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

>little brother merely pushed his plate forward. Martha, mindful of her

manners, refused a third helping. But the little brother had no such

scruples; he was famishing, and accepted a third and a fourth plateful,

the mistress of the house standing by with an amused smile on her face.

She must have remembered him for the rest of her life as the little boy

with the large appetite.

 

It was dark before they reached home, and Laura got into trouble, not

only for spoiling her best boots, but still more for telling a lie, for

she had led her mother to believe they were going into the market town

shopping. But even when she lay in bed supperless she felt the

experience was worth the punishment, for she had been where she had

never been before and seen the old house and the lady in the scarlet

jacket and tasted the beef and seen Tommy Beamish eat four large

helpings.

 

After all, Martha did not go to live there. Her mother was not satisfied

with her account of the place and her father heard the next day that the

house was haunted. ‘She shan’t goo there while we’ve got a crust for

her,’ said her Dad. ‘Not as I believes in ghostesses—lot o’ rubbish I

calls ‘em—but the child might think she seed summat and be scared out

of her wits an’ maybe catch her death o’ cold in that girt, draughty,

old kitchen.’

 

So Martha waited until two sisters, milliners in the market town, wanted

a maid; and, once there, grew strong and rosy and, according to their

report, learned to say a great deal more than ‘Yes, mum’; for their only

complaint against her was that she was inclined to be saucy and sang so

loudly about her work that the customers in the shop could hear her.

 

When the girls had been in their petty places a year, their mothers

began to say it was time they ‘bettered themselves’ and the clergyman’s

daughter was consulted. Did she know if a scullerymaid or a tweeny was

required at any of the big country houses around? If not, she would wait

until she had two or three such candidates for promotion on her list,

then advertise in the Morning Post or the Church Times for

situations for them. Other girls secured places through sisters or

friends already serving in large establishments.

 

When the place was found, the girl set out alone on what was usually her

first train journey, with her yellow tin trunk tied up with thick cord,

her bunch of flowers and brown paper parcel bursting with left-overs.

 

The tin trunk would be sent on to the railway station by the carrier and

the mother would walk the three miles to the station with her daughter.

They would leave Lark Rise, perhaps before it was quite light on a

winter morning, the girl in her best, would-be fashionable clothes and

the mother carrying the baby of the family, rolled in its shawl.

Neighbours would come to their garden gates to see them off and call

after them ‘Pleasant journey! Hope you’ll have a good place!’ or ‘Mind

you be a good gal, now, an’ does just as you be told!’ or, more

comfortingly, ‘You’ll be back for y’r holidays before you knows where

you are and then there won’t be no holdin’ you, you’ll have got that

London proud!’ and the two would go off in good spirits, turning and

waving repeatedly.

 

Laura once saw the departure of such a couple, the mother enveloped in a

large plaid shawl, with her baby’s face looking out from its folds, and

the girl in a bright blue, poplin frock which had been bought at the

second-hand clothes shop in the town-a frock made in the extreme fashion

of three years before, but by that time ridiculously obsolete. Laura’s

mother, foreseeing the impression it would make at the journey’s end,

shook her head and clicked her tongue and said, ‘Why ever couldn’t they

spend the money on a bit of good navy serge!’ But they, poor innocents,

were delighted with it.

 

They went off cheerfully, even proudly; but, some hours later, Laura met

the mother returning alone. She was limping, for the sole of one of her

old boots had parted company with the upper, and the eighteen-months-old

child must have hung heavily on her arm. When asked if Aggie had gone

off all right, she nodded, but could not answer; her heart was too full.

After all, she was just a mother who had sent her young daughter into

the unknown and was tormented with doubts and fears for her.

 

What the girl, bound for a strange and distant part of the country to

live a new, strange life among strangers, felt when the train moved off

with her can only be imagined. Probably those who saw her round, stolid

little face and found her slow in learning her new duties for the next

few days would have been surprised and even a little touched if they

could have read her thoughts.

 

The girls who ‘went into the kitchen’ began as scullerymaids, washing up

stacks of dishes, cleaning saucepans and dish covers, preparing

vegetables, and doing the kitchen scrubbing and other rough work. After

a year or two of this, they became under kitchen-maids and worked up

gradually until they were second in command to the cook. When they

reached that point, they did much of the actual cooking under

supervision; sometimes they did it without any, for there were stories

of cooks who never put hand to a dish, but, having taught the

kitchen-maid, left all the cooking to her, excepting some spectacular

dish for a dinner party. This pleased the ambitious kitchen-maid, for

she was gaining experience and would soon be a professional cook

herself; then, if she attained the summit of her ambition,

cook-housekeeper.

