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

morning; and a carriage

with gentry out paying calls in the afternoon were about the sum of it.

No motors, no buses, and only one of the old penny-farthing high

bicycles at rare intervals. People still rushed to their cottage doors

to see one of the latter come past.

 

A few of the houses had thatched roofs, whitewashed outer walls and

diamond-paned windows, but the majority were just stone or brick boxes

with blue-slated roofs. The older houses were relics of pre-enclosure

days and were still occupied by descendants of the original squatters,

themselves at that time elderly people. One old couple owned a donkey

and cart, which they used to carry their vegetables, eggs, and honey to

the market town and sometimes hired out at sixpence a day to their

neighbours. One house was occupied by a retired farm bailiff, who was

reported to have ‘well feathered his own nest’ during his years of

stewardship. Another aged man owned and worked upon about an acre of

land. These, the innkeeper, and one other man, a stonemason who walked

the three miles to and from his work in the town every day, were the

only ones not employed as agricultural labourers.

 

Some of the cottages had two bedrooms, others only one, in which case it

had to be divided by a screen or curtain to accommodate parents and

children. Often the big boys of a family slept downstairs, or were put

out to sleep in the second bedroom of an elderly couple whose own

children were out in the world. Except at holiday times, there were no

big girls to provide for, as they were all out in service. Still, it was

often a tight fit, for children swarmed, eight, ten, or even more in

some families, and although they were seldom all at home together, the

eldest often being married before the youngest was born, beds and

shakedowns were often so closely packed that the inmates had to climb

over one bed to get into another.

 

But Lark Rise must not be thought of as a slum set down in the country.

The inhabitants lived an open-air life; the cottages were kept clean by

much scrubbing with soap and water, and doors and windows stood wide

open when the weather permitted. When the wind cut across the flat land

to the east, or came roaring down from the north, doors and windows had

to be closed; but then, as the hamlet people said, they got more than

enough fresh air through the keyhole.

 

There were two epidemics of measles during the decade, and two men had

accidents in the harvest field and were taken to hospital; but, for

years together, the doctor was only seen there when one of the ancients

was dying of old age, or some difficult first confinement baffled the

skill of the old woman who, as she said, saw the beginning and end of

everybody. There was no cripple or mental defective in the hamlet, and,

except for a few months when a poor woman was dying of cancer, no

invalid. Though food was rough and teeth were neglected, indigestion was

unknown, while nervous troubles, there as elsewhere, had yet to be

invented: The very word ‘nerve’ was used in a different sense to the

modern one. ‘My word! An’ ‘aven’t she got a nerve!’ they would say of

any one who expected more than was reasonable.

 

In nearly all the cottages there was but one room downstairs, and many

of these were poor and bare, with only a table and a few chairs and

stools for furniture and a superannuated potato-sack thrown down by way

of hearthrug. Other rooms were bright and cosy, with dressers of

crockery, cushioned chairs, pictures on the walls and brightly coloured

hand-made rag rugs on the floor. In these there would be pots of

geraniums, fuchsias, and old-fashioned, sweet-smelling musk on the

windowsills. In the older cottages there were grandfathers’ clocks,

gate-legged tables, and rows of pewter, relics of a time when life was

easier for country folk.

 

The interiors varied, according to the number of mouths to be fed and

the thrift and skill of the housewife, or the lack of those qualities;

but the income in all was precisely the same, for ten shillings a week

was the standard wage of the farm labourer at that time in that

district.

 

Looking at the hamlet from a distance, one house would have been seen, a

little apart, and turning its back on its neighbours, as though about to

run away into the fields. It was a small grey stone cottage with a

thatched roof, a green-painted door and a plum tree trained up the wall

to the eaves. This was called the ‘end house’ and was the home of the

stonemason and his family. At the beginning of the decade there were two

children: Laura, aged three, and Edmund, a year and a half younger. In

some respects these children, while small, were more fortunate than

their neighbours. Their father earned a little more money than the

labourers. Their mother had been a children’s nurse and they were well

looked after. They were taught good manners and taken for walks, milk

was bought for them, and they were bathed regularly on Saturday nights

and, after ‘Gentle Jesus’ was said, were tucked up in bed with a

peppermint or clove ball to suck. They had tidier clothes, too, for

their mother had taste and skill with her needle and better-off

relations sent them parcels of outgrown clothes. The other children used

to tease the little girl about the lace on her drawers and led her such

a life that she once took them off and hid them in a haystack.

