Lark Rise to Candleford (45 page)

'She didn't mean any harm,' apologized Laura's mother.
'There's so little going on here that when anybody does come the folks take
more interest than they would in a town.'

'I'd interest her! I'd hail-fellow-well-met her!' exclaimed
Mr. Herring, who had so far sat mute. 'I'd teach her how to behave to her
betters, if I had my way.'

'God knows I did my best to put them in their places when we
were living here,' sighed Mrs. Herring, her anger subsiding, 'but 'twas no
good. Why we ever thought to live in such a place I couldn't tell you if you
asked me, unless it was that the house was going cheap at the time Mr. Herring
retired and a nice bit of ground went with it. It's very different at Candleford.
Of course, there are poor people there, but we don't have to associate with
them; they keep to their part of the town and we keep to ours. You should see
our house: nice iron railings in front and an entry where the stairs go up, not
like this, with the door opening straight out on the path and anybody right on
top of you before you know where you are. Not but what this is a nice little
house,' she added hastily, remembering that she owned it, 'but you know what I
mean. Candleford's different. Civilized, that's what my son-in-law calls it,
and he works at the biggest grocer's in the town, so he ought to know. It's
civilized, he says, and he's right. You can't call a place like this civilized,
now can you?'

Laura thought it must be a fine thing to be civilized until,
later, she asked her mother what the word meant and her mother replied: 'A
civilized place is where the people wear clothes and don't run naked like
savages.' So it meant nothing, for everybody in this country wore clothes. One
old Lark Rise woman wore three flannel petticoats in winter. She thought that
if all the Candleford people were like Mr. and Mrs. Herring she would not like
them much. How rude they had been to poor Rachel!

But they were funny. When her father came home from work that
night her mother told him about the visit, imitating first Mrs. Herring's
voice, then that of Mr. Herring, and making the one even more carefully genteel
than it had been and the other more sudden and squeaky.

They all laughed a good deal, then her father said: 'I forgot
to tell you I saw Harris last night and he says we can have the pony and cart
any Sunday we like now.'

The children were so pleased they made a little song about
it:

We're going over to Candleford, To Candleford, to Candleford,
We're going over to Candleford To see our relations,

and they sang it about the house so often that their mother
said it just about drove her melancholy mad. The loan of the pony and cart was
not everything, it appeared; the half-year's rent had to be got together and taken
because, big as Candleford was, the Herrings would know they had been. They
knew everything, nosy parkers as they were, and if the rent, then about due,
was not taken, they would think their tenants had not the money. That would
never do. 'Don't be poor and look poor, too,' was a family maxim. Then the
Sunday outfits had to be overhauled and a few small presents purchased to take
with them. Planning a summer Sunday outing in those days meant more than
turning over the leaves of a bus time-table.

Very early one Sunday morning, while the rest of the hamlet
was still asleep and the sky was still pink and the garden flowers and currant
bushes were still greyish-rough with dew, they heard the sound of wheels
drawing up at their gate and knew that the innkeeper's old pony had come with
the spring cart to take them.

Father and Mother rode on the front seat, Father in his best
black coat and grey-striped trousers and Mother resplendent in her pale grey
wedding gown with rows and rows of narrow blue velvet ribbon edging its many
flounces. The wedding bonnet had long been cast aside, for, as she often said,
'headgear does date so', and on this occasion she wore a tiny blue velvet
bonnet, like a little flat mat on her hair, with wide velvet strings tied in a
bow under her chin,—a new bonnet, the procuring of which had helped to delay
the expedition. Upon her lap she nursed a basket containing the presents; a
bottle of her elderberry wine, a fowl she had specially fattened, and a length
of pillow-lace, made to order by a neighbour, which she thought would make nice
neckfrills for the cousins' best frocks. Their father, not to be outdone in
generosity, at the last moment filled the back of the cart, where Edmund and
Laura were to sit, with a selection of his choicest vegetables, so that,
throughout the drive, Laura's legs rested higher than her seat on a sack of
spring cabbage, the first of the season.

