Lark Rise - Flora Thompson (read more books .TXT) 📗
- Author: Flora Thompson
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little snobbish. She courted the notice of the betters, though, she was
wont to declare, they were only betters when they were better men and
women. An invitation to tea at the Rectory was, to her, something to be
fished for before and talked about afterwards, and when the daughter of
a poor, but aristocratic local family set up as a music teacher, Miss
Shepherd at once decided to learn the violin.
Laura was once the delighted witness of a funny little display of this
weakness. It was the day of the school treat at the Manor House, and the
children had met at the school and were being marched, two and two,
through garden and shrubbery paths to the back door. Other guests, such
as the curate, the doctor’s widow, and the daughters of the rich farmer,
who were to have tea in the drawing-room while the children feasted in
the servants’ hall, were going to the front door.
Now, Miss Holmes had always marched right in with her pupils and sipped
her own tea and nibbled her cake between attending to their wants; but
Miss Shepherd was more ambitious. When the procession reached a point
where the shrubbery path crossed the main drive which led to the front
door, she paused and considered; then said, ‘I think I will go to the
front door, dears. I want to see how well you can behave without me,’
and off she branched up the drive in her best brown frock, tight little
velvet hip-length jacket, and long fur boa wound like a snake round her
neck, followed by at least one pair of cynically smiling little eyes.
She had the satisfaction of ringing the front-door bell and drinking tea
in the drawing-room; but it was a short-lived triumph. In a very few
minutes she was out in the servants’ hall, passing bread and butter to
her charges and whispering to one of her monitors that ‘Dear Mrs.
Bracewell gave me my tea first, because, as she said, she knew I was
anxious to get back to my children.’
Squire himself called at the school once a year; but nobody felt nervous
when his red, jovial face appeared in the doorway, and smiles broke out
all around when he told his errand. He was arranging a concert, to take
place in the schoolroom, and would like some of the children to sing. He
took his responsibilities less seriously than his mother did hers;
spending most of his days roaming the fields, and spinneys with a gun
under his arm and a brace of spaniels at his heels, leaving her to
manage house and gardens and what was left of the family estate, as well
as to support the family dignity. His one indoor accomplishment was
playing the banjo and singing Negro songs. He had trained a few of the
village youths to support him in his Negro Minstrel Troupe, which always
formed the backbone of the annual concert programme. A few other items
were contributed by his and his mother’s friends and the gaps were
filled up by the school-children.
So, after his visit, the school became animated. What should be sung and
who should sing it were the questions of the moment. Finally, it was
arranged that everybody should sing something. Even Laura, who had
neither voice nor ear for music, was to join in the communal songs.
They sang, very badly, mildly pretty spring and Nature songs from the
School Song Book, such as they had sung the year before and the year
before that, some of them actually the same songs. One year Miss
Shepherd thought it ‘would be nice’ to sing a Primrose League song to
‘please Squire’. One verse ran:
O come, ye Tories, all unite
To bear the Primrose badge with might,
And work and hope and strive and fight
And pray may God defend the right.
When Laura’s father heard this, he wrote a stiffly polite little note to
the mistress, saying that, as a Liberal of pronounced views, he could
not allow a child of his to sing such a song. Laura did not tell him she
had already been asked to sing very softly, not to put the other singers
out of tune. ‘Just move your lips, dear,’ the mistress had said. Laura,
in fact, was to have gone on to help dress the stage, where all the
girls who were taking part in the programme sat in a row throughout the
performance, forming a background for the soloists. That year she had
the pleasure of sitting among the audience and hearing the criticism, as
well as seeing the stage and listening to the programme. A good
three-pennyworth (‘children, half-price’).
When the great night came, the whole population of the neighbourhood
assembled, for it was the only public entertainment of the year. Squire
and his Negro Minstrel Troupe was the great attraction. They went on,
dressed in red and blue, their hands and faces blackened with burnt
cork, and rattled their bones and cracked their jokes and sang such
songs as:
A friend of Darwin’s came to me,
A million years ago said he
You had a tail and no great toe.
I answered him, ‘That may be so,
But I’ve one now, I’ll let you know—
G-r-r-r-r-r out!’
Very few in the audience had heard of Darwin or his theory; but they all
knew what ‘G-r-r-r-r-r out!’ meant, especially when emphasised by a kick
on Tom Binns’s backside by Squire’s boot. The schoolroom rocked. ‘I
pretty well busted me sides wi’ laughin’,’ they said afterwards.
After the applause had died down, a little bell would ring and a robust
curate from a neighbouring village would announce the next item. Most of
these were piano pieces, played singly, or as duets, by young ladies in
white evening frocks, cut in a modest V at the neck, and white kid
gloves reaching to the elbow. As their contributions to the programme
were announced, they would rise from the front seat in the audience; a
gentleman—two gentlemen—would spring forward, and between them hand
the fair performer up the three shallow steps which led to the platform
and hand her over to yet another gentleman, who led her to the piano and
held her gloves and fan and turned her music pages.
