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

a habit, and,

although she never married, Emily had quite a good-sized family.

 

The hamlet women’s attitude towards the unmarried mother was

contradictory. If one of them brought her baby on a visit to the hamlet

they all went out of their way to pet and fuss over them. ‘The pretty

dear!’ they would cry. ‘How ever can anybody say such a one as him ought

not to be born. Ain’t he a beauty! Ain’t he a size! They always say, you

know, that that sort of child is the finest. An’ don’t you go mindin’

what folks says about you, me dear. It’s only the good girls, like you,

that has ‘em; the others is too artful!’

 

But they did not want their own daughters to have babies before they

were married. ‘I allus tells my gals,’ one woman would say

confidentially to another, ‘that if they goes getting theirselves into

trouble they’ll have to go to th’ work’us, for I won’t have ‘em at

home.’ And the other would agree, saying, ‘So I tells mine, an’ I allus

think that’s why I’ve had no trouble with ‘em.’

 

To those who knew the girls, the pity was that their own mothers should

so misjudge their motives for keeping chaste; but there was little room;

for their finer feelings in the hamlet mother’s life. All her strength,

invention and understanding were absorbed in caring for her children’s

bodies; their mental and spiritual qualities were outside her range. At

the same time, if one of the girls had got into trouble, as they called

it, the mother would almost certainly have had her home and cared for

her. There was more than one home in the hamlet where the mother was

bringing up a grandchild with her own younger children, the grandchild

calling the grandmother ‘Mother’.

 

If, as sometimes happened, a girl had to be married in haste, she was

thought none the worse of on that account. She had secured her man. All

was well. ”Tis but Nature’ was the general verdict.

 

But though they were lenient with such slips, especially when not in

their own families, anything in the way of what they called ‘loose

living’ was detested by them. Only once in the history of the hamlet had

a case of adultery been known to the general public, and, although that

had occurred ten or twelve years before, it was still talked of in the

‘eighties. The guilty couple had been treated to ‘rough music’. Effigies

of the pair had been made and carried aloft on poles by torchlight to

the house of the woman, to the accompaniment of the banging of pots,

pans, and coal-shovels, the screeching of tin whistles and mouth-organs,

and cat-calls, hoots, and jeers. The man, who was a lodger at the

woman’s house, disappeared before daybreak the next morning, and soon

afterwards the woman and her husband followed him.

 

About the middle of the decade, the memory of that historic night was

revived when an unmarried woman with four illegitimate children moved

into a vacant house in the hamlet. Her coming raised a fury of

indignation. Words hitherto only heard by the children when the Lessons

were read in church were flung about freely: ‘harlot’ was one of the

mildest. The more ardent moralists were for stoning her or driving her

out of the place with rough music. The more moderate proposed getting

her landlord to turn her out as a bad character. However, upon closer

acquaintance, she turned out to be so clean, quiet, and well-spoken,

that her sins, which she had apparently abandoned, were forgiven her,

and one after another of the neighbours began ‘passing the time of day’

with her when they met. Then, as though willing to do anything in reason

to conform to their standard, she got married to a man who had been

navvying on a stretch of new railway line and then settled down to farm

labour. So there were wedding bells instead of rough music and the

family gradually merged into ordinary hamlet life.

 

It was the hamlet’s gain. One of the boys was musical, an aunt had

bought him a good melodeon, and, every light evening, he played it for

hours on the youths’ gathering ground in front of the ‘Wagon and

Horses’.

 

Before his arrival there had been no musical instrument of any kind at

Lark Rise, and, in those days before gramophones or wireless, any one

who liked ‘a bit of a tune’ had to go to church to hear it, and then it

would only be a hymn tune wheezed out by an ancient harmonium. Now they

could have all the old favourites—‘Home, Sweet Home’, ‘Annie Laurie’,

‘Barbara Allen’, and ‘Silver Threads Among the Gold’—they had only to

ask for what they fancied. Alf played well and had a marvellous ear. If

the baker or any other caller hummed the tune of a new popular song in

his hearing, Alf would be playing it that night on his melodeon.

 

Women stood at their cottage gates, men leaned out of the inn window,

and children left their play and gathered around him to listen. Often he

played dance tunes, and the youths would foot it with each other as

partners, for there was seldom a grown-up girl at home and the little

ones they despised. So the little girls, too, had to dance with each

other. One stout old woman, who was said to have been gay in her time,

would come out and give them hints, or she would take a turn herself,

gliding around alone, her feet hidden by her long skirts, massively

graceful.

 

Sometimes they would sing to the dance music, and the standers-by would

join in:

 

I have a bonnet, trimmed with blue,

Why don’t you wear it? So I do.

When do you wear it? When I can,

When I go out with my young man.

