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

toolshed known as ‘the hovel’. It was not even an

earth closet; but merely a deep pit with a seat set over it, the

half-yearly emptying of which caused every door and window in the

vicinity to be sealed. Unfortunately, there was no means of sealing the

chimneys!

 

These ‘privies’ were as good an index as any to the characters of their

owners. Some were horrible holes; others were fairly decent, while some,

and these not a few, were kept well cleared, with the seat scrubbed to

snow-whiteness and the brick floor raddled. One old woman even went so

far as to nail up a text as a finishing touch, ‘Thou God seest me’—most

embarrassing to a Victorian child who had been taught that no one must

even see her approach the door.

 

In other such places health and sanitary maxims were scrawled with lead

pencil or yellow chalk on the whitewashed walls. Most of them embodied

sound sense and some were expressed in sound verse, but few were so

worded as to be printable. One short and pithy maxim may pass: ‘Eat

well, work well, sleep well, and –- well once a day’.

 

On the wall of the ‘little house’ at Laura’s home pictures cut from the

newspapers were pasted. These were changed when the walls were

whitewashed and in succession they were ‘The Bombardment of Alexandria’,

all clouds of smoke, flying fragments, and flashes of explosives;

‘Glasgow’s Mournful Disaster: Plunges for Life from the Daphne‘, and

‘The Tay Bridge Disaster’, with the end of the train dangling from the

broken bridge over a boiling sea. It was before the day of Press

photography and the artists were able to give their imagination full

play. Later, the place of honour in the ‘little house’ was occupied by

‘Our Political Leaders’, two rows of portraits on one print; Mr.

Gladstone, with hawklike countenance and flashing eyes, in the middle of

the top row, and kind, sleepy-Looking Lord Salisbury in the other. Laura

loved that picture because Lord Randolph Churchill was there. She

thought he must be the most handsome man in the world.

 

At the back or side of each cottage was a lean-to pigsty and the house

refuse was thrown on a nearby pile called ‘the muck’ll’. This was so

situated that the oozings from the sty could drain into it; the manure

was also thrown there when the sty was cleared, and the whole formed a

nasty, smelly eyesore to have within a few feet of the windows. ‘The

wind’s in the so-and-so,’ some woman indoors would say, ‘I can smell th’

muck’ll’, and she would often be reminded of the saying, ‘Pigs for

health’, or told that the smell was a healthy one.

 

It was in a sense a healthy smell for them; for a good pig fattening in

the sty promised a good winter. During its lifetime the pig was an

important member of the family, and its health and condition were

regularly reported in letters to children away from home, together with

news of their brothers and sisters. Men callers on Sunday afternoons

came, not to see the family, but the pig, and would lounge with its

owner against the pigsty door for an hour, scratching piggy’s back and

praising his points or turning up their own noses in criticism. Ten to

fifteen shillings was the price paid for a pigling when weaned, and they

all delighted in getting a bargain. Some men swore by the ‘dilling’, as

the smallest of a litter was called, saying it was little and good, and

would soon catch up; others preferred to give a few shillings more for a

larger young pig.

 

The family pig was everybody’s pride and everybody’s business. Mother

spent hours boiling up the ‘little taturs’ to mash and mix with the

pot-liquor, in which food had been cooked, to feed to the pig for its

evening meal and help out the expensive barley meal. The children, on

their way home from school, would fill their arms with sow thistle,

dandelion, and choice long grass, or roam along the hedgerows on wet

evenings collecting snails in a pail for the pig’s supper. These piggy

crunched up with great relish. ‘Feyther’, over and above farming out the

sty, bedding down, doctoring, and so on, would even go without his

nightly half-pint when, towards the end, the barley-meal bill mounted

until ‘it fair frightened anybody’.

 

Sometimes, when the weekly income would not run to a sufficient quantity

of fattening food, an arrangement would be made with the baker or miller

that he should give credit now, and when the pig was killed receive a

portion of the meat in payment. More often than not one-half the

pig-meat would be mortgaged in this way, and it was no uncommon thing to

hear a woman say, ‘Us be going to kill half a pig, please God, come

Friday,’ leaving the uninitiated to conclude that the other half would

still run about in the sty.

 

Some of the families killed two separate half pigs a year; others one,

or even two, whole ones, and the meat provided them with bacon for the

winter or longer. Fresh meat was a luxury only seen in a few of the

cottages on Sunday, when six-pennyworth of pieces would be bought to

make a meat pudding. If a small joint came their way as a Saturday night

bargain, those without oven grates would roast it by suspending it on a

string before the fire, with one of the children in attendance as

turnspit. Or a ‘Pot-roast’ would be made by placing the meat with a

little lard or other fat in an iron saucepan and keeping it well shaken

over the fire. But, after all, as they said, there was nothing to beat a

‘toad’. For this the meat was enclosed whole in a suet crust and well

boiled, a method which preserved all the delicious juices of the meat

and provided a good pudding into the bargain. When some superior person

tried to give them a hint, the women used to say, ‘You tell us how to

get the victuals; we can cook it all right when we’ve got it’; and they

could.

