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

>pudding washed down with beer, just as they did at the harvest home

dinner.

 

The little party from the end house walked alone in the straggling

procession; the mother, still rather pale from her recent confinement,

pushing the baby carriage with little May and baby Elizabeth; Laura and

Edmund, on tiptoe with excitement, helping to shove the carriage over

the rough turf of the park. Their father had not come. He did not care

for ‘do’s’, and had gone to work at his bench at the shop alone while

his workmates held high holiday. There were as yet no trade union laws

to forbid such singularity.

 

There were more people in the park than the children had ever seen

together, and the roundabouts, swings, and coconut shies were doing a

roaring trade. Tea was partaken of in a huge marquee in relays, one

parish at a time, and the sound of the brass band, roundabout

hurdy-gurdy, coconut thwacks, and showmen’s shouting surged round the

frail, canvas walls like a roaring sea.

 

Within, the mingled scents of hot tea, dough cake, tobacco smoke, and

trampled grass lent a holiday savour to a simple menu. But if the

provisions were simple in quality, the quantity was prodigious. Clothes

baskets of bread and butter and jam cut in thick slices and watering

cans of tea, already milked and sugared, were handed round and

disappeared in a twinkling. ‘God bless my soul,’ one old clergyman

exclaimed. ‘Where on earth do they put it all!’ They put three-fourths

of it in the same handy receptacle he himself used for his four-course

dinners; but the fourth part went into their pockets. That was their

little weakness—not to be satisfied with a bellyful, but to manage

somehow to secure a portion to take home for next day.

 

After tea there were sports, with races, high jumps, dipping heads into

tubs of water to retrieve sixpences with the teeth, grinning through

horse-collars, the prize going to the one making the most gtotesque

face, and, to crown all, climbing the greased pole for the prize leg of

mutton. This was a tough job, as the pole was as tall and slender as a

telephone post and extremely slippery. Prudent wives would not allow

their husbands to attempt it on account of spoiling their clothes, so

the competition was left to the ragamuffins and a few experts who had

had the foresight to bring with them a pair of old trousers. This

competition must have run concurrently with the other events, for all

the afternoon there was a crowd around it, and first one, then another,

would ‘have a go’. It was painful to watch the climbers, shinning up a

few inches, then slipping back again, and, as one retired, another

taking his place, until, late in the afternoon, the champion arrived,

climbed slowly but steadily to the top and threw down the joint, which,

by the way, must have been already roasted after four or five hours in

the burning sun. It was whispered around that he had carried a bag of

ashes and sprinkled them on the greasy surface as he ascended.

 

The local gentlepeople promenaded the ground in parties: stout,

red-faced squires, raising their straw hats to mop their foreheads;

hunting ladies, incongruously garbed in silks and ostrich-feather boas;

young girls in embroidered white muslin and boys in Eton suits. They had

kind words for everybody, especially for the poor and lonely, and, from

time to time, they would pause before some sight and try to enter into

the spirit of the other beholders; but everywhere their arrival hushed

the mirth, and there was a sigh of relief when they moved on. After

dancing the first dance they disappeared, and ‘now we can have some

fun’, the people said.

 

All this time Edmund and Laura, with about two hundred other children,

had been let loose in the crowd to spend their pennies and watch the

fun. They rode on the wooden horses, swung in the swing-boats, pried

around coconut shies and shooting booths munching coconut or rock or

long strips of black liquorice, until their hands were sticky and their

faces grimed.

 

Laura, who hated crowds and noise, was soon tired of it and looked

longingly at the shady trees and woods and spinneys around the big open

space where the fair was held. But before she escaped a new and

wonderful experience awaited her. Before one of the booths a man was

beating a drum and before him two girls were posturing and pirouetting.

‘Walk up! Walk up!’ he was shouting. ‘Walk up and see the tightrope

dancing! Only one penny admission. Walk up! Walk up!