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

a small picking left to supplement the

weekly wage. They had their home-cured bacon, their ‘bit o’ leazings’,

their small wheat or barley patch on the allotment; their knowledge of

herbs for their homely simples, and the wild fruits and berries of the

countryside for jam, jellies, and wine, and round about them as part of

their lives were the last relics of country customs and the last echoes

of country songs, ballads, and game rhymes. This last picking, though

meagre, was sweet.

II

A Hamlet Childhood

 

Oxford was only nineteen miles distant. The children at the end house

knew that, for, while they were small, they were often taken by their

mother for a walk along the turnpike and would never pass the milestone

until the inscription had been read to them: OXFORD XIX MILES.

 

They often wondered what Oxford was like and asked questions about it.

One answer was that it was ‘a gert big town’ where a man might earn as

much as five and twenty shillings a week; but as he would have to pay

‘pretty near’ half of it in house rent and have nowhere to keep a pig or

to grow many vegetables, he’d be a fool to go there.

 

One girl who had actually been there on a visit said you could buy a

long stick of pink-and-white rock for a penny and that one of her aunt’s

young gentlemen lodgers had given her a whole shilling for cleaning his

shoes. Their mother said it was called a city because a bishop lived

there, and that a big fair was held there once a year, and that was all

she seemed to know about it. They did not ask their father, although he

had lived there as a child, when his parents had kept an hotel in the

city (his relations spoke of it as an hotel, but his wife once called it

a pot-house, so probably it was an ordinary public-house). They already

had to be careful not to ask their father too many questions, and when

their mother said, ‘Your father’s cross again,’ they found it was better

not to talk at all.

 

So, for some time, Oxford remained to them a dim blur of bishops (they

had seen a picture of one with big white sleeves, sitting in a

high-backed chair) and swings and shows and coconut shies (for they knew

what a fair was like) and little girls sucking pink-and-white rock and

polishing shoes. To imagine a place without pigsties and vegetable

gardens was more difficult. With no bacon or cabbage, what could people

have to eat?

 

But the Oxford road with the milestone they had known as long as they

could remember. Round the Rise and up the narrow hamlet road they would

go until they came to the turning, their mother pushing the baby

carriage (‘pram’ was a word of the future) with Edmund strapped in the

high, slippery seat or, later, little May, who was born when Edmund was

five, and Laura holding on at the side or darting hither and thither to

pick flowers.

 

The baby carriage was made of black wickerwork, something like an

old-fashioned bath-chair in shape, running on three wheels and pushed

from behind. It wobbled and creaked and rattled over the stones, for

rubber tyres were not yet invented and its springs, if springs it had,

were of the most primitive kind. Yet it was one of the most cherished of

the family possessions, for there was only one other baby carriage in

the hamlet, the up-to-date new bassinet which the young wife at the inn

had recently purchased. The other mothers carried their babies on one

arm, tightly rolled in shawls, with only the face showing.

 

As soon as the turning was passed, the flat, brown fields were left

behind and they were in a different world with a different atmosphere

and even different flowers. Up and down went the white main road between

wide grass margins, thick, berried hedgerows and overhanging trees.

After the dark mire of the hamlet ways, even the milky-white road

surface pleased them, and they would splash up the thin, pale mud, like

uncooked batter, or drag their feet through the smooth white dust until

their mother got cross and slapped them.

 

Although it was a main road, there was scarcely any traffic, for the

market town lay in the opposite direction along it, the next village was

five miles on, and with Oxford there was no road communication from that

distant point in those days of horse-drawn vehicles. To-day, past that

same spot, a first-class, tar-sprayed road, thronged with motor traffic,

runs between low, closely trimmed hedges. Last year a girl of eighteen

was knocked down and killed by a passing car at that very turning: At

that time it was deserted for hours together. Three miles away trains

roared over a viaduct, carrying those who would, had they lived a few

years before or later, have used the turnpike. People were saying that

far too much money was being spent on keeping such roads in repair, for

their day was over; they were only needed now for people going from

village to village. Sometimes the children and their mother would meet a

tradesman’s van, delivering goods from the market town at some country

mansion, or the doctor’s tall gig, or the smart turn-out of a brewer’s

traveller; but often they walked their mile along the turnpike and back

without seeing anything on wheels.

 

The white tails of rabbits bobbed in and out of the hedgerows; stoats

crossed the road in front of the children’s feet—swift, silent,

stealthy creatures which made them shudder; there were squirrels in the

oak-trees, and once they even saw a fox curled up asleep in the ditch

beneath thick overhanging ivy. Bands of little blue butterflies flitted

here and there or poised themselves with quivering wings on the long

grass bents; bees hummed in the white clover blooms, and over all a deep

silence brooded. It seemed as though the road had been made ages before,

then forgotten.

 

The children were allowed to run freely on the grass verges, as wide as

a small meadow in places. ‘Keep to the grinsard,’ their mother would

call. ‘Don’t go on the road. Keep to the grinsard!’ and it was many

years before Laura realized that that name for the grass verges, in

general use there, was a worn survival of the old English ‘greensward’.

 

It was no hardship to her to be obliged to keep to the greensward, for

flowers strange to the hamlet soil flourished there, eyebright and

harebell, sunset-coloured patches of lady’s-glove, and succory with

vivid blue flowers and stems like black wire.

 

In one little roadside dell mushrooms might sometimes be found, small

button mushrooms with beaded moisture on their cold milk-white skins.

The dell was the farthest point of their walk; after searching the long

grass for mushrooms, in season and out of season—for they would not

give up hope—they turned back and never reached the second milestone.

 

Once or twice when they reached the dell they got a greater thrill than

even the discovery of a mushroom could give; for the gipsies were there,

their painted caravan drawn up, their poor old skeleton horse turned

loose to graze, and their fire with a cooking pot over it, as though the

whole road belonged to them. With men making pegs, women combing their

hair or making cabbage nets, and boys and girls and dogs sprawling

around, the dell was full of dark, wild life, foreign to the hamlet

children and fascinating, yet terrifying.

 

When they saw the gipsies they drew back behind their mother and the

baby carriage, for there was a tradition that once, years before, a

child from a neighbouring village had been stolen by them. Even the cold

ashes where a gipsy’s fire had been sent little squiggles of fear down

Laura’s spine, for how could she know that they were not still lurking

near with designs upon her own person? Her mother laughed at her fears

and said, ‘Surely to goodness they’ve got children enough of their own,’

but Laura would not be reassured. She never really enjoyed the game the

hamlet children played going home from school, when one of them went on

before to hide and the others followed slowly, hand in hand, singing:

 

‘I hope we shan’t meet any gipsies to-night!

I hope we shan’t meet any gipsies to-night!’

 

And when the hiding-place was reached and the supposed gipsy sprung out

and grabbed the nearest, she always shrieked, although she knew it was

only a game.

 

But in those early days of the walks fear only gave spice to excitement,

for Mother was there, Mother in her pretty maize-coloured gown with the

rows and rows of narrow brown velvet sewn round the long skirt, which

stuck out like a bell, and her second-best hat with the honeysuckle. She

was still in her twenties and still very pretty, with her neat little

figure, rose-leaf complexion and hair which was brown in some lights and

golden in others. When her family grew larger and troubles crowded upon

her and the rose-leaf complexion had faded and the last of the

pre-marriage wardrobe had worn out, the walks were given up; but by that

time Edmund and Laura were old enough to go where they liked, and,

though they usually preferred to go farther afield on Saturdays and

other school holidays, they would sometimes go to the turnpike to jump

over and over the milestone and scramble about in the hedges for

blackberries and crabapples.

 

It was while they were still small they were walking there one day with

a visiting aunt; Edmund and Laura, both in clean, white, starched

clothes, holding on to a hand on either side. The children were a little

shy, for they did not remember seeing this aunt before. She was married

to a master builder in Yorkshire and only visited her brother and his

family at long intervals. But they liked her, although Laura had already

sensed that their mother did not. Jane was too dressy and ‘set up’ for

her taste, she said. That morning, her luggage being still at the

railway station, she was wearing the clothes she had travelled in, a

long, pleated dove-coloured gown with an apron arrangement drawn round

and up and puffed over a bustle at the back, and, on her head, a tiny

toque made entirely of purple velvet pansies.

 

Swish, swish, swish, went her long skirt over the grass verges; but

every time they crossed the road she would relinquish Laura’s hand to

gather it up from the dust, thus revealing to the child’s delighted gaze

a frilly purple petticoat. When she was grown up she would have a frock

and petticoat just like those, she decided.

 

But Edmund was not interested in clothes. Being a polite little boy, he

was trying to make conversation. He had already shown his aunt the spot

where they had found the dead hedgehog and the bush where the thrush had

built last spring and told her the distant rumble they heard was a train

going over the viaduct, when they came to the milestone.

 

‘Aunt Jenny,’ he said, ‘what’s Oxford like?’

 

‘Well, it’s all old buildings, churches and colleges where rich people’s

sons go to school when they’re grown up.’

 

‘What do they learn there?’ demanded Laura.

 

‘Oh, Latin and Greek and suchlike, I suppose.’

 

‘Do they all go there?’ asked Edmund seriously.

 

‘Well, no. Some go to Cambridge; there are colleges there as well. Some

go to one and some to the other,’ said the aunt with a smile that meant

‘Whatever will these children want to know next?’

 

Four-year-old Edmund pondered