Lark Rise to Candleford (3 page)

But Lark Rise must not be thought of as a slum set down in
the country. The inhabitants lived an open-air life; the cottages were kept
clean by much scrubbing with soap and water, and doors and windows stood wide open
when the weather permitted. When the wind cut across the flat land to the east,
or came roaring down from the north, doors and windows had to be closed; but
then, as the hamlet people said, they got more than enough fresh air through
the keyhole.

There were two epidemics of measles during the decade, and
two men had accidents in the harvest field and were taken to hospital; but, for
years together, the doctor was only seen there when one of the ancients was
dying of old age, or some difficult first confinement baffled the skill of the
old woman who, as she said, saw the beginning and end of everybody. There was
no cripple or mental defective in the hamlet, and, except for a few months when
a poor woman was dying of cancer, no invalid. Though food was rough and teeth
were neglected, indigestion was unknown, while nervous troubles, there as elsewhere,
had yet to be invented: the very word 'nerve' was used in a different sense to
the modern one. 'My word! An' 'aven't she got a nerve!' they would say of any
one who expected more than was reasonable.

In nearly all the cottages there was but one room downstairs,
and many of these were poor and bare, with only a table and a few chairs and stools
for furniture and a superannuated potato-sack thrown down by way of hearthrug.
Other rooms were bright and cosy, with dressers of crockery, cushioned chairs,
pictures on the walls and brightly coloured hand-made rag rugs on the floor. In
these there would be pots of geraniums, fuchsias, and old-fashioned,
sweet-smelling musk on the windowsills. In the older cottages there were
grandfathers' clocks, gate-legged tables, and rows of pewter, relics of a time
when life was easier for country folk.

The interiors varied, according to the number of mouths to be
fed and the thrift and skill of the housewife, or the lack of those qualities; but
the income in all was precisely the same, for ten shillings a week was the
standard wage of the farm labourer at that time in that district.

Looking at the hamlet from a distance, one house would have
been seen, a little apart, and turning its back on its neighbours, as though
about to run away into the fields. It was a small grey stone cottage with a thatched
roof, a green-painted door and a plum tree trained up the wall to the eaves.
This was called the 'end house' and was the home of the stonemason and his
family. At the beginning of the decade there were two children: Laura, aged
three, and Edmund, a year and a half younger. In some respects these children,
while small, were more fortunate than their neighbours. Their father earned a
little more money than the labourers. Their mother had been a children's nurse
and they were well looked after. They were taught good manners and taken for
walks, milk was bought for them, and they were bathed regularly on Saturday
nights and, after 'Gentle Jesus' was said, were tucked up in bed with a peppermint
or clove ball to suck. They had tidier clothes, too, for their mother had taste
and skill with her needle and better-off relations sent them parcels of
outgrown clothes. The other children used to tease the little girl about the
lace on her drawers and led her such a life that she once took them off and hid
them in a haystack.

Their mother at that time used to say that she dreaded the
day when they would have to go to school; children got so wild and rude and
tore their clothes to shreds going the mile and a half backwards and forwards.
But when the time came for them to go she was glad, for, after a break of five
years, more babies had begun to arrive, and, by the end of the 'eighties, there
were six children at the end house.

As they grew, the two elder children would ask questions of
anybody and everybody willing or unwilling to answer them. Who planted the buttercups?
Why did God let the wheat get blighted? Who lived in this house before we did,
and what were their children's names? What's the sea like? Is it bigger than
Cottisloe Pond?
Why
can't we go to Heaven in the donkey-cart? Is it
farther than Banbury? And so on, taking their bearings in that small corner of
the world they had somehow got into.

This asking of questions teased their mother and made them
unpopular with the neighbours. 'Little children should be seen and not heard', they
were told at home. Out of doors it would more often be 'Ask no questions and
you'll be told no lies.' One old woman once handed the little girl a leaf from
a pot-plant on her window-sill. 'What's it called?' was the inevitable
question. "Tis called mind your own business,' was the reply; 'an' I think
I'd better give a slip of it to your mother to plant in a pot for you.' But no
such reproofs could cure them of the habit, although they soon learned who and
who not to question.

