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

as she was in theory, the dear soul was in practice a

little snobbish. She courted the notice of the betters, though, she was

wont to declare, they were only betters when they were better men and

women. An invitation to tea at the Rectory was, to her, something to be

fished for before and talked about afterwards, and when the daughter of

a poor, but aristocratic local family set up as a music teacher, Miss

Shepherd at once decided to learn the violin.

 

Laura was once the delighted witness of a funny little display of this

weakness. It was the day of the school treat at the Manor House, and the

children had met at the school and were being marched, two and two,

through garden and shrubbery paths to the back door. Other guests, such

as the curate, the doctor’s widow, and the daughters of the rich farmer,

who were to have tea in the drawing-room while the children feasted in

the servants’ hall, were going to the front door.

 

Now, Miss Holmes had always marched right in with her pupils and sipped

her own tea and nibbled her cake between attending to their wants; but

Miss Shepherd was more ambitious. When the procession reached a point

where the shrubbery path crossed the main drive which led to the front

door, she paused and considered; then said, ‘I think I will go to the

front door, dears. I want to see how well you can behave without me,’

and off she branched up the drive in her best brown frock, tight little

velvet hip-length jacket, and long fur boa wound like a snake round her

neck, followed by at least one pair of cynically smiling little eyes.

 

She had the satisfaction of ringing the front-door bell and drinking tea

in the drawing-room; but it was a short-lived triumph. In a very few

minutes she was out in the servants’ hall, passing bread and butter to

her charges and whispering to one of her monitors that ‘Dear Mrs.

Bracewell gave me my tea first, because, as she said, she knew I was

anxious to get back to my children.’

 

Squire himself called at the school once a year; but nobody felt nervous

when his red, jovial face appeared in the doorway, and smiles broke out

all around when he told his errand. He was arranging a concert, to take

place in the schoolroom, and would like some of the children to sing. He

took his responsibilities less seriously than his mother did hers;

spending most of his days roaming the fields, and spinneys with a gun

under his arm and a brace of spaniels at his heels, leaving her to

manage house and gardens and what was left of the family estate, as well

as to support the family dignity. His one indoor accomplishment was

playing the banjo and singing Negro songs. He had trained a few of the

village youths to support him in his Negro Minstrel Troupe, which always

formed the backbone of the annual concert programme. A few other items

were contributed by his and his mother’s friends and the gaps were

filled up by the school-children.

 

So, after his visit, the school became animated. What should be sung and

who should sing it were the questions of the moment. Finally, it was

arranged that everybody should sing something. Even Laura, who had

neither voice nor ear for music, was to join in the communal songs.

 

They sang, very badly, mildly pretty spring and Nature songs from the

School Song Book, such as they had sung the year before and the year

before that, some of them actually the same songs. One year Miss

Shepherd thought it ‘would be nice’ to sing a Primrose League song to

‘please Squire’. One verse ran:

 

O come, ye Tories, all unite

To bear the Primrose badge with might,

And work and hope and strive and fight

And pray may God defend the right.

 

When Laura’s father heard this, he wrote a stiffly polite little note to

the mistress, saying that, as a Liberal of pronounced views, he could

not allow a child of his to sing such a song. Laura did not tell him she

had already been asked to sing very softly, not to put the other singers

out of tune. ‘Just move your lips, dear,’ the mistress had said. Laura,

in fact, was to have gone on to help dress the stage, where all the

girls who were taking part in the programme sat in a row throughout the

performance, forming a background for the soloists. That year she had

the pleasure of sitting among the audience and hearing the criticism, as

well as seeing the stage and listening to the programme. A good

three-pennyworth (‘children, half-price’).

 

When the great night came, the whole population of the neighbourhood

assembled, for it was the only public entertainment of the year. Squire

and his Negro Minstrel Troupe was the great attraction. They went on,

dressed in red and blue, their hands and faces blackened with burnt

cork, and rattled their bones and cracked their jokes and sang such

songs as:

 

A friend of Darwin’s came to me,

A million years ago said he

You had a tail and no great toe.

I answered him, ‘That may be so,

But I’ve one now, I’ll let you know—

G-r-r-r-r-r out!’

 

Very few in the audience had heard of Darwin or his theory; but they all

knew what ‘G-r-r-r-r-r out!’ meant, especially when emphasised by a kick

on Tom Binns’s backside by Squire’s boot. The schoolroom rocked. ‘I

pretty well busted me sides wi’ laughin’,’ they said afterwards.

 

After the applause had died down, a little bell would ring and a robust

curate from a neighbouring village would announce the next item. Most of

these were piano pieces, played singly, or as duets, by young ladies in

white evening frocks, cut in a modest V at the neck, and white kid

gloves reaching to the elbow. As their contributions to the programme

were announced, they would rise from the front seat in the audience; a

gentleman—two gentlemen—would spring forward, and between them hand

the fair performer up the three shallow steps which led to the platform

and hand her over to yet another gentleman, who led her to the piano and

held her gloves and fan and turned her music pages.

