Lark Rise to Candleford (21 page)

After a confinement, if the eldest girl was too young and
there was no other relative available, the housework, cooking, and washing
would be shared among the neighbours, who would be repaid in kind when they themselves
were in like case.

Babies, especially young babies, were adored by their parents
and loved and petted and often spoilt by the whole family until another
arrived; then, as they used to say, its 'nose was put out of joint'; all the adoration
was centred on the newcomer, and the ex-baby was fortunate if it had a still
devoted elder sister to stand by it.

In the production of their large families the parents
appeared reckless. One obvious method of birth control, culled from the Old
Testament, was known in the hamlet and practised by one couple, which had
managed to keep their family down to four. The wife told their secret to
another woman, thinking to help her; but it only brought scorn down on her own head.
'Did you ever! Fancy begrudging a little child a bit o' food, the nasty greedy
selfish hussy, her!' was the general verdict. But, although they protested so
volubly, and bore their own frequent confinements with courage and
cheerfulness, they must have sometimes rebelled in secret, for there was great
bitterness in the tone in which in another mood they would say: 'The wife ought
to have the first child and the husband the second, then there wouldn't ever be
any more.'

That showed how the land lay, as Laura's mother said to her
in later life. She herself lived to see the decline in the birth-rate, and,
when she discussed it with her daughter in the early 1930s, laughed heartily at
some of the explanations advanced by the learned, and said: 'If they knew what
it meant to carry and bear and bring up a child themselves, they wouldn't
expect the women to be in a hurry to have a second or third now they've got a
say in the matter. Now, if they made it a bit easier for people, dividing it
out a bit, so to speak, by taking over some of the money worry. It's never
seemed fair to my mind that the one who's got to go through all a confinement
means should have to scrape and pinch beforehand to save a bit as well. Then
there's the other child or children. What mother wants to rob those she's
already got by bringing in another to share what there's too little of already?'

None of the unmarried hamlet girls had babies in the
'eighties, although there must have been quite a crop of illegitimate births a
few years earlier, for when the attendance register was called out at school
the eldest children of several families answered to another surname than that
borne by their brothers and sisters and by which they themselves were commonly known.
These would be the children of couples who had married after the birth of their
first child, a common happening at that time—and little thought of.

In the 'eighties a young woman of thirty came from Birmingham
to have her illegitimate baby at her sister's home in the hamlet, and a widow who
had already three legitimate children and afterwards married again managed to
produce two children between her two marriages. These births passed without
much comment; but when a young girl of sixteen whose home was out in the fields
near the hamlet was known to be 'in trouble' public feeling was stirred.

One evening, a few weeks before the birth, Emily passed
through the hamlet with her father on their way to interview the young man she
had named as responsible for her condition. It was a sad little sight. Emily,
who had so recently been romping with the other children, going slowly,
unwillingly, and red-eyed from crying, her tell-tale figure enveloped in her
mother's plaid shawl, and her respectable, grey-headed father in his Sunday
suit urging her to 'Come on!' as though longing to be through with a
disagreeable business. Women came to their cottage gates and children left
their play to watch them pass by, for every one knew or guessed their errand,
and much sympathy was felt towards them on account of Emily's youth and her
parents' respectability.

The interview turned out even more mortifying than the father
could have expected, for Emily had named the young son of the house where she
had been in service, and he not only repudiated the charge, but was able to prove
that he had been away from home for some time before and after the crucial
date. Yet, in spite of the evidence, the neighbours still believed Emily's
version of the story and treated her as a wronged heroine, to be petted and
made much of. Perhaps they made too much of her, for what should have been an
episode turned into a habit, and, although she never married, Emily had quite a
good-sized family.

The hamlet women's attitude towards the unmarried mother was contradictory.
If one of them brought her baby on a visit to the hamlet they all went out of
their way to pet and fuss over them. 'The pretty dear!' they would cry. 'How
ever can anybody say such a one as him ought not to be born. Ain't he a beauty!
Ain't he a size! They always say, you know, that that sort of child is the
finest. An' don't you go mindin' what folks says about you, me dear. It's only
the good girls, like you, that has 'em; the others is too artful!'

But they did not want their own daughters to have babies
before they were married. 'I allus tells my gals,' one woman would say confidentially
to another, 'that if they goes getting theirselves into trouble they'll have to
go to th' work'us, for I won't have 'em at home.' And the other would agree,
saying, 'So I tells mine, an' I allus think that's why I've had no trouble with
'em.'

To those who knew the girls, the pity was that their own
mothers should so misjudge their motives for keeping chaste; but there was
little room; for their finer feelings in the hamlet mother's life. All her
strength, invention and understanding were absorbed in caring for her
children's bodies; their mental and spiritual qualities were outside her range.
At the same time, if one of the girls had got into trouble, as they called it,
the mother would almost certainly have had her home and cared for her. There
was more than one home in the hamlet where the mother was bringing up a
grandchild with her own younger children, the grandchild calling the
grandmother 'Mother'.

If, as sometimes happened, a girl had to be married in haste,
she was thought none the worse of on that account. She had secured her man. All
was well. ''Tis but Nature' was the general verdict.

But though they were lenient with such slips, especially when
not in their own families, anything in the way of what they called 'loose living'
was detested by them. Only once in the history of the hamlet had a case of
adultery been known to the general public, and, although that had occurred ten
or twelve years before, it was still talked of in the 'eighties. The guilty
couple had been treated to 'rough music'. Effigies of the pair had been made
and carried aloft on poles by torchlight to the house of the woman, to the
accompaniment of the banging of pots, pans, and coal-shovels, the screeching of
tin whistles and mouth-organs, and cat-calls, hoots, and jeers. The man, who
was a lodger at the woman's house, disappeared before daybreak the next
morning, and soon afterwards the woman and her husband followed him.