 

My young man is gone to sea

With silver buckles on his knee,

With his blue coat and yellow hose,

And that’s the way the polka goes.

 

Or perhaps it would be:

 

Step and fetch her, step and fetch her,

Step and fetch her, pretty litle dear.

Do not tease her, try and please her,

Step and fetch her, pretty litle dear.

 

And so they would dance and sing through the long summer evenings, until

dusk fell and the stars came out and they all went laughing and panting

home, a community simple enough to be made happy by one little boy with

a melodeon.

IX

Country Playtime

 

‘Shall we dance to-night or shall we have a game?’ was a frequent

question among the girls after Alf’s arrival. Until the novelty of the

dancing wore off, the old country games were eclipsed; but their day was

not over. Some of the quieter girls always preferred the games, and,

later, on those evenings when Alf was away, playing for dancers in other

villages, they all went back to the games.

 

Then, beneath the long summer sunsets, the girls would gather on one of

the green open spaces between the houses and bow and curtsey and sweep

to and fro in their ankle-length frocks as they went through the game

movements and sang the game rhymes as their mothers and grandmothers had

done before them.

 

How long the games had been played and how they originated no one knew,

for they had been handed down for a time long before living memory and

accepted by each succeeding generation as a natural part of its

childhood. No one inquired the meaning of the words of the game rhymes;

many of the girls, indeed, barely mastered them, but went through the

movements to the accompaniment of an indistinct babbling. But the rhymes

had been preserved; breaking down into doggerel in places; but still

sufficiently intact to have spoken to the discerning, had any such been

present, of an older, sweeter country civilization than had survived,

excepting in a few such fragments.

 

Of all the generations that had played the games, that of the ‘eighties

was to be the last. Already those children had one foot in the national

school and one on the village green. Their children and grandchildren

would have left the village green behind them; new and as yet

undreamed-of pleasures and excitements would be theirs. In ten years’

time the games would be neglected, and in twenty forgotten. But all

through the ‘eighties the games went on and seemed to the children

themselves and to onlookers part of a life that always had been and

always would be.

 

The Lark Rise children had a large repertoire, including the well-known

games still met with at children’s parties, such as ‘Oranges and

Lemons’, ‘London Bridge’, and ‘Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush’; but

also including others which appear to have been peculiar to that part of

the country. Some of these were played by forming a ring, others by

taking sides, and all had distinctive rhymes, which were chanted rather

than sung.

 

The boys of the hamlet did not join in them, for the amusement was too

formal and restrained for their taste, and even some of the rougher

girls when playing would spoil a game, for the movements were stately

and all was done by rule. Only at the end of some of the games, where

the verse had deteriorated into doggerel, did the play break down into a

romp. Most of the girls when playing revealed graces unsuspected in them

at other times; their movements became dignified and their voices softer

and sweeter than ordinarily, and when hauteur was demanded by the part,

they became, as they would have said, ‘regular duchesses’. It is

probable that carriage and voice inflexion had been handed down with the

words.

 

One old favourite was ‘Here Come Three Tinkers’. For this all but two of

the players, a big girl and a little one, joined hands in a row, and the

bigger girl out took up her stand about a dozen paces in front of the

row with the smaller one lying on the turf behind her feigning sleep.

Then three of the line of players detached themselves and, hand in hand,

tripped forward, singing:

 

Here come three tinkers, three by three,

To court your daughter, fair ladye,

Oh, can we have a lodging here, here, here?

Oh, can we have a lodging here?

 

Upon which the fair lady (pronounced ‘far-la-dee’) admonished her

sleeping daughter:

 

Sleep, sleep, my daughter. Do not wake.

Here come three tinkers you can’t take.

 

Then, severely, to the tinkers:

 

You cannot have a lodging here, here, here.

You cannot have a lodging here.

 

And the tinkers returned to the line, and three others came forward,

calling themselves tailors, soldiers, sailors, gardeners, bricklayers,

or policemen, according to fancy, the rhymes being sung for each three,

until it was time for the climax, and, putting fresh spirit into their

tones, the conquering candidates came forward, singing:

 

Here come three princes, three by three,

To court your daughter, fair ladye,

Oh, can we have a lodging here, here, here?

Oh, can we have a lodging here?

 

At the mere mention of the rank of the princes the scene changed. The

fair lady became all becks and nods and smiles, and, lifting up her

supposedly sleeping daughter, sang:

 

Oh, wake, my daughter, wake, wake, wake.

Here come three princes you can take.

 

And, turning to the princes:

 

Oh, you can have a lodging here, here, here.

Oh, you can have a lodging here.

 

Then, finally, leading forward and presenting her daughter, she said:

 

Here is my daughter, safe and sound,

And in her pocket five thousand pound,

And on her finger a gay gold ring,

And I’m