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

there was little hospital nursing,

teaching, typing, or shop work to engage the daughters of small farmers,

small shopkeepers, innkeepers, and farm bailiffs. Most of them had

either to go out to service or remain at home.

 

After the mansion, there were the steward’s, the head gardener’s and the

stud-groom’s houses to visit with the garland; then on through gardens

and park and woods and fields to the next stopping-place. Things did not

always go smoothly. Feet got tired, especially when boots did not fit

properly or were worn thin. Squabbles broke out among the boys and

sometimes had to be settled by a fight. Often a heavy shower would send

the whole party packing under trees for shelter, with the unveiled

garland freshening outside in the rain; or some irate gamekeeper would

turn the procession back from a short cut, adding miles to the way. But

these were slight drawbacks to happiness on a day as near to perfection

as anything can be in human life.

 

There came a point in the circuit when faces were turned towards home,

instead of away from it; and at last, at long last, the lights in the

Lark Hill windows shone clear through the spring twilight. The great day

was over, for ever, as it seemed, for at ten years old a year seems as

long as a century. Still, there was the May money to be shared out in

school the next morning, and the lady to be stroked before being put

back in her box, and the flowers which had survived to be put in water:

even to-morrow would not be quite a common day. So the last waking

thoughts blended with dreams of swans and peacocks and footmen and sore

feet and fat cooks with pink faces wearing daisy crowns which turned

into pure gold, then melted away.

XIV

To Church on Sunday

 

If the Lark Rise people had been asked their religion, the answer of

nine out of ten would have been ‘Church of England’, for practically all

of them were christened, married, and buried as such, although, in adult

life, few went to church between the baptisms of their offspring. The

children were shepherded there after Sunday school and about a dozen of

their elders attended regularly; the rest stayed at home, the women

cooking and nursing, and the men, after an elaborate Sunday toilet,

which included shaving and cutting each other’s hair and much puffing

and splashing with buckets of water, but stopped short before lacing up

boots or putting on a collar and tie, spent the rest of the day eating,

sleeping, reading the newspaper, and strolling round to see how their

neighbours’ pigs and gardens were looking.

 

There were a few keener spirits. The family at the inn was Catholic and

was up and off to early Mass in the next village before others had

turned over in bed for an extra Sunday morning snooze. There were also

three Methodist families which met in one of their cottages on Sunday

evenings for prayer and praise; but most of these attended church as

well, thus earning for themselves the name of ‘Devil dodgers’.

 

Every Sunday, morning and afternoon, the two cracked, flat-toned bells

at the church in the mother village called the faithful to worship.

Ding-dong, Ding-dong, Ding-dong, they went, and, when they heard them,

the hamlet churchgoers hurried across fields and over stiles, for the

Parish Clerk was always threatening to lock the church door when the

bells stopped and those outside might stop outside for all he cared.

 

With the Fordlow cottagers, the Squire’s and farmer’s families and

maids, the Rectory people and the hamlet contingent, the congregation

averaged about thirty. Even with this small number, the church was

fairly well filled, for it was a tiny place, about the size of a barn,

with nave and chancel only, no side aisles. The interior was almost as

bare as a barn, with its grey, roughcast walls, plain-glass windows, and

flagstone floor. The cold, damp, earthy odour common to old and unheated

churches pervaded the atmosphere, with occasional whiffs of a more

unpleasant nature said to proceed from the stacks of mouldering bones in

the vault beneath. Who had been buried there, or when, was unknown, for,

excepting one ancient and mutilated brass in the wall by the font, there

were but two memorial tablets, both of comparatively recent date. The

church, like the village, was old and forgotten, and those buried in the

vault, who must have once been people of importance, had not left even a

name. Only the stained glass window over the altar, glowing jewel-like

amidst the cold greyness, the broken piscina within the altar rails, and

a tall broken shaft of what had been a cross in the churchyard, remained

to witness mutely to what once had been.

 

The Squire’s and clergyman’s families had pews in the chancel, with

backs to the wall on either side, and between them stood two long

benches for the school-children, well under the eyes of authority. Below

the steps down into the nave stood the harmonium, played by the

clergyman’s daughter, and round it was ranged the choir of small

schoolgirls. Then came the rank and file of the congregation, nicely

graded, with the farmer’s family in the front row, then the Squire’s

gardener and coachman, the schoolmistress, the maidservants, and the

cottagers, with the Parish Clerk at the back to keep order.

 

‘Clerk Tom’, as he was called, was an important man in the parish. Not

only did he dig the graves, record the banns of marriage, take the chill

off the water for winter baptisms, and stoke the coke stove which stood

in the nave at the end of his seat; but he also took an active and

official part in the services. It was his duty to lead the congregation

in the responses and to intone the ‘Amens’. The psalms were not sung or

chanted, but read, verse and verse about, by the Rector and people, and

in these especially Tom’s voice so drowned the subdued murmur of his

fellow worshippers that it sounded like a duet between him and the

clergyman—a duet in which Tom won easily, for his much louder voice

would often trip up the Rector before he had quite finished his portion,

while he prolonged his own final syllables at will.

