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

little whitewashed room under the

roof. He had slept there for years, leaving his wife the downstair room,

that she might not be disturbed by his fevered tossing during his

rheumatic attacks, and also because, like many old people, he woke

early, and liked to get up and light the fire and read his Bible before

his wife was ready for her cup of tea to be taken to her.

 

Gradually, his limbs became so locked he could not turn over in bed

without help. Giving to and doing for others was over for him. He would

lie upon his back for hours, his tired old blue eyes fixed upon the

picture nailed on the wall at the foot of his bed. It was the only

coloured thing in the room; the rest was bare whiteness. It was of the

Crucifixion, and, printed above the crown of thorns were the words:

 

This have I done for thee.

 

And underneath the pierced and bleeding feet:

 

What hast thou done for me?

 

His, two years’ uncomplaining endurance of excruciating pain answered

for him.

 

When her husband was asleep, or lying, washed and tended, gazing at his

picture, Laura’s grandmother would sit among her feather cushions

downstairs reading Bow Bells or the Princess Novelettes or the

Family Herald. Except when engaged in housework, she was never seen

without a book in her hand. It was always a novelette, and she had a

large assortment of these which she kept tied up in flat parcels, ready

to exchange with other novelette readers.

 

She had been very pretty when she was young. ‘The Belle of Hornton’,

they had called her in her native village, and she often told Laura of

the time when her hair had reached down to her knees, like a great

yellow cape, she said, which covered her. Another of her favourite

stories was of the day when she had danced with a real lord. It was at

his coming-of-age celebrations, and a great honour, for he had passed

over his own friends and the daughters of his tenants in favour of one

who was but a gamekeeper’s daughter. Before the evening was over he had

whispered in her ear that she was the prettiest girl in the county, and

she had cherished the compliment all her life. There were no further

developments. My Lord was My Lord, and Hannah Pollard was Hannah

Pollard, a poor girl, but the daughter of decent parents. No further

developments were possible in real life, though such affairs ended

differently in her novelettes. Perhaps that was why she enjoyed them.

 

It was difficult for Laura to connect the long, yellow hair and the

white frock with blue ribbons worn at the coming-of-age f�te with her

grandmother, for she saw her only as a thin, frail old woman who wore

her grey hair parted like curtains and looped at the ears with little

combs. Still, there was something which made her worth looking at.

Laura’s mother said it was because her features were good. ‘My mother,’

she would say, ‘will look handsome in her coffin. Colour goes and the

hair turns grey, but the framework lasts.’

 

Laura’s mother was greatly disappointed in her little daughter’s looks.

Her own mother had been an acknowledged belle, she herself had been

charmingly pretty, and she naturally expected her children to carry on

the tradition. But Laura was a plain, thin child: ‘Like a moll heron,

all legs and wings,’ she was told in the hamlet, and her dark eyes and

wide mouth looked too large for her small face. The only compliment ever

paid her in childhood was that of a curate who said she was ‘intelligent

looking’. Those around her would have preferred curly hair and a rosebud

mouth to all the intelligence in the world.

 

Laura’s grandmother had never tramped ten miles on a Sunday night to

hear her husband preach in a village chapel. She had gone to church once

every Sunday, unless it rained or was too hot, or she had a cold, or

some article of her attire was too shabby. She was particular about her

clothes and liked to have everything handsome about her. In her bedroom

there were pictures and ornaments, as well as the feather cushions and

silk patchwork quilt.

 

When she came to the end house, the best chair was placed by the fire

for her and the best possible tea put on the table, and Laura’s mother

did not whisper her troubles to her as she did to her father. If some

little thing did leak out, she would only say, ‘All men need a bit of

humouring.’

 

Some women, too, thought Laura, for she could see that her grandmother

had always been the one to be indulged and spared all trouble and

unpleasantness. If the fiddle had belonged to her, it would never have

been sold; the whole family would have combined to buy a handsome new

case for it.

 

After her husband died, she went away to live with her eldest son, and

the round house shared the fate of Sally’s. Where it stood is now a

ploughed field. The husband’s sacrifices, the wife’s romance, are as

though they had never been—‘melted into air, into thin air’.

 

Those were a few of the old men and women to whom the Rector referred as

‘our old folks’ and visiting townsmen lumped together as ‘a lot of old

yokels’. There were a few other homes of old people in the hamlet; that

of Master Ashley, for instance, who, like Sally, had descended from one

of the original squatters and still owned the ancestral cottage and

strip of land. He must have been one of the last people to use a

breast-plough, a primitive implement consisting of a ploughshare at one

end of a stout stick and a cross-piece of shaped wood at the other which

the user pressed to his breast to drive the share through the soil. On

his land stood the only surviving specimen of the old furze and daub

building which had once been common in the neighbourhood. The walls were

of furze branches closely pressed together and daubed with a mixture of

mud and mortar. It was said that the first settlers built their cottages

of these materials with their own hands.