In this way they learned the little that was known of the
past of the hamlet and of places beyond. They had no need to ask the names of
the birds, flowers, and trees they saw every day, for they had already learned
these unconsciously, and neither could remember a time when they did not know
an oak from an ash, wheat from barley, or a Jenny wren from a blue-tit. Of what
was going on around them, not much was hidden, for the gossips talked freely
before children, evidently considering them not meant to hear as well as not to
be heard, and, as every house was open to them and their own home was open to
most people, there was not much that escaped their sharp ears.

The first charge on the labourers' ten shillings was house
rent. Most of the cottages belonged to small tradesmen in the market town and
the weekly rents ranged from one shilling to half a crown. Some labourers in other
villages worked on farms or estates where they had their cottages rent free;
but the hamlet people did not envy them, for 'Stands to reason,' they said,
'they've allus got to do just what they be told, or out they goes, neck and
crop, bag and baggage.' A shilling, or even two shillings a week, they felt,
was not too much to pay for the freedom to live and vote as they liked and to
go to church or chapel or neither as they preferred.

Every house had a good vegetable garden and there were
allotments for all; but only three of the thirty cottages had their own water
supply. The less fortunate tenants obtained their water from a well on a vacant
plot on the outskirts of the hamlet, from which the cottage had disappeared.
There was no public well or pump. They just had to get their water where and
how they could; the landlords did not undertake to supply water.

Against the wall of every well-kept cottage stood a tarred or
green-painted water butt to catch and store the rain-water from the roof. This
saved many journeys to the well with buckets, as it could be used for cleaning
and washing clothes and for watering small, precious things in the garden. It
was also valued for toilet purposes and the women would hoard the last drops
for themselves and their children to wash in. Rain-water was supposed to be
good for the complexion, and, though they had no money to spend upon beautifying
themselves, they were not too far gone in poverty to neglect such means as they
had to that end.

For drinking water, and for cleaning water, too, when the
water butts failed, the women went to the well in all weathers, drawing up the buckets
with a windlass and carting them home suspended from their shoulders by a yoke.
Those were weary journeys 'round the Rise' for water, and many were the rests
and endless was the gossip, as they stood at corners in their big white aprons
and crossover shawls.

A few of the younger, more recently married women who had
been in good service and had not yet given up the attempt to hold themselves a
little aloof would get their husbands to fill the big red store crock with water
at night. But this was said by others to be 'a sin and a shame', for, after his
hard day's work, a man wanted his rest, not to do ''ooman's work'. Later on in
the decade it became the fashion for the men to fetch water at night, and then,
of course, it was quite right that they should do so and a woman who 'dragged
her guts out' fetching more than an occasional load from the well was looked
upon as a traitor to her sex.

In dry summers, when the hamlet wells failed, water had to be
fetched from a pump at some farm buildings half a mile distant. Those who had wells
in their gardens would not give away a spot, as they feared if they did theirs,
too, would run dry, so they fastened down the lids with padlocks and disregarded
all hints.

The only sanitary arrangement known in the hamlet was housed
either in a little beehive-shaped building at the bottom of the garden or in a corner
of the wood and toolshed known as 'the hovel'. It was not even an earth closet;
but merely a deep pit with a seat set over it, the half-yearly emptying of
which caused every door and window in the vicinity to be sealed. Unfortunately,
there was no means of sealing the chimneys!

These 'privies' were as good an index as any to the
characters of their owners. Some were horrible holes; others were fairly
decent, while some, and these not a few, were kept well cleared, with the seat
scrubbed to snow-whiteness and the brick floor raddled. One old woman even went
so far as to nail up a text as a finishing touch, 'Thou God seest me'—most embarrassing
to a Victorian child who had been taught that no one must even see her approach
the door.

In other such places health and sanitary maxims were scrawled
with lead pencil or yellow chalk on the whitewashed walls. Most of them
embodied sound sense and some were expressed in sound verse, but few were so worded
as to be printable. One short and pithy maxim may pass: 'Eat well, work well,
sleep well, and —— well once a day'.

