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

the old quarrel, she brought him in and insisted upon

making tea for him. He was by that time very old and she thought he

looked very frail; but in spite of that he had walked many miles across

country from the parish where he was doing temporary duty. He sat by the

fire while she made toast and they talked of the absent two and of her

other children and of neighbours and friends. He stayed a long time,

partly because they had so much to say to each other and partly because

he was very tired and, as she thought, ill.

 

Presently the children’s father came in from his work and there was a

strained moment which ended, to her great relief, in a polite handclasp.

The old feud was either forgotten or repented of.

 

The father could see at once that the old man was not in a fit state to

walk seven or eight miles at night in that weather and begged him not to

think of doing so. But what was to be done? They were far from a railway

station, even had there been a convenient train, and there was no

vehicle for hire within three miles. Then some one suggested that Master

Ashley’s donkey-cart would be better than nothing, and the father

departed to borrow it. He brought it to the garden gate, for he had to

drive it himself, and this, surprisingly, he was ready to do although he

had just come in tired and damp from his work and had had no proper

meal.

 

With his knees wrapped round in an old fur coat that had once belonged

to the children’s grandmother and a hot brick at his feet, the visitor

was about to say ‘Farewell,’ when the mother, Martha like, exclaimed:

‘I’m sorry it’s such a poor turn-out for a gentleman like you to ride

in.’

 

‘Poor!’ he exclaimed. ‘I’m proud of it and shall always remember this

day. My Master rode through Jerusalem on one of these dear patient

beasts, you know!’

 

A fortnight afterwards she read in the local paper that the Rev. Alfred

Augustus Peregrine Marley, who was relieving the Vicar of Such-and-such

a parish, had collapsed and died at the altar while administering Holy

Communion.

XV

Harvest Home

 

If one of the women was accused of hoarding her best clothes instead of

wearing them, she would laugh and say: ‘Ah! I be savin’ they for high

days an’ holidays an’ bonfire nights.’ If she had, they would have

lasted a long time, for there were very few holidays and scarcely any

which called for a special toilet.

 

Christmas Day passed very quietly. The men had a holiday from work and

the children from school and the churchgoers attended special Christmas

services. Mothers who had young children would buy them an orange each

and a handful of nuts; but, except at the end house and the inn, there

was no hanging up of stockings, and those who had no kind elder sister

or aunt in service to send them parcels got no Christmas presents.

 

Still, they did manage to make a little festival of it. Every year the

farmer killed an ox for the purpose and gave each of his men a joint of

beef, which duly appeared on the Christmas dinner-table together with

plum pudding—not Christmas pudding, but suet duff with a good

sprinkling of raisins. Ivy and other evergreens (it was not a holly

country) were hung from the ceiling and over the pictures; a bottle of

homemade wine was uncorked, a good fire was made up, and, with doors

and windows closed against the keen, wintry weather, they all settled

down by their own firesides for a kind of super-Sunday. There was little

visiting of neighbours and there were no family reunions, for the girls

in service could not be spared at that season, and the few boys who had

gone out in the world were mostly serving abroad in the Army.

 

There were still bands of mummers in some of the larger villages, and

village choirs went carol-singing about the countryside; but none of

these came to the hamlet, for they knew the collection to be expected

there would not make it worth their while. A few families, sitting by

their own firesides, would sing carols and songs; that, and more and

better food and a better fire than usual, made up their Christmas cheer.

 

The Sunday of the Feast was more exciting. Then strangers, as well as

friends, came from far and near to throng the houses and inn and to

promenade on the stretch of road which ran through the hamlet. On that

day the big ovens were heated and nearly every family managed to have a

joint of beef and a Yorkshire pudding for dinner. The men wore their

best suits, complete with collar and tie, and the women brought out

their treasured finery and wore it, for, even if no relatives from a

distance were expected, some one might be ‘popping in’, if not to

dinner, to tea or supper. Half a crown, at least, had been saved from

the harvest money for spending at the inn, and the jugs and beer-cans

went merrily round the Rise. ‘Arter all, ‘tis the Feast,’ they said;

‘an’t only comes once a year,’ and they enjoyed the extra food and drink

and the excitement of seeing so many people about, never dreaming that

they were celebrating the dedication five hundred years before of the

little old church in the mother village which so few of them attended.

 

Those of the Fordlow people who liked to see life had on that day to go

to Lark Rise, for, beyond the extra food, there was no celebration in

the mother village. Some time early in that century the scene of the

Feast had shifted from the site of the church to that of the only inn in

the parish.

 

At least a hundred people, friends and strangers, came from the market

town and surrounding villages; not that there was anything to do at Lark

Rise, or much to see; but because it was Fordlow Feast and a pleasant

walk with a drink at the end was a good way of spending a fine September

Sunday evening.

