Lark Rise to Candleford (8 page)

If it rained, they donned sacks, split up one side to form a
hood and cloak combined. If it was frosty, they blew upon their nails and
thumped their arms across their chest to warm them. If they felt hungry after their
bread-and-lard breakfast, they would pare a turnip and munch it, or try a bite
or two of the rich, dark brown oilcake provided for the cattle. Some of the
boys would sample the tallow candles belonging to the stable lanterns; but that
was done more out of devilry than from hunger, for, whoever went short, the
mothers took care that their Tom or Dicky should have 'a bit o' summat to peck
at between meals'—half a cold pancake or the end of yesterday's roly-poly.

With 'Gee!' and 'Wert up!' and 'Who-a-a, now!' the teams
would draw out. The boys were hoisted to the backs of the tall carthorses, and
the men, walking alongside, filled their clay pipes with shag and drew the
first precious puffs of the day, as, with cracking of whips, clopping of hooves
and jingling of harness, the teams went tramping along the muddy byways.

The field names gave the clue to the fields' history. Near
the farmhouse, 'Moat Piece', 'Fishponds', 'Duffus [i.e. dovehouse] piece', 'Kennels',
and 'Warren Piece' spoke of a time before the Tudor house took the place of
another and older establishment. Farther on, 'Lark Hill', 'Cuckoos' Clump',
'The Osiers', and 'Pond Piece' were named after natural features, while
'Gibbard's Piece' and 'Blackwell's' probably commemorated otherwise
long-forgotten former occupants. The large new fields round the hamlet had been
cut too late to be named and were known as 'The Hundred Acres', 'The Sixty
Acres', and so on according to their acreage. One or two of the ancients
persisted in calling one of these 'The Heath' and another 'The Racecourse'.

One name was as good as another to most of the men; to them
it was just a name and meant nothing. What mattered to them about the field in
which they happened to be working was whether the road was good or bad which led
from the farm to it; or if it was comparatively sheltered or one of those bleak
open places which the wind hurtled through, driving the rain through the
clothes to the very pores; and was the soil easily workable or of back-breaking
heaviness or so bound together with that 'hemmed' twitch that a ploughshare
could scarcely get through it.

There were usually three or four ploughs to a field, each of
them drawn by a team of three horses, with a boy at the head of the leader and
the ploughman behind at the shafts. All day, up and down they would go, ribbing
the pale stubble with stripes of dark furrows, which, as the day advanced,
would get wider and nearer together, until, at length, the whole field lay a
rich velvety plum-colour.

Each plough had its following of rooks, searching the clods
with side-long glances for worms and grubs. Little hedgerow birds flitted hither
and thither, intent upon getting their tiny share of whatever was going. Sheep,
penned in a neighbouring field, bleated complainingly; and above the ma-a-ing
and cawing and twittering rose the immemorial cries of the land-worker: 'Wert
up!' 'Who-o-o-a!' 'Go it, Poppet!' 'Go it, Lightfoot!' 'Boo-oy, be you deaf, or
be you hard of hearin', dang ye!'

After the plough had done its part, the horse-drawn roller
was used to break down the clods; then the harrow to comb out and leave in neat
piles the weeds and the twitch grass which infested those fields, to be fired
later and fill the air with the light blue haze and the scent that can haunt
for a lifetime. Then seed was sown, crops were thinned out and hoed and, in
time, mown, and the whole process began again.

Machinery was just coming into use on the land. Every autumn
appeared a pair of large traction engines, which, posted one on each side of a field,
drew a plough across and across by means of a cable. These toured the district
under their own steam for hire on the different farms, and the outfit included
a small caravan, known as 'the box', for the two drivers to live and sleep in.
In the 'nineties, when they had decided to emigrate and wanted to learn all
that was possible about farming, both Laura's brothers, in turn, did a spell
with the steam plough, horrifying the other hamlet people, who looked upon such
nomads as social outcasts. Their ideas had not then been extended to include mechanics
as a class apart and they were lumped as inferiors with sweeps and tinkers and others
whose work made their faces and clothes black. On the other hand, clerks and
salesmen of every grade, whose clean smartness might have been expected to
ensure respect, were looked down upon as 'counter-jumpers'. Their recognized
world was made up of landowners, farmers, publicans, and farm labourers, with
the butcher, the baker, the miller, and the grocer as subsidiaries.