On the wall of the 'little house' at Laura's home pictures
cut from the newspapers were pasted. These were changed when the walls were whitewashed
and in succession they were 'The Bombardment of Alexandria', all clouds of
smoke, flying fragments, and flashes of explosives; 'Glasgow's Mournful Disaster:
Plunges for Life from the
Daphne
', and 'The Tay Bridge Disaster', with
the end of the train dangling from the broken bridge over a boiling sea. It was
before the day of Press photography and the artists were able to give their
imagination full play. Later, the place of honour in the 'little house' was occupied
by 'Our Political Leaders', two rows of portraits on one print; Mr. Gladstone,
with hawklike countenance and flashing eyes, in the middle of the top row, and
kind, sleepy-looking Lord Salisbury in the other. Laura loved that picture
because Lord Randolph Churchill was there. She thought he must be the most
handsome man in the world.

At the back or side of each cottage was a lean-to pigsty and
the house refuse was thrown on a nearby pile called 'the muck'll'. This was so situated
that the oozings from the sty could drain into it; the manure was also thrown
there when the sty was cleared, and the whole formed a nasty, smelly eyesore to
have within a few feet of the windows. 'The wind's in the so-and-so,' some
woman indoors would say, 'I can smell th' muck'll', and she would often be
reminded of the saying, 'Pigs for health', or told that the smell was a healthy
one.

It was in a sense a healthy smell for them; for a good pig
fattening in the sty promised a good winter. During its lifetime the pig was an
important member of the family, and its health and condition were regularly
reported in letters to children away from home, together with news of their
brothers and sisters. Men callers on Sunday afternoons came, not to see the
family, but the pig, and would lounge with its owner against the pigsty door
for an hour, scratching piggy's back and praising his points or turning up
their own noses in criticism. Ten to fifteen shillings was the price paid for a
pigling when weaned, and they all delighted in getting a bargain. Some men
swore by the 'dilling', as the smallest of a litter was called, saying it was
little and good, and would soon catch up; others preferred to give a few shillings
more for a larger young pig.

The family pig was everybody's pride and everybody's
business. Mother spent hours boiling up the 'little taturs' to mash and mix
with the pot-liquor, in which food had been cooked, to feed to the pig for its evening
meal and help out the expensive barley meal. The children, on their way home
from school, would fill their arms with sow thistle, dandelion, and choice long
grass, or roam along the hedgerows on wet evenings collecting snails in a pail
for the pig's supper. These piggy crunched up with great relish. 'Feyther',
over and above farming out the sty, bedding down, doctoring, and so on, would
even go without his nightly half-pint when, towards the end, the barley-meal
bill mounted until 'it fair frightened anybody'.

Sometimes, when the weekly income would not run to a
sufficient quantity of fattening food, an arrangement would be made with the
baker or miller that he should give credit now, and when the pig was killed
receive a portion of the meat in payment. More often than not one-half the pig-meat
would be mortgaged in this way, and it was no uncommon thing to hear a woman
say, 'Us be going to kill half a pig, please God, come Friday,' leaving the
uninitiated to conclude that the other half would still run about in the sty.

Some of the families killed two separate half pigs a year;
others one, or even two, whole ones, and the meat provided them with bacon for
the winter or longer. Fresh meat was a luxury only seen in a few of the cottages
on Sunday, when six-pennyworth of pieces would be bought to make a meat
pudding. If a small joint came their way as a Saturday night bargain, those
without oven grates would roast it by suspending it on a string before the
fire, with one of the children in attendance as turnspit. Or a 'Pot-roast'
would be made by placing the meat with a little lard or other fat in an iron
saucepan and keeping it well shaken over the fire. But, after all, as they
said, there was nothing to beat a 'toad'. For this the meat was enclosed whole
in a suet crust and well boiled, a method which preserved all the delicious
juices of the meat and provided a good pudding into the bargain. When some superior
person tried to give them a hint, the women used to say, 'You tell us how to get
the victuals; we can cook it all right when we've got it'; and they could.