Lark Rise to Candleford (7 page)

That was indoors. Outside there was plenty to see and hear
and learn, for the hamlet people were interesting, and almost every one of them
interesting in some different way to the others, and to Laura the old people
were the most interesting of all, for they told her about the old times and
could sing old songs and remember old customs, although they could never
remember enough to satisfy her. She sometimes wished she could make the earth
and stones speak and tell her about all the dead people who had trodden upon
them. She was fond of collecting stones of all shapes and colours, and for
years played with the idea that, one day, she would touch a secret spring and a
stone would fly open and reveal a parchment which would tell her exactly what
the world was like when it was written and placed there.

There were no bought pleasures, and, if there had been, there
was no money to pay for them; but there were the sights, sounds and scents of the
different seasons: spring with its fields of young wheat-blades bending in the
wind as the cloud-shadows swept over them; summer with its ripening grain and
its flowers and fruit and its thunderstorms, and how the thunder growled and
rattled over that flat land and what boiling, sizzling downpours it brought!
With August came the harvest and the fields settled down to the long winter
rest, when the snow was often piled high and frozen, so that the buried hedges
could be walked over, and strange birds came for crumbs to the cottage doors
and hares in search of food left their spoor round the pigsties.

The children at the end house had their own private
amusements, such as guarding the clump of white violets they found blooming in
a cleft of the brook bank and called their 'holy secret', or pretending the scabious,
which bloomed in abundance there, had fallen in a shower from the mid-summer
sky, which was exactly the same dim, dreamy blue. Another favourite game was to
creep silently up behind birds which had perched on a rail or twig and try to
touch their tails. Laura once succeeded in this, but she was alone at the time
and nobody believed she had done it.

A little later, remembering man's earthy origin, 'dust thou
art and to dust thou shalt return', they liked to fancy themselves bubbles of earth.
When alone in the fields, with no one to see them, they would hop, skip and
jump, touching the ground as lightly as possible and crying 'We are bubbles of
earth! Bubbles of earth! Bubbles of earth!'

But although they had these private fancies, unknown to their
elders, they did not grow into the ultra-sensitive, misunderstood, and thwarted
adolescents who, according to present-day writers, were a feature of that era.
Perhaps, being of mixed birth with a large proportion of peasant blood in them,
they were tougher in fibre than some. When their bottoms were soundly smacked,
as they often were, their reaction was to make a mental note not to repeat the
offence which had caused the smacking, rather than to lay up for themselves
complexes to spoil their later lives; and when Laura, at about twelve years
old, stumbled into a rickyard where a bull was in the act of justifying its
existence, the sight did not warp her nature. She neither peeped from behind a
rick, nor fled, horrified, across country; but merely thought in her old-fashioned
way, 'Dear me! I had better slip quietly away before the men see me.' The bull
to her was but a bull performing a necessary function if there was to be butter
on the bread and bread and milk for breakfast, and she thought it quite natural
that the men in attendance at such functions should prefer not to have women or
little girls as spectators. They would have felt, as they would have said, 'a
bit okkard'. So she just withdrew and went another way round without so much as
a kink in her subconscious.

From the time the two children began school they were merged
in the hamlet life, sharing the work and play and mischief of their younger companions
and taking harsh or kind words from their elders according to circumstances.
Yet, although they shared in the pleasures, limitations, and hardships of the
hamlet, some peculiarity of mental outlook prevented them from accepting
everything that existed or happened there as a matter of course, as the other
children did. Small things which passed unnoticed by others interested,
delighted, or saddened them. Nothing that took place around them went unnoted;
words spoken and forgotten the next moment by the speaker were recorded in
their memories, and the actions and reactions of others were impressed on their
minds, until a clear, indelible impression of their little world remained with
them for life.

Their own lives were to carry them far from the hamlet.
Edmund's to South Africa, India, Canada, and, lastly, to his soldier's grave in
Belgium. Their credentials presented, they will only appear in this book as
observers of and commentators upon the country scene of their birth and early
years.