Such machinery as the farmer owned was horse-drawn and was
only in partial use. In some fields a horse-drawn drill would sow the seed in rows,
in others a human sower would walk up and down with a basket suspended from his
neck and fling the seed with both hands broadcast. In harvest time the
mechanical reaper was already a familiar sight, but it only did a small part of
the work; men were still mowing with scythes and a few women were still reaping
with sickles. A thrashing machine on hire went from farm to farm and its use
was more general; but men at home still thrashed out their allotment crops and
their wives' leazings with a flail and winnowed the corn by pouring from sieve
to sieve in the wind.

The labourers worked hard and well when they considered the
occasion demanded it and kept up a good steady pace at all times. Some were better
workmen than others, of course; but the majority took a pride in their craft
and were fond of explaining to an outsider that field work was not the fool's
job that some townsmen considered it. Things must be done just so and at the
exact moment, they said; there were ins and outs in good land work which took a
man's lifetime to learn. A few of less admirable build would boast: 'We gets
ten bob a week, a' we yarns every penny of it; but we doesn't yarn no more; we
takes hemmed good care o' that!' But at team work, at least, such
'slack-twisted 'uns' had to keep in step, and the pace, if slow, was steady.

While the ploughmen were in charge of the teams, other men
went singly, or in twos or threes, to hoe, harrow, or spread manure in other
fields; others cleared ditches and saw to drains, or sawed wood or cut chaff or
did other odd jobs about the farmstead. Two or three highly skilled middle-aged
men were sometimes put upon piecework, hedging and ditching, sheep-shearing,
thatching, or mowing, according to the season. The carter, shepherd, stockman,
and blacksmith had each his own specialized job. Important men, these, with two
shillings a week extra on their wages and a cottage rent free near the
farmstead.

When the ploughmen shouted to each other across the furrows,
they did not call 'Miller' or 'Gaskins' or 'Tuffrey' or even 'Bill', 'Tom', or 'Dick',
for they all had nicknames and answered more readily to 'Bishie' or 'Pumpkin'
or 'Boamer'. The origin of many of these names was forgotten, even by the bearers;
but a few were traceable to personal peculiarities. 'Cockie' or'Cock-eye' had a
slight cast; 'Old Stut' stuttered, while 'Bavour' was so called because when he
fancied a snack between meals he would say 'I must just have my mouthful of
bavour', using the old name for a snack, which was rapidly becoming modernized into
'lunch' or 'luncheon'.

When a few years later, Edmund worked in the fields for a
time, the carter, having asked him some question and being struck with the
aptness of his reply, exclaimed: 'Why, boo-oy, you be as wise as Solomon, an' Solomon
I shall call 'ee!' and Solomon he was until he left the hamlet. A younger
brother was called 'Fisher'; but the origin of this name was a mystery. His
mother, who was fonder of boys than girls, used to call him her 'kingfisher'.

Sometimes afield, instead of the friendly shout, a low
hissing whistle would pass between the ploughs. It was a warning-note and meant
that 'Old Monday', the farm bailiff, had been sighted. He would come riding across
the furrows on his little long-tailed grey pony, himself so tall and his steed
so dumpy that his feet almost touched the ground, a rosy, shrivelled,
nutcracker-faced old fellow, swishing his ash stick and shouting, 'Hi, men! Ho,
men! What do you reckon you're doing!'

He questioned them sharply and found fault here and there,
but was in the main fairly just in his dealings with them. He had one great
fault in their eyes, however; he was always in a hurry himself and he tried to hurry
them, and that was a thing they detested.

The nickname of 'Old Monday', or 'Old Monday Morning', had
been bestowed upon him years before when some hitch had occurred and he was
said to have cried: 'Ten o'clock Monday morning! To-day's Monday, to-morrow's Tuesday,
next day's Wednesday—half the week gone and nothing done!' This name, of
course, was reserved for his absence; while he was with them it was 'Yes,
Muster Morris' and 'No, Muster Morris', and 'I'll see what I can do, Muster
Morris'. A few of the tamer-spirited even called him 'sir'. Then, as soon as
his back was turned, some wag would point to it with one hand and slap his own
buttocks with the other, saying, but not too loudly, 'My elbow to you, you ole
devil!'