 

Some girls preferred house to kitchen work, and they would be found a

place in some mansion as third or fourth housemaid and work upward.

Troops of men and maidservants were kept in large town and country

houses in those days.

 

The maids on the lower rungs of the ladder seldom saw their employers.

If they happened to meet one or other of them about the house, her

ladyship would ask kindly how they were getting on and how their parents

were; or his lordship would smile and make some mild joke if he happened

to be in a good humour. The upper servants were their real mistresses,

and they treated beginners as a sergeant treated recruits, drilling them

well in their duties by dint of much scolding; but the girl who was

anxious to learn and did not mind hard work or hard words and could keep

a respectful tongue in her head had nothing to fear from them.

 

The food of the maids in those large establishments was wholesome and

abundant, though far from dainty. In some houses they would be given

cold beef or mutton, or even hot Irish stew for breakfast, and the

midday meal was always a heavy one, with suet pudding following a cut

from a hot joint. Their bedrooms were poor according to modern

standards; but, sleeping in a large attic, shared with two or three

others, was not then looked upon as a hardship, provided they had a bed

each and their own chest of drawers and washstands. The maids had no

bathroom. Often their employers had none either. Some families had

installed one for their own use; others preferred the individual tub in

the bedroom. A hip-bath was part of the furniture of the maids’ room.

Like the children of the family, they had no evenings out, unless they

had somewhere definite to go and obtained special leave. They had to go

to church on Sunday, whether they wanted to or not, and had to leave

their best hats with the red roses and ostrich tips in the boxes under

their beds and ‘make frights of themselves’ in funny little flat

bonnets. When the Princess of Wales, afterwards Queen Alexandra, set the

fashion of wearing the hair in a curled fringe over the forehead, and

the fashion spread until it became universal, a fringe was forbidden to

maids. They must wear their hair brushed straight back from their brows.

A great hardship.

 

The wages paid would amuse the young housekeepers of to-day. At her

petty place, a girl was paid from one to two shillings a week. A

grown-up servant in a tradesman’s family received seven pounds a year,

and that was about the wage of a farmhouse servant. The Rectory cook

had sixteen pounds a year; the Rectory housemaid twelve; both excellent

servants. The under servants in big houses began at seven pounds a year,

which was increased at each advancement, until, as head housemaid, they

might receive as much as thirty. A good cook could ask fifty, and even

obtain another five by threatening to leave. ‘Everybody who was

anything,’ as they used to say, kept a maid in those days—stud grooms’

wives, village schoolmasters’ wives, and, of course, innkeepers’ and

shopkeepers’ wives. Even the wives of carpenters and masons paid a girl

sixpence to clean the knives and boots and take out the children on

Saturday.

 

As soon as a mother had even one daughter in service, the strain upon

herself slackened a little. Not only was there one mouth less to feed,

one pair of feet less to be shod, and a tiny space left free in the

cramped sleeping quarters; but, every month, when the girl received her

wages, a shilling or more would be sent to ‘our Mum’, and, as the wages

increased, the mother’s portion grew larger. In addition to presents,

some of the older girls undertook to pay their parents’ rent; others to

give them a ton of coal for the winter; and all sent Christmas and

birthday presents and parcels of left-off clothing.

 

The unselfish generosity of these poor girls was astonishing. It was

said in the hamlet that some of them stripped themselves to help those

at home. One girl did so literally. She had come for her holidays in her

new best frock—a pale grey cashmere with white lace collar and cuffs.

It had been much admired and she had obviously enjoyed wearing it during

her fortnight at home; but when Laura said, ‘I do like your new frock,

Clem,’ she replied in what was meant for an off-hand tone, ‘Oh, that!

I’m leaving that for our young Sally. She hasn’t got hardly anything,

and it don’t matter what I wear when I’m away. There’s nobody I care

about to see it,’ and Clem went back in her second-best navy serge and

Sally wore the pale grey to church the next Sunday.

 

Many of them must have kept themselves very short of money, for they

would send half or even more of their wages home. Laura’s mother used to

say that she would rather have starved than allow a child of hers to be

placed at such a disadvantage among other girls at their places in

service, not to mention the temptations to which they might be exposed

through poverty. But the mothers were so poor, so barely able to feed

their families and keep out of debt, that it was only human of them to

take what their children sent and sometimes even pressed upon them.

 

Strange to say, although they were grateful to and fond of their

daughters, their boys, who were always at home and whose money barely

paid for their keep, seemed always to come first with them. If there was

any inconvenience, it must not fall on the boys; if there was a limited

quantity of anything, the boys must still have their full share; the

boys’