Lark Rise to Candleford (74 page)

'Then,' said her aunt, 'I'll come with you,' and, after she
had bundled away her ironing and put her infant in the perambulator, they
hurried off together without seeing or speaking to anybody. Their way lay for the
greater part through fields and across a wild heath, and they still saw no one
who knew them or could possibly guess their errand.

In the meantime, as they journeyed, in the village of their
destination the nurse was washing and making comfortable the invalid. They were
alone in the house, together in the one room. Poor Lily was a little peevish,
for she was in a weak state—as it proved, actually dying—and objected to being
disturbed by the nurse's ministrations.

'Come, come! You must let me make you look nice. Your sister
will be here directly,' said the nurse cheerfully.

'I know,' said Lily. 'I can see her. Aunt Emma is with her.
They're just coming over Hardwick Heath and they're picking some blackberries.'

'Oh, no, my dear,' said the nurse. 'You mustn't expect your
aunt so early in the day as this. She doesn't even know you're so ill and she's
got her young baby to see to. And they wouldn't be picking blackberries. They'd
be hurrying on to see you.'

Shortly afterwards they arrived. And blackberries had been
picked, for the aunt, not having had time to take flowers from her own garden,
had gathered a little bouquet of harebells and other heath flowers, which she
had backed with early-turned yellow and crimson bramble leaves and a few sprays
loaded with fruit.

After she had become accustomed to her new surroundings at
Candleford Green, Laura was happier, or at least gayer, than she had been since
early childhood. Because of her age, or the overflowing abundance of Miss
Lane's table, or because something in the air or the life suited her, her thin
figure filled out, a brighter colour appeared in her cheeks, and such an inrush
of energy and high spirits took hold of her that she would dance, rather than
walk, about the house and garden, and felt she could never tire.

This may have been partly due to her release from home cares.
At home she had been a little mother to her younger brothers and sisters and
the sharer in many of her mother's perplexities. Now she was the youngest in a
houseful of adults, the elder of whom treated her as a child. Miss Lane was, at
times, even indulgent to her, calling her 'my chick' and making her presents of
small, pretty things, which she knew would please her. The old servant, Zillah,
tolerated her when she found that she had now some one at hand willing to run
upstairs 'to save her poor feet', or to whisk the washing off the line and
bring it indoors when it started to rain, or to creep into the low henhouse to
collect the eggs for her. She would still sometimes refer to Laura as 'that
lafeting little thing' and tell her to wait until the black ox trod on her
toes, and, once, in a very bad-tempered moment, she foretold that 'Our missis'll
rue the day when she brought that hoity-toity little piece to live along with
her', but that was only because Laura had accidentally left footprints on her newly
scoured flagstones. Often she was quite pleasant, and on the whole their
relations may be described as a state of armed neutrality.

There was no neutrality about Matthew. As he said, if he
liked anybody, he
liked
them; if not, they had better keep out of his
way. His liking for Laura took the form of kindly teasing. He quizzed her about
her clothes and accused her of altering the shape of her best hat once a fortnight.
She had re-trimmed it once and he, happening to come into the kitchen while she
was doing it, had asked what she thought she was up to. When she said she was
trying to make the crown a little lower, he had offered to take the hat out to
the forge and lower the crown with his sledge-hammer on the anvil, and that
episode furnished him with a standing joke which he repeated every time Laura
appeared in anything new. That is a sample of Matthew's jokes. He had scores of
similar ones which he was constantly repeating with the intention of amusing
her.

Matthew was a small, bent, elderly man with weak blue eyes
and sandy whiskers. No one looking at him would have guessed at his importance
in the eyes of the local farmers and land-owners. He was a farrier as well as a
smith, and such a farrier, it was said, as few neighbourhoods could boast of.
Horses, indeed, appeared to be more to him than human beings; he understood and
could cure so many of their ailments that the veterinary surgeon had seldom to
be sent for by the Candleford Green horse-owners.