 

‘Tinkle, tinkle, tinkle’, went the piano, and ‘Warble, warble, warble’

went the voices, as the performers worked their conscientious way

through the show piano pieces and popular drawing-room ballads of the

moment. Each performer was greeted and dismissed with a round of

applause, which served the double purpose of encouraging the singer and

relieving the boredom of the audience. Youths and young men in the back

seats would sometimes carry this too far, drowning the programme with

their stamping and shouting until they had to be reprimanded, when they

would subside sulkily, complaining, ‘Us’ve paid our sixpences, ain’t

we?’

 

Once, when the athletic curate sang ‘You should see Me dance the Polka’

he accompanied the song with such violent action that he polked part of

the platform down and left the double row of schoolgirls hanging in the

air on the backmost planks while he finished his song on the floor:

 

You should see me dance the polka,

You should see me cover the ground,

You should see my coat tails flying

As I dance my way around.

 

Edmund and Laura had the words and actions by heart, if not the tune,

and polked that night in their mother’s bedroom until they woke up the

baby and were slapped. A sad ending to an evening of pure bliss.

 

When the school-children on the platform rose and came forward to sing

they, also, were applauded; but their performance and those of the young

ladies were but the lettuce in the salad; all the flavour was in the

comic items.

 

Now, Miss Shepherd was a poet, and had several times turned out a neat

verse to supplement those of a song she considered too short. One year

she took the National Anthem in hand and added a verse. It ran:

 

May every village school

Uphold Victoria’s rule,

To Church and State be true,

God save the Queen.

 

Which pleased Squire so much that he talked of sending it to the

newspapers.

 

Going home with lanterns swinging down the long dark road, the groups

would discuss the evening’s entertainment. Squire’s Minstrels and the

curate’s songs were always unreservedly praised and the young ladies’

performances were tolerated, although, often, a man would complain, ‘I

don’t know if I be goin’ deaf, or what; but I couldn’t hear a dommed

word any of ‘em said.’ As to the school-children’s efforts, criticism

was applied more to how they looked than to their musical performance.

Those who had scuffled or giggled, or even blushed, heard of it from

their parents, while such remarks were frequent as: ‘Got up to kill,

that young Mary Ann Parish was!’ or ‘I declare I could see the hem o’

young Rose Mitchell’s breeches showin’,’ or ‘That Em Tuffrey made a poor

show. Whatever wer’ her mother a thinkin’ on?’ Taken all in all, they

enjoyed the concert almost as much as their grandchildren enjoy the

cinema.

XIII

May Day

 

After the excitement of the concert came the long winter months, when

snowstorms left patches on the ploughed fields, like scrapings of sauce

on left-over pieces of Christmas pudding, until the rains came and

washed them away and the children, carrying old umbrellas to school, had

them turned inside out by the wind, and cottage chimneys smoked and

washing had to be dried indoors. But at last came spring and spring

brought May Day, the greatest day in the year from the children’s point

of view.

 

The May garland was all that survived there of the old May Day

festivities. The maypole and the May games and May dances in which whole

parishes had joined had long been forgotten. Beyond giving flowers for

the garland and pointing out how things should be done and telling how

they had been done in their own young days, the older people took no

part in the revels.

 

For the children as the day approached all hardships were forgotten and

troubles melted away. The only thing that mattered was the weather.

‘Will it be fine?’ was the constant question, and many an’aged eye was

turned skyward in response to read the signs of wind and cloud.

Fortunately, it was always reasonably fine. Showers there were, of

course, at that season, but never a May Day of hopelessly drenching

rain, and the May garland was carried in procession every year

throughout the ‘eighties.

 

The garland was made, or ‘dressed’, in the schoolroom. Formerly it had

been dressed out of doors, or in one of the cottages, or in some one’s

barn; but dressed it had been and probably in much the same fashion for

countless generations.

 

The foundation of the garland was a light wooden framework of uprights

supporting graduated hoops, forming a bell-shaped structure about four

feet high. This frame was covered with flowers, bunched and set closely,

after the manner of wreath-making.

 

On the last morning of April the children would come to school with

bunches, baskets, arms and pinafores full of flowers—every blossom they

could find in the fields and hedges or beg from parents and neighbours.

On the previous Sunday some of the bigger boys would have walked six or

eight miles to a distant wood where primroses grew. These, with violets

from the hedgerows, cowslips from the meadows, and wallflowers, oxlips,

and sprays of pale red flowering currant from the cottage gardens formed

the main supply. A sweetbriar hedge in the schoolmistress’s garden