‘Tinkle, tinkle, tinkle’, went the piano, and ‘Warble, warble, warble’
went the voices, as the performers worked their conscientious way
through the show piano pieces and popular drawing-room ballads of the
moment. Each performer was greeted and dismissed with a round of
applause, which served the double purpose of encouraging the singer and
relieving the boredom of the audience. Youths and young men in the back
seats would sometimes carry this too far, drowning the programme with
their stamping and shouting until they had to be reprimanded, when they
would subside sulkily, complaining, ‘Us’ve paid our sixpences, ain’t
we?’
Once, when the athletic curate sang ‘You should see Me dance the Polka’
he accompanied the song with such violent action that he polked part of
the platform down and left the double row of schoolgirls hanging in the
air on the backmost planks while he finished his song on the floor:
You should see me dance the polka,
You should see me cover the ground,
You should see my coat tails flying
As I dance my way around.
Edmund and Laura had the words and actions by heart, if not the tune,
and polked that night in their mother’s bedroom until they woke up the
baby and were slapped. A sad ending to an evening of pure bliss.
When the school-children on the platform rose and came forward to sing
they, also, were applauded; but their performance and those of the young
ladies were but the lettuce in the salad; all the flavour was in the
comic items.
Now, Miss Shepherd was a poet, and had several times turned out a neat
verse to supplement those of a song she considered too short. One year
she took the National Anthem in hand and added a verse. It ran:
May every village school
Uphold Victoria’s rule,
To Church and State be true,
God save the Queen.
Which pleased Squire so much that he talked of sending it to the
newspapers.
Going home with lanterns swinging down the long dark road, the groups
would discuss the evening’s entertainment. Squire’s Minstrels and the
curate’s songs were always unreservedly praised and the young ladies’
performances were tolerated, although, often, a man would complain, ‘I
don’t know if I be goin’ deaf, or what; but I couldn’t hear a dommed
word any of ‘em said.’ As to the school-children’s efforts, criticism
was applied more to how they looked than to their musical performance.
Those who had scuffled or giggled, or even blushed, heard of it from
their parents, while such remarks were frequent as: ‘Got up to kill,
that young Mary Ann Parish was!’ or ‘I declare I could see the hem o’
young Rose Mitchell’s breeches showin’,’ or ‘That Em Tuffrey made a poor
show. Whatever wer’ her mother a thinkin’ on?’ Taken all in all, they
enjoyed the concert almost as much as their grandchildren enjoy the
cinema.
XIIIMay Day
After the excitement of the concert came the long winter months, when
snowstorms left patches on the ploughed fields, like scrapings of sauce
on left-over pieces of Christmas pudding, until the rains came and
washed them away and the children, carrying old umbrellas to school, had
them turned inside out by the wind, and cottage chimneys smoked and
washing had to be dried indoors. But at last came spring and spring
brought May Day, the greatest day in the year from the children’s point
of view.
The May garland was all that survived there of the old May Day
festivities. The maypole and the May games and May dances in which whole
parishes had joined had long been forgotten. Beyond giving flowers for
the garland and pointing out how things should be done and telling how
they had been done in their own young days, the older people took no
part in the revels.
For the children as the day approached all hardships were forgotten and
troubles melted away. The only thing that mattered was the weather.
‘Will it be fine?’ was the constant question, and many an’aged eye was
turned skyward in response to read the signs of wind and cloud.
Fortunately, it was always reasonably fine. Showers there were, of
course, at that season, but never a May Day of hopelessly drenching
rain, and the May garland was carried in procession every year
throughout the ‘eighties.
The garland was made, or ‘dressed’, in the schoolroom. Formerly it had
been dressed out of doors, or in one of the cottages, or in some one’s
barn; but dressed it had been and probably in much the same fashion for
countless generations.
The foundation of the garland was a light wooden framework of uprights
supporting graduated hoops, forming a bell-shaped structure about four
feet high. This frame was covered with flowers, bunched and set closely,
after the manner of wreath-making.
On the last morning of April the children would come to school with
bunches, baskets, arms and pinafores full of flowers—every blossom they
could find in the fields and hedges or beg from parents and neighbours.
On the previous Sunday some of the bigger boys would have walked six or
eight miles to a distant wood where primroses grew. These, with violets
from the hedgerows, cowslips from the meadows, and wallflowers, oxlips,
and sprays of pale red flowering currant from the cottage gardens formed
the main supply. A sweetbriar hedge in the schoolmistress’s garden
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