Lark Rise to Candleford (9 page)

A few women still did field work, not with the men, or even
in the same field as a rule, but at their own special tasks, weeding and
hoeing, picking up stones, and topping and tailing turnips and mangel; or, in wet
weather, mending sacks in a barn. Formerly, it was said, there had been a large
gang of field women, lawless, slatternly creatures, some of whom had thought
nothing of having four or five children out of wedlock. Their day was over; but
the reputation they had left behind them had given most country-women a
distaste for 'goin' afield'. In the 'eighties about half a dozen of the hamlet
women did field work, most of them being respectable middle-aged women who,
having got their families off hand, had spare time, a liking for an open-air
life, and a longing for a few shillings a week they could call their own.

Their hours, arranged that they might do their housework
before they left home in the morning and cook their husband's meal after they returned,
were from ten to four, with an hour off for dinner. Their wage was four
shillings a week. They worked in sunbonnets, hobnailed boots and men's coats,
with coarse aprons of sacking enveloping the lower part of their bodies. One, a
Mrs. Spicer, was a pioneer in the wearing of trousers; she sported a pair of
her husband's corduroys. The others compromised with ends of old trouser legs
worn as gaiters. Strong, healthy, weather-beaten, hard as nails, they worked
through all but the very worst weathers and declared they would go 'stark,
staring mad' if they had to be shut up in a house all day.

To a passer-by, seeing them bent over their work in a row,
they might have appeared as alike as peas in a pod. They were not. There was
Lily, the only unmarried one, big and strong and clumsy as a carthorse and dark
as a gipsy, her skin ingrained with field mould and the smell of the earth
about her, even indoors. Years before she had been betrayed by a man and had
sworn she would never marry until she had brought up the boy she had had by him—a
quite superfluous oath, her neighbours thought, for she was one of the very few
really ugly people in the world.

The 'eighties found her a woman of fifty, a creature of
earth, earthy, whose life was a round of working, eating, and sleeping. She
lived alone in a tiny cottage, in which, as she boasted, she could get her
meals, eat them, and put the things away without leaving her seat by the hearth.
She could read a little, but had forgotten how to write, and Laura's mother
wrote her letters to her soldier son in India.

Then there was Mrs. Spicer, the wearer of the trousers, a
rough-tongued old body, but independent and upright, who kept her home spotless
and boasted that she owed no man a penny and wanted nothing from anybody. Her
gentle, hen-pecked, little husband adored her.

Very different from either was the comfortable, pink-cheeked
Mrs. Braby, who always carried an apple or a paper of peppermints in her
pocket, in case she should meet a child she favoured. In her spare time she was
a great reader of novelettes and out of her four shillings subscribed to
Bow
Bells
and the
Family Herald
. Once when Laura, coming home from school,
happened to overtake her, she enlivened the rest of the journey with the synopsis
of a serial she was reading, called
His Ice Queen
, telling her how the
heroine, rich, lovely, and icily virtuous in her white velvet and swansdown,
almost broke the heart of the hero by her cool aloofness; then, suddenly
melting, threw herself into his arms. But, after all, the plot could not have
been quite as simple as that, for there was a villainous colonel in it. 'Oh! I
do just about hate that colonel!' Mrs. Braby ejaculated at intervals. She pronounced
it 'col-on-el', as spelt, which so worked upon Laura that at last she ventured,
'But don't they call that word "colonel", Mrs. Braby?' Which led to a
spelling lesson: 'Col-on-el; that's as plain as the nose on your face. Whatever
be you a-thinkin' of, child? They don't seem to teach you much at school these
days!' She was distinctly offended and did not offer Laura a peppermint for
weeks, which served her right, for she should not have tried to correct her
elders.

