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

could find the necessary cash covered their walls with

wall-paper in big, sprawling, brightly coloured flower designs. Those

who could not, used whitewash or pasted up newspaper sheets. On the wall

space near the hearth hung the flitch or flitches of bacon, and every

house had a few pictures, mostly coloured ones given by grocers as

almanacks and framed at home. These had to be in pairs, and lovers’

meetings lovers’ partings, brides in their wedding gowns, widows

standing by newly made graves, children begging in the snow or playing

with puppies or kittens in nurseries were the favourite subjects.

 

Yet, even out of these unpromising materials, in a room which was

kitchen, living-room, nursery, and wash-house combined, some women would

contrive to make a pleasant, attractive-looking home. A well-whitened

hearth, a homemade rag rug in bright colours, and a few geraniums on

the windowsill would cost nothing, but make a great difference to the

general effect. Others despised these finishing touches. What was the

good of breaking your back pegging rugs for the children to mess up when

an old sack thrown down would serve the same purpose, they said. As to

flowers in pots, they didn’t hold with the nasty, messy things. But they

did, at least, believe in cleaning up their houses once a day, for

public opinion demanded that of them. There were plenty of bare,

comfortless homes in the hamlet, but there was not one really dirty one.

 

Every morning, as soon as the men had been packed off to work, the older

children to school, the smaller ones to play, and the baby had been

bathed and put to sleep in its cradle, rugs and mats were carried out of

doors and banged against walls, fireplaces were ‘ridded up’, and tables

and floors were scrubbed. In wet weather, before scrubbing, the stone

floor had often to be scraped with an old knife-blade to loosen the

trodden-in mud; for, although there was a scraper for shoes beside every

doorstep, some of the stiff, clayey mud would stick to the insteps and

uppers of boots and be brought indoors.

 

To avoid bringing in more during the day, the women wore pattens over

their shoes to go to the well or the pigsty. The patten consisted of a

wooden sole with a leather toepiece, raised about two inches from the

ground on an iron ring. Clack! Clack! Clack! over the stones, and

Slush! Slush! Slush! through the mud went the patten rings. You could

not keep your movements secret if you wore pattens to keep yourself dry

shod.

 

A pair of pattens only cost tenpence and lasted for years. But the

patten was doomed. Vicarage ladies and farmers’ wives no longer wore

them to go to and fro between their dairies and poultry yards, and newly

married cottagers no longer provided themselves with a pair. ‘Too proud

to wear pattens’ was already becoming a proverb at the beginning of the

decade, and by the end of it they had practically disappeared.

 

The morning cleaning proceeded to the accompaniment of neighbourly

greetings and shouting across garden and fences, for the first sound of

the banging of mats was a signal for others to bring out theirs, and it

would be ‘Have ‘ee heard this?’ and ‘What d’ye think of that?’ until

industrious housewives declared that they would take to banging their

mats overnight, for they never knew if it was going to take them two

minutes or two hours.

 

Nicknames were not used among the women, and only the aged were spoken

of by their Christian names, Old Sally or Old Queenie or sometimes

Dame—Dame Mercer or Dame Morris. The other married women were Mrs. This

or Mrs. That, even with those who had known them from their cradles. Old

men were called Master, not Mister. Younger men were known by their

nicknames or their Christian names, excepting a few who were more than

usually respected. Children were carefully taught to address all as Mr.

or Mrs.

 

Cleaning began at about the same time in every house, but the time of

finishing varied. Some housewives would have everything spick-and-span

and themselves ‘tidied up’ by noon; others would still be at it at

teatime. ‘A slut’s work’s never done’ was a saying among the good

housewives.

 

It puzzled Laura that, although everybody cleaned up every day, some

houses looked what they called there ‘a pictur’ and others a muddle. She

remarked on this to her mother.

 

‘Come here,’ was the answer. ‘See this grate I’m cleaning? Looks done,

doesn’t it? But you wait.’

 

Up and down and round and round and between the bars went the brush;

then: ‘Now look. Looks different, doesn’t it?’ It did. It had been

passably polished before; now it was resplendent. ‘There!’ said her

mother. ‘That’s the secret; just that bit of extra elbow-grease after

some folks would consider a thing done.’

 

But that final polish, the giving of which came naturally to Laura’s

mother, could not have been possible to all. Pregnancy and nursing and

continual money worries must have worn down the strength and energy of

many. Taking these drawbacks into account, together with the

inconvenience and overcrowding of the cottages, the general standard of

cleanliness was marvellous.

 

There was one postal delivery a day, and towards ten o’clock, the heads

of the women beating their mats would be turned towards the allotment

path to watch for ‘Old Postie’. Some days there were two, or even three,

letters for Lark Rise; quite as often there were none; but there were

few women who did not gaze longingly. This longing for letters was

called ‘yearning’ (pronounced ‘yarnin”); ‘No, I be-ant expectin’

nothin’, but I be so yarnin” one woman would say to another as they

watched the old postman dawdle over the stile and between the allotment

plots. On wet days he carried an old green gig umbrella with whalebone

ribs, and, beneath its immense circumference he seemed to make no more

progress than an overgrown mushroom. But at last he would reach and

usually pass the spot where the watchers were standing.

