Lark Rise to Candleford (41 page)

She had known that pig all its life. Her father had often
held her over the door of its sty to scratch its back and she had pushed
lettuce and cabbage stalks through the bars for it to enjoy. Only that morning
it had routed and grunted and squealed because it had had no breakfast. Her
mother had said its noise got on her nerves and her father had looked uncomfortable,
although he had passed it off by saying: 'No. No breakfast to-day, piggy.
You're going to have a big operation by and by and there's no breakfast before
operations.'

Now it had had its operation and there it hung, cold and
stiff and so very, very dead. Not funny at all any more, but in some queer way
dignified. The butcher had draped a long, lacy piece of fat from its own
interior over one of its forelegs, in the manner in which ladies of that day
sometimes carried a white lacy shawl, and that last touch seemed to Laura utterly
heartless. She stayed there a long time, patting its hard, cold side and wondering
that a thing so recently full of life and noise could be so still. Then,
hearing her mother call her, she ran out of the door farthest from where she
was working lest she should be scolded for crying over a dead pig.

There was fried liver and fat for supper and when Laura said,
'No, thank you,' her mother looked at her rather suspiciously, then said:
'Well, perhaps better not, just going to bed and all; but here's a nice bit of
sweetbread. I was saving it for Daddy, but you have it. You'll like that.' And
Laura ate the sweetbread and dipped her bread in the thick, rich gravy and
refused to think about the poor pig in the pantry, for, although only five
years old, she was learning to live in this world of compromises.

No one who saw Laura's mother at that time would have
wondered at the hasty, youthful marriage which turned her husband's
contemplated sojourn of a few months into a permanent abode. She was a slight,
graceful girl with a wild-rose complexion and hair the colour of a new penny
which she parted in the middle and drew down to a knot at the back of her head
because a gentleman of the family, where she had been nurse to the children before
her marriage, had told her she ought always to do it like that.

'A pocket Venus,' she said he had called her. 'But quite
nicely,' she hastened to assure her listener, 'for he was a married gentleman
with no nonsense about him.' Another thing she told her children about her
nursing days was that when visitors were staying in the house it was the custom
for some member of the family to bring them up to the nursery after dinner to
listen to the bedtime stories she was telling the children. 'A regular
amusement,' she said it was with them, and her own children did not think that
at all strange, for the bedtime stories were now being told to them and they
knew how exciting they were.

Some of them were short stories, begun and finished in an
evening, fairy stories and animal stories and stories of good and bad children,
the good ones rewarded and the bad ones punished, according to the convention
of that day. A few of these were part of the stock-in-trade of all tellers of
stories to children, but far more of them were of her own invention, for she
said it was easier to make up a tale than to try to remember one. The children
liked her own stories best. 'Something out of your own head, Mother,' they
would beg, and she would wrinkle up her brow and pretend to think hard, then
begin: 'Once upon a time.'

One story remained with Laura long after hundreds of others
had become a blur of pleasurable memory. Not because it was one of her mother's
best, for it was not, but because it had a colour scheme which appealed to a
childish taste. It was about a little girl who crept under a bush on a heath,
'just like Hardwick Heath, where we went blackberrying, you know', and found a
concealed opening which led to an underground palace in which all the furniture
and hangings were pale blue and silver. 'Silver tables and silver chairs and
silver plates to eat off and all the cushions and curtains made of pale blue
satin.' The heroine had marvellous adventures, but they left no impression on
Laura's mind, while the blue and silver, deep down under the earth, shone with
a kind of moonlight radiance in her imagination. But when her mother, at her
urgent request, tried to tell the story again the magic was gone, although she
introduced silver floors and silver ceilings, hoping to please her. Perhaps she
overdid it.

Then there were serial stories which went on in nightly
instalments for weeks, or perhaps months, for nobody wanted them to end and the
teller's invention never flagged. There was one, however, which came to a
sudden and tragic conclusion. One night when it was bedtime, or past bedtime,
and the children had begged for more and been given it and were still begging
for more, their mother lost patience and startled them both by saying, 'and
then he came to the sea and fell in and was eaten by a shark, and that was the
end of poor Jimmy', and the end of their story, too, for what further
developments were possible?

Then there were the family stories, each one of which they
knew by heart and could just as well have told to each other. Their favourite
was the one they called 'Granny's Golden Footstool'. It was short and simple
enough. Their father's parents had at one time kept a public-house and livery
stables in Oxford and the story ran that, either going to, or coming from, the
'Horse and Rider', their grandfather had handed their grandmother into the carriage
and placed a box containing a thousand pounds in gold at her feet, saying:
'It's not every lady who can ride in her own carriage with a golden footstool.'

They must have been on their way there with the purchase
money, for they can have brought no golden footstool away with them. Before
that adventure, made possible by a legacy left to the grandmother by one of her
relatives, the grandfather had been a builder in a small way, and, after it, he
went back to building again, in a still smaller way, presumably, for by the
time Laura was born the family business had disappeared and her father was
working for wages.

The thousand pounds had vanished as completely as Jimmy after
the shark had eaten him, and all they could do about it was to try to imagine
what so much gold together must have looked like and to plan what they would do
with such a sum if they had it now. Even their mother liked talking about it,
although, as she said, she had no patience with wasteful, extravagant ways,
such as some people she knew had got, and them proud and set up when they ought
to be ashamed of themselves for coming down in the world.