 

The afternoon service, with not a prayer left out or a creed spared,

seemed to the children everlasting. The school-children, under the stern

eye of the Manor House, dared not so much as wriggle; they sat in their

stiff, stuffy, best clothes, their stomachs lined with heavy Sunday

dinner, in a kind of waking doze, through which Tom’s ‘Amens’ rang like

a bell and the Rector’s voice buzzed beelike. Only on the rare occasions

when a bat fluttered down from the roof, or a butterfly drifted in at a

window, or the Rector’s little fox terrier looked in at the door and

sidled up the nave, was the tedium lightened.

 

Edmund and Laura, alone in their grandfather’s seat, modestly situated

exactly half-way down the nave, were more fortunate, for they sat

opposite the church door and, in summer, when it was left open, they

could at least watch the birds and the bees and the butterflies crossing

the opening and the breezes shaking the boughs of the trees and ruffling

the long grass on the graves. It was interesting, too, to observe some

woman in the congregation fussing with her back hair, or a man easing

his tight collar, or old Dave Pridham, who had a bad bunion, shuffling

off a shoe before the sermon began, with one eye all the time upon the

clergyman; or to note how closely together some newly married couple

were sitting, or to see Clerk Tom’s young wife suckling her baby. She

wore a fur tippet in winter and her breast hung like a white heather

bell between the soft blackness until it was covered up with a white

handkerchief, ‘for modesty’.

 

Mr. Ellison in the pulpit was the Mr. Ellison of the Scripture lessons,

plus a white surplice. To him, his congregation were but children of a

larger growth, and he preached as he taught. A favourite theme was the

duty of regular churchgoing. He would hammer away at that for forty-five

minutes, never seeming to realize that he was preaching to the absent,

that all those present were regular attendants, and that the stray sheep

of his flock were snoring upon their beds a mile and a half away.

 

Another favourite subject was the supreme rightness of the social order

as it then existed. God, in His infinite wisdom, had appointed a place

for every man, woman, and child on this earth and it was their bounden

duty to remain contentedly in their niches. A gentleman might seem to

some of his listeners to have a pleasant, easy life, compared to theirs

at field labour; but he had his duties and responsibilities, which would

be far beyond their capabilities. He had to pay taxes, sit on the Bench

of Magistrates, oversee his estate, and keep up his position by

entertaining. Could they do these things? No. Of course they could not;

and he did not suppose that a gentleman could cut as straight a furrow

or mow or thatch a rick as expertly as they could. So let them be

thankful and rejoice in their physical strength and the bounty of the

farmer, who found them work on his land and paid them wages with his

money.

 

Less frequently, he would preach eternal punishment for sin, and touch,

more lightly, upon the bliss reserved for those who worked hard, were

contented with their lot and showed proper respect to their superiors.

The Holy Name was seldom mentioned, nor were human griefs or joys, or

the kindly human feelings which bind man to man. It was not religion he

preached, but a narrow code of ethics, imposed from above upon the lower

orders, which, even in those days, was out of date.

 

Once and once only did inspiration move him. It was the Sunday after the

polling for the General Election of 1886, and he had begun preaching one

of his usual sermons on the duty to social superiors, when, suddenly

something, perhaps the memory of the events of the past week, seemed to

boil up within him. Flushed with anger—‘righteous anger’, he would have

called it—and his frosty blue eyes flashing like swords, he cast

himself forward across the ledge of his pulpit and roared: ‘There are

some among you who have lately forgotten that duty, and we know the

cause, the bloody cause!’

 

Laura shivered. Bad language in church! and from the Rector! But, later

in life, she liked to think that she had lived early enough to have

heard a mild and orthodox Liberalism denounced from the pulpit as ‘a

bloody cause’. It lent her the dignity of an historical survival.

 

The sermon over, the people sprang to their feet like Jacks-in-a-box.

With what gusto they sang the evening hymn, and how their lungs expanded

and their tongues wagged as they poured out of the churchyard! Not that

they resented anything that was said in the Rector’s sermons. They did

not listen to them. After the Bloody Cause sermon Laura tried to find

out how her elders had reacted to it; but all she could learn was: ‘I

seems to have lost the thread just then,’ or, more frankly, ‘I must’ve

been nodding’; the most she could get was one woman’s, ‘My! didn’t th’

old parson get worked up today!’

 

Some of them went to church to show off their best clothes and to see

and criticize those of their neighbours; some because they loved to hear

their own voices raised in the hymns, or