One man worked with the field women or in the same field. He
was a poor, weedy creature, getting old and not very strong and they had put
him upon half-pay. He was known as 'Algy' and was not a native, but had appeared
there suddenly, years before, out of a past he never mentioned. He was tall and
thin and stooping, with watery blue eyes and long ginger side-whiskers of the
kind then known as 'weepers'. Sometimes, when he straightened his back, the
last vestiges of a military bearing might be detected, and there were other
grounds for supposing he had at some time been in the Army. When tipsy, or
nearly so, he would begin, 'When I was in the Grenadier Guards …' a sentence
that always tailed off into silence. Although his voice broke on the high notes
and often deteriorated into a squeak, it still bore the same vague resemblance
to that of a man of culture as his bearing did to that of a soldier. Then, instead
of swearing with 'd——s' and 'b——s' as the other men did, he would, when surprised,
burst into a 'Bai Jove!' which amused everybody, but threw little light on his
mystery.

Twenty years before, when his present wife had been a widow
of a few weeks' standing, he had knocked at her door during a thunderstorm and asked
for a night's lodging, and had been there ever since, never receiving a letter
or speaking of his past, even to his wife. It was said that during his first
days at field work his hands had blistered and bled from softness. There must
have been great curiosity in the hamlet about him at first; but it had long
died down and by the 'eighties he was accepted as 'a poor, slack-twisted
crittur', useful for cracking jokes on. He kept his own counsel and worked
contentedly to the best of his power. The only thing that disturbed him was the
rare visit of the German band. As soon as he heard the brass instruments strike
up and the 'pom, pom' of the drum, he would stick his fingers in his ears and
run, across fields, anywhere, and not be seen again that day.

On Friday evening, when work was done, the men trooped up to
the farmhouse for their wages. These were handed out of a window to them by the
farmer himself and acknowledged by a rustic scraping of feet and pulling of
forelocks. The farmer had grown too old and too stout to ride horseback, and, although
he still made the circuit of his land in his high dogcart every day, he had to
keep to the roads, and pay-day was the only time he saw many of his men. Then,
if there was cause for complaint, was the time they heard of it. 'You, there!
What were you up to in Causey Spinney last Monday, when you were supposed to be
clearing the runnels?' was a type of complaint that could always be countered
by pleading. 'Call o' Nature, please, sir.' Less frequent and harder to answer
was: 'I hear you've not been too smart about your work lately, Stimson. 'Twon't
do, you know, 'twon't do! You've got to earn your money if you're going to stay
here.' But, just as often, it would be: 'There, Boamer, there you are, my lad,
a bright and shining golden half-sovereign for you. Take care you don't go
spending it all at once!' or an inquiry about some wife in childbed or one of
the ancients' rheumatism. He could afford to be jolly and affable: he paid poor
old Monday Morning to do his dirty work for him.

Apart from that, he was not a bad-hearted man and had no idea
he was sweating his labourers. Did they not get the full standard wage, with no
deduction for standing by in bad weather? How they managed to live and keep
their families on such a sum was their own affair. After all, they did not need
much, they were not used to luxuries. He liked a cut off a juicy sirloin and a
glass of good port himself; but bacon and beans were better to work on. 'Hard
liver, hard worker' was a sound old country maxim, and the labouring man did
well to follow it. Besides, was there not at least one good blowout for everybody
once a year at his harvest-home dinner, and the joint of beef at Christmas,
when he killed a beast and distributed the meat, and soup and milk-puddings for
anybody who was ill; they had only to ask for and fetch them.

He never interfered with his men as long as they did their
work well. Not he! He was a staunch Conservative himself, a true blue, and they
knew his colour when they went to vote; but he never tried to influence them at
election times and never inquired afterwards which way they had voted. Some masters
did it, he knew, but it was a dirty, low-down trick, in his opinion. As to
getting them to go to church—that was the parson's job.

Although they hoodwinked him whenever possible and referred
to him behind his back as 'God a'mighty', the farmer was liked by his men. 'Not
a bad ole sort,' they said; 'an' does his bit by the land.' All their rancour
was reserved for the bailiff.

