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

complete with drum and fife band. Upon inquiry it had been

found that such a regiment had been passing at the time along a road

near Bicester, six miles away, and it was concluded that the apparition

in the sky must have been a freak reflection.

 

Some of the tales related practical jokes, often cruel ones, for even in

the ‘eighties the sense of humour there was not over-refined, and it

had, in past times, been cruder still. It was still the practice there

to annoy certain people by shouting after them a nickname or a

catchword, and one old and very harmless woman was known as ‘Thick and

thin’. One winter night, years before, when the snowdrifts were

knee-high and it was still snowing, a party of thoughtless youths had

knocked at her cottage door and got her and her husband out of bed by

telling them that their daughter, married and living three miles away,

was brought to bed and had sent for her mother.

 

The old couple huddled on all the clothes they possessed, lighted their

lantern, and set out, the practical jokers shadowing them. They

struggled through the snowdrifts for some distance, but the road was all

but impassable, and the old man was for turning back. Not so the mother.

Determined to reach her child in her hour of need, she struggled onward,

encouraging her husband the while by coaxing, ‘Come on John. Through

thick and thin!’ and ‘Thick and thin’ she was ever after.

 

But tastes were changing, if slowly, by the ‘eighties, and such a story,

though it might be still current, no longer produced the loud guffaws it

had formerly done. A few sniggers, perhaps, then silence; or ‘I calls it

a shame, sarvin’ poor old people like that. Now let’s have a song to

te-ake the taste of it out of our mouths.’

 

All times are times of transition; but the eighteen-eighties were so in

a special sense, for the world was at the beginning of a new era, the

era of machinery and scientific discovery. Values and conditions of life

were changing everywhere. Even to simple country people the change was

apparent. The railways had brought distant parts of the country nearer;

newspapers were coming into every home; machinery was superseding hand

labour, even on the farms to some extent; food bought at shops, much of

it from distant countries, was replacing the homemade and home-grown.

Horizons were widening; a stranger from a village five miles away was no

longer looked upon as ‘a furriner’.

 

But, side by side with these changes, the old country civilization

lingered. Traditions and customs which had lasted for centuries did not

die out in a moment. State-educated children still played the old

country rhyme games; women still went leazing, although the field had

been cut by the mechanical reaper; and men and boys still sang the old

country ballads and songs, as well as the latest music-hall successes.

So, when a few songs were called for at the ‘Wagon and Horses’, the

programme was apt to be a curious mixture of old and new.

 

While the talking was going on, the few younger men, ‘boy-chaps’, as

they were called until they were married, would not have taken a great

part in it. Had they shown any inclination to do so, they would have

been checked, for the age of youthful dominance was still to come; and,

as the women used to say, ‘The old cocks don’t like it when the young

cocks begin to crow’. But, when singing began they came into their own,

for they represented the novel.

 

They usually had first innings with such songs of the day as had

percolated so far. ‘Over the Garden Wall’, with its many parodies,

‘Tommy, Make Room for Your Uncle’, ‘Two Lovely Black Eyes’, and other

‘comic’ or ‘sentimental’ songs of the moment. The most popular of these

would have arrived complete with tune from the outer world; others,

culled from the penny song-book they most of them carried, would have to

have a tune fitted to them by the singer. They had good lusty voices and

bawled them out with spirit. There were no crooners in those days.

 

The men of middle age inclined more to long and usually mournful stories

in verse, of thwarted lovers, children buried in snowdrifts, dead

maidens, and motherless homes. Sometimes they would vary these with

songs of a high moral tone, such as:

 

Waste not, want not,

Some maxim I would teach;

Let your watchword be never despair

And practise what you preach.

Do not let your chances like the sunbeams pass you by,

For you’ll never miss the water till the well runs dry.

 

But this dolorous singing was not allowed to continue long. ‘Now, then,

all together, boys,’ some one would shout, and the company would revert

to old favourites. Of these, one was ‘The Barleymow’. Trolled out in

chorus, the first verse went:

 

Oh, when we drink out of our noggins, my boys.

We’ll drink to the barleymow.

We’ll drink to the barleymow, my boys,

We’ll drink to the barleymow.

So knock your pint on the settle’s back;

Fill again, in again, Hannah Brown,

We’ll drink to the barleymow, my boys,

We’ll drink now the barley’s mown.

 

So they went on, increasing the measure in each stanza, from noggins to

half-pints, pints, quarts, gallons, barrels, hogsheads, brooks, ponds,

rivers, seas, and oceans. That song could be made to last a whole

evening, or it could be dropped as soon as they got tired of it.

 

Another favourite for singing in chorus was ‘King Arthur’, which was

also a favourite for outdoor singing and was often heard to the

accompaniment of the jingling of harness and cracking of whips as the

teams went afield. It was also sung by solitary wayfarers to keep up

their spirits on dark nights. It ran:

 

When King Arthur first did reign,

He ru-led like a king;

He bought three sacks of barley meal

To make a plum pudding.

 

The pudding it was made

And duly stuffed with plums,

And lumps of suet put in it

As big as my two thumbs.

 

The king and queen sat down to it

And all the lords beside:

And what they couldn’t eat that night

The queen next morning fried.

 

Every time Laura heard this sung she saw the queen, a gold crown on her

head, her train over her arm, and her sleeves rolled up, holding the

frying-pan over the fire. Of course, a queen would have fried pudding

for breakfast: ordinary common people seldom had any left over to fry.

 

Then Lukey, the only bachelor of mature age in the hamlet, would oblige

with:

 

Me feyther’s a hedger and ditcher,

An’ me mother does nothing but spin,

But I’m a pretty young girl and

The money comes slowly in.

Oh, dear! what can the matter be?

Oh, dear! what shall I do?

For there’s nobody coming to marry,

And there’s nobody coming to woo.

 

They say I shall die an old maid,

Oh, dear! how shocking the thought!

For them all my beauty will fade,

And I’m sure it won’t be my own fault.

Oh, dear! what can the matter be?

Oh, dear! what shall I do?

There’s nobody coming to marry,

And there’s nobody coming to woo!

 

This was given point by Luke’s own unmarried state. He sang it as a

comic song and his rendering certainly made it one. Perhaps, then, for a

change, poor old Algy, the mystery man, would be asked for a song and he

would sing in a cracked falsetto, which seemed to call for the tinkling

notes of a piano as accompaniment:

 

Have you ever been on the Penin-su-lah?

If not, I advise you to stay where you haw,

For should you adore a

Sweet Spanish senor-ah,

She may prove what some might call sin-gu-lah.

 

Then there were snatches that any one might break out with at any time

when no one else happened to be singing:

 

I wish, I wish, ‘twer all in vain,

I wish I were a maid again!

A maid again I ne’er shall be

Till oranges grow on an apple tree

 

or:

 

Now all you young chaps, take a warning by me,

And do not build your nest at the top of any tree,

For the green leaves they will wither and the flowers they will decay,

And the beauty of that fair maid will soon pass away.

 

One comparatively recent settler, who had only lived at the hamlet about

a quarter of a century, had composed a snatch for himself, to sing when

he felt homesick. It ran:

 

Where be Dedington boo-oys, where be they now?

They be at Dedington at the ‘Plough’;

If they be-ent, they be at home,

And this is the ‘Wagon and Horses’.

 

But, always, sooner or later, came the cry, ‘Let’s give the old ‘uns a

turn. Here you, Master Price, what about “It was my father’s custom and

always shall be mine”, or “Lord Lovell stood”, or summat of that sort’

as has stood the testing o’ time?’ and Master Price would rise from his

corner of the settle, using the stick he called his ‘third leg’ to

support his bent figure as he sang:

 

Lord Lovell stood at his castle gate,

Calming his milk-white steed,

When up came Lady Nancy Bell

To wish her lover God-speed.

 

‘And where are you going, Lord Lovell?’ she said.

‘And where are you going?’ said she.

‘Oh, I’m going away from my Nancy Bell,

Away to a far country-tre-tre;

Away to a far coun-tre.’

 

‘And when will you come back, Lord Lovell?’ she said,

‘When will you come back?’ said she.

‘Oh, I will come back in a year and a day,

Back to my Lady Nancy-ce-ce-ce.

Back to my Lady Nan-cee.’

 

But Lord Lovell was gone more than his year and a day, much longer, and

when he did at last return, the church bells were tolling:

 

‘And who is it dead?’ Lord Lovell, he said.

‘And who is it dead,’ said he.

And some said, ‘Lady Nancy Bell,’

And some said, ‘Lady Nancy-ce-ce-ce,

And some said,‘Lady Nan-cee.’

 

… … …

 

Lady Nancy died as it were to-day;

And Lord Lovell, he died to-morrow,

And she, she died for pure, pure grief,

And he, he died for sorrow.

 

And they buried her in the chancel high,

And they buried him in the choir;

And out of her grave sprung a red, red rose,

And out of his sprung a briar.

 

And they grew till they grew to the church roof,

And then they couldn’t grow any higher;

So they twined themselves in a true lovers’ knot,

For all lovers true to admire.

 

After that they would all look thoughtfully into their mugs. Partly

because the old song had saddened them, and partly because by that time

the beer was getting low and the one half-pint had to be made to last

until closing time. Then some would say, ‘What’s old Master Tuffrey up

to, over in his corner there? Ain’t heard him strike up to-night’, and

there would be calls for old David’s ‘Outlandish Knight’; not because

they wanted particularly to hear it—indeed, they had heard it so often

they all knew it by heart—but because, as they said, ‘Poor old feller

be eighty-three. Let ‘un sing while he can.’

 

So David would have his turn. He only knew the one ballad, and that, he

said, his grandfather had sung, and had said that he had heard his own

grandfather sing it. Probably a long chain of grandfathers had sung it;

but David was fated to be the last of them. It was out