At last the children were strapped into the high, narrow seat
with their backs to those of their parents and off they went, their father
coaxing the old grey mare past her stable door, which she made determined
efforts to enter, with: 'Come on', Polly, old girl. Not tired already. Why, we
haven't started yet.' Later on, he lost patience and called her 'a measley old
screw', and once, when she stopped dead in the middle of the road, he said,
'Damn the mare!' and their mother looked back over the shoulder as though she
feared the animal's owner might hear. Between the stops, she trotted in little
bursts, and the children bumped up and down in their seat like rubber balls
bouncing. All of which was as exciting to them as a flight in an aeroplane
would be to a modern child.

From their high seat they could see over hedges into
buttercup meadows where cows lay munching the wet grass and big cropping
cart-horses loomed up out of the morning mist. In one place the first wild
roses were out in the hedge and their father lassoed a spray with his whip and
passed it over his shoulder to Laura. The delicate pale pink cups had dew in
them. Farther on, he stopped Polly, handed the reins to their mother and leapt
down. 'Ah! I thought so!' he said as he plunged his arm into the hedge at a
spot from which he had seen a bird flutter out, and he came back with two
bright blue eggs in his palm and let them all feel and stroke them before
putting them back in the nest. They were warm and as soft as satin.

'Pat, pat, pat', went Polly's hooves in the dust, 'creak,
creak, creak', went the harness, and 'rattle, rattle, rattle', went the
iron-tyred wheels over the stony places. The road might have been made entirely
for their convenience. There was no other vehicle upon it. The farm carts and
bakers' vans which passed that way on weekdays were standing in yards with
their shafts pointing skyward; the gentry's carriages reposed in lofty,
stone-paved coach-houses, and coachmen and carters and drivers were all still
in bed, for it was Sunday.

The blinds of roadside cottages were drawn and their gardens
were deserted of all but a prowling cat or a thrush cracking a snail on a
stone, and the children bumped and jolted on through this early morning world
with their hearts full of blissful expectation.

They were going over to Candleford. It was always called
'going over', for the country people never spoke of just plain going anywhere;
it had to be going up or down or round or over to a place, and there were so
many ups and downs, so many small streams to cross and so many gates across
roads to open between their home and Candleford that 'going over' seemed best
to describe the journey.

Towards midday they passed through a village where the
people, in their Sunday best, were streaming towards the lych-gate of the
church. The squire and the farmers wore top hats, and the squire's head
gardener and the schoolmaster and the village carpenter. The farm labourers
wore bowlers, or, the older men, soft, round black felts. With the top-hatted
men were women in rich, dark, heavy dresses who clung to their husband's arms
while their children walked meekly in front or, not so meekly, behind them.
Other villagers in workday clothes, with very clean shirts and their boots
unlaced for greater Sunday ease, carried their dinners to the baker's, or stood
in a group at the bakehouse door; while slowly up and down the road in front of
them paced a handsome pair of greys with a carriage behind them and a coachman
and a footman on the box with cockades in their glossy hats. Shepherded by
their teachers, the school-children marched two and two to church from the
Sunday School.

This village was so populous and looked so fine, with its
pretty cottages standing back on each side of an avenue of young chestnut
trees, that Laura thought at first it was Candleford. But, no, she was told; it
was Lord So-and-So's place. No doubt the carriage and greys belonged to him. It
was what was called a model village, with three bedrooms to every house and a
pump to supply water to each group of cottages.

Only good people were allowed to live there, her father said.
That was why so many were going to church. He seemed to speak seriously, but
her mother clicked her tongue, and, to placate her, he said that he thought the
bakehouse was a good idea. 'How would you like to send your Sunday joint out to
be baked and find it just done to a turn when you came out of church?' he asked
their mother. But that did not seem to please her either; she said more went to
the cooking of a good dinner than just baking the meat, and, besides, how could
you be sure of getting all your dripping? It was a funny thing bakers so often
had dripping to sell. They said they bought it from the cooks at big houses.
But did they?