About the middle of the decade, the memory of that historic
night was revived when an unmarried woman with four illegitimate children moved
into a vacant house in the hamlet. Her coming raised a fury of indignation.
Words hitherto only heard by the children when the Lessons were read in church
were flung about freely: 'harlot' was one of the mildest. The more ardent
moralists were for stoning her or driving her out of the place with rough
music. The more moderate proposed getting her landlord to turn her out as a bad
character. However, upon closer acquaintance, she turned out to be so clean,
quiet, and well-spoken, that her sins, which she had apparently abandoned, were
forgiven her, and one after another of the neighbours began 'passing the time
of day' with her when they met. Then, as though willing to do anything in
reason to conform to their standard, she got married to a man who had been navvying
on a stretch of new railway line and then settled down to farm labour. So there
were wedding bells instead of rough music and the family gradually merged into
ordinary hamlet life.

It was the hamlet's gain. One of the boys was musical, an
aunt had bought him a good melodeon, and, every light evening, he played it for
hours on the youths' gathering ground in front of the 'Wagon and Horses'.

Before his arrival there had been no musical instrument of
any kind at Lark Rise, and, in those days before gramophones or wireless, any
one who liked 'a bit of a tune' had to go to church to hear it, and then it would
only be a hymn tune wheezed out by an ancient harmonium. Now they could have
all the old favourites—'Home, Sweet Home', 'Annie Laurie', 'Barbara Allen', and
'Silver Threads Among the Gold'—they had only to ask for what they fancied. Alf
played well and had a marvellous ear. If the baker or any other caller hummed
the tune of a new popular song in his hearing, Alf would be playing it that
night on his melodeon.

Women stood at their cottage gates, men leaned out of the inn
window, and children left their play and gathered around him to listen. Often
he played dance tunes, and the youths would foot it with each other as partners,
for there was seldom a grown-up girl at home and the little ones they despised.
So the little girls, too, had to dance with each other. One stout old woman,
who was said to have been gay in her time, would come out and give them hints,
or she would take a turn herself, gliding around alone, her feet hidden by her
long skirts, massively graceful.

Sometimes they would sing to the dance music, and the
standers-by would join in:

I have a bonnet, trimmed with blue,

Why don't you wear it? So I do.

When do you wear it? When I can,

When I go out with my young man.

My young man is gone to sea

With silver buckles on his knee,

With his blue coat and yellow hose,

And that's the way the polka goes.

Or perhaps it would be:

Step and fetch her, step and fetch her,

Step and fetch her, pretty litle dear.

Do not tease her, try and please her,

Step and fetch her, pretty little dear.

And so they would dance and sing through the long summer
evenings, until dusk fell and the stars came out and they all went laughing and
panting home, a community simple enough to be made happy by one little boy with
a melodeon.

'Shall we dance to-night or shall we have a game?' was a
frequent question among the girls after Alf's arrival. Until the novelty of the
dancing wore off, the old country games were eclipsed; but their day was not
over. Some of the quieter girls always preferred the games, and, later, on those
evenings when Alf was away, playing for dancers in other villages, they all
went back to the games.

Then, beneath the long summer sunsets, the girls would gather
on one of the green open spaces between the houses and bow and curtsey and
sweep to and fro in their ankle-length frocks as they went through the game movements
and sang the game rhymes as their mothers and grandmothers had done before
them.

How long the games had been played and how they originated no
one knew, for they had been handed down for a time long before living memory
and accepted by each succeeding generation as a natural part of its childhood.
No one inquired the meaning of the words of the game rhymes; many of the girls,
indeed, barely mastered them, but went through the movements to the
accompaniment of an indistinct babbling. But the rhymes had been preserved;
breaking down into doggerel in places; but still sufficiently intact to have
spoken to the discerning, had any such been present, of an older, sweeter
country civilization than had survived, excepting in a few such fragments.

Of all the generations that had played the games, that of the
'eighties was to be the last. Already those children had one foot in the
national school and one on the village green. Their children and grandchildren would
have left the village green behind them; new and as yet undreamed-of pleasures
and excitements would be theirs. In ten years' time the games would be
neglected, and in twenty forgotten. But all through the 'eighties the games
went on and seemed to the children themselves and to onlookers part of a life
that always had been and always would be.

The Lark Rise children had a large repertoire, including the
well-known games still met with at children's parties, such as 'Oranges and Lemons',
'London Bridge', and 'Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush'; but also including
others which appear to have been peculiar to that part of the country. Some of
these were played by forming a ring, others by taking sides, and all had
distinctive rhymes, which were chanted rather than sung.

The boys of the hamlet did not join in them, for the
amusement was too formal and restrained for their taste, and even some of the
rougher girls when playing would spoil a game, for the movements were stately and
all was done by rule. Only at the end of some of the games, where the verse had
deteriorated into doggerel, did the play break down into a romp. Most of the
girls when playing revealed graces unsuspected in them at other times; their
movements became dignified and their voices softer and sweeter than ordinarily,
and when hauteur was demanded by the part, they became, as they would have
said, 'regular duchesses'. It is probable that carriage and voice inflexion had
been handed down with the words.

One old favourite was 'Here Come Three Tinkers'. For this all
but two of the players, a big girl and a little one, joined hands in a row, and
the bigger girl out took up her stand about a dozen paces in front of the row
with the smaller one lying on the turf behind her feigning sleep. Then three of
the line of players detached themselves and, hand in hand, tripped forward,
singing: