Lark Rise - Flora Thompson (read more books .TXT) 📗
- Author: Flora Thompson
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roof. He had slept there for years, leaving his wife the downstair room,
that she might not be disturbed by his fevered tossing during his
rheumatic attacks, and also because, like many old people, he woke
early, and liked to get up and light the fire and read his Bible before
his wife was ready for her cup of tea to be taken to her.
Gradually, his limbs became so locked he could not turn over in bed
without help. Giving to and doing for others was over for him. He would
lie upon his back for hours, his tired old blue eyes fixed upon the
picture nailed on the wall at the foot of his bed. It was the only
coloured thing in the room; the rest was bare whiteness. It was of the
Crucifixion, and, printed above the crown of thorns were the words:
This have I done for thee.
And underneath the pierced and bleeding feet:
What hast thou done for me?
His, two years’ uncomplaining endurance of excruciating pain answered
for him.
When her husband was asleep, or lying, washed and tended, gazing at his
picture, Laura’s grandmother would sit among her feather cushions
downstairs reading Bow Bells or the Princess Novelettes or the
Family Herald. Except when engaged in housework, she was never seen
without a book in her hand. It was always a novelette, and she had a
large assortment of these which she kept tied up in flat parcels, ready
to exchange with other novelette readers.
She had been very pretty when she was young. ‘The Belle of Hornton’,
they had called her in her native village, and she often told Laura of
the time when her hair had reached down to her knees, like a great
yellow cape, she said, which covered her. Another of her favourite
stories was of the day when she had danced with a real lord. It was at
his coming-of-age celebrations, and a great honour, for he had passed
over his own friends and the daughters of his tenants in favour of one
who was but a gamekeeper’s daughter. Before the evening was over he had
whispered in her ear that she was the prettiest girl in the county, and
she had cherished the compliment all her life. There were no further
developments. My Lord was My Lord, and Hannah Pollard was Hannah
Pollard, a poor girl, but the daughter of decent parents. No further
developments were possible in real life, though such affairs ended
differently in her novelettes. Perhaps that was why she enjoyed them.
It was difficult for Laura to connect the long, yellow hair and the
white frock with blue ribbons worn at the coming-of-age f�te with her
grandmother, for she saw her only as a thin, frail old woman who wore
her grey hair parted like curtains and looped at the ears with little
combs. Still, there was something which made her worth looking at.
Laura’s mother said it was because her features were good. ‘My mother,’
she would say, ‘will look handsome in her coffin. Colour goes and the
hair turns grey, but the framework lasts.’
Laura’s mother was greatly disappointed in her little daughter’s looks.
Her own mother had been an acknowledged belle, she herself had been
charmingly pretty, and she naturally expected her children to carry on
the tradition. But Laura was a plain, thin child: ‘Like a moll heron,
all legs and wings,’ she was told in the hamlet, and her dark eyes and
wide mouth looked too large for her small face. The only compliment ever
paid her in childhood was that of a curate who said she was ‘intelligent
looking’. Those around her would have preferred curly hair and a rosebud
mouth to all the intelligence in the world.
Laura’s grandmother had never tramped ten miles on a Sunday night to
hear her husband preach in a village chapel. She had gone to church once
every Sunday, unless it rained or was too hot, or she had a cold, or
some article of her attire was too shabby. She was particular about her
clothes and liked to have everything handsome about her. In her bedroom
there were pictures and ornaments, as well as the feather cushions and
silk patchwork quilt.
When she came to the end house, the best chair was placed by the fire
for her and the best possible tea put on the table, and Laura’s mother
did not whisper her troubles to her as she did to her father. If some
little thing did leak out, she would only say, ‘All men need a bit of
humouring.’
Some women, too, thought Laura, for she could see that her grandmother
had always been the one to be indulged and spared all trouble and
unpleasantness. If the fiddle had belonged to her, it would never have
been sold; the whole family would have combined to buy a handsome new
case for it.
After her husband died, she went away to live with her eldest son, and
the round house shared the fate of Sally’s. Where it stood is now a
ploughed field. The husband’s sacrifices, the wife’s romance, are as
though they had never been—‘melted into air, into thin air’.
Those were a few of the old men and women to whom the Rector referred as
‘our old folks’ and visiting townsmen lumped together as ‘a lot of old
yokels’. There were a few other homes of old people in the hamlet; that
of Master Ashley, for instance, who, like Sally, had descended from one
of the original squatters and still owned the ancestral cottage and
strip of land. He must have been one of the last people to use a
breast-plough, a primitive implement consisting of a ploughshare at one
end of a stout stick and a cross-piece of shaped wood at the other which
the user pressed to his breast to drive the share through the soil. On
his land stood the only surviving specimen of the old furze and daub
building which had once been common in the neighbourhood. The walls were
of furze branches closely pressed together and daubed with a mixture of
mud and mortar. It was said that the first settlers built their cottages
of these materials with their own hands.
