Lark Rise, Flora Thompson [most life changing books .TXT] 📗

tear himself away would be heard and the

scent of his twitch fire smoke would float in at the windows. It was

pleasant, too, in summer twilight, perhaps in hot weather when water was

scarce, to hear the swish of water on parched earth in a garden—water

which had been fetched from the brook a quarter of a mile distant. ‘It’s

no good stintin’ th’ land,’ they would say. ‘If you wants anything out

you’ve got to put summat in, if ‘tis only elbow-grease.’

 

The allotment plots were divided into two, and one half planted with

potatoes and the other half with wheat or barley. The garden was

reserved for green vegetables, currant and gooseberry bushes, and a few

old-fashioned flowers. Proud as they were of their celery, peas and

beans, cauliflowers and marrows, and fine as were the specimens they

could show of these, their potatoes were their special care, for they

had to grow enough to last the year round. They grew all the

old-fashioned varieties—ashleaf kidney, early rose, American rose,

magnum bonum, and the huge misshaped white elephant. Everybody knew the

elephant was an unsatisfactory potato, that it was awkward to handle

when paring and that it boiled down to a white pulp in cooking; but it

produced tubers of such astonishing size that none of the men could

resist the temptation to plant it. Every year specimens were taken to

the inn to be weighed on the only pair of scales in the hamlet, then

handed round for guesses to be made of the weight. As the men said, when

a patch of elephants was dug up and spread out, ‘You’d got summat to put

in your eye and look at.’

 

Very little money was spent on seed; there was little to spend, and they

depended mainly upon the seed saved from the previous year. Sometimes,

to secure the advantage of fresh soil, they would exchange a bag of seed

potatoes with friends living at a distance, and sometimes a gardener at

one of the big houses around would give one of them a few tubers of a

new variety. These would be carefully planted and tended, and, when the

crop was dug up, specimens would be presented to neighbours.

 

Most of the men sang or whistled as they dug or hoed. There was a good

deal of outdoor singing in those days. Workmen sang at their jobs; men

with horses and carts sang on the road; the baker, the miller’s man, and

the fish-hawker sang as they went from door to door; even the doctor and

parson on their rounds hummed a tune between their teeth. People were

poorer and had not the comforts, amusements, or knowledge we have

to-day; but they were happier. Which seems to suggest that happiness

depends more upon the state of mind—and body, perhaps—than upon

circumstances and events.

IV

At the ‘Wagon and Horses’

 

Fordlow might boast of its church, its school, its annual concert, and

its quarterly penny reading, but the hamlet did not envy it these

amenities, for it had its own social centre, warmer, more human, and

altogether preferable in the taproom of the ‘Wagon and Horses’.

 

There the adult male population gathered every evening, to sip its

half-pints, drop by drop, to make them last, and to discuss local

events, wrangle over politics or farming methods, or to sing a few songs

‘to oblige’.

 

It was an innocent gathering. None of them got drunk; they had not money

enough, even with beer, and good beer, at twopence a pint. Yet the

parson preached from the pulpit against it, going so far on one occasion

as to call it a den of iniquity. ”Tis a great pity he can’t come an’

see what it’s like for his own self,’ said one of the older men on the

way home from church. ‘Pity he can’t mind his own business,’ retorted a

younger one. While one of the ancients put in pacifically, ‘Well, ‘tis

his business, come to think on’t. The man’s paid to preach, an’ he’s got

to find summat to preach against, stands to reason.’

 

Only about half a dozen men held aloof from the circle and those were

either known to ‘have religion’, or suspected of being ‘close wi’ their

ha’pence’.

 

The others went as a matter of course, appropriating their own special

seats on settle or bench. It was as much their home as their own

cottages, and far more homelike than many of them, with its roaring

fire, red window curtains, and well-scoured pewter.

 

To spend their evenings there was, indeed, as the men argued, a saving,

for, with no man in the house, the fire at home could be let die down

and the rest of the family could go to bed when the room got cold. So

the men’s spending money was fixed at a shilling a week, sevenpence for

the nightly half-pint and the balance for other expenses. An ounce of

tobacco, Nigger Head brand, was bought for them by their wives with the

groceries.

 

It was exclusively a men’s gathering. Their wives never accompanied

them; though sometimes a woman who had got her family off hand, and so

had a few halfpence to spend on herself, would knock at the back door

with a bottle or jug and perhaps linger a little, herself unseen, to

listen to what was going on within. Children also knocked at the back

door to buy candles or treacle or cheese, for the innkeeper ran a small

shop at the back of his premises, and the children, too, liked to hear

what was going on. Indoors, the innkeeper’s children would steal out of

bed and sit on the stairs in their nightgowns. The stairs went up from

the taproom, with only the back of the settle between, and it gave the

men a bit of a shock one night when what looked at first sight like a

big white bird came flopping down among them. It was little Florrie, who

had gone to sleep on the stairs and fallen. They nursed her on their

knees, held her feet to the fire, and soon dried her tears, for she was

not hurt, only frightened.