And, just as they prided themselves on the golden footstool
and the accompanying tradition that their grandmother was 'a lady by birth' who
had made a runaway marriage with their grandfather, almost every family in the
hamlet prided itself upon some family tradition which, in its own estimation,
at least, raised it above the common mass of the wholly uninteresting. An uncle
or a great-uncle had owned a cottage which, in the course of time, had been
magnified into a whole row of houses; or some one in the family had once kept a
shop or a public-house, or farmed his own land. Or they boasted of good blood,
even if it came illegitimately. One man claimed to be the great-grandson of an
earl, 'on the wrong side of the blanket, of course,' he admitted; but he liked
to talk about it, and his listener, noticing, perhaps for the first time, his
fine figure and big, hooked nose, and considering the reputation of a certain
wild young nobleman of a former generation, would feel inclined to believe
there was some foundation for his story.

Another of Edmund and Laura's family stories, more fantastic,
though not so well substantiated as that of the golden footstool, was that one
of their mother's uncles, when a very young man, shut his father in a box and
himself ran away to the Australian goldfields. In answer to their questions as
to why he had shut his father up in a box, how he had got him into it, and how
the father had got out again, their mother could only say that she did not
know. It had all happened before her own father was born. It was a large family
and he was the youngest. But she had seen the box: it was a long oak coffer
that could well have held a man, and that was the story she had been told as
long as she could remember.

That must have been eighty years before, and the uncle was
never heard of again, but they never tired of talking about him and wondering
if he found any gold. Perhaps he had made a fortune at the diggings and died
without children and without making a will. Then the money would be theirs,
wouldn't it? Perhaps it was even now in Chancery, waiting for them to claim it.
Several families in the hamlet had money in Chancery. They knew it was there
because one of the Sunday newspapers printed each week a list of names of
people who had fortunes waiting, and their names had been there, in print, 'as
large as life and twice as natural'. True, as the children's father said, most
of their names were common ones, but if this was pointed out to them they were
quite offended and hinted that when they could raise a few pounds to 'hire a
lawyer chap' to set about claiming it, no disbeliever would participate.

The children had not seen their names in print, but they
enjoyed planning what they would do with their Chancery money. Edmund said he
would buy a ship and visit every country in the world. Laura thought she would
like a house full of books in the middle of a wood, and their mother declared
she would be quite satisfied if she had an income of thirty shillings a week,
'paid regular and to be depended upon'.

Their Chancery money was a chimera, and none of them
throughout their lives had more than a few pounds at a time, but their wishes
were more or less granted. Edmund crossed the sea many times and saw four out
of the five continents; Laura had her house full of books, if not actually in a
wood, with a wood somewhere handy; and their poor mother, towards the end of
her life, got her modest thirty shillings a week, for that was the exact sum to
which the Canadian Government made up her small income when granting her her
Mother's Pension. The memory of that wish gave an added bitterness to the tears
she shed for the first few years when the monthly cheque arrived.

But all that was far in the future on those winter evenings
when they sat in the firelight, the two children on little stools at their
mother's feet, while she knitted their socks and told them stories or sang.
They had had their evening meal and their father's plate stood over a saucepan
of water on the hob, keeping warm. Laura loved to watch the warm light
flickering on the walls, lighting up one thing after another and casting dark
shadows, including their own, more than life-size and excitingly grotesque.

Edmund joined in the chorus of such things as 'There is a
Tavern' and 'Little Brown Jug' but Laura refrained, by special request, for she
had no ear for music and they said her singing put them out of tune. But she
loved to watch the firelight shadows and to hear her mother's voice singing to
sweet melancholy airs of a pale host of fair maidens who pined and faded for
love. There was 'Lily Lyle, Sweet Lily Lyle', which began:

'Twas a still, calm night and the moon's pale light

Shone over hill and dale

When friends mute with grief stood around the deathbed

Of their loved, lost Lily Lyle.

Heart as pure as forest lily,

Never knowing guile,

Had its home within the bosom Of sweet Lily Lyle.

Several other dying maidens were celebrated in similar words
to similar airs. Then there was 'The Old Armchair' and 'The Gipsy's Warning'
and a group of cottage songs apparently dating from the beginning of the
century, such as:

'Twas a fine clear night and the moon shone bright

When the village clock struck eight

And Mary hastened with delight

Unto the garden gate.

But what was there that made her sad?

The gate was there, but not the lad,

Which caused poor Mary to sigh and say,

'He never shall make a goose of me.'

She traced the garden here and there

And the village clock struck nine,

Which caused poor Wary to sigh and say

'He never shall be mine.'

She traced the garden here and there

And the village clock struck ten,

Young William caught her in his arms,

Never to part again.

Now he'd been to buy the ring that day

And he had been such a long, long way,

So how could Mary so cruel prove

As to banish the lad whom she dearly loved?

So down in a cot by the riverside

William and Mary now reside.

And she's blessed the hour that she did wait

For her absent lover at the garden gate.

Sometimes the children would talk about what they would do
when they were grown up. Their future had already been mapped out for them.
Edmund was to be apprenticed to a trade—a carpenter's, their mother thought; it
was cleaner work than that of a mason and carpenters did not drink in
public-houses as masons did, and people respected them more.

Laura was to go as nursemaid under one of her mother's old
nurse friends with whom she had kept up a correspondence. Then, in time, she
would be head nurse herself in what was then known as 'a good family'; where,
if she did not marry, she would be sure of a home for life, for the imaginary
good family her mother had in mind was of the kind where loved old nurses
dressed in black silk and had a room of their own in which to receive
confidences. But these ideas did not interest the children so much as that of
having houses of their own in which they could do as they liked. 'And you'll
come to stay with me and I shall spring-clean the house and bake some pies the
day before,' promised Laura, who knew from her mother's example what was due to
an honoured guest. Edmund's idea was that he would have treacle mixed with milk
for dinner without any bread at all, but then he was much younger than she was.