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

smelt strongly of lavender. The children handled it

lovingly, fascinated by a substance which had travelled so far and smelt

so sweetly.

 

She asked sixpence a slab; but obligingly came down to twopence, and

three pieces were purchased and placed in a fancy bowl on the side table

to perfume the room and to be exhibited as a rarity.

 

Alas! the vendor had barely time to clear out of the hamlet before all

the perfume had evaporated and the bark became what it had been before

she sprinkled it with oil of lavender—just ordinary bark from a pine

trunk!

 

Such brilliance was exceptional. Most of the tramps were plain beggars.

‘Please could you give me a morsel of bread, for I be so hungry. I’m

telling God I haven’t put a bite between my lips since yesterday

morning’ was a regular formula with them when they knocked at the door

of a cottage; and, although many of them looked well-nourished, they

were never turned away. Thick slices, which could ill be spared, were

plastered with lard; the cold potatoes which the housewife had intended

to fry for her own dinner were wrapped in newspaper, and by the time

they left the hamlet they were insured against starvation for at least a

week. The only reward for such generosity, beyond the whining

professional ‘God bless ye’, was the cheering reflection that however

badly off one might be oneself, there were others poorer.

 

Where all these wayfarers came from or how they had fallen so low in the

social scale was uncertain. According to their own account, they had

been ordinary decent working people with homes ‘just such another as

yourn, mum’; but their houses had been burned down or flooded, or they

had fallen out of work, or spent a long time in hospital and had never

been able to start again. Many of the women pleaded that their husbands

were dead, and several men came begging with the plea that, having lost

their wives, they had the children to look after and could not leave

them to work for their living.

 

Sometimes whole families took to the road with their bags and bundles

and tea-cans, begging their food as they went and sleeping in casual

wards or under ricks or in ditches. Laura’s father, coming home from

work at dusk one night, thought he heard a rustling in the ditch by the

roadside. When he looked down into it, a row of white faces looked up at

him, belonging to a mother, a father, and three or four children. He

said that in the half light only their faces were visible and that they

looked like a set of silver coins, ranging from a florin to a threepenny

bit. Though late in the summer, the night was not cold. ‘Thank God for

that!’ said the children’s mother when she heard about them, for, had it

been cold, he might have brought them all home with him. He had brought

home tramps before and had them sit at table with the family, to his

wife’s disgust, for he had what she considered peculiar ideas on

hospitality and the brotherhood of man.

 

There was no tallyman, or Johnny Fortnight, in those parts; but once,

for a few months, a man who kept a small furniture shop in a

neighbouring town came round selling his wares on the instalment plan.

On his first visit to Lark Rise he got no order at all; but on his

second one of the women, more daring than the rest, ordered a small

wooden washstand and a zinc bath for washing day. Immediately washstands

and zinc baths became the rage. None of the women could think how they

had managed to exist so long without a washstand in their bedroom. They

were quite satisfied with the buckets and basins of water in the pantry

or by the fireside or out of doors for their own use; but supposing some

one fell ill and the doctor had to wash his hands in a basin placed on a

clean towel on the kitchen table! or supposing some of their town

relatives came on a visit, those with a real sink and water laid on!

They felt they would die with mortification if they had to apologize for

having no washstand. As to the zinc bath, that seemed even more

necessary. That wooden tub their mother had used was ‘a girt okkard old

thing’. Although they had not noticed its weight much before, it seemed

almost to break their backs when they could see a bright, shining new

bath hanging under the eaves of the next-door barn.

 

It was not long before practically every house had a new bath and

washstand. A few mothers of young children went farther and ordered a

fireguard as well. Then the fortnightly payments began. One-and-six was

the specified instalment, and, for the first few fortnights, this was

forthcoming. But it was so difficult to get that eighteenpence together.

A few pence had always to be used out of the first week’s ninepence,

then in the second week some urgent need for cash would occur. The

instalments fell to a shilling. Then to sixpence. A few gave up the

struggle and defaulted.

 

Month after month the salesman came round and collected what he could;

but he did not try to tempt them to buy anything more, for he could see

that he would never be paid for it. He was a good-hearted man who

listened to their tales of woe and never bullied or threatened to County

Court them. Perhaps the debts were not as important to him as they

appeared to his customers; or he may have felt he was to blame for

tempting them to order things they could not afford. He continued

calling until he had collected as much as he thought possible, then

disappeared from the scene.