At twelve by the sun, or by signal from the possessor of one
of the old turnip-faced watches which descended from father to son, the teams
would knock off for the dinner-hour. Horses were unyoked, led to the shelter of
a hedge or a rick and given their nosebags and men and boys threw themselves
down on sacks spread out beside them and tin bottles of cold tea were uncorked
and red handkerchiefs of food unwrapped. The lucky ones had bread and cold
bacon, perhaps the top or the bottom of a cottage loaf, on which the small cube
of bacon was placed, with a finger of bread on top, called the thumb-piece, to
keep the meat untouched by hand and in position for manipulation with a
clasp-knife. The consumption of this food was managed neatly and decently, a
small sliver of bacon and a chunk of bread being cut and conveyed to the mouth
in one movement. The less fortunate ones munched their bread and lard or morsel
of cheese; and the boys with their ends of cold pudding were jokingly bidden
not to get 'that 'ere treacle' in their ears.

The food soon vanished, the crumbs from the red handkerchiefs
were shaken out for the birds, the men lighted their pipes and the boys wandered
off with their catapults down the hedgerows. Often the elders would sit out
their hour of leisure discussing politics, the latest murder story, or local
affairs; but at other times, especially when one man noted for that kind of
thing was present, they would while away the time in repeating what the women
spoke of with shamed voices as 'men's tales'.

These stories, which were kept strictly to the fields and
never repeated elsewhere, formed a kind of rustic
Decameron
, which
seemed to have been in existence for centuries and increased like a snowball as
it rolled down the generations. The tales were supposed to be extremely indecent,
and elderly men would say after such a sitting, 'I got up an' went over to th'
osses, for I couldn't stand no more on't. The brimstone fair come out o' their
mouths as they put their rascally heads together.' What they were really like
only the men knew; but probably they were coarse rather than filthy. Judging by
a few stray specimens which leaked through the channel of eavesdropping
juniors, they consisted chiefly of 'he said' and 'she said', together with a
lavish enumeration of those parts of the human body then known as 'the unmentionables'.

Songs and snatches on the same lines were bawled at the
plough-tail and under hedges and never heard elsewhere. Some of these ribald
rhymes were so neatly turned that those who have studied the subject have
attributed their authorship to some graceless son of the Rectory or Hall. It
may be that some of these young scamps had a hand in them, but it is just as likely
that they sprung direct from the soil, for, in those days of general churchgoing,
the men's minds were well stored with hymns and psalms and some of them were
very good at parodying them.

There was 'The Parish Clerk's Daughter', for instance. This
damsel was sent one Christmas morning to the church to inform her father that
the Christmas present of beef had arrived after he left home. When she reached
the church the service had begun and the congregation, led by her father, was
half-way through the psalms. Nothing daunted, she sidled up to her father and
intoned:

'Feyther, the me-a-at's come, an' what's me mother to d-o-o-o
w'it?'

And the answer came pat: 'Tell her to roast the thick an'
boil th' thin, an' me-ak a pudden o' th' su-u-u-u-et.' But such simple
entertainment did not suit the man already mentioned. He would drag out the
filthiest of the stock rhymes, then go on to improvise, dragging in the names
of honest lovers and making a mock of fathers of first children. Though nine
out of ten of his listeners disapproved and felt thoroughly uncomfortable, they
did nothing to check him beyond a mild 'Look out, or them boo-oys'll hear 'ee!'
or 'Careful! some 'ooman may be comin' along th' roo-ad.'

But the lewd scandalizer did not always have everything his
own way. There came a day when a young ex-soldier, home from his five years' service
in India, sat next to him. He sat through one or two such extemporized songs,
then, eyeing the singer, said shortly, 'You'd better go and wash out your dirty
mouth.'

The answer was a bawled stanza in which the objector's name
figured. At that the ex-soldier sprung to his feet, seized the singer by the
scruff of his neck, dragged him to the ground and, after a scuffle, forced earth
and small stones between his teeth. 'There, that's a lot cleaner!' he said,
administering a final kick on the buttocks as the fellow slunk, coughing and
spitting, behind the hedge.