There is something exhilarating about pay-day, even when the
pay is poor and already mortgaged for necessities. With that morsel of gold in
their pockets, the men stepped out more briskly and their voices were cheerier than
ordinary. When they reached home they handed the half-sovereign straight over
to their wives, who gave them back a shilling for the next week's pocket-money.
That was the custom of the countryside. The men worked for the money and the
women had the spending of it. The men had the best of the bargain. They earned
their half-sovereign by hard toil, it is true, but in the open air, at work
they liked and took an interest in, and in congenial company. The women, kept
close at home, with cooking, cleaning, washing, and mending to do, plus their
constant pregnancies and a tribe of children to look after, had also the worry
of ways and means on an insufficient income.

Many husbands boasted that they never asked their wives what
they did with the money. As long as there was food enough, clothes to cover everybody,
and a roof over their heads, they were satisfied, they said, and they seemed to
make a virtue of this and think what generous, trusting, fine-hearted fellows
they were. If a wife got in debt or complained, she was told: 'You must larn to
cut your coat accordin' to your cloth, my gal.' The coats not only needed
expert cutting, but should have been made of elastic.

On light evenings, after their tea-supper, the men worked for
an hour or two in their gardens or on the allotments. They were first-class gardeners
and it was their pride to have the earliest and best of the different kinds of
vegetables. They were helped in this by good soil and plenty of manure from
their pigsties; but good tilling also played its part. They considered keeping
the soil constantly stirred about the roots of growing things the secret of
success and used the Dutch hoe a good deal for this purpose. The process was
called 'tickling'. 'Tickle up old Mother Earth and make her bear!' they would
shout to each other across the plots, or salute a busy neighbour in passing
with: 'Just tickling her up a bit, Jack?'

The energy they brought to their gardening after a hard day's
work in the fields was marvellous. They grudged no effort and seemed never to tire.
Often, on moonlight nights in spring, the solitary fork of some one who had not
been able to tear himself away would be heard and the scent of his twitch fire
smoke would float in at the windows. It was pleasant, too, in summer twilight,
perhaps in hot weather when water was scarce, to hear the
swish
of water
on parched earth in a garden—water which had been fetched from the brook a
quarter of a mile distant. 'It's no good stintin' th' land,' they would say.
'If you wants anything out you've got to put summat in, if 'tis only
elbow-grease.'

The allotment plots were divided into two, and one half
planted with potatoes and the other half with wheat or barley. The garden was reserved
for green vegetables, currant and gooseberry bushes, and a few old-fashioned
flowers. Proud as they were of their celery, peas and beans, cauliflowers and
marrows, and fine as were the specimens they could show of these, their
potatoes were their special care, for they had to grow enough to last the year
round. They grew all the old-fashioned varieties—ashleaf kidney, early rose,
American rose, magnum bonum, and the huge misshaped white elephant. Everybody
knew the elephant was an unsatisfactory potato, that it was awkward to handle when
paring and that it boiled down to a white pulp in cooking; but it produced
tubers of such astonishing size that none of the men could resist the
temptation to plant it. Every year specimens were taken to the inn to be
weighed on the only pair of scales in the hamlet, then handed round for guesses
to be made of the weight. As the men said, when a patch of elephants was dug up
and spread out, 'You'd got summat to put in your eye and look at.'

Very little money was spent on seed; there was little to
spend, and they depended mainly upon the seed saved from the previous year.
Sometimes, to secure the advantage of fresh soil, they would exchange a bag of
seed potatoes with friends living at a distance, and sometimes a gardener at one
of the big houses around would give one of them a few tubers of a new variety.
These would be carefully planted and tended, and, when the crop was dug up,
specimens would be presented to neighbours.

Most of the men sang or whistled as they dug or hoed. There
was a good deal of outdoor singing in those days. Workmen sang at their jobs;
men with horses and carts sang on the road; the baker, the miller's man, and the
fish-hawker sang as they went from door to door; even the doctor and parson on
their rounds hummed a tune between their teeth. People were poorer and had not
the comforts, amusements, or knowledge we have to-day; but they were happier.
Which seems to suggest that happiness depends more upon the state of mind—and
body, perhaps—than upon circumstances and events.