 

A more amusing episode was that of the barrels of beer. At that time in

that part of the country, brewers’ travellers, known locally as

‘outriders’, called for orders at farmhouses and superior cottages, as

well as at inns. No experienced outrider visited farm labourers’

cottages; but the time came when a beginner, full of youthful enthusiasm

and burning to fill up his order book, had the brilliant idea of

canvassing the hamlet for orders.

 

Wouldn’t it be splendid, he asked the women, to have their own

nine-gallon cask of good ale in for Christmas, and only have to go into

the pantry and turn the tap to get a glass for their husband and

friends. The ale cost far less by the barrel than when bought at the

inn. It would be an economy in the long run, and how well it would look

to bring out a jug of foaming ale from their own barrel for their

friends. As to payment, they sent in their bills quarterly, so there

would be plenty of time to save up.

 

The women agreed that it would, indeed, be splendid to have their own

barrel, and even the men, when told of the project at night, were

impressed by the difference in price when buying by the nine-gallon

cask. Some of them worked it out on paper and were satisfied that,

considering that they would be spending a few shillings extra at

Christmas in any case, and that the missus had been looking rather

peaked lately and a glass of good beer cost less than doctor’s physic,

and that maybe a daughter in service would be sending a postal order,

they might venture to order the cask.

 

Others did not trouble to work it out; but, enchanted with the idea,

gave the order lightheartedly. After all, as the outrider said,

Christmas came but once a year, and this year they would have a jolly

one. Of course there were kill-joys, like Laura’s father, who said

sardonically: ‘They’ll laugh the other side of their faces when it comes

to paying for it.’

 

The barrels came and were tapped and the beer was handed around. The

barrels were empty and the brewer’s carter in his leather apron heaved

them into the van behind his steaming, stamping horses; but none of the

mustard or cocoa tins hidden away in secret places contained more than a

few coppers towards paying the bill. When the day of reckoning came only

three of the purchasers had the money ready. But time was allowed. Next

month would do; but, mind! it must be forthcoming then. Most of the

women tried hard to get that money together; but, of course, they could

not. The traveller called again and again, each time growing more

threatening, and, after some months, the brewer took the matter to the

County Court, where the judge, after hearing the circumstances of sale

and the income of the purchasers, ordered them all to pay twopence

weekly off the debt. So ended the great excitement of having one’s own

barrel of beer on tap.

 

The packman, or pedlar, once a familiar figure in that part of the

country, was seldom seen in the ‘eighties. People had taken to buying

their clothes at the shops in the market town, where fashions were newer

and prices lower. But one last survivor of the once numerous clan still

visited the hamlet at long and irregular intervals.

 

He would turn aside from the turnpike and come plodding down the narrow

hamlet road, an old white-headed, white-bearded man, still hale and

rosy, although almost bent double under the heavy, black canvas-covered

pack he carried strapped on his shoulders. ‘Anything out of the pack

to-day?’ he would ask at each house, and, at the least encouragement,

fling down his load and open it on the doorstep. He carried a tempting

variety of goods: dress-lengths and shirt-lengths and remnants to make

up for the children; aprons and pinafores, plain and fancy; corduroys

for the men, and coloured scarves and ribbons for Sunday wear.

 

‘That’s a bit of right good stuff, ma’am, that is,’ he would say,

holding up some dress-length to exhibit it. ‘A gown made of this piece’d

last anybody for ever and then make ‘em a good petticoat afterwards.’

Few of the hamlet women could afford to test the quality of his piece

goods; cottons or tapes, or a paper of pins, were their usual purchases;

but his dress-lengths and other fabrics were of excellent quality and

wore much longer than any one would wish anything to wear in these days

of rapidly changing fashions. It was from his pack the soft, warm

woollen, grey with a white fleck in it, came to make the frock Laura

wore with a little black satin apron and a bunch of snowdrops pinned to

the breast when she went to sell stamps in the post office.

 

Once every summer a German band passed through the hamlet and halted

outside the inn to play. It was composed of an entire family, a father

and his six sons, the latter graded in size like a set of jugs, from the

tall young man who played the cornet to the chubby pink-faced little boy

who beat the drum.

 

Drawn up in the semicircle in their neat, green uniforms, they would

blow away at their instruments until their chubby German cheeks seemed

near to bursting point. Most of the music they played was above the

heads of the hamlet folks, who said they liked something with a bit more

‘chune’ in it; but when, at the end of the performance, they gave _God

Save the Queen_ the standers-by joined with gusto in singing it.

 

That was the sign for the landlord to come out in his shirt-sleeves with

three frothing beer mugs. One for the father, who poured the beer down

his throat like water down a sink, and the other two to be passed