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

brought them cups of tea on a tray.

 

The children did reasonably well, for Scripture was the one subject they

were thoroughly taught; even the dullest knew most of the Church

Catechism by heart. The written paper was the stumbling-block to many;

but this was Laura and Edmund’s best subject and both succeeded in

different years in carrying off the large, calf-bound, gilt-edged ‘Book

of Common Prayer’ which was given as a prize—the only prize given at

that school.

 

Laura won hers by means of a minor miracle. That day, for the first and

last time in her life, the gift of words descended upon her. The subject

set was ‘The Life of Moses’, and although up to that moment she had felt

no special affection for the great law-giver, a sudden wave of

hero-worship surged over her. While her classmates were still wrinkling

their brows and biting their pens, she was well away with the baby in

the bulrushes scene. Her pen flew over her paper as she filled sheet

after sheet, and she had got the Children of Israel through the Red Sea,

across the desert, and was well in sight of Pisgah when the little bell

on the mistress’s table tinkled that time was up.

 

The Inspector, who had been watching her, was much amused by her

verbosity and began reading her paper at once, although, as a rule, he

carried the essay away to read. After three or four pages he laughingly

declared that he must have more tea as ‘that desert’ made him feel

thirsty.

 

Such inspiration never visited her again. She returned to her usual

pedestrian style of essay writing, in which there were so many

alterations and erasures that, although she wrote a fair amount, she got

no more marks than those who got stuck at ‘My dear Grandmother’.

 

There was a good deal of jealousy and unkindness among the parents over

the passes and still more over the one annual prize for Scripture. Those

whose children had not done well in examinations would never believe

that the success of others was due to merit. The successful ones were

spoken of as ‘favourites’ and disliked. ‘You ain’t a-goin’ to tell me

that that young So-and-So did any better n’r our Jim,’ some disappointed

mother would say. ‘Stands to reason that what he could do our Jimmy

could do, and better, too. Examinations are all a lot of humbug, if

you asks me.’ The parents of those who had passed were almost

apologetic. ”Tis all luck,’ they would say. ‘Our Tize happened to hit

it this time; next year it’ll be your Alice’s turn.’ They showed no

pleasure in any small success their own children might have. Indeed, it

is doubtful if they felt any, except in the case of a boy who, having

passed the fourth standard, could leave school and start work. Their

ideal for themselves and their children was to keep to the level of the

normal. To them outstanding ability was no better than outstanding

stupidity.

 

Boys who had been morose or rebellious during their later schooldays

were often transformed when they got upon a horse’s back or were

promoted to driving a dungcart afield. For the first time in their

lives, they felt themselves persons of importance. They bandied lively

words with the men and gave themselves manly airs at home with their

younger brothers and sisters. Sometimes, when two or three boys were

working together, they were too lively, and very little work was done.

‘One boy’s a boy; two boys be half a boy, and three boys be no boy at

all’, ran the old country saying. ‘Little gallasses’, the men called

them when vexed; and, in more indulgent moods, ‘young dogs’. ‘Ain’t he a

regular young dog?’ a fond parent would ask, when a boy, just starting

work, would set his cap at an angle, cut himself an ash stick, and try

to walk like a man.

 

They were lovable little fellows, in their stiff new corduroys and

hobnailed boots, with their broad, childish faces, powdered with

freckles and ready to break into dimples at a word. For a few years they

were happy enough, for they loved their work and did not, as yet, feel

the pinch of their poverty. The pity of it was that the calling they

were entering should have been so unappreciated and underpaid. There was

nothing the matter with the work, as work, the men agreed. It was a

man’s life, and they laughed scornfully at the occupations of some who

looked down upon them; but the wages were ridiculously low and the farm

labourer was so looked down upon and slighted that the day was soon to

come when a country boy leaving school would look for any other way of

earning a living than on the land.

 

At that time boys of a roving disposition who wanted to see a bit of the

world before settling down went into the Army. Nearly every family in

the hamlet had its soldier son or uncle or cousin, and it was a common

sight to see a scarlet coat going round the Rise. After their Army

service, most of the hamlet-bred young men returned and took up the old

life on the land; but a few settled in other parts of the country. One

was a policeman in Birmingham, another kept a public house, and a third

was said to be a foreman in a brewery in Staffordshire. A few other boys

left the hamlet to become farm servants in the North of England. To

obtain such situations, they went to Banbury Fair and stood in the

Market to be hired by an agent. They were engaged for a year and during

that time were lodged and fed with the farmer’s family, but received

little or no money until the year was up, when they were paid in a lump

sum. They were usually well treated, especially in the matter of food;

but were glad to return at the end of the year from what was, to them, a

foreign country where, at first, they could barely understand the

speech.

