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

of date, even

then, and only tolerated on account of his age. It ran:

 

An outlandish knight, all from the north lands,

A-wooing came to me,

He said he would take me to the north lands

And there he would marry me.

 

‘Go, fetch me some of your father’s gold

And some of your mother’s fee,

And two of the best nags out of the stable

Where there stand thirty and three.’

 

She fetched him some of her father’s gold

And some of her mother’s fee,

And two of the best nags out of the stable

Where there stood thirty and three.

 

And then she mounted her milk-white steed

And he the dapple grey,

And they rode until they came to the sea-shore,

Three hours before it was day.

 

‘Get off, get off thy milk-white steed

And deliver it unto me,

For six pretty maids I have drowned here

And thou the seventh shall be.

 

‘Take off, take off, thy silken gown,

And deliver it unto me,

For I think it is too rich and too good

To rot in the salt sea.’

 

‘If I must take off my silken gown,

Pray turn thy back to me,

For I think it’s not fitting a ruffian like you

A naked woman should see.’

 

He turned his back towards her

To view the leaves so green,

And she took hold of his middle so small

And tumbled him into the stream.

 

And he sank high and he sank low

Until he came to the side.

‘Take hold of my hand, my pretty ladye,

And I will make you my bride.’

 

‘Lie there, lie there, you false-hearted man,

Lie there instead of me,

For six pretty maids hast thou drowned here

And the seventh hath drowned thee.’

 

So then she mounted the milk-white steed

And led the dapple grey,

And she rode till she came to her own father’s door,

An hour before it was day.

 

As this last song was piped out in the aged voice, women at their

cottage doors on summer evenings would say: ‘They’ll soon be out now.

Poor old Dave’s just singing his “Outlandish Knight”.’

 

Songs and singers all have gone, and in their places the wireless blares

out variety and swing music, or informs the company in cultured tones of

what is happening in China or Spain. Children no longer listen outside.

There are very few who could listen, for the thirty or forty which

throve there in those days have dwindled to about half a dozen, and

these, happily, have books, wireless, and a good fire in their own

homes. But, to one of an older generation, it seems that a faint echo of

those songs must still linger round the inn doorway. The singers were

rude and untaught and poor beyond modern imagining; but they deserve to

be remembered, for they knew the now lost secret of being happy on

little.

V

Survivals

 

There were three distinct types of home in the hamlet. Those of the old

couples in comfortable circumstances, those of the married people with

growing families, and the few new homes which had recently been

established. The old people who were not in comfortable circumstances

had no homes at all worth mentioning, for, as soon as they got past

work, they had either to go to the workhouse or find accommodation in

the already overcrowded cottages of their children. A father or a mother

could usually be squeezed in, but there was never room for both, so one

child would take one parent and another the other, and even then, as

they used to say, there was always the in-law to be dealt with. It was a

common thing to hear ageing people say that they hoped God would be

pleased to take them before they got past work and became a trouble to

anybody.

 

But the homes of the more fortunate aged were the most comfortable in

the hamlet, and one of the most attractive of these was known as ‘Old

Sally’s’. Never as ‘Old Dick’s’, although Sally’s husband, Dick, might

have been seen at any hour of the day, digging and hoeing and watering

and planting his garden, as much a part of the landscape as his own row

of beehives.

 

He was a little, dry, withered old man, who always wore his smock-frock

rolled up round his waist and the trousers on his thin legs gartered

with buckled straps. Sally was tall and broad, not fat, but massive, and

her large, beamingly good-natured face, with its well-defined moustache

and tight, coal-black curls bobbing over each ear, was framed in a white

cap frill; for Sally, though still strong and active, was over eighty,

and had remained faithful to the fashions of her youth.

 

She was the dominating partner. If Dick was called upon to decide any

question whatever, he would edge nervously aside and say, ‘I’ll just

step indoors and see what Sally thinks about it,’ or ‘All depends upon

what Sally says.’ The house was hers and she carried the purse; but Dick

was a willing subject and enjoyed her dominion over him. It saved him a

lot of thinking, and left him free to give all his time and attention to

the growing things in his garden.

 

Old Sally’s was a long, low, thatched cottage with diamond-paned windows

winking under the eaves and a rustic porch smothered in honeysuckle.

Excepting the inn, it was the largest house in the hamlet, and of the

two downstair rooms one was used as a kind of kitchen-storeroom, with

pots and pans and a big red crockery water vessel at one end, and

potatoes in sacks and peas and beans spread out to dry at the other. The

apple crop was stored on racks suspended beneath the ceiling and bunches

of herbs dangled below. In one corner stood the big brewing copper in

which Sally still brewed with good malt and hops once a quarter. The

scent of the last brewing hung over the place till the next and mingled

with apple and onion and dried thyme and sage smells, with a dash of

soapsuds thrown in, to compound the aroma which remained in the

children’s memories for life and caused a whiff of any two of the

component parts in any part of the world to be recognized with an

appreciative sniff and a mental ejaculation of ‘Old Sally’s!’

 

The inner room—‘the house’, as it was called—was a perfect snuggery,

with walls two feet thick and outside shutters to close at night and a

padding of rag rugs, red curtains and feather cushions within. There was

a good oak, gate-legged table, a dresser with pewter and willow-pattern

plates, and a grandfather’s clock that not only told the time, but the

day of the week as well. It had even once told the changes of the moon;

but the works belonging to that part had stopped and only the fat, full

face, painted with eyes, nose and mouth, looked out from the square

where the four quarters should have rotated. The clock portion kept such

good time that half the hamlet set its own clocks by it. The other half

preferred to follow the hooter at the brewery in the market town, which

could be heard when the wind was in the right quarter. So there were two

times in the hamlet and people would say when asking the hour, ‘Is that

hooter time, or Old Sally’s?’

 

The garden was a large one, tailing off at the bottom into a little

field where Dick grew his corn crop. Nearer the cottage were fruit

trees, then the yew hedge, close and solid as a wall, which sheltered

the beehives and enclosed the flower garden. Sally had such flowers, and

so many of them, and nearly all of them sweet-scented! Wallflowers and

tulips, lavender and sweet william, and pinks and old-world roses with

enchanting names—Seven Sisters, Maiden’s Blush, moss rose, monthly

rose, cabbage rose, blood rose, and, most thrilling of all to the

children, a big bush of the York and Lancaster rose, in the blooms of

which the rival roses mingled in a pied white and red. It seemed as

though all the roses in Lark Rise had gathered together in that one

garden. Most of the gardens had only one poor starveling bush or none;

but, then, nobody else had so much of anything as Sally.

 

A continual subject for speculation was as to how Dick and Sally managed

to live so comfortably with no visible means of support beyond their

garden and beehives and the few shillings their two soldier sons might

be supposed to send them, and Sally in her black silk on Sundays and

Dick never without a few ha’pence for garden seeds or to fill his

tobacco pouch. ‘Wish they’d tell me how ‘tis done,’ somebody would

grumble. ‘I could do wi’ a leaf out o’ their book.’

 

But Dick and Sally did not talk about their affairs. All that was known

of them was that the house belonged to Sally, and that it had been built

by her grandfather before the open heath had been cut up into fenced

fields and the newer houses had been built to accommodate the labourers

who came to work in them. It was only when Laura was old enough to write

their letters for them that she learned more. They could both read and

Dick could write well enough to exchange letters with their own

children; but one day they received a business letter that puzzled them,

and Laura was called in, sworn to secrecy, and consulted. It was one of

the nicest things that happened to her as a child, to be chosen out of

the whole hamlet for their confidence and to know that Dick and Sally

liked her, though so few other people did. After that, at twelve years

old, she became their little woman of business, writing letters to

seedsmen and fetching postal orders from the market town to put in them

and helping Dick to calculate the interest due on their savings bank

account. From them she learned a great deal about the past life of the

hamlet.

 

Sally could just remember the Rise when it still stood in a wide expanse

of open heath, with juniper bushes and furze thickets and close,

springy, rabbit-bitten turf. There were only six houses then and they

stood in a ring round an open green, all with large gardens and fruit

trees and faggot piles. Laura could pick out most of the houses, still

in a ring, but lost to sight of each other among the newer, meaner

dwellings that had sprung up around and between them. Some of the houses

had been built on and made into two, others had lost their lean-tos and

outbuildings. Only Sally’s remained the same, and Sally was eighty.

Laura in her lifetime was to see a ploughed field where Sally’s stood;

but had she been told that she would not have believed it.

 

Country people had not been so poor when Sally was a girl, or their

prospects so hopeless. Sally’s father had kept a cow, geese, poultry,

pigs, and a donkey-cart to carry his produce to the market town. He

could do this because he had commoners’ rights and could turn his

animals out to graze, and cut furze for firing and even turf to make a

lawn for one of his customers. Her mother made butter, for themselves

and to sell, baked their own bread, and made candles for lighting. Not

much of a light, Sally said, but it cost next to nothing, and, of

course, they went to bed early.

 

Sometimes her father would do a day’s work for wages, thatching a rick,

cutting and laying a hedge, or helping with