A mile and a half up the straight, narrow road in the
opposite direction to that of the turnpike, round a corner, just out of sight
of the hamlet, lay the mother village of Fordlow. Here, again, as soon as the turning
of the road was passed, the scene changed, and the large open fields gave place
to meadows and elm trees and tiny trickling streams.

The village was a little, lost, lonely place, much smaller
than the hamlet, without a shop, an inn, or a post office, and six miles from a
railway station. The little squat church, without spire or tower, crouched back
in a tiny churchyard that centuries of use had raised many feet above the road,
and the whole was surrounded by tall, windy elms in which a colony of rooks
kept up a perpetual cawing. Next came the Rectory, so buried in orchards and
shrubberies that only the chimney stacks were visible from the road; then the
old Tudor farmhouse with its stone, mullioned windows and reputed dungeon.
These, with the school and about a dozen cottages occupied by the shepherd,
carter, blacksmith, and a few other superior farm-workers, made up the village.
Even these few buildings were strung out along the roadside, so far between and
so sunken in greenery that there seemed no village at all. It was a standing joke
in the hamlet that a stranger had once asked the way to Fordlow after he had
walked right through it. The hamlet laughed at the village as 'stuck up'; while
the village looked down on 'that gipsy lot' at the hamlet.

Excepting the two or three men who frequented the inn in the
evening, the villagers seldom visited the hamlet, which to them represented the
outer wilds, beyond the bounds of civilisation. The hamlet people, on the other
hand, knew the road between the two places by heart, for the church and the
school and the farmhouse which was the men's working head-quarters were all in
the village. The hamlet had only the inn.

Very early in the morning, before daybreak for the greater
part of the year, the hamlet men would throw on their clothes, breakfast on
bread and lard, snatch the dinner-baskets which had been packed for them overnight,
and hurry off across fields and over stiles to the farm. Getting the boys off
was a more difficult matter. Mothers would have to call and shake and sometimes
pull boys of eleven or twelve out of their warm beds on a winter morning. Then
boots which had been drying inside the fender all night and had become shrunk
and hard as boards in the process would have to be coaxed on over chilblains.
Sometimes a very small boy would cry over this and his mother to cheer him
would remind him that they were only boots, not breeches. 'Good thing you
didn't live when breeches wer' made o' leather,' she would say, and tell him
about the boy of a previous generation whose leather breeches were so baked up in
drying that it took him an hour to get into them. 'Patience! Have patience, my
son', his mother had exhorted. 'Remember Job.' 'Job!' scoffed the boy. 'What
did he know about patience? He didn't have to wear no leather breeches.'

Leather breeches had disappeared in the 'eighties and were
only remembered in telling that story. The carter, shepherd, and a few of the older
labourers still wore the traditional smock-frock topped by a round black felt
hat, like those formerly worn by clergymen. But this old country style of dress
was already out of date; most of the men wore suits of stiff, dark brown
corduroy, or, in summer, corduroy trousers and an unbleached drill jacket known
as a 'sloppy'.

Most of the young and those in the prime of life were
thick-set, red-faced men of good medium height and enormous strength who prided
themselves on the weights they could carry and boasted of never having had 'an
e-ache nor a pa-in' in their lives. The elders stooped, had gnarled and swollen
hands and walked badly, for they felt the effects of a life spent out of doors
in all weathers and of the rheumatism which tried most of them. These elders
wore a fringe of grey whisker beneath the jaw, extending from ear to ear. The
younger men sported drooping walrus moustaches. One or two, in advance of the
fashion of their day, were clean-shaven; but as Sunday was the only shaving
day, the effect of either style became blurred by the end of the week.

They still spoke the dialect, in which the vowels were not
only broadened, but in many words doubled. 'Boy' was 'boo-oy', 'coal', 'coo-al',
'pail', 'pay-ull', and so on. In other words, syllables were slurred, and words
were run together, as 'brenbu'er' for bread and butter. They had hundreds of
proverbs and sayings and their talk was stiff with simile. Nothing was simply
hot, cold, or coloured; it was 'as hot as hell', 'as cold as ice', 'as green as
grass', or 'as yellow as a guinea'. A botched-up job done with insufficient
materials was 'like Dick's hatband that went half-way round and tucked'; to try
to persuade or encourage one who did not respond was 'putting a poultice on a
wooden leg'. To be nervy was to be 'like a cat on hot bricks'; to be angry, 'mad
as a bull'; or any one might be 'poor as a rat', 'sick as a dog', 'hoarse as a
crow', 'as ugly as sin', 'full of the milk of human kindness', or 'stinking
with pride'. A temperamental person was said to be 'one o' them as is either up
on the roof or down the well'. The dialect was heard at its best on the lips of
a few middle-aged men, who had good natural voices, plenty of sense, and a
grave, dignified delivery. Mr. Frederick Grisewood of the B.B.C. gave a perfect
rendering of the old Oxfordshire dialect in some broadcast sketches a few years
ago. Usually, such imitations are maddening to the native born; but he made the
past live again for one listener.

The men's incomes were the same to a penny; their
circumstances, pleasures, and their daily field work were shared in common; but
in themselves they differed; as other men of their day differed, in country and
town. Some were intelligent, others slow at the uptake; some were kind and
helpful, others selfish; some vivacious, others taciturn. If a stranger had
gone there looking for the conventional Hodge, he would not have found him.

Nor would he have found the dry humour of the Scottish
peasant, or the racy wit and wisdom of Thomas Hardy's Wessex. These men's minds
were cast in a heavier mould and moved more slowly. Yet there were occasional gleams
of quiet fun. One man who had found Edmund crying because his magpie, let out
for her daily exercise, had not returned to her wicker cage, said: 'Doo'nt 'ee
take on like that, my man. You goo an' tell Mrs. Andrews about it [naming the
village gossip] an' you'll hear where your Maggie's been seen, if 'tis as far
away as Stratton.'

Their favourite virtue was endurance. Not to flinch from pain
or hardship was their ideal. A man would say, 'He says, says he, that field o'
oo-ats's got to come in afore night, for there's a rain a-comin'. But we didn't
flinch, not we! Got the last loo-ad under cover by midnight. A'moost too
fagged-out to walk home; but we didn't flinch. We done it!' Or,'Ole bull he
comes for me, wi's head down. But I didn't flinch. I ripped off a bit o' loose
rail an' went for he. 'Twas him as did th' flinchin'. He! he!' Or a woman would
say, 'I set up wi' my poor old mother six nights runnin'; never had me clothes
off. But I didn't flinch, an' I pulled her through, for she didn't flinch
neither.' Or a young wife would say to the midwife after her first confinement,
'I didn't flinch, did I? Oh, I do hope I didn't flinch.'

The farm was large, extending far beyond the parish
boundaries; being, in fact, several farms, formerly in separate occupancy, but
now thrown into one and ruled over by the rich old man at the Tudor farmhouse.
The meadows around the farmstead sufficed for the carthorses' grazing and to support
the store cattle and a couple of milking cows which supplied the farmer's
family and those of a few of his immediate neighbours with butter and milk. A
few fields were sown with grass seed for hay, and sainfoin and rye were grown
and cut green for cattle food. The rest was arable land producing corn and root
crops, chiefly wheat.

Around the farmhouse were grouped the farm buildings; stables
for the great stamping shaggy-fetlocked carthorses; barns with doors so wide and
high that a load of hay could be driven through; sheds for the yellow-and-blue
painted farm wagons, granaries with outdoor staircases; and sheds for storing
oilcake, artificial manures, and agricultural implements. In the rickyard,
tall, pointed, elaborately thatched ricks stood on stone straddles; the dairy
indoors, though small, was a model one; there was a profusion of all that was
necessary or desirable for good farming.

Labour, too, was lavishly used. Boys leaving school were
taken on at the farm as a matter of course, and no time-expired soldier or
settler on marriage was ever refused a job. As the farmer said, he could always
do with an extra hand, for labour was cheap and the land was well tilled up to
the last inch.

When the men and boys from the hamlet reached the farmyard in
the morning, the carter and his assistant had been at work for an hour, feeding
and getting ready the horses. After giving any help required, the men and boys
would harness and lead out their teams and file off to the field where their
day's work was to be done.