 

The Monday of the Feast—for it lasted two days—was kept by women and

children only, the men being at work. It was a great day for tea

parties; mothers and sisters and aunts and cousins coming in droves from

about the neighbourhood. The chief delicacy at these teas was ‘baker’s

cake’, a rich, fruity, spicy dough cake, obtained in the following

manner. The housewife provided all the ingredients excepting the dough,

putting raisins and currants, lard, sugar, and spice in a basin which

she gave to the baker, who added the dough, made and baked the cake, and

returned it, beautifully browned in his big oven. The charge was the

same as that for a loaf of bread the same size, and the result was

delicious. ‘There’s only one fault wi’ these ‘ere baker’s cakes,’ the

women used to say; ‘they won’t keep!’ And they would not; they were too

good and there were too many children about.

 

The women made their houses very clean and neat for Feast Monday, and,

with hollyhocks nodding in at the open windows and a sight of the clean,

yellow stubble of the cleared fields beyond, and the hum of friendly

talk and laughter within, the tea parties were very pleasant.

 

At the beginning of the ‘eighties the outside world remembered Fordlow

Feast to the extent of sending one old woman with a gingerbread stall.

On it were gingerbread babies with currants for eyes, brown-and-white

striped peppermint humbugs, sticks of pink-and-white rock, and a few

boxes and bottles of other sweets. Even there, on that little old stall

with its canvas awning, the first sign of changing taste might have been

seen, for, one year, side by side with the gingerbread babies, stood a

box filled with thin, dark brown slabs packed in pink paper. ‘What is

that brown sweet?’ asked Laura, spelling out the word ‘Chocolate’. A

visiting cousin, being fairly well educated and a great reader, already

knew it by name. ‘Oh, that’s chocolate,’ he said off-handedly. ‘But

don’t buy any; it’s for drinking. They have it for breakfast in France.’

A year or two later, chocolate was a favourite sweet even in a place as

remote as the hamlet; but it could no longer be bought from the

gingerbread stall, for the old woman no longer brought it to the Feast.

Perhaps she had died. Except for the tea-drinkings, Feast Monday had

died, too, as a holiday.

 

The younger hamlet people still went occasionally to feasts and club

walkings in other villages. In larger places these were like small

fairs, with roundabouts, swings, and coconut shies. At the club walkings

there were brass bands and processions of the club members, all wearing

their club colours in the shape of rosettes and wide sashes worn across

the breast. There was dancing on the green to the strains of the band,

and country people came from miles around to the village where the feast

or club walking was being held.

 

Palm Sunday, known locally as Fig Sunday, was a minor hamlet festival.

Sprays of soft gold and silver willow catkins, called ‘palm’ in that

part of the country, were brought indoors to decorate the houses and be

worn as buttonholes for churchgoing. The children at the end house

loved fetching in the palm and putting it in pots and vases and hanging

it over the picture frames. Better still, they loved the old custom of

eating figs on Palm Sunday. The week before, the innkeeper’s wife would

get in a stock to be sold in pennyworths in her small grocery store.

Some of the more expert cooks among the women would use these to make

fig puddings for dinner and the children bought pennyworths and ate them

out of screws of blue sugar paper on their way to Sunday school.

 

The gathering of the palm branches must have been a survival from old

Catholic days, when, in many English churches, the willow served for

palm to be blessed on Palm Sunday. The original significance of eating

figs on that day had long been forgotten; but it was regarded as an

important duty, and children ordinarily selfish would give one of their

figs, or at least a bite out of one, to the few unfortunates who had

been given no penny.

 

No such mystery surrounded the making of a bonfire on November 5th.

Parents would tell inquiring children all about the Gunpowder Plot and

‘that unked ole Guy Fawkes in his black mask’, as though it had all

happened recently; and, the night before, the boys and youths of the

hamlet would go round knocking at all but the poorest doors and

chanting:

 

Remember, remember, the fifth of November,

The gunpowder treason and plot.

A stick or a stake, for King James’s sake

Will you please to give us a faggot?

If you won’t give us one, we’ll take two!

The better for us and the worse for you.

 

The few housewives who possessed faggot stacks (cut from the undergrowth

of woods in the autumn and sold at one and sixpence a score) would give

them a bundle or two; others would give them hedge-trimmings, or a piece

of old line-post, or anything else that was handy, and, altogether, they

managed to collect enough wood to make a modest bonfire which they lit

on one of the open spaces and capered and shouted around and roasted

potatoes and chestnuts in the ashes, after the manner of boys

everywhere.

 

Harvest time was a natural holiday. ‘A hemmed hard-worked ‘un,’