A cupboard, known as 'Matthew's cupboard', high up on the
kitchen wall, held the drugs he used. When he unlocked it, bottles of all
shapes and sizes could be seen; big embrocation bottles, stoppered glass jars containing
powder or crystals, and several blue poison bottles, one of which must have
held at least a pint and was labelled 'Laudanum'. He would hold this last
bottle up to the light, shake it gently, and say: 'A wineglass of this wouldn't
do some folks I know much harm. Their headaches and whimseys 'udn't trouble
them no more, nor other folks neither.'

That was another of Matthew's jokes. He had no enemies, and,
as far as was known, no intimate friends among his own kind. His affections
were reserved for animals, especially for those he had cured of some sickness or
injury. If a cow had a difficult calving, or a pig went off its food, or an
infirm old dog had to be put away, Matthew was sent for. He had a tame thrush
which he had found in the fields with a broken wing and brought home to treat.
He had succeeded to some extent in mending its wing, but it could still only
flutter, not fly, so he bought a round wicker cage for it which he kept hung on
the wall outside the back door. He released it every day during his
dinner-hour, when it would follow him round the garden,
hoppity-hop
.

The younger smiths, who called Laura 'Missy', had little to
say to her in public, but when they met her alone in the garden they would
offer to reach her a pear or a greengage, or show her some new flower which had
come out, or ask her if she had seen old Tibby's new kittens in the woodshed,
blushing the while in a way which delighted Laura, who loved to come soundlessly
upon them in her new rubber-soled shoes.

Those new lightweight shoes in which Laura hopped and skipped
when she should have walked were the thin black rubber ones with dingy-looking,
greyish-black uppers, now known as 'gym shoes'. They were known then by the
ugly name of 'plimsolls' and had for some time been popular for informal
seaside wear by otherwise well-dressed women and children. Now they had been
introduced into country districts as a novelty for summer wear, and men and
women and girls and boys were all sporting their 'softs'. They were soon found
unsuitable for wear in wet weather and on rough country roads, and newer and
smarter styles in buck-skin or canvas superseded them for tennis and croquet,
but for a summer or two they were 'all the rage', and the young, hitherto
accustomed to stiff, heavy leather shoes, luxuriated in them.

Miss Lane still kept to the old middle-class country custom
of one huge washing of linen every six weeks. In her girlhood it would have
been thought poor looking to have had a weekly or fortnightly washday. The better
off a family was, the more changes of linen its members were supposed to
possess, and the less frequent the washday. That was one reason why our
grandmothers counted their articles of underwear by the dozen. And the underwear
then in fashion was not of the kind to be washed out in a basin. It had to be
boiled and blued and required much ironing. There may have already been
laundries, though Laura never heard of one in that district. A few women in
cottages took in washing, but most of it was done at home.

For the big wash at Miss Lane's, a professional washerwoman
came for two days, arriving at six o'clock on the Monday morning in a clean
apron and sunbonnet, with a second apron of sacking and a pair of Pattens in a large
open basket upon her arm. Charwomen, too, carried these baskets, 'in case', as
they said—meaning in the hope that something or other would be given them to
put into them. They were seldom disappointed.

All day on the two washdays, steam and the smell of soapsuds
came in great puffs from the window and door of the small, detached building known
as the 'wash-house', and the back yard was flooded with waste water flowing
down the gutter to the open drain, while the old washerwoman clattered about in
her pattens, or stood at her wooden washtub, scouring and rinsing and wringing
and blueing, and Zillah, as red as a turkeycock and in a fiendish temper,
oversaw and helped with the work in hand. Indoors, Laura washed up and got the
meals. If Miss Lane wanted anything cooked, she had to cook it herself, but
cold food was the rule. A ham or half a ham had usually been boiled a few days before.

Soon, sheets and pillow-cases and towels were billowing in
the wind on a line the whole length of the garden, while Miss Lane's more
intimate personal wear dried modestly on a line by the henhouse, 'out of the men's
sight'. All went well if the weather happened to be fine. If not, very much the
reverse. The old country saying which referred to a disagreeable-looking man or
woman: 'He'—or she—'looks about as pleasant as a wet washday' would have lost
its full flavour of irony if used in these days.

