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

not Christmas

or her birthday. Then Edmund awoke and called out he had found an

engine. It was a tiny tin engine, perhaps a penny one, but his delight

was unbounded. Then Mother came into their room and said that the Major

had brought the presents from Oxford. She had a little red silk

handkerchief, such as were worn inside the coat-collar at that time for

extra warmth. It was before fur collars were thought of. Father had a

pipe and the baby a rattle. It was amazing. To be thought of! To be

brought presents, and such presents, by one who was not even a relative!

The good, kind Major was in no danger of being forgotten by the family

at the end house. Mother made his bed and tidied his room, and Laura was

sent with covered plates whenever there was anything special for dinner.

She would knock at his door and go in and say in her demure little way,

‘Please, Mr. Sharman, Mother says could you fancy a little of

so-and-so?’

 

But the Major was too old and ill to be able to live alone much longer,

even with such help as the children’s mother and other kind neighbours

could give. The day came when the doctor called in the relieving

officer. The old man was seriously ill; he had no relatives. There was

only one place where he could be properly looked after, and that was the

workhouse infirmary. They were right in their decision. He was not able

to look after himself; he had no relatives or friends able to undertake

the responsibility; the workhouse was the best place for him. But they

made one terrible mistake. They were dealing with a man of intelligence

and spirit, and they treated him as they might have done one in the

extreme of senile decay. They did not consult him or tell him what they

had decided; but ordered the carrier’s cart to call at his house the

next morning and wait at a short distance while they, in the doctor’s

gig, drove up to his door. When they entered, the Major had just dressed

and dragged himself to his chair by the fire. ‘It’s a nice morning, and

we’ve come to take you for a drive,’ announced the doctor cheerfully,

and, in spite of his protests, they hustled on his coat and had him out

and in the carrier’s cart in a very few minutes.

 

Laura saw the carrier touch up his horse with the whip and the cart

turn, and she always wished afterwards she had not, for, as soon as he

realized where he was being taken, the old soldier, the independent old

bachelor, the kind family friend, collapsed and cried like a child. He

was beaten. But not for long. Before six weeks were over he was back in

the parish and all his troubles were over, for he came in his coffin.

 

As he had no relatives to be informed, the time appointed for his

funeral was not known in the hamlet, or no doubt a few of his old

neighbours would have gathered in the churchyard. As it was, Laura,

standing back among the graves, a milk-can in her hand, was the only

spectator, and that quite by chance. No mourner followed the coffin into

the church, and she was far too shy to come forward; but when it was

brought out and carried towards the open grave it was no longer

unaccompanied, for the clergyman’s middle-aged daughter walked behind

it, an open prayerbook in her hand and an expression of gentle pity in

her eyes. She could barely have known him in life, for he was not a

churchgoer; but she had seen the solitary coffin arrive and had hurried

across from her home to the church that he might at least have one

fellow human being to say ‘Farewell’ to him. In after years, when Laura

heard her spoken of slightingly, and, indeed, often felt irritated

herself by her interfering ways, she thought of that graceful action.

 

The children’s grandparents lived in a funny little house out in the

fields. It was a round house, tapering off at the top, so there were two

rooms downstairs and only one—and that a kind of a loft, with a sloping

ceiling—above them. The garden did not adjoin the house, but was shut

away between high hedges on the other side of the cart track which led

to it. It was full of currant and gooseberry bushes, raspberry canes,

and old hardy flowers run wild, almost solid with greenery, for, since

the gardener had grown old and stiff in the joints, he had not been able

to do much pruning or trimming. There Laura spent many happy hours,

supposed to be picking fruit for jam, but for the better part of the

time reading or dreaming. One corner, overhung by a damson tree and

walled in with bushes and flowers, she called her ‘green study’.

 

Laura’s grandfather was a tall old man with snow-white hair and beard

and the bluest eyes imaginable. He must at that time have been well on

in the seventies, for her mother had been his youngest child and a

latecomer. One of her outstanding distinctions in the eyes of her own

children was that she had been born an aunt, and, as soon as she could

talk, had insisted upon her two nieces, both older than herself,

addressing her as ‘Aunt Emma’.

 

Before he retired from active life, the grandfather had followed the old

country calling of an eggler, travelling the countryside with a little

horse and trap, buying up eggs from farms and cottages and selling them

at markets and to shopkeepers. At the back of the round house stood the

little lean-to stable in which his pony Dobbin had lived. The children

loved to lie in the manger and climb about among the rafters. The death

of Dobbin of old age had put an end to his master’s eggling, for he had

no capital with which to buy another horse. Far from it. Moreover, by

that time he was himself suffering from Dobbin’s complaint; so he

settled down to doing what he could in his garden and making a private

daily round on his own feet, from his home to the end house, from the

end house to church, and back home again.

 

At the church he not only attended every service, Sunday and weekday,

but, when there was no service, he would go there alone to pray and

meditate, for he was a deeply religious man. At one time he had been a

local preacher, and had walked miles on Sunday evenings to conduct, in

turn with others, the services at the cottage meeting houses in the

different villages. In old age he had returned to the Church of England,

not because of any change of opinion, for creeds did not trouble

him—his feet were too firmly planted on the Rock upon which they are

all founded—but because the parish church was near enough for him to

attend its services, was always open for his private devotions, and the

music there, poor as it was, was all the music left to him.

 

Some members of his old meeting-house congregations still remembered

what they considered his inspired preaching ‘of the Word’. ‘You did

ought to be a better gal, wi’ such a gran’fer,’ said a Methodist woman

to Laura one day when she saw her crawl through a gap in a hedge and

tear her new pinafore. But Laura was not old enough to appreciate her

grandfather, for he died when she was ten, and his loving care for her

mother, his youngest and dearest child, led to many lectures and

reproofs. Had he seen the torn pinafore, it would certainly have

provoked both. However, she had just sufficient discrimination to know

he was better than most people.

 

As has already been mentioned, he had at one time played the violin in

one of the last instrumental church choirs in the district. He had also

played it at gatherings at home and in neighbours’ houses and, in his

earlier, unregenerate days, at weddings and feasts and fairs. Laura,

happening to think of this one day, said to her mother, ‘Why doesn’t

Grandfather ever play his fiddle now! What’s he done with it?’

 

‘Oh,’ said her mother in a matter-of-fact tone. ‘He hasn’t got it any

longer. He sold it once when Granny was ill and they were a bit short of

money. It was a good fiddle and he got five pounds for it.’

 

She spoke as though there was no more in selling your fiddle than in

selling half a pig or a spare sack of potatoes in an emergency; but

Laura, though so much younger, felt differently about it. Though devoid

of the most rudimentary musical instinct herself, she had imagination

enough to know that to a musician his musical instrument must be a most

precious possession. So, when she was alone with her grandfather one

day, she said, ‘Didn’t you miss your fiddle, Granda?’

 

The old man gave her a quick, searching look, then smiled sadly. ‘I did,

my maid, more than anything I’ve ever had to part with, and that’s not a

little, and I miss it still and always shall. But it went for a good

cause, and we can’t have everything we want in this world. It wouldn’t

be good for us.’ But Laura did not agree. She thought it would have been

good for him to have his dear old fiddle. That wretched money, or rather

the lack of it, seemed the cause of everybody’s troubles.

 

The fiddle was not the only thing he had had to give up. He had given up

smoking when he retired and they had to live on their tiny savings and

the small allowance from a brother who had prospered as a coal-merchant.

Perhaps what he felt most keenly of all was that he had had to give up

giving, for he loved to give.

 

One of Laura’s earliest memories was of her grandfather coming through

the gate and up the end house garden in his old-fashioned close-fitting

black overcoat and bowler hat, his beard nicely trimmed and shining,

with a huge vegetable marrow under his arm. He came every morning and

seldom came empty-handed. He would bring a little basket of early

raspberries or green peas, already shelled, or a tight little bunch of

sweet williams and moss rosebuds, or a baby rabbit, which some one else

had given him—always something. He would come indoors, and if anything

in the house was broken, he would mend it, or he would take a stocking

out of his pocket and sit down and knit, and all the time he was working

he would talk in a kind, gentle voice to his daughter, calling her

‘Emmie’. Sometimes she would cry as she told him of her troubles, and he

would get up and smooth her hair and wipe her eyes and say, ‘That’s

better! That’s better! Now you’re going to be my own brave little wench!

And remember, my dear, there’s One above who knows what’s best for us,

though we may not see it ourselves at the time.’

 

By the middle of the ‘eighties the daily visits had ceased, for the

chronic rheumatism against which he had fought was getting the better of

him. First, the church was too far for him; then the end house; then his

own garden across the road, and at last his world narrowed down to the

bed upon which he was lying. That bed was not the four-poster with the

silk-and-satin patchwork quilt in rich shades of red and brown and

orange which stood in the best downstairs bedroom, but the plain white

bed beneath the sloping ceiling in the