Soon after the model village was left behind Polly got tired
and stood stockstill in the road, and their mother suggested a rest and a
nosebag for her and some food for them. So they all got out and sat on a
stone-heap like gipsies and ate little cakes and drank milk out of a bottle
while they listened to the skylarks overhead and smelt the wild thyme at their
feet. They were in a new country by then, a country of large grass fields
dotted with trees where herds of bullocks grazed, or peered at them through the
iron railings by the roadside. Their father pointed out some earthworks, which
he said were thrown up by the Romans and described those old warriors in their
brass helmets so well that the children seemed to see them; but neither he, nor
they, dreamed that another field within sight would one day be surrounded by
buildings called 'hangars', or that one day, within their own lifetimes, other
warriors would soar from it into the sky, armed with more deadly weapons than
the Romans ever knew. No, that field lay dreaming in the sunshine, flat and
green, waiting for a future of which they knew nothing.

Soon after that Candleford came out to meet them. First,
wayside cottages embowered in flower gardens, then cottages in pairs with iron
railings enclosing neat little front plots and tiled paths leading up to the
doors. Then the gasometer (for they actually had gas at Candleford!) and the
railway station, which made the town accessible to all but such cross-country
districts as theirs. Then came pavements and lamp-posts and people, more people
than they had ever seen together in their lives before. But, while they were
still on the outskirts, they felt their mother nudge their father's arm and
heard her ejaculate: 'There's pomp for you! Feathers, if you please!' Then,
throwing her voice ahead: 'Why, it's Ethel and Alma, coming to meet us. Here
are your cousins. Turn round and wave to them, dears!' Still held by the strap,
Laura wriggled round and saw, coming towards them, two tall girls in white.

The feathers that had shocked her mother, partly, perhaps,
because of the contrast between their richness and Laura's plain little hat of
white chip with its pink ribbon tied round in a bow to match her pink frock,
were long white ostrich plumes wreathed round floppy leghorn hats. The hats
were exactly alike and the feathers of the same fullness down to the last
strand. The white embroidered muslin dresses they wore were also replicas of
each other, for it was the fashion then to dress sisters alike, regardless of
type. But the girls had seen them and came running towards the spring cart with
a twinkle of long, black-stockinged legs and shiny patent-leather best shoes.
After the health of themselves, their parents, and the rest of the family had
been inquired into, they came round to the back of the cart.

'So this is Laura? And this is dear little Edmund? How do you
do? How do you do, dear?' Alma was twelve and Ethel thirteen, but their cool,
grown-up manner might have belonged to twenty-five and thirty. Laura began to
wish herself back at home as, one blush of embarrassment all over, she answered
for herself and Edmund. She could scarcely believe that these two tall,
well-dressed, nearly grown-up girls were her cousins. She had expected
something quite different.

However, things were easier when their equipage moved on,
with Ethel and Alma holding on, one on each side of the tail board, and smiling
a little as they answered their uncle's shouted questions. 'Yes, Uncle', Alma
was still at the Candleford school; but Ethel was at Miss Bussell's, a weekly
boarder; she came home on Friday night and went back on Monday morning. She was
going to stay there until she was old enough to go to the Training College for
Schoolteachers. 'That's right!' called Laura's father. 'Stuff your own brains
now and you'll be able to stuff other people's hereafter. And Alma, is she
going to be a teacher, too?' Oh, no, when she left school she was going to be
apprenticed to a Court dressmaker in Oxford. 'That's first-rate,' said their
uncle. 'Then when Laura is presented at Court she'll be able to make her dress
for her.' The girls laughed uncertainly, as if they were not sure if that was
meant for a joke or not, and his wife told him not to be 'a great donkey', but
Laura felt uncomfortable. The only Court she had heard of was the County Court,
to which a neighbour had recently been summoned, and the idea of being
presented there was far from pleasant.