On the evening of the second washday, the washerwoman
departed with three shillings, wages for the two days, in her pocket, and in
her basket whatever she had been able to collect. The rest of the week was spent
by the family in folding, sprinkling, mangling, ironing and airing the clothes.
The only pleasant thing about the whole orgy of cleanliness was to see the
piles of snowy linen, ironed and aired and mended, with lavender bags in the
folds, placed on the shelves of the linen closet and to know that six whole
weeks would pass before the next upheaval.

Laura's modest stock of three of everything was, of course,
inadequate for such a period; so, before she had come there, it had been
arranged that her washing should be sent home to her mother every week. The clothes
Laura sent home one week were returned by her mother the next, so Laura
received a parcel from home every Saturday. It had had a cross-country journey
in two different carriers' carts, but it still seemed to smell of home.

It was her treat of the week to open it. She would bundle the
clean clothes, beautifully ironed and folded as they were, higgledy-piggledy upon
her bed and seize the little box or package she always found within containing
a few little cakes her mother had baked for her, or a cooked home-made sausage
or two, or a tiny pot of jam or jelly, or flowers from the home garden. There
was always something.

But before she put the flowers in water or tasted a crumb of
the food, she would read her mother's letter. Written in the delicate, pointed Italianate
handwriting her mother had been taught when a child by an old lady of ninety,
the letter would usually begin, 'Dear Laura'. Only on special occasions would
her mother write, 'My own dear', for she was not demonstrative. After the
beginning would come the formula: 'I hope this will find you still well and
happy, as it leaves us all at home. I hope you will like the few little things
I enclose. I know you have got plenty and better where you are, but you may
like to taste the home food', or 'smell the home flowers'.

Then followed the home news and news of the neighbours, all
told in simple, homely language, but with the tang of wit and occasional spice of
malice which made her conversation so racy. She always wrote four or five pages
and often ended her letters with 'My pen has run away with me again', but there
never was a word too much for Laura. She kept her mother's letters to her for
years and afterwards wished she had kept them longer. They deserved a wider
public than one young daughter.

At that time Laura had, as it were, one foot in each of two
worlds. Behind her lay her country childhood and country traditions, many of which
were still current at Candleford Green. Miss Lane's and several similar
establishments also still flourished there; but new ideas and new ways were
seeping in from the outer world which were still unknown at Lark Rise, and with
these Laura was becoming acquainted through friends she was making of her own
age.

Some of these she came to know through talking to them over
their post-office business; others through her relatives in Candleford town, or
because they belonged to families approved of by Miss Lane. They had most of
them been brought up in different circumstances from those of her own childhood
and they spoke of 'poor people' and 'cottage people' in a way which grated on
Laura; but they were lively and amusing and, on the whole, she enjoyed their
company.

When she met one of these girls in the street, she would
sometimes be invited to 'Come into the wigwam and have a palaver', and they
would go up carpeted stairs into the crowded, upholstered drawing-room over the
shop and exchange confidences. Or the friend would play her latest 'piece' upon
the piano for Laura and Laura would sit and listen, or not listen, but just sit
and take mental notes.

There was a piano in every drawing-room and there were palms
in pots and saddle-bag suites of furniture and hand-painted milking-stools and fire-screens,
and cushions and antimacassars in the latest art shades; but, beyond bound
volumes of the
Quiver
and the
Sunday at Home
and a few stray
copies of popular novels, mostly of a semi-religious character, there were no
books to be seen. The one father who was a reader remained faithful to those
works of Charles Dickens which his parents had taken in monthly parts. Most of
the fathers of such families found sufficient reading in their
Daily Telegraph
,
and the mothers, on Sunday afternoons, dozed over
Queechy
or
The Wide
Wide World
. The more daring and up to date among the daughters, who liked a
thrill in their reading, devoured the novels of Ouida in secret, hiding the
book beneath the mattresses of their beds between whiles. For their public reading
they had the
Girls' Own Paper
.