 

When the pig was fattened—and the fatter the better—the date of

execution had to be decided upon. It had to take place some time during

the first two quarters of the moon; for, if the pig was killed when the

moon was waning the bacon would shrink in cooking, and they wanted it to

‘plimp up’. The next thing was to engage the travelling pork butcher, or

pig-sticker, and, as he was a thatcher by day, he always had to kill

after dark, the scene being lighted with lanterns and the fire of

burning straw which at a later stage of the proceedings was to singe the

bristles off the victim.

 

The killing was a noisy, bloody business, in the course of which the

animal was hoisted to a rough bench that it might bleed thoroughly and

so preserve the quality of the meat. The job was often bungled, the pig

sometimes getting away and having to be chased; but country people of

that day had little sympathy for the sufferings of animals, and men,

women, and children would gather round to see the sight.

 

After the carcass had been singed, the pig-sticker would pull off the

detachable, gristly, outer coverings of the toes, known locally as ‘the

shoes’, and fling them among the children, who scrambled for, then

sucked and gnawed them, straight from the filth of the sty and blackened

by fire as they were.

 

The whole scene, with its mud and blood, flaring lights and dark

shadows, was as savage as anything to be seen in an African jungle. The

children at the end house would steal out of bed to the window. ‘Look!

Look! It’s hell, and those are the devils,’ Edmund would whisper,

pointing to the men tossing the burning straw with their pitchforks; but

Laura felt sick and would creep back into bed and cry: she was sorry for

the pig.

 

But, hidden from the children, there was another aspect of the

pig-killing. Months of hard work and self-denial were brought on that

night to a successful conclusion. It was a time to rejoice, and rejoice

they did, with beer flowing freely and the first delicious dish of pig’s

fry sizzling in the frying-pan.

 

The next day, when the carcass had been cut up, joints of pork were

distributed to those neighbours who had sent similar ones at their own

pig-killing. Small plates of fry and other oddments were sent to others

as a pure compliment, and no one who happened to be ill or down on his

luck at these occasions was ever forgotten.

 

Then the housewife ‘got down to it’, as she said. Hams and sides of

bacon were salted, to be taken out of the brine later and hung on the

wall near the fireplace to dry. Lard was dried out, hogs’ puddings were

made, and the chitterlings were cleaned and turned three days in

succession under running water, according to ancient ritual. It was a

busy time, but a happy one, with the larder full and something over to

give away, and all the pride and importance of owning such riches.

 

On the following Sunday came the official ‘pig feast’, when fathers and

mothers, sisters and brothers, married children and grandchildren who

lived within walking distance arrived to dinner.

 

If the house had no oven, permission was obtained from an old couple in

one of the thatched cottages to heat up the big bread-baking oven in

their wash-house. This was like a large cupboard with an iron door,

lined with brick and going far back into the wall. Faggots of wood were

lighted inside and the door was closed upon them until the oven was well

heated. Then the ashes were swept out and baking-tins with joints of

pork, potatoes, batter puddings, pork pies, and sometimes a cake or two,

were popped inside and left to bake without further attention.

 

Meanwhile, at home, three or four different kinds of vegetables would be

cooked, and always a meat pudding, made in a basin. No feast and few

Sunday dinners were considered complete without that item, which was

eaten alone, without vegetables, when a joint was to follow. On ordinary

days the pudding would be a roly-poly containing fruit, currants, or

jam; but it still appeared as a first course, the idea being that it

took the edge off the appetite. At the pig feast there would be no sweet

pudding, for that could be had any day, and who wanted sweet things when

there was plenty of meat to be had!

 

But this glorious plenty only came once or at most twice a year, and

there were all the other days to provide for. How was it done on ten

shillings a week? Well, for one thing, food was much cheaper than it is

to-day. Then, in addition to the bacon, all vegetables, including

potatoes, were home-grown and grown in abundance. The men took great

pride in their gardens and allotments and there was always competition

amongst them as to who should have the earliest and choicest of each

kind. Fat green peas, broad beans as big as a halfpenny, cauliflowers a

child could make an armchair of, runner beans and cabbage and kale, all

in their seasons went into the pot with the roly-poly and slip of bacon.

 

Then they ate plenty of green food, all home-grown and freshly pulled;

lettuce and radishes and young onions with pearly heads and leaves like

fine grass. A few slices of bread and homemade lard, flavoured with

rosemary, and plenty of green food ‘went down good’ as they used to say.