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

should’ve got aten

up meself before now.’ And he pinched the bloaters between his great red

fingers, pretended to consider the matter with his head on one side,

then declared each separate fish had the softest of soft roes, whether

it had or not. ‘Oozin’, simply oozin’ with goodness, I tell ye!’ and

oozing it certainly was when released from his grip. ‘But what’s the

good of one bloater amongst the lot of ye? Tell ye what I’ll do,’ he

would urge. ‘I’ll put ye in these three whoppers for tuppence-ha’penny.’

 

It was no good. The twopence-halfpenny was never forthcoming; even the

penny could so ill be spared that the purchaser often felt selfish and

greedy after she had parted with it; but, after a morning at the

washtub, she needed a treat so badly, and a bloater made a tasty change

from her usually monotonous diet.

 

The oranges were tempting, too, for the children loved them. It was one

of their greatest treats to find oranges on the mantelshelf when they

came home from school in winter. Sour they might be and hard and skinny

within; but without how rich and glowing! and what a strange foreign

scent pervaded the room when their mother divided each one into quarters

and distributed them. Even when the pulp had been eaten, the peel

remained, to be dried on the hob and taken to school to chew in class or

‘swopped’ for conkers or string or some other desirable object.

 

Jerry’s cart had a great attraction for Laura. At the sound of his

wheels she would run out to feast her eyes on the lovely rich colours of

grapes and pears and peaches. She loved to see the fish, too, with their

cool colours and queer shapes, and would imagine them swimming about in

the sea or resting among the seaweed. ‘What is that one called?’ she

asked one day, pointing to a particularly queer-looking one.

 

‘That’s a John Dory, me dear. See them black marks? Look like

finger-marks, don’t ‘em? An’ they do say that they be finger-marks. He

made ‘em, that night, ye know, when they was fishin’, ye know, an’ He

took some an’ cooked ‘em all ready for ‘em, an’ ever since, they say,

that ivery John Dory as comes out o’ th’ sea have got His finger-marks

on ‘un.’

 

Laura was puzzled, for Jerry had mentioned no name and he was, moreover,

a drinking, swearing old man, little likely, as she thought, to repeat a

sacred legend.

 

‘Do you mean the Sea of Galilee?’ she asked timidly.

 

‘That’s it, me dear. That’s what they say, whether true or not, of

course, I don’t know; but there be the finger-marks, right enough, an’

that’s what they say in our trade.’

 

It was on Jerry’s cart tomatoes first appeared in the hamlet. They had

not long been introduced into this country and were slowly making their

way into favour. The fruit was flatter in shape then than now and deeply

grooved and indented from the stem, giving it an almost starlike

appearance. There were bright yellow ones, too, as well as the scarlet;

but, after a few years, the yellow ones disappeared from the market and

the red ones became rounder and smoother, as we see them now.

 

At first sight, the basket of red and yellow fruit attracted Laura’s

colour-loving eye. ‘What are those?’ she asked old Jerry.

 

‘Love-apples, me dear. Love-apples, they be; though some hignorant folks

be a callin’.‘em tommytoes. But you don’t want any o’ they—nasty sour

things, they be, as only gentry can eat. You have a nice sweet orange

wi’ your penny.’ But Laura felt she must taste the love-apples and

insisted upon having one.

 

Such daring created quite a sensation among the onlookers. ‘Don’t ‘ee go

tryin’ to eat it, now,’ one woman urged. ‘It’ll only make ‘ee sick. I

know because I had one of the nasty horrid things at our Minnie’s.’ And

nasty, horrid things tomatoes remained in the popular estimation for

years; though most people to-day would prefer them as they were then,

with the real tomato flavour pronounced, to the watery insipidity of our

larger, smoother tomato.

 

Mr. Wilkins, the baker, came three times a week. His long, lank figure,

girded by a white apron which always seemed about to slip down over his

hips, was a familiar one at the end house. He always stayed there for a

cup of tea, for which he propped himself up against the end of the

dresser. He would never sit down; he said he had not time, and that was

why he did not stop to change his flour-dusty bakehouse clothes before

he started on his round.

 

He was no ordinary baker, but a ship’s carpenter by trade who had come

to the neighbouring village on a visit to relatives, met his present

wife, married her, and cast anchor inland. Her father was old, she was

the only child, and the family business had to be attended to; so,

partly for love and partly for future gain he had given up the sea, but

he still remained a sailor at heart.

 

He would stand in the doorway of Laura’s home and look out at the

wheatfields billowing in the breeze and the white clouds hurrying over

them, and say: ‘All very fine; but it seems a bit dead to me, right away

from the sea, like this.’ And he would tell the children how the waves

pile up in a storm, ‘like the wall of a house coming down on your ship’,

and about other seas, calm and bright as a looking-glass, with little

islands and palm trees-but treacherous, too—and treacherous little men

living in palm leaf huts, ‘their faces as brown as your frock, Laura.’

