of their safe arrival at the farthest point in their journey. Or
perhaps they sent the telegrams to prove how far they really had travelled, for
a cyclist's word as to his day's mileage then ranked with an angler's account
of his catch.

'Did run in two hours, forty and a half minutes. Only ran
down two fowls, a pig, and a carter', is a fair sample of their communications.
The bag was mere brag; the senders had probably hurt no living creature; some
of them may even have dismounted by the roadside to allow a horsed carriage to
pass, but every one of them liked to pose as 'a regular devil of a fellow'.

They were townsmen out for a lark, and, after partaking of
refreshment at the hotel, they would play leap-frog or kick an old tin about
the green. They had a lingo of their own. Quite common things, according to them,
were 'scrumptious', or 'awfully good', or 'awfully rotten', or just 'bally
awful'. Cigarettes they called 'fags'; their bicycles their 'mounts', or 'my
machine' or 'my trusty steed'; the Candleford Green people they alluded to as
'the natives'. Laura was addressed by them as 'fair damsel', and their
favourite ejaculation was 'What ho!' or 'What ho, she bumps!'

But they were not to retain their position as bold pioneer
adventurers long. Soon, every man, youth and boy whose families were above the poverty
line was riding a bicycle. For some obscure reason, the male sex tried hard to
keep the privilege of bicycle riding to themselves. If a man saw or heard of a
woman riding he was horrified. 'Unwomanly. Most unwomanly! God knows what the
world's coming to,' he would say; but, excepting the fat and elderly and the
sour and envious, the women suspended judgement. They saw possibilities which
they were soon to seize. The wife of a doctor in Candleford town was the first
woman cyclist in that district. 'I should like to tear her off that thing and smack
her pretty little backside,' said one old man, grinding his teeth with fury.
One of more gentle character sighed and said: ''T'ood break my heart if I saw
my wife on one of they', which those acquainted with the figure of his
middle-aged wife thought reasonable.

Their protestations were unavailing; one woman after another
appeared riding a glittering new bicycle. In long skirts, it is true, but with most
of their petticoats left in the bedroom behind them. Even those women who as
yet did not cycle gained something in freedom of movement, for the two or three
bulky petticoats formerly worn were replaced by neat serge knickers—heavy and
cumbersome knickers, compared with those of to-day, with many buttons and stiff
buttonholes and cambric linings to be sewn in on Saturday nights, but a great
improvement on the petticoats.