Lark Rise - Flora Thompson (read more books .TXT) 📗

the ‘eighties

about half a dozen of the hamlet women did field work, most of them

being respectable middle-aged women who, having got their families off

hand, had spare time, a liking for an open-air life, and a longing for a

few shillings a week they could call their own.

 

Their hours, arranged that they might do their housework before they

left home in the morning and cook their husband’s meal after they

returned, were from ten to four, with an hour off for dinner. Their wage

was four shillings a week. They worked in sunbonnets, hobnailed boots

and men’s coats, with coarse aprons of sacking enveloping the lower part

of their bodies. One, a Mrs. Spicer, was a pioneer in the wearing of

trousers; she sported a pair of her husband’s corduroys. The others

compromised with ends of old trouser legs worn as gaiters. Strong,

healthy, weather-beaten, hard as nails, they worked through all but the

very worst weathers and declared they would go ‘stark, staring mad’ if

they had to be shut up in a house all day.

 

To a passer-by, seeing them bent over their work in a row, they might

have appeared as alike as peas in a pod. They were not. There was Lily,

the only unmarried one, big and strong and clumsy as a carthorse and

dark as a gipsy, her skin ingrained with field mould and the smell of

the earth about her, even indoors. Years before she had been betrayed by

a man and had sworn she would never marry until she had brought up the

boy she had had by him—a quite superfluous oath, her neighbours

thought, for she was one of the very few really ugly people in the

world.

 

The ‘eighties found her a woman of fifty, a creature of earth, earthy,

whose life was a round of working, eating, and sleeping. She lived alone

in a tiny cottage, in which, as she boasted, she could get her meals,

eat them, and put the things away without leaving her seat by the

hearth. She could read a little, but had forgotten how to write, and

Laura’s mother wrote her letters to her soldier son in India.

 

Then there was Mrs. Spicer, the wearer of the trousers, a rough-tongued

old body, but independent and upright, who kept her home spotless and

boasted that she owed no man a penny and wanted nothing from anybody.

Her gentle, hen-pecked, little husband adored her.

 

Very different from either was the comfortable, pink-cheeked Mrs. Braby,

who always carried an apple or a paper of peppermints in her pocket, in

case she should meet a child she favoured. In her spare time she was a

great reader of novelettes and out of her four shillings subscribed to

Bow Bells and the Family Herald. Once when Laura, coming home from

school, happened to overtake her, she enlivened the rest of the journey

with the synopsis of a serial she was reading, called His Ice Queen,

telling her how the heroine, rich, lovely, and icily virtuous in her

white velvet and swansdown, almost broke the heart of the hero by her

cool aloofness; then, suddenly melting, threw herself into his arms.

But, after all, the plot could not have been quite as simple as that,

for there was a villainous colonel in it. ‘Oh! I do just about hate that

colonel!’ Mrs. Braby ejaculated at intervals. She pronounced it

‘col-on-el’, as spelt, which so worked upon Laura that at last she

ventured, ‘But don’t they call that word “colonel”, Mrs. Braby?’ Which

led to a spelling lesson: ‘Col-on-el; that’s as plain as the nose on

your face. Whatever be you a-thinkin’ of, child? They don’t seem to

teach you much at school these days!’ She was distinctly offended and

did not offer Laura a peppermint for weeks, which served her right, for

she should not have tried to correct her elders.

 

One man worked with the field women or in the same field. He was a poor,

weedy creature, getting old and not very strong and they had put him

upon half-pay. He was known as ‘Algy’ and was not a native, but had

appeared there suddenly, years before, out of a past he never mentioned.

He was tall and thin and stooping, with watery blue eyes and long ginger

side-whiskers of the kind then known as ‘weepers’. Sometimes, when he

straightened his back, the last vestiges of a military bearing might be

detected, and there were other grounds for supposing he had at some time

been in the Army. When tipsy, or nearly so, he would begin, ‘When I was

in the Grenadier Guards …’ a sentence that always tailed off into

silence. Although his voice broke on the high notes and often

deteriorated into a squeak, it still bore the same vague resemblance to

that of a man of culture as his bearing did to that of a soldier. Then,

instead of swearing with ‘d–-s’ and ‘b–-s’ as the other men did, he

would, when surprised, burst into a ‘Bai Jove!’ which amused everybody,

but threw little light on his mystery.

 

Twenty years before, when his present wife had been a widow of a few

weeks’ standing, he had knocked at her door during a thunderstorm and

asked for a night’s lodging, and had been there ever since, never

receiving a letter or speaking of his past, even to his wife. It was

said that during his first days at field work his hands had blistered

and bled from softness. There must have been great curiosity in the

hamlet about him at first; but it had long died down and by the

‘eighties he was accepted as ‘a poor, slack-twisted crittur’, useful for

cracking jokes on. He kept his own counsel and worked contentedly to the

best of his power. The only thing that disturbed him was the rare visit

of the German band. As soon as he heard the brass instruments strike up

and the ‘pom, pom’ of the drum, he would stick his fingers in his ears

and run, across fields, anywhere, and not be seen again that day.

 

On Friday evening, when work was done, the men trooped up to the

farmhouse for their wages. These were handed out of a window to them by

the farmer himself and acknowledged by a rustic scraping of feet and

pulling of forelocks. The farmer had grown too old and too stout to ride

horseback, and, although he still made the circuit of his land in his

high dogcart every day, he had to keep to the roads, and pay-day was the

only time he saw many of his men. Then, if there was cause for

complaint, was the time they heard of it. ‘You, there! What were you up

to in Causey Spinney last Monday, when you were supposed to be clearing

the runnels?’ was a type of complaint that could always be countered by

pleading. ‘Call o’ Nature, please, sir.’ Less frequent and harder to

answer was: ‘I hear you’ve not been too smart about your work lately,

Stimson. ‘Twon’t do, you know, ‘twon’t do! You’ve got to earn your money

if you’re going to stay here.’ But, just as often, it would be: ‘There,

Boamer, there you are, my lad, a bright and shining golden

half-sovereign for you. Take care you don’t go spending it all at once!’

or an inquiry about some wife in childbed or one of the ancients’

rheumatism. He could afford to be jolly and affable: he paid poor old

Monday Morning to do his dirty work for him.

 

Apart from that, he was not a bad-hearted man and had no idea he was

sweating his labourers. Did they not get the full standard wage, with no

deduction for standing by in bad weather? How they managed to live and

keep their families on such a sum was their own affair. After all, they

did not need much, they were not used to luxuries. He liked a cut off a

juicy sirloin and a glass of good port himself; but bacon and beans were

better to work on. ‘Hard liver, hard worker’ was a sound old country

maxim, and the labouring man did well to follow it. Besides, was there

not at least one good blowout for everybody once a year at his

harvest-home dinner, and the joint of beef at Christmas, when he killed

a beast and distributed the meat, and soup and milk-puddings for anybody

who was ill; they had only to ask for and fetch them.

 

He never interfered with his men as long as they did their work well.

Not he! He was a staunch Conservative himself, a true blue, and they

knew his colour when they went to vote; but he never tried to influence

them at election times and never inquired afterwards which way they had

voted. Some masters did it, he knew, but it was a dirty, low-down trick,

in his opinion. As to getting them to go to church—that was the

parson’s job.

 

Although they hoodwinked him whenever possible and referred to him

behind his back as ‘God a’mighty’, the farmer was liked by his men. ‘Not

a bad ole sort,’ they said; ‘an’ does his bit by the land.’ All their

rancour was reserved for the bailiff.

 

There is something exhilarating about pay-day, even when the pay is poor

and already mortgaged for necessities. With that morsel of gold in their

pockets, the men stepped out more briskly and their voices were cheerier

than ordinary. When they reached home they handed the half-sovereign

straight over to their wives, who gave them back a shilling for the next

week’s pocket-money. That was the custom of the countryside. The men

worked for the money and the women had the spending of it. The men had

the best of the bargain. They earned their half-sovereign by hard toil,

it is true, but in the open air, at work they liked and took an interest

in, and in congenial company. The women, kept close at home, with

cooking, cleaning, washing, and mending to do, plus their constant

pregnancies and a tribe of children to look after, had also the worry of

ways and means on an insufficient income.

 

Many husbands boasted that they never asked their wives what they did

with the money. As long as there was food enough, clothes to cover

everybody, and a roof over their heads, they were satisfied, they said,

and they seemed to make a virtue of this and think what generous,

trusting, fine-hearted fellows they were. If a wife got in debt or

complained, she was told: ‘You must larn to cut your coat accordin’ to

your cloth, my gal.’ The coats not only needed expert cutting, but

should have been made of elastic.

 

On light evenings, after their tea-supper, the men worked for an hour or

two in their gardens or on the allotments. They were first-class

gardeners and it was their pride to have the earliest and best of the

different kinds of vegetables. They were helped in this by good soil and

plenty of manure from their pigsties; but good tilling also played its

part. They considered keeping the soil constantly stirred about the

roots of growing things the secret of success and used the Dutch hoe a

good deal for this purpose. The process was called ‘tickling’. ‘Tickle

up old Mother Earth and make her bear!’ they would shout to each other

across the plots, or salute a busy neighbour in passing with: ‘Just

tickling her up a bit, Jack?’

 

The energy they brought to their gardening after a hard day’s work in

the fields was marvellous. They grudged no effort and seemed never to

tire. Often, on moonlight nights in spring, the solitary fork of some

one who had not been able to