 

Then there were one or two poorer couples, just holding on to their

homes, but in daily fear of the workhouse. The Poor Law authorities

allowed old people past work a small weekly sum as outdoor relief; but

it was not sufficient to live upon, and, unless they had more than

usually prosperous children to help support them, there came a time when

the home had to be broken up. When, twenty years later, the Old Age

Pensions began, life was transformed for such aged cottagers. They were

relieved of anxiety. They were suddenly rich. Independent for life! At

first when they went to the Post Office to draw it, tears of gratitude

would run down the cheeks of some, and they would say as they picked up

their money, ‘God bless that Lord George! [for they could not believe

one so powerful and munificent could be a plain ‘Mr.’] and God bless

you, miss!’ and there were flowers from their gardens and apples from

their trees for the girl who merely handed them the money.

VI

The Besieged Generation

 

To Laura, as a child, the hamlet once appeared as a fortress. She was

coming home alone from school one wild, grey, March afternoon, and,

looking up from her battling against the wind, got a swift new

impression of the cluster of stark walls and slated roofs on the Rise,

with rooks tumbling and clouds hurrying overhead, smoke beating down

from the chimneys, and clothes on clotheslines straining away in the

wind.

 

‘It’s a fort! It’s a fort!’ she cried, and she went on up the road,

singing in her flat, tuneless little voice the Salvation Army hymn of

the day, ‘Hold the fort, for I am coming’.

 

There was a deeper likeness than that of her childish vision. The hamlet

was indeed in a state of siege, and its chief assailant was Want. Yet,

like other citizens during a long, but not too desperate siege, its

inhabitants had become accustomed to their hard conditions and were able

to snatch at any small passing pleasure and even at times to turn their

very straits to laughter.

 

To go from the homes of the older people to those of the besieged

generation was to step into another chapter of the hamlet’s history. All

the graces and simple luxuries of the older style of living had

disappeared. They were poor people’s houses rich only in children,

strong, healthy children, who, in a few years, would be ready to take

their part in the work of the world and to provide good, healthy blood

for the regeneration of city populations; but, in the meantime, their

parents had to give their all in order to feed and clothe them.

 

In their houses the good, solid, hand-made furniture of their

forefathers had given place to the cheap and ugly products of the early

machine age. A deal table, the top ribbed and softened by much

scrubbing; four or five windsor chairs with the varnish blistered and

flaking; a side table for the family photographs and ornaments, and a

few stools for fireside seats, together with the beds upstairs, made up

the collection spoken of by its owners as ‘our few sticks of furniture’.

 

If the father had a special chair in which to rest after his day’s work

was done, it would be but a rather larger replica of the hard windsors

with wooden arms added. The clock, if any, was a cheap, foreign

timepiece, standing on the mantelshelf—one which could seldom be relied

upon to keep correct time for twelve hours together. Those who had no

clock depended upon the husband’s watch for getting up in the morning.

The watch then went to work with him, an arrangement which must have

been a great inconvenience to most wives; but was a boon to the gossips,

who could then knock at a neighbour’s door and ask the time when they

felt inclined for a chat.

 

The few poor crocks were not good enough to keep on show and were hidden

away in the pantry between mealtimes. Pewter plates and dishes as

ornaments had gone. There were still plenty of them to be found, kicked

about around gardens and pigsties. Sometimes a travelling tinker would

spy one of these and beg or buy it for a few coppers, to melt down and

use in his trade. Other casual callers at the cottages would buy a set

of handwrought, brass drop-handles from an inherited chest of drawers

for sixpence; or a corner cupboard, or a gate-legged table which had

become slightly infirm, for half a crown. Other such articles of

furniture were put out of doors and spoilt by the weather, for the newer

generation did not value such things; it preferred the products of its

own day, and, gradually, the hamlet was being stripped of such relics.

 

As ornaments for their mantelpieces and side tables the women liked

gaudy glass vases, pottery images of animals, shell-covered boxes and

plush photograph frames. The most valued ornaments of all were the white

china mugs inscribed in gilt lettering ‘A Present for a Good Child’, or

‘A Present from Brighton’, or some other seaside place. Those who had

daughters in service to bring them would accumulate quite a collection

of these, which were hung by the handles in rows from the edge of a

shelf, and were a source of great pride in the owner and of envy in the

neighbours.

 

Those who