 

At ‘the hiring’ the different grades of farm workers stood in groups,

according to their occupations—the shepherds with their crooks, the

carters with whips and tufts of horsehair in their hats, and the

maidservants relying upon their sex to distinguish them. The young

boys, not as yet specialists, were easily picked out by their youth and

their innocent, wondering faces. The maids who secured situations by

hiring themselves out at the Fair were farmhouse servants of the

rougher kind. None of the hamlet girls attended the Fair for that

purpose.

 

Squire at the Manor House, known as ‘our Squire’, not out of any

particular affection or respect, but in contradistinction to the richer

and more important squire in a neighbouring parish, was at that time

unmarried, though verging on middle age, and his mother still reigned as

Lady of the Manor. Two or three times a year she called at the school to

examine the needlework, a tall, haughty, and still handsome old dame in

a long, flowing, pale-grey silk dustcloak and small, close-fitting,

black bonnet, with two tiny King Charles’s spaniels on a leash.

 

It would be almost impossible for any one born in this century to

imagine the pride and importance of such small country gentlepeople in

the ‘eighties. As far as was known, the Bracewells were connected with

no noble family; they had but little land, kept up but a small

establishment, and were said in the village and hamlet to be ‘poor as

crows’. Yet, by virtue of having been born into a particular caste and

of living in the ‘big house’ of the parish, they expected to reign over

their poorer neighbours and to be treated by them with the deference due

to royalty. Like royalty, too, they could be charming to those who

pleased them. Those who did not had to beware.

 

A good many of the cottagers still played up to them, the women

curtseying to the ground when their carriage passed and speaking in awed

tones in their presence. Others, conscious of their own

independence—for none of the hamlet people worked on their land or

occupied their cottages—and having breathed the new free air of

democracy, which was then beginning to percolate even into such remote

places, were inclined to laugh at their pretensions. ‘We don’t want

nothin’ from they,’ they would say, ‘and us shouldn’t get it if us did.

Let the old gal stay at home and see that her own tea-caddy’s kept

locked up, not come nosing round here axin’ how many spoonsful we puts

in ours.’

 

Mrs. Bracewell knew nothing of such speeches. If she had, she would

probably have thought the world—her world—was coming to an end. Which

it was. In her girlhood under the Regency, she had been taught her duty

towards the cottagers, and that included reproving them for their

wasteful habits. It also included certain charities. She was generous

out of all proportion to her small means; keeping two aged women

pensioners, doling out soup in the winter to those she called ‘the

deserving poor’, and entertaining the school-children to a tea and a

magic-lantern entertainment every Christmas.

 

Meanwhile, as the old servants in and about her house died or were

pensioned off, they were not replaced. By the middle of the ‘eighties

only a cook and a house-parlourmaid sat down to meals in the vast

servants’ hall where a large staff had formerly feasted. Grass grew

between the flagstones in the stable yard where generations of grooms

and coachmen had hissed over the grooming of hunters and carriage

horses, and the one old mare which drew her wagonette when she paid

calls took a turn at drawing the lawn-mower, or even the plough,

betweenwhiles.

 

As she got poorer, she got prouder, more overbearing in manner and more

acid in tone, and the girls trembled when she came into school.

especially Laura, who knew that her sewing would never pass that eagle

eye without stern criticism. She would work slowly along the form,

examining each garment, and exclaiming that the sewing was so badly done

that she did not know what the world was coming to. Stitches were much

too large; the wrong side of the work was not as well finished as the

right side; buttonholes were bungled and tapes sewn on askew; and the

feather-stitching looked as though a spider had crawled over the piece

of work. But when she came to examine the work of one of the prize

sewers her face would light up. ‘Very neat! Exquisitely sewn!’ she would

say, and have the stitching passed round the class as an example.

 

The schoolmistress attended at her elbow, overawed, like the children,

but trying to appear at her ease. Miss Holmes, in her day, had called

Mrs. Bracewell ‘ma’am’ and sketched a slight curtsey as she held open

the door for her. The later mistresses called her ‘Mrs. Bracewell’, but

not very frequently or with conviction.

 

At that time the position of a village schoolmistress was a trying one

socially. Perhaps it is still trying in some places, for it is not many

years ago that the President of a Women’s Institute wrote: ‘We are very

democratic here. Our Committee consists of three ladies, three women,

and the village schoolmistress.’ That mistress, though neither lady nor

woman, was still placed. In the ‘eighties the schoolmistress was so

nearly a new institution that a vicar’s wife, in a real dilemma, said:

‘I should like to ask Miss So-and-So to tea; but do I ask her to kitchen

or dining-room tea?’

 

Miss Holmes had settled that question herself when she became engaged to

the squire’s gardener. Miss Shepherd was more ambitious socially.

Indeed, democratic