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

class="calibre1">Bread had to be bought, and that was a heavy item, with so many growing

children to be fed; but flour for the daily pudding and an occasional

plain cake could be laid in for the winter without any cash outlay.

After the harvest had been carried from the fields, the women and

children swarmed over the stubble picking up the ears of wheat the

horse-rake had missed. Gleaning, or ‘leazing’, as it was called locally.

 

Up and down and over and over the stubble they hurried, backs bent, eyes

on the ground, one hand outstretched to pick up the ears, the other

resting on the small of the back with the ‘handful’. When this had been

completed, it was bound round with a wisp of straw and erected with

others in a double rank, like the harvesters erected their sheaves in

shocks, beside the leazer’s water-can and dinner-basket. It was hard

work, from as soon as possible after daybreak until nightfall, with only

two short breaks for refreshment; but the single ears mounted, and a

woman with four or five strong, well-disciplined children would carry a

good load home on her head every night. And they enjoyed doing it, for

it was pleasant in the fields under the pale blue August sky, with the

clover springing green in the stubble and the hedges bright with hips

and haws and feathery with traveller’s joy. When the rest-hour came, the

children would wander off down the hedgerows gathering crabapples or

sloes, or searching for mushrooms, while the mothers reclined and

suckled their babes and drank their cold tea and gossiped or dozed until

it was time to be at it again.

 

At the end of the fortnight or three weeks that the leazing lasted, the

corn would be thrashed out at home and sent to the miller, who paid

himself for grinding by taking toll of the flour. Great was the

excitement in a good year when the flour came home—one bushel, two

bushels, or even more in large, industrious families. The mealy-white

sack with its contents was often kept for a time on show on a chair in

the living-room and it was a common thing for a passer-by to be invited

to ‘step inside an’ see our little bit o’ leazings’. They liked to have

the product of their labour before their own eyes and to let others

admire it, just as the artist likes to show his picture and the composer

to hear his opus played. ‘Them’s better’n any o’ yer oil-paintin’s,’ a

man would say, pointing to the flitches on his wall, and the women felt

the same about the leazings.

 

Here, then, were the three chief ingredients of the one hot meal a day,

bacon from the flitch, vegetables from the garden, and flour for the

roly-poly. This meal, called ‘tea’, was taken in the evening, when the

men were home from the fields and the children from school, for neither

could get home at midday.

 

About four o’clock, smoke would go up from the chimneys, as the fire was

made up and the big iron boiler, or the three-legged pot, was slung on

the hook of the chimney-chain. Everything was cooked in the one utensil;

the square of bacon, amounting to little more than a taste each;

cabbage, or other green vegetables in one net, potatoes in another, and

the roly-poly swathed in a cloth. It sounds a haphazard method in these

days of gas and electric cookers; but it answered its purpose, for, by

carefully timing the putting in of each item and keeping the simmering

of the pot well regulated, each item was kept intact and an appetising

meal was produced. The water in which the food had been cooked, the

potato parings, and other vegetable trimmings were the pig’s share.

 

When the men came home from work they would find the table spread with a

clean whitey-brown cloth, upon which would be knives and two-pronged

steel forks with buckhorn handles. The vegetables would then be turned

out into big round yellow crockery dishes and the bacon cut into dice,

with much the largest cube upon Feyther’s plate, and the whole family

would sit down to the chief meal of the day. True, it was seldom that

all could find places at the central table; but some of the smaller

children could sit upon stools with the seat of a chair for a table, or

on the doorstep with their plates on their laps.

 

Good manners prevailed. The children were given their share of the food,

there was no picking and choosing, and they were expected to eat it in

silence. ‘Please’ and ‘Thank you’ were permitted, but nothing more.

Father and Mother might talk if they wanted to; but usually they were

content to concentrate upon their enjoyment of the meal. Father might

shovel green peas into his mouth with his knife, Mother might drink her

tea from her saucer, and some of the children might lick their plates

when the food was devoured; but who could eat peas with a two-pronged

fork, or wait for tea to cool after the heat and flurry of cooking, and

licking the plates passed as a graceful compliment to Mother’s good

dinner. ‘Thank God for my good dinner. Thank Father and Mother. Amen’

was the grace used in one family, and it certainly had the merit of

giving credit where credit was due.

 

For other meals they depended largely on bread and butter, or, more

often, bread and lard, eaten with any relish that happened to be at

hand. Fresh butter was too costly for general use, but a pound was

sometimes purchased in the summer, when it cost tenpence. Margarine,

then called ‘butterine’, was already on the market, but was little used

there, as most people preferred lard, especially when it was their own

homemade lard flavoured with rosemary leaves. In summer there was

always plenty of green food from the garden and homemade jam as long as

it lasted, and sometimes an egg or two, where fowls were kept, or when

eggs were plentiful and sold at twenty a shilling.

 

When bread and lard appeared alone, the men would spread mustard on

their slices and the children would be given a scraping of black treacle

or a sprinkling of brown sugar. Some children, who preferred it, would

have ‘sop’—bread steeped in boiling water, then strained and sugar

added.

 

Milk was a rare luxury, as it had to be fetched a mile and a half from

the farmhouse. The cost was not great: a penny a jug or can,

irrespective of size. It was, of course, skimmed milk, but hand-skimmed,

not separated, and so still had some small proportion of cream left. A

few families fetched it daily; but many did not bother about it. The

women said they preferred their tea neat, and it did not seem to occur

to them that the children needed milk. Many of them never tasted it from

the time they were weaned until they went out in the world. Yet they

were stout-limbed and rosy-cheeked and full of life and mischief.

 

The skimmed milk was supposed by the farmer to be sold at a penny a

pint, that remaining unsold going to feed his own calves and pigs. But

the dairymaid did not trouble to measure it; she just filled the

proffered vessel and let it go as ‘a pen’orth’. Of course, the jugs and

cans got larger and larger. One old woman increased the size of her

vessels by degrees until she had the impudence to take a small, new, tin

cooking boiler which was filled without question. The children at the

end house wondered what she could do with so much milk, as she had only

her husband and herself at home. ‘That’ll make you a nice big rice

pudding, Queenie’, one of them said tentatively.

 

‘Pudden! Lor’ bless ‘ee!’ was Queenie’s reply. ‘I don’t ever make no

rice puddens. That milk’s for my pig’s supper, an’, my! ain’t ‘ee just

about thrivin’ on it. Can’t hardly see out of his eyes, bless him!’

 

‘Poverty’s no disgrace, but ‘tis a great inconvenience’ was a common

saying among the Lark Rise people; but that put the case too mildly, for

their poverty was no less than a hampering drag upon them. Everybody had

enough to eat and a shelter which, though it fell far short of modern

requirements, satisfied them. Coal at a shilling a hundredweight and a

pint of paraffin for lighting had to be squeezed out of the weekly wage;

but for boots, clothes, illness, holidays, amusements, and household

renewals there was no provision whatever. How did they manage?

 

Boots were often bought with the extra money the men earned in the

harvest field. When that was paid, those lucky families which were not

in arrears with their rent would have a new pair all round, from the

father’s hobnailed dreadnoughts to little pink kid slippers for the

baby. Then some careful housewives paid a few pence every week into the

boot club run by a shopkeeper in the market town. This helped; but it

was not sufficient, and how to get a pair of new boots for ‘our young

Ern or Alf’ was a problem which kept many a mother awake at night.

 

Girls needed boots, too, and good, stout, nailed ones for those rough

and muddy roads; but they were not particular, any boots would do. At a

confirmation class which Laura attended, the clergyman’s daughter, after

weeks of careful preparation, asked her catechumens: ‘Now, are you sure

you are all of you thoroughly prepared for to-morrow. Is there anything

you would like to ask me?’

 

‘Yes, miss,’ piped up a voice in a corner, ‘me mother says have you got

a pair of your old boots you could give me, for I haven’t got any fit to

go in.’

 

Alice got her boots on that occasion; but there was not a confirmation

every day. Still, boots were obtained somehow; nobody went barefoot,

even though some of the toes might sometimes stick out beyond the toe of

the boot.

 

To obtain clothes was an even more difficult matter. Mothers of families

sometimes said in despair that they supposed they would have to black

their own backsides and go naked. They never quite came to that; but it

was difficult to keep decently covered, and that was a pity because they

did dearly love what they called ‘anything a bit dressy’. This taste was

not encouraged by the garments made by the girls in school from material

given by the Rectory people—roomy chemises and wide-legged drawers made

of unbleached calico, beautifully sewn, but without an inch of trimming;

harsh, but strong flannel petticoats and worsted stockings that would

almost stand up with no legs in them—although these were gratefully

received and had their merits, for they wore for years and the calico

improved with washing.

 

For outer garments they had to depend upon daughters, sisters, and aunts

away in service, who all sent parcels, not only of their own clothes,

but also of those they could beg from their mistresses. These were worn

and altered and dyed and turned and ultimately patched and darned as

long as the shreds hung together.

 

But, in spite of their poverty and the worry and anxiety attending it,

they were not unhappy, and, though poor, there was nothing sordid about

their lives. ‘The nearer the bone the sweeter the meat’, they used to

say, and they were getting very near the bone from which their country

ancestors had fed. Their children and children’s children would have to

depend wholly upon whatever was carved for them from the communal joint,

and for their pleasure upon the mass enjoyments of a new era. But for

that generation there was still