 

The children heard no bad language beyond an occasional ‘b–-‘ or

‘d–-‘, for their mother was greatly respected and the merest hint of

anything stronger was hushed by nudges and whispers of, ‘Don’t forget

Landlady’, or ‘Mind! ‘Ooman present’. Nor were the smutty songs and

stories of the fields ever repeated there; they were kept for their own

time and place.

 

Politics was a favourite topic, for, under the recently extended

franchise, every householder was a voter, and they took their new

responsibility seriously. A mild Liberalism prevailed, a Liberalism that

would be regarded as hide-bound Toryism now, but was daring enough in

those days. One man who had been to work in Northampton proclaimed

himself a Radical; but he was cancelled out by the landlord, who called

himself a ‘true blue’. With the collaboration of this Left and Right,

questions of the moment were thrashed out and settled to the

satisfaction of the majority.

 

‘Three Acres and a Cow’, ‘The Secret Ballot’, ‘The Parnell Commission

and Crime’, ‘Disestablishment of the Church’, were catchwords that flew

about freely. Sometimes a speech by Gladstone, or some other leader

would be read aloud from a newspaper and punctuated by the fervent

‘Hear! Hear’ of the company. Or Sam, the man with advanced opinions,

would relate with reverent pride the story of his meeting and shaking

hands with Joseph Arch, the farm-worker’s champion. ‘Joseph Arch!’ he

would cry. ‘Joseph Arch is the man for the farm labourer!’ and knock on

the table and wave aloft his pewter mug, very carefully, for every drop

was precious.

 

Then the landlord, standing back to the fireplace with legs astride,

would say with the authority of one in his own house, ‘It’s no good you

chaps think’n you’re goin’ against the gentry. They’ve got the land and

they’ve got the money, an‘ they’ll keep it. Where’d you be without

them to give you work an’ pay your wages, I’d like to know?’ and this,

as yet, unanswerable question would cast a chill over the company until

some one conjured it away with the name of Gladstone. Gladstone! The

Grand Old Man! The People’s William! Their faith in his power was

touching, and all voices would join in singing:

 

God bless the people’s William,

Long may he lead the van

Of Liberty and Freedom,

God bless the Grand Old Man.

 

But the children, listening, without and within, liked better the

evenings of tale-telling; when, with curdling blood and creeping spine,

they would hear about the turnpike ghost, which, only a mile away from

the spot where they stood, had been seen in the form of a lighted

lantern, bobbing up and down in the path of a solitary wayfarer, the

bearer, if any, invisible. And the man in a neighbouring village who, on

his six-mile walk in the dark to fetch medicine for his sick wife, met a

huge black dog with eyes of fire—the devil, evidently. Or perhaps the

talk would turn to the old sheep-stealing days and the ghost which was

said still to haunt the spot where the gibbet had stood; or the lady

dressed in white and riding a white horse, but minus her head, who,

every night as the clock struck twelve, rode over a bridge on the way to

the market town.

 

One cold winter night, as this tale was being told, the doctor, an old

man of eighty, who still attended the sick in the villages for miles

around, stopped his dogcart at the inn gate and came in for hot brandy

and water.

 

‘You, sir, now,’ said one of the men. ‘You’ve been over Lady Bridge at

midnight many’s the time, I’ll warrant. Can you say as you’ve ever seen

anything?’

 

The doctor shook his head. ‘No,’ he replied, ‘I can’t say that I have.

But,’ and he paused to weigh his words, ‘well, it’s rather a curious

thing. During the fifty years I’ve been amongst you I’ve had many

horses, as you know, and not one of them have I got over that bridge at

night without urging. Whether they can see more than we can see, of

course, I don’t know; but there it is for what it is worth. Good night,

men.’

 

In addition to these public and well-known ghost stories, there were

family tales of death warnings, or of a father, mother, or wife who had

appeared after death to warn, counsel, or accuse. But it was all

entertainment; nobody really believed in ghosts, though few would have

chosen to go at night to haunted spots, and it all ended in: ‘Well,

well, if the livin’ don’t hurt us, the dead can’t. The good wouldn’t

want to come back, an’ the bad wouldn’t be let to.’

 

The newspapers furnished other tales of dread. Jack the Ripper was

stalking the streets of East London by night, and one poor wretched

woman after another was found murdered and butchered. These crimes were

discussed for hours together in the hamlet and everybody had some theory

as to the identity and motive of the elusive murderer. To the children

the name was indeed one of dread and the cause of much anguished

sleeplessness. Father might be hammering away in the shed and Mother

quietly busy with her sewing downstairs; but the Ripper! the Ripper! he

might be nearer still, for he might have crept in during the day and be

hiding in the cupboard on the landing!

 

One curious tale had to do with natural phenomena. Some years before,

the people in the hamlet had seen a regiment of soldiers marching in the

sky, all