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

there; one might

have a velvet tippet and no shoes worth mentioning; or a smart frock,

but no coat; and the same applied to the children’s clothes and the

sheets and towels and cups and saucepans. There was never enough of

anything, except food.

 

Monday was washing-day, and then the place fairly hummed with activity.

‘What d’ye think of the weather?’ ‘Shall we get ‘em dry?’ were the

questions shouted across gardens, or asked as the women met going to and

from the well for water. There was no gossiping at corners that morning.

It was before the days of patent soaps and washing powders, and much

hard rubbing was involved. There were no washing coppers, and the

clothes had to be boiled in the big cooking pots over the fire. Often

these inadequate vessels would boil over and fill the house with ashes

and steam. The small children would hang round their mothers’ skirts and

hinder them, and tempers grew short and nerves frayed long before the

clothes, well blued, were hung on the lines or spread on the hedges. In

wet weather they had to be dried indoors, and no one who has not

experienced it can imagine the misery of living for several days with a

firmament of drying clothes on lines overhead.

 

After their meagre midday meal, the women allowed themselves a little

leisure. In summer, some of them would take out their sewing and do it

in company with others in the shade of one of the houses. Others would

sew or read indoors, or carry their babies out in the garden for an

airing. A few who had no very young children liked to have what they

called ‘a bit of a lay down’ on the bed. With their doors locked and

window-blinds drawn, they, at least, escaped the gossips, who began to

get busy at this hour.

 

One of the most dreaded of these was Mrs. Mullins, a thin, pale, elderly

woman who wore her iron-grey hair thrust into a black chenille net at

the back of her head and wore a little black shawl over her shoulders,

summer and winter alike. She was one of the most common sights of the

hamlet, going round the Rise in her pattens, with her door-key dangling

from her fingers.

 

That door-key was looked upon as a bad sign, for she only locked her

door when she intended to be away some time. ‘Where’s she a prowlin’ off

to?’ one woman would ask another as they rested with their water-buckets

at a corner. ‘God knows, an’ He won’t tell us,’ was likely to be the

reply. ‘But, thanks be, she won’t be a goin’ to our place now she’s seen

me here.’

 

She visited every cottage in turn, knocking at the door and asking the

correct time, or for the loan of a few matches, or the gift of a

pin—anything to make an opening. Some housewives only opened the door a

crack, hoping to get rid of her, but she usually managed to cross the

threshold, and, once within, would stand just inside the door, twisting

her door-key and talking.

 

She talked no scandal. Had she done so, her visits might have been less

unwelcome. She just babbled on, about the weather, or her sons’ last

letters, or her pig, or something she had read in the Sunday newspaper.

There was a saying in the hamlet: ‘Standing gossipers stay longest’, and

Mrs. Mullins was a standing example of this. ‘Won’t you sit down, Mrs.

Mullins?’ Laura’s mother would say if she happened herself to be seated.

But it was always, ‘No, oh no, thankee. I mustn’t stop a minute’; but

her minutes always mounted up to an hour or more, and at last her

unwilling hostess would say, ‘Excuse me, I must just run round to the

well,’ or ‘I’d nearly forgotten that I’d got to fetch a cabbage from the

allotment,’ and, even then, the chances were that Mrs. Mullins would

insist upon accompanying her, talking them both to a standstill every

few yards.

 

Poor Mrs. Mullins! With her children all out in the world, her home must

have seemed to her unbearably silent, and, having no resources of her

own and a great longing to hear her own voice, she was forced out in

search of company. Nobody wanted her, for she had nothing interesting to

say, and yet talked too much to allow her listener a fair share of the

conversation. She was that worst of all bores, a melancholy bore, and at

the sight of her door-key and little black shawl the pleasantest of

little gossiping groups would scatter.

 

Mrs. Andrews was an even greater talker; but, although most people

objected to her visits on principle, they did not glance at the clock

every two minutes while she was there or invent errands for themselves

in order to get rid of her. Like Mrs. Mullins, she had got her family

off hand and so had unlimited leisure; but, unlike her, she had always

something of interest to relate. If nothing had happened in the hamlet

since her last call, she was quite capable of inventing something. More

often, she would take up some stray, unimportant fact, blow it up like a

balloon, tie it neatly with circumstantial detail and present it to her

listener, ready to be launched on the air of the hamlet. She would watch

the clothesline of some expectant mother, and if no small garments

appeared on it in what she considered due time, it would be: ‘There’s

that Mrs. Wren, only a month from her time, and not a stitch put into a

rag yet.’ If she saw a well-dressed stranger call at one of the

cottages, she would know ‘for a fac” that he was the bailiff with a

County Court summons, or that he had been to tell the parents that

‘their young Jim’, who was working up-country, had got into trouble with

the police over some money. She ‘sized up’ every girl at home on holiday

and thought that most of them looked pregnant. She took care to say

‘thought’ and ‘looked’ in those cases, because she knew that in

ninety-nine cases out of a hundred time would prove her suspicions to

have been groundless.

