Lark Rise - Flora Thompson (read more books .TXT) 📗
- Author: Flora Thompson
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hoed and, in time, mown, and the whole process began again.
Machinery was just coming into use on the land. Every autumn appeared a
pair of large traction engines, which, posted one on each side of a
field, drew a plough across and across by means of a cable. These toured
the district under their own steam for hire on the different farms, and
the outfit included a small caravan, known as ‘the box’, for the two
drivers to live and sleep in. In the ‘nineties, when they had decided to
emigrate and wanted to learn all that was possible about farming, both
Laura’s brothers, in turn, did a spell with the steam plough, horrifying
the other hamlet people, who looked upon such nomads as social outcasts.
Their ideas had not then been extended to include mechanics as a class
apart and they were lumped as inferiors with sweeps and tinkers and
others whose work made their faces and clothes black. On the other hand,
clerks and salesmen of every grade, whose clean smartness might have
been expected to ensure respect, were looked down upon as
‘counter-jumpers’. Their recognized world was made up of landowners,
farmers, publicans, and farm labourers, with the butcher, the baker, the
miller, and the grocer as subsidiaries.
Such machinery as the farmer owned was horse-drawn and was only in
partial use. In some fields a horse-drawn drill would sow the seed in
rows, in others a human sower would walk up and down with a basket
suspended from his neck and fling the seed with both hands broadcast. In
harvest time the mechanical reaper was already a familiar sight, but it
only did a small part of the work; men were still mowing with scythes
and a few women were still reaping with sickles. A thrashing machine on
hire went from farm to farm and its use was more general; but men at
home still thrashed out their allotment crops and their wives’ leazings
with a flail and winnowed the corn by pouring from sieve to sieve in the
wind.
The labourers worked hard and well when they considered the occasion
demanded it and kept up a good steady pace at all times. Some were
better workmen than others, of course; but the majority took a pride in
their craft and were fond of explaining to an outsider that field work
was not the fool’s job that some townsmen considered it. Things must be
done just so and at the exact moment, they said; there were ins and outs
in good land work which took a man’s lifetime to learn. A few of less
admirable build would boast: ‘We gets ten bob a week, a’ we yarns every
penny of it; but we doesn’t yarn no more; we takes hemmed good care o’
that!’ But at team work, at least, such ‘slack-twisted ‘uns’ had to keep
in step, and the pace, if slow, was steady.
While the ploughmen were in charge of the teams, other men went singly,
or in twos or threes, to hoe, harrow, or spread manure in other fields;
others cleared ditches and saw to drains, or sawed wood or cut chaff or
did other odd jobs about the farmstead. Two or three highly skilled
middle-aged men were sometimes put upon piecework, hedging and ditching,
sheep-shearing, thatching, or mowing, according to the season. The
carter, shepherd, stockman, and blacksmith had each his own specialized
job. Important men, these, with two shillings a week extra on their
wages and a cottage rent free near the farmstead.
When the ploughmen shouted to each other across the furrows, they did
not call ‘Miller’ or ‘Gaskins’ or ‘Tuffrey’ or even ‘Bill’, ‘Tom’, or
‘Dick’, for they all had nicknames and answered more readily to ‘Bishie’
or ‘Pumpkin’ or ‘Boamer’. The origin of many of these names was
forgotten, even by the bearers; but a few were traceable to personal
peculiarities. ‘Cockie’ or’Cock-eye’ had a slight cast; ‘Old Stut’
stuttered, while ‘Bavour’ was so called because when he fancied a snack
between meals he would say ‘I must just have my mouthful of bavour’,
using the old name for a snack, which was rapidly becoming modernized
into ‘lunch’ or ‘luncheon’.
When a few years later, Edmund worked in the fields for a time, the
carter, having asked him some question and being struck with the aptness
of his reply, exclaimed: ‘Why, boo-oy, you be as wise as Solomon, an’
Solomon I shall call ‘ee!’ and Solomon he was until he left the hamlet.
A younger brother was called ‘Fisher’; but the origin of this name was a
mystery. His mother, who was fonder of boys than girls, used to call him
her ‘kingfisher’.
Sometimes afield, instead of the friendly shout, a low hissing whistle
would pass between the ploughs. It was a warning-note and meant that
‘Old Monday’, the farm bailiff, had been sighted. He would come riding
across the furrows on his little long-tailed grey pony, himself so tall
and his steed so dumpy that his feet almost touched the ground, a rosy,
shrivelled, nutcracker-faced old fellow, swishing his ash stick and
shouting, ‘Hi, men! Ho, men! What do you reckon you’re doing!’
He questioned them sharply and found fault here and there, but was in
the main fairly just in his dealings with them. He had one great fault
in their eyes, however; he was always in a hurry himself and he tried to
hurry them, and that was a thing they detested.
The nickname of ‘Old Monday’, or ‘Old Monday Morning’, had been bestowed
upon him years before when some hitch had occurred and he was said to
have cried: ‘Ten o’clock Monday morning! To-day’s Monday, to-morrow’s
Tuesday, next day’s Wednesday—half the week gone and nothing done!’
