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

tell you!’ and rushed back, if not to rescue, to be near him, she

found Edmund, her gentle little Edmund, with face as red as a

turkey-cock, hitting out with clenched fists at such a rate that some of

the bigger boys, standing near, started applauding.

 

So Edmund was not a coward, like she was! Edmund could fight! Though

where and how he had learned to do so was a mystery. Perhaps, being a

boy, it came to him naturally. At any rate, fight he did, so often and

so well that soon no one near his own age risked offending him. His

elders gave him an occasional cuff, just to keep him in his place; but

in scuffles with others they took his part, perhaps because they knew he

was likely to win. So all was well with Edmund. He was accepted inside

the circle, and the only drawback, from Laura’s point of view, was that

she was still outside.

 

Although they started to school so early, the hamlet children took so

much time on the way that the last quarter of a mile was always a race,

and they would rush, panting and dishevelled, into school just as the

bell stopped, and the other children, spick and span, fresh from their

mothers’ hands, would eye them sourly. ‘That gipsy lot from Lark Rise!’

they would murmur.

 

Fordlow National School was a small grey one-storied building, standing

at the cross-roads at the entrance to the village. The one large

classroom which served all purposes was well lighted with several

windows, including the large one which filled the end of the building

which faced the road. Beside, and joined on to the school, was a tiny

two-roomed cottage for the schoolmistress, and beyond that a playground

with birch trees and turf, bald in places, the whole being enclosed

within pointed, white-painted palings.

 

The only other building in sight was a row of model cottages occupied by

the shepherd, the blacksmith, and other superior farm-workers. The

school had probably been built at the same time as the houses and by the

same model landlord; for, though it would seem a hovel compared to a

modern council school, it must at that time have been fairly up-to-date.

It had a lobby with pegs for clothes, boys’ and girls’ earth-closets,

and a backyard with fixed wash-basins, although there was no water laid

on. The water supply was contained in a small bucket, filled every

morning by the old woman who cleaned the schoolroom, and every morning

she grumbled because the children had been so extravagant that she had

to ‘fill ‘un again’.

 

The average attendance was about forty-five. Ten or twelve of the

children lived near the school, a few others came from cottages in the

fields, and the rest were the Lark Rise children. Even then, to an

outsider, it would have appeared a quaint, old-fashioned little

gathering; the girls in their ankle-length frocks and long, straight

pinafores, with their hair strained back from their brows and secured on

their crowns by a ribbon or black tape or a bootlace; the bigger boys in

corduroys and hobnailed boots, and the smaller ones in homemade sailor

suits or, until they were six or seven, in petticoats.

 

Baptismal names were such as the children’s parents and grandparents had

borne. The fashion in Christian names was changing; babies were being

christened Mabel and Gladys and Doreen and Percy and Stanley; but the

change was too recent to have affected the names of the older children.

Mary Ann, Sarah Ann, Eliza, Martha, Annie, Jane, Amy, and Rose were

favourite girls’ names. There was a Mary Ann in almost every family, and

Eliza was nearly as popular. But none of them were called by their

proper names. Mary Ann and Sarah Ann were contracted to Mar’ann and

Sar’ann. Mary, apart from Ann, had, by stages, descended through Molly

and Polly to Poll. Eliza had become Liza, then Tiza, then Tize; Martha

was Mat or Pat; Jane was Jin; and every Amy had at least one ‘Aim’ in

life, of which she had constant reminder. The few more uncommon names

were also distorted. Two sisters named at the font Beatrice and Agnes,

went through life as Beat and Agg, Laura was Lor, or Low, and Edmund was

Ned or Ted.

 

Laura’s mother disliked this cheapening of names and named her third

child May, thinking it would not lend itself to a diminutive. However,

while still in her cradle, the child became Mayie among the neighbours.

 

There was no Victoria in the school, nor was there a Miss Victoria or a

Lady Victoria in any of the farmhouses, rectories, or mansions in the

district, nor did Laura ever meet a Victoria in later life. That great

name was sacred to the Queen and was not copied by her subjects to the

extent imagined by period novelists of today.

 

The schoolmistress in charge of the Fordlow school at the beginning of

the ‘eighties had held that position for fifteen years and seemed to her

pupils as much a fixture as the school building; but for most of that

time she had been engaged to the squire’s head gardener and her long

reign was drawing to a close.

 

She was, at that time, about forty, and was a small, neat little body

with a pale, slightly pock-marked face, snaky black curls hanging down

to her shoulders, and eyebrows arched into a perpetual inquiry. She wore

in school stiffly starched, holland aprons with bibs, one embroidered

with red one week, and one with blue the next, and was seldom seen

without a posy of flowers pinned on her breast and another tucked into

her hair.

 

Every morning, when school had assembled, and Governess, with her

starched apron and bobbing curls appeared in the doorway, there was a

great rustling and scraping of curtseying and pulling of forelocks.

‘Good morning, children,’ ‘Good morning, ma’am,’ were the formal,

old-fashioned greetings. Then, under her determined fingers the

harmonium wheezed out ‘Once in Royal’, or ‘We are but little children

weak’, prayers followed, and the day’s work began.

 

Reading, writing, and arithmetic were the principal subjects, with a

Scripture lesson every morning, and needlework every afternoon for the

girls. There was no assistant mistress; Governess taught all the classes

simultaneously, assisted only by two monitors—ex-scholars, aged about

twelve, who were paid a shilling a week each for their services.

 

Every morning at ten o’clock the Rector arrived to take the older

children for Scripture. He was a parson of the old school; a commanding

figure, tall and stout, with white hair, ruddy cheeks and an

aristocratically beaked nose, and he was as far as possible removed by

birth, education, and worldly circumstances from the lambs of his flock.

He spoke to them from a great height, physical, mental, and spiritual.

‘To order myself lowly and reverently before my betters’ was the clause

he underlined in the Church Catechism, for had he not been divinely

appointed pastor and master to those little rustics and was it not one

of his chief duties to teach them to realize this? As a man, he was

kindly disposed—a giver of blankets and coals at Christmas, and of soup

and milk puddings to the sick.

 

His lesson consisted of Bible reading, turn and turn about round the

class, of reciting from memory the names of the kings of Israel and

repeating the Church Catechism. After that, he would deliver a little

lecture on morals and behaviour. The children must not lie or steal or

be discontented or envious. God had placed them just where they were in

the social order and given them their own especial work to do; to envy

others or to try to change their own lot in life was a sin of which he

hoped they would never be guilty. From his lips the children heard

nothing of that God who is Truth and Beauty and Love; but they learned

for him and repeated to him long passages from the Authorized Version,

thus laying up treasure for themselves; so, the lessons, in spite of

much aridity, were valuable.

 

Scripture over and the Rector bowed and curtsied out of the door,

ordinary lessons began. Arithmetic was considered the most important of

the subjects taught, and those who were good at figures ranked high in

their classes. It was very simple arithmetic, extending only to the

first four rules, with the money sums, known as ‘bills of parcels’, for

the most advanced pupils.

 

The writing lesson consisted of the copying of copperplate maxims: ‘A

fool and his money are soon parted’; ‘Waste not, want not’; ‘Count ten

before you speak’, and so on. Once a week composition would be set,

usually in the form of writing a letter describing some recent event.

This was regarded chiefly as a spelling test.

 

History was not taught formally; but history readers were in use

containing such picturesque stories as those of King Alfred and the

cakes, King Canute commanding the waves, the loss of the White Ship, and

Raleigh spreading his cloak for Queen Elizabeth.

 

There were no geography readers, and, excepting what could be gleaned

from the descriptions of different parts of the world in the ordinary

readers, no geography was taught. But, for some reason or other, on the

walls of the schoolroom were hung splendid maps: The World, Europe,

North America, South America, England, Ireland, and Scotland. During

long waits in class for her turn to read, or to have her copy or sewing

examined, Laura would gaze on these maps until the shapes of the

countries with their islands and inlets became photographed on her

brain. Baffin Bay and the land around the poles were especially

fascinating to her.

 

Once a day, at whatever hour the poor, overworked mistress could find

time, a class would be called out to toe the chalked semicircle on the

floor for a reading lesson. This lesson, which should have been

pleasant, for the reading matter was good, was tedious in the extreme.

Many of the children read so slowly and haltingly that Laura, who was

impatient by nature, longed to take hold of their words and drag them

out of their mouths, and it often seemed to her that her own turn to

read would never come. As often as she could do so without being

detected, she would turn over and peep between the pages of her own

Royal Reader, and, studiously holding the book to her nose, pretend to

be following the lesson while she was pages ahead.

 

There was plenty there to enthral any child: ‘The Skater Chased by

Wolves’; ‘The Siege of Torquilstone’, from Ivanhoe; Fenimore Cooper’s

Prairie on Fire; and Washington Irving’s Capture of Wild Horses.

 

Then there were fascinating descriptions of such far-apart places as

Greenland and the Amazon; of the Pacific Ocean with its fairy islands

and coral reefs; the snows of Hudson Bay Territory and the sterile

heights of the Andes. Best of all she loved the description of the

Himalayas, which began: ‘Northward of the great plain of India, and

along its whole extent, towers the sublime mountain region of the

Himalayas, ascending gradually until it terminates in a long range of

summits wrapped in perpetual snow.’

 

Interspersed between the prose readings were poems: ‘The Slave’s Dream’;

‘Young Lochinvar’; ‘The Parting of Douglas and Marmion’; Tennyson’s

‘Brook’ and ‘Ring out, Wild Bells’; Byron’s ‘Shipwreck’; Hogg’s

‘Skylark’, and many more. ‘Lochiel’s Warning’ was a favourite with

Edmund, who often, in bed at night, might be heard declaiming: ‘Lochiel!

Lochiel! beware of the day!’ while Laura, at any time, with or without

encouragement, was ready to ‘look back into other years’ with Henry

Glassford Bell, and recite his scenes from the life of Mary Queen of

Scots, reserving her most