 

Sometimes she would widen her field and tell of the doings in high

society. She ‘knew for a fac” that the then Prince of Wales had given

one of his ladies a necklace with pearls the size of pigeon’s eggs, and

that the poor old Queen, with her crown on her head and tears streaming

down her cheeks, had gone down on her knees to beg him to turn the whole

lot of saucy hussies out of Windsor Castle. It was said in the hamlet

that, when Mrs. Andrews spoke, you could see the lies coming out of her

mouth like steam, and nobody believed a word she said, even when,

occasionally, she spoke the truth. Yet most of the women enjoyed a chat

with her. As they said, it ‘made a bit of a change’. Laura’s mother was

too hard on her when she called her a pest, or interrupted one of her

stories at a crucial point to ask, ‘Are you sure that is right, Mrs.

Andrews?’ In a community without cinemas or wireless and with very

little reading matter, she had her uses.

 

Borrowers were another nuisance. Most of the women borrowed at some

time, and a few families lived entirely on borrowing the day before

pay-day. There would come a shy, low-down, little knock at the door, and

when it was opened, a child’s voice would say, ‘Oh, please Mrs.

So-and-So, could you oblige me mother with a spoonful of tea [or a cup

of sugar, or half a loaf] till me Dad gets his money?’ If the required

article could not be spared at the first house, she would go from door

to door repeating her request until she got what she wanted, for such

were her instructions.

 

The borrowings were usually repaid, or there would soon have been

nowhere to borrow from; but often an insufficient quantity or an

inferior quality were returned, and the result was a smouldering

resentment against the habitual borrowers. But no word of direct

complaint was uttered. Had it been, the borrower might have taken

offence, and the women wished above all things to be on good terms with

their neighbours.

 

Laura’s mother detested the borrowing habit. She said that when she had

first set up housekeeping she had made it her rule when a borrower came

to the door to say, ‘Tell your mother I never borrow myself and I never

lend. But here’s the tea. I don’t want it back again. Tell your mother

she’s welcome to it.’ The plan did not work. The same borrower came

again and again, until she had to say, ‘Tell your mother I must have it

back this time.’ Again the plan did not work. Laura once heard her

mother say to Queenie, ‘Here’s half a loaf, Queenie, if it’s any good to

you. But I won’t deceive you about it; it’s one that Mrs. Knowles sent

back that she’d borrowed from me, and I can’t fancy it myself, out of

her house. If you don’t have it, it’ll have to go in the pig-tub.’

 

‘That’s all right, me dear,’ was Queenie’s smiling response. ‘It’ll do

fine for our Tom’s tea. He won’t know where it’s been, an’ ‘ould’nt care

if he did. All he cares about’s a full belly.’

 

However, there were other friends and neighbours to whom it was a

pleasure to lend, or to give on the rare occasions when that was

possible. They seldom asked directly for a loan, but would say, ‘My poor

old tea-caddy’s empty,’ or ‘I ain’t got a mossel o’ bread till the baker

comes.’ They spoke of this kind of approach as ‘a nint’ and said that if

anybody liked to take it they could; if not, no harm was done, for they

hadn’t demeaned themselves by asking.

 

As well as the noted gossips, there were in Lark Rise, as elsewhere,

women who, by means of a dropped hint or a subtle suggestion, could

poison another’s mind, and others who wished no harm to anybody, yet

loved to discuss their neighbours’ affairs and were apt to babble

confidences. But, though few of the women were averse to a little

scandal at times, most of them grew restive when it passed a certain

point. ‘Let’s give it a rest,’ they would say, or ‘Well, I think we’ve

plucked enough feathers out of her wings for one day,’ and they would

change the subject and talk about their children, or the rising prices,

or the servant problem—from the maid’s standpoint.

 

Those of the younger set who were what they called ‘folks together’,

meaning friendly, would sometimes meet in the afternoon in one of their

cottages to sip strong, sweet, milkless tea and talk things over. These

tea-drinkings were never premeditated. One neighbour would drop in, then

another, and another would be beckoned to from the doorway or fetched in

to settle some disputed point. Then some one would say, ‘How about a cup

o’ tay?’ and they would all run home to fetch a spoonful, with a few

leaves over to help make up the spoonful for the pot.

 

Those who assembled thus were those under forty. The older women did not

care for little tea-parties, nor for light, pleasant chit-chat; there

was more of the salt of the earth in their conversation and they were

apt to express things in terms which the others, who had all been in

good service, considered coarse and countrified.

 

As they settled around the room to enjoy their cup of tea, some would

have babies at the breast