This name, of course, was reserved for his absence; while he was with
them it was ‘Yes, Muster Morris’ and ‘No, Muster Morris’, and ‘I’ll see
what I can do, Muster Morris’. A few of the tamer-spirited even called
him ‘sir’. Then, as soon as his back was turned, some wag would point to
it with one hand and slap his own buttocks with the other, saying, but
not too loudly, ‘My elbow to you, you ole devil!’
At twelve by the sun, or by signal from the possessor of one of the old
turnip-faced watches which descended from father to son, the teams would
knock off for the dinner-hour. Horses were unyoked, led to the shelter
of a hedge or a rick and given their nosebags and men and boys threw
themselves down on sacks spread out beside them and tin bottles of cold
tea were uncorked and red handkerchiefs of food unwrapped. The lucky
ones had bread and cold bacon, perhaps the top or the bottom of a
cottage loaf, on which the small cube of bacon was placed, with a finger
of bread on top, called the thumb-piece, to keep the meat untouched by
hand and in position for manipulation with a clasp-knife. The
consumption of this food was managed neatly and decently, a small sliver
of bacon and a chunk of bread being cut and conveyed to the mouth in one
movement. The less fortunate ones munched their bread and lard or morsel
of cheese; and the boys with their ends of cold pudding were jokingly
bidden not to get ‘that ‘ere treacle’ in their ears.
The food soon vanished, the crumbs from the red handkerchiefs were
shaken out for the birds, the men lighted their pipes and the boys
wandered off with their catapults down the hedgerows. Often the elders
would sit out their hour of leisure discussing politics, the latest
murder story, or local affairs; but at other times, especially when one
man noted for that kind of thing was present, they would while away the
time in repeating what the women spoke of with shamed voices as ‘men’s
tales’.
These stories, which were kept strictly to the fields and never repeated
elsewhere, formed a kind of rustic Decameron, which seemed to have
been in existence for centuries and increased like a snowball as it
rolled down the generations. The tales were supposed to be extremely
indecent, and elderly men would say after such a sitting, ‘I got up an’
went over to th’ osses, for I couldn’t stand no more on’t. The brimstone
fair come out o’ their mouths as they put their rascally heads
together.’ What they were really like only the men knew; but probably
they were coarse rather than filthy. Judging by a few stray specimens
which leaked through the channel of eavesdropping juniors, they
consisted chiefly of ‘he said’ and ‘she said’, together with a lavish
enumeration of those parts of the human body then known as ‘the
unmentionables’.
Songs and snatches on the same lines were bawled at the plough-tail and
under hedges and never heard elsewhere. Some of these ribald rhymes were
so neatly turned that those who have studied the subject have attributed
their authorship to some graceless son of the Rectory or Hall. It may be
that some of these young scamps had a hand in them, but it is just as
likely that they sprung direct from the soil, for, in those days of
general churchgoing, the men’s minds were well stored with hymns and
psalms and some of them were very good at parodying them.
There was ‘The Parish Clerk’s Daughter’, for instance. This damsel was
sent one Christmas morning to the church to inform her father that the
Christmas present of beef had arrived after he left home. When she
reached the church the service had begun and the congregation, led by
her father, was half-way through the psalms. Nothing daunted, she sidled
up to her father and intoned:
‘Feyther, the me-a-at’s come, an’ what’s me mother to d-o-o-o w’it?’
And the answer came pat: ‘Tell her to roast the thick an’ boil th’ thin,
an’ me-ak a pudden o’ th’ su-u-u-u-et.’ But such simple entertainment
did not suit the man already mentioned. He would drag out the filthiest
of the stock rhymes, then go on to improvise, dragging in the names of
honest lovers and making a mock of fathers of first children. Though
nine out of ten of his listeners disapproved and felt thoroughly
uncomfortable, they did nothing to check him beyond a mild ‘Look out, or
them boo-oys’ll hear ‘ee!’ or ‘Careful! some ‘ooman may be comin’ along
th’ roo-ad.’
But the lewd scandalizer did not always have everything his own way.
There came a day when a young ex-soldier, home from his five years’
service in India, sat next to him. He sat through one or two such
extemporized songs, then, eyeing the singer, said shortly, ‘You’d better
go and wash out your dirty mouth.’
The answer was a bawled stanza in which the objector’s name figured. At
that the ex-soldier sprung to his feet, seized the singer by the scruff
of his neck, dragged him to the ground and, after a scuffle, forced
earth and small stones between his teeth. ‘There, that’s a lot cleaner!’
he said, administering a final kick on the buttocks as the fellow slunk,
coughing and spitting, behind the hedge.
A few women still did field work, not with the men, or even in the same
field as a rule, but at their own special tasks, weeding and hoeing,
picking up stones, and topping and tailing turnips and mangel; or, in
wet weather, mending sacks in a barn. Formerly, it was said, there had
been a large gang of field women, lawless, slatternly creatures, some of
whom had thought nothing of having four or five children out of wedlock.
Their day was over; but the reputation they had left behind them had
given most country-women a distaste for ‘goin’ afield’. In
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