Once he had been shipwrecked and spent nine days in an open boat, the

last two without water. His tongue had stuck to the roof of his mouth

and he had spent weeks after rescue in hospital.

 

‘And yet,’ he would say, ‘I’d dearly love just one more trip; but my

dear wife would cry her eyes out if I mentioned it, and the business, of

course, couldn’t be left. No. I’ve swallowed the anchor, all right. I’ve

swallowed the anchor.’

 

Mr. Wilkins brought the image of the real living sea to the end house;

otherwise the children would have only known it in pictures. True, their

mother in her nursing days had been to the seaside with her charges and

had many pleasant stories to tell of walks on piers, digging on sands,

gathering seaweed, and shrimping with nets. But the seaside was

different—delightful in its way, no doubt, but nothing like the wide

tumbling ocean with ships on it.

 

The only portion of the sea which came their way was contained in a

medicine bottle which a hamlet girl in service at Brighton brought home

as a curiosity. In time the bottle of sea-water became the property of a

younger sister, a schoolfellow of Laura’s, who was persuaded to barter

it for a hunch of cake and a blue-bead necklace. Laura treasured it for

years.

 

Many casual callers passed through the hamlet. Travelling tinkers with

their barrows, braziers, and twirling grindstones turned aside from the

main road and came singing:

 

Any razors or scissors to grind?

Or anything else in the tinker’s line?

Any old pots or kettles to mend?

 

After squinting into any leaking vessel against the light, or trying the

edges of razors or scissors upon the hard skin of their palms, they

would squat by the side of the road to work, or start their emery wheel

whizzing, to the delight of the hamlet children, who always formed a

ring around any such operations.

 

Gipsy women with cabbage-nets and clothes-pegs to sell were more

frequent callers for they had a camping-place only a mile away and no

place was too poor to yield them a harvest. When a door was opened to

them, if the housewife appeared to be under forty, they would ask in a

wheedling voice: ‘Is your mother at home, my dear?’ Then, when the

position was explained, they would exclaim in astonished tones: ‘You

don’t mean to tell me you be the mother? Look at that, now. I shouldn’t

have taken you to be a day over twenty.’

 

No matter how often repeated, this compliment was swallowed whole, and

made a favourable opening for a long conversation, in the course of

which the wily ‘Egyptian’ not only learned the full history of the

woman’s own family, but also a good deal about those of her neighbours,

which was duly noted for future use. Then would come a request for

‘handful of little ‘taters, or an onion or two for the pot’, and, if

these were given, as they usually were, ‘My pretty lady’ would be asked

for an old shift of her own or an old shirt of her husband’s, or

anything that the children might have left off, and, poverty-stricken

though the hamlet was, a few worn-out garments would be secured to swell

the size of the bundle which, afterwards, would be sold to the rag

merchant.

 

Sometimes the gipsies would offer to tell fortunes; but this offer was

always refused, not out of scepticism or lack of curiosity about the

future, but because the necessary silver coin was not available. ‘No,

thank ‘ee,’ the women would say. ‘I don’t want nothink of that sort. My

fortune’s already told.’

 

‘Ah, my lady! you med think so; but them as has got childern never

knows. You be born, but you ain’t dead yet, an’ you may dress in silks

and ride in your own carriage yet. You wait till that fine strappin’ boy

o’ yourn gets rich. He won’t forget his mother, I’ll bet!’ and after

this free prognostication, they would trail off to the next house,

leaving behind a scent as strong as a vixen’s.

 

The gipsies paid in entertainment for what they received. Their calls

made a welcome break in the day. Those of the tramps only harrowed the

feelings and left the depressed in spirit even more depressed.

 

There must have been hundreds of tramps on the roads at that time. It

was a common sight, when out for a walk, to see a dirty, unshaven man,

his rags topped with a battered bowler, lighting a fire of sticks by the

roadside to boil his tea-can. Sometimes he would have a poor bedraggled

woman with him and she would be lighting the fire while he lolled at

ease on the turf or picked out the best pieces from the bag of food they

had collected at their last place of call.

 

Some of them carried small, worthless things to sell—matches,

shoe-laces, or dried lavender bags. The children’s mother often bought

from these out of pity; but never from the man who sold oranges, for

they had seen him on one of their walks, spitting on his oranges and

polishing them with a filthy rag. Then there was the woman who, very

early one morning, knocked at the door with small slabs of tree-bark in

her apron. She was cleaner and better-dressed than the ordinary tramp

and brought with her a strong scent of lavender. The bark appeared to be

such as could have been hacked with a clasp-knife from the nearest pine

tree; but she claimed for it a very different origin. It was the famous

lavender bark, she said, brought from foreign parts by her sailor son.

One fragment kept among clothes was not only an everlasting perfume, but

it was also death to moths. ‘You just smell it, my dears,’ she said,

handing pieces to the mother and the children, who had crowded to the

door.

 

It certainly