 

Their mother at that time used to say that she dreaded the day when they

would have to go to school; children got so wild and rude and tore their

clothes to shreds going the mile and a half backwards and forwards. But

when the time came for them to go she was glad, for, after a break of

five years, more babies had begun to arrive, and, by the end of the

‘eighties, there were six children at the end house.

 

As they grew, the two elder children would ask questions of anybody and

everybody willing or unwilling to answer them. Who planted the

buttercups? Why did God let the wheat get blighted? Who lived in this

house before we did, and what were their children’s names? What’s the

sea like? Is it bigger than Cottisloe Pond? Why can’t we go to Heaven

in the donkey-cart? Is it farther than Banbury? And so on, taking their

bearings in that small corner of the world they had somehow got into.

 

This asking of questions teased their mother and made them unpopular

with the neighbours. ‘Little children should be seen and not heard’,

they were told at home. Out of doors it would more often be ‘Ask no

questions and you’ll be told no lies.’ One old woman once handed the

little girl a leaf from a pot-plant on her windowsill. ‘What’s it

called?’ was the inevitable question. “Tis called mind your own

business,’ was the reply; ‘an’ I think I’d better give a slip of it to

your mother to plant in a pot for you.’ But no such reproofs could cure

them of the habit, although they soon learned who and who not to

question.

 

In this way they learned the little that was known of the past of the

hamlet and of places beyond. They had no need to ask the names of the

birds, flowers, and trees they saw every day, for they had already

learned these unconsciously, and neither could remember a time when they

did not know an oak from an ash, wheat from barley, or a Jenny wren from

a blue-tit. Of what was going on around them, not much was hidden, for

the gossips talked freely before children, evidently considering them

not meant to hear as well as not to be heard, and, as every house was

open to them and their own home was open to most people, there was not

much that escaped their sharp ears.

 

The first charge on the labourers’ ten shillings was house rent. Most of

the cottages belonged to small tradesmen in the market town and the

weekly rents ranged from one shilling to half a crown. Some labourers in

other villages worked on farms or estates where they had their cottages

rent free; but the hamlet people did not envy them, for ‘Stands to

reason,’ they said, ‘they’ve allus got to do just what they be told, or

out they goes, neck and crop, bag and baggage.’ A shilling, or even two

shillings a week, they felt, was not too much to pay for the freedom to

live and vote as they liked and to go to church or chapel or neither as

they preferred.

 

Every house had a good vegetable garden and there were allotments for

all; but only three of the thirty cottages had their own water supply.

The less fortunate tenants obtained their water from a well on a vacant

plot on the outskirts of the hamlet, from which the cottage had

disappeared. There was no public well or pump. They just had to get

their water where and how they could; the landlords did not undertake to

supply water.

 

Against the wall of every well-kept cottage stood a tarred or

green-painted water butt to catch and store the rain-water from the

roof. This saved many journeys to the well with buckets, as it could be

used for cleaning and washing clothes and for watering small, precious

things in the garden. It was also valued for toilet purposes and the

women would hoard the last drops for themselves and their children to

wash in. Rain-water was supposed to be good for the complexion, and,

though they had no money to spend upon beautifying themselves, they were

not too far gone in poverty to neglect such means as they had to that

end.

 

For drinking water, and for cleaning water, too, when the water butts

failed, the women went to the well in all weathers, drawing up the

buckets with a windlass and carting them home suspended from their

shoulders by a yoke. Those were weary journeys ‘round the Rise’ for

water, and many were the rests and endless was the gossip, as they stood

at corners in their big white aprons and crossover shawls.

 

A few of the younger, more recently married women who had been in good

service and had not yet given up the attempt to hold themselves a little

aloof would get their husbands to fill the big red store crock with

water at night. But this was said by others to be ‘a sin and a shame’,

for, after his hard day’s work, a man wanted his rest, not to do

”ooman’s work’. Later on in the decade it became the fashion for the

men to fetch water at night, and then, of course, it was quite right

that they should do so and a woman who ‘dragged her guts out’ fetching

more than an occasional load from the well was looked upon as a traitor

to her sex.

 

In dry summers, when the hamlet wells failed, water had to be fetched

from a pump at some farm buildings half a mile distant. Those who had

wells in their gardens would not give away a spot, as they feared if

they did theirs, too, would run dry, so they fastened down the lids with

padlocks and disregarded all hints.

 

The only sanitary arrangement known in the hamlet was housed either in a

little beehive-shaped building at the bottom of the garden or in a

corner of the wood and