 

‘No, I ain’t got nothin’ for you, Mrs. Parish,’ he would call. ‘Your

young Annie wrote to you only last week. She’s got summat else to do

besides sittin’ down on her arse writing home all the time.’ Or, waving

his arm for some woman to meet him, for he did not intend to go a step

further than he was obliged: ‘One for you, Mrs. Knowles, and, my! ain’t

it a thin-roed ‘un! Not much time to write to her mother these days. I

took a good fat ‘un from her to young Chad Gubbins.’

 

So he went on, always leaving a sting behind, a gloomy, grumpy old man

who seemed to resent having to serve such humble people. He had been a

postman forty years and had walked an incredible number of miles in all

weathers, so perhaps the resulting flat feet and rheumaticky limbs were

to blame; but the whole hamlet rejoiced when at last he was pensioned

off and a smart, obliging young postman took his place on the Lark Rise

round.

 

Delighted as the women were with the letters from their daughters, it

was the occasional parcels of clothing they sent that caused the

greatest excitement. As soon as a parcel was taken indoors, neighbours

who had seen Old Postie arrive with it would drop in, as though by

accident, and stay to admire, or sometimes to criticise, the contents.

 

All except the aged women, who wore what they had been accustomed to

wearing and were satisfied, were very particular about their clothes.

Anything did for everyday wear, as long as it was clean and whole and

could be covered with a decent white apron; it was the ‘Sunday best’

that had to be just so. ‘Better be out of the world than out of the

fashion’ was one of their sayings. To be appreciated, the hat or coat

contained in the parcel had to be in the fashion, and the hamlet had a

fashion of its own, a year or two behind outside standards, and strictly

limited as to style and colour.

 

The daughter’s or other kinswoman’s clothes were sure to be appreciated,

for they had usually already been seen and admired when the girl was at

home for her holiday, and had indeed helped to set the standard of what

was worn. The garments bestowed by the mistresses were unfamiliar and

often somewhat in advance of the hamlet vogue, and so were often

rejected for personal wear as ‘a bit queer’ and cut down for the

children; though the mothers often wished a year or two later when that

particular fashion arrived that they had kept them for themselves. Then

they had colour prejudices. A red frock! Only a fast hussy would wear

red. Or green—sure to bring any wearer bad luck! There was a positive

taboo on green in the hamlet; nobody would wear it until it had been

home-dyed navy or brown. Yellow ranked with red as immodest; but there

was not much yellow worn anywhere in the ‘eighties. On the whole, they

preferred dark or neutral colours; but there was one exception; blue had

nothing against it. Marine and sky blue were the favourite shades, both

very bright and crude.

 

Much prettier were the colours of the servant girls’ print morning

dresses—lilac, or pink, or buff, sprigged with white—which were cut

down for the little girls to wear on May Day and for churchgoing

throughout the summer.

 

To the mothers the cut was even more important than the colour. If

sleeves were worn wide they liked them to be very wide; if narrow, skin

tight. Skirts in those days did not vary in length; they were made to

touch the ground. But they were sometimes trimmed with frills or

flounces or bunched up at the back, and the women would spend days

altering this trimming to make it just right, or turning gathers into

pleats or pleats into gathers.

 

The hamlet’s fashion lag was the salvation of its wardrobes, for a style

became ‘all the go’ there just as the outer world was discarding it, and

good, little-worn specimens came that way by means of the parcels. The

Sunday garment at the beginning of the decade was the tippet, a little

shoulder cape of black silk or satin with a long, dangling fringe. All

the women and some of the girls had these, and they were worn proudly to

church or Sunday school with a posy of roses or geraniums pinned in

front.

 

Hats were of the chimney-pot variety, a tall cylinder of straw, with a

very narrow brim and a spray of artificial flowers trained up the front.

Later in the decade, the shape changed to wide brims and squashed

crowns. The chimney-pot hat had had its day, and the women declared they

would not be seen going to the privy in one.

 

Then there were the bustles, at first looked upon with horror, and no

wonder! but after a year or two the most popular fashion ever known in

the hamlet and the one which lasted longest. They cost nothing, as they

could be made at home from any piece of old cloth rolled up into a

cushion and worn under any frock. Soon all the women, excepting the

aged, and all the girls, excepting the tiniest, were peacocking in their

bustles, and they wore them so long that Edmund was old enough in the

day of their decline to say that he had seen the last bustle on earth

going round the Rise on a woman with a bucket of pig-wash.

 

This devotion to fashion gave a spice to life and helped to make

bearable the underlying poverty. But the poverty was