Then there were one or two poorer couples, just holding on to their
homes, but in daily fear of the workhouse. The Poor Law authorities
allowed old people past work a small weekly sum as outdoor relief; but
it was not sufficient to live upon, and, unless they had more than
usually prosperous children to help support them, there came a time when
the home had to be broken up. When, twenty years later, the Old Age
Pensions began, life was transformed for such aged cottagers. They were
relieved of anxiety. They were suddenly rich. Independent for life! At
first when they went to the Post Office to draw it, tears of gratitude
would run down the cheeks of some, and they would say as they picked up
their money, ‘God bless that Lord George! [for they could not believe
one so powerful and munificent could be a plain ‘Mr.’] and God bless
you, miss!’ and there were flowers from their gardens and apples from
their trees for the girl who merely handed them the money.
VIThe Besieged Generation
To Laura, as a child, the hamlet once appeared as a fortress. She was
coming home alone from school one wild, grey, March afternoon, and,
looking up from her battling against the wind, got a swift new
impression of the cluster of stark walls and slated roofs on the Rise,
with rooks tumbling and clouds hurrying overhead, smoke beating down
from the chimneys, and clothes on clotheslines straining away in the
wind.
‘It’s a fort! It’s a fort!’ she cried, and she went on up the road,
singing in her flat, tuneless little voice the Salvation Army hymn of
the day, ‘Hold the fort, for I am coming’.
There was a deeper likeness than that of her childish vision. The hamlet
was indeed in a state of siege, and its chief assailant was Want. Yet,
like other citizens during a long, but not too desperate siege, its
inhabitants had become accustomed to their hard conditions and were able
to snatch at any small passing pleasure and even at times to turn their
very straits to laughter.
To go from the homes of the older people to those of the besieged
generation was to step into another chapter of the hamlet’s history. All
the graces and simple luxuries of the older style of living had
disappeared. They were poor people’s houses rich only in children,
strong, healthy children, who, in a few years, would be ready to take
their part in the work of the world and to provide good, healthy blood
for the regeneration of city populations; but, in the meantime, their
parents had to give their all in order to feed and clothe them.
In their houses the good, solid, hand-made furniture of their
forefathers had given place to the cheap and ugly products of the early
machine age. A deal table, the top ribbed and softened by much
scrubbing; four or five windsor chairs with the varnish blistered and
flaking; a side table for the family photographs and ornaments, and a
few stools for fireside seats, together with the beds upstairs, made up
the collection spoken of by its owners as ‘our few sticks of furniture’.
If the father had a special chair in which to rest after his day’s work
was done, it would be but a rather larger replica of the hard windsors
with wooden arms added. The clock, if any, was a cheap, foreign
timepiece, standing on the mantelshelf—one which could seldom be relied
upon to keep correct time for twelve hours together. Those who had no
clock depended upon the husband’s watch for getting up in the morning.
The watch then went to work with him, an arrangement which must have
been a great inconvenience to most wives; but was a boon to the gossips,
who could then knock at a neighbour’s door and ask the time when they
felt inclined for a chat.
The few poor crocks were not good enough to keep on show and were hidden
away in the pantry between mealtimes. Pewter plates and dishes as
ornaments had gone. There were still plenty of them to be found, kicked
about around gardens and pigsties. Sometimes a travelling tinker would
spy one of these and beg or buy it for a few coppers, to melt down and
use in his trade. Other casual callers at the cottages would buy a set
of handwrought, brass drop-handles from an inherited chest of drawers
for sixpence; or a corner cupboard, or a gate-legged table which had
become slightly infirm, for half a crown. Other such articles of
furniture were put out of doors and spoilt by the weather, for the newer
generation did not value such things; it preferred the products of its
own day, and, gradually, the hamlet was being stripped of such relics.
As ornaments for their mantelpieces and side tables the women liked
gaudy glass vases, pottery images of animals, shell-covered boxes and
plush photograph frames. The most valued ornaments of all were the white
china mugs inscribed in gilt lettering ‘A Present for a Good Child’, or
‘A Present from Brighton’, or some other seaside place. Those who had
daughters in service to bring them would accumulate quite a collection
of these, which were hung by the handles in rows from the edge of a
shelf, and were a source of great pride in the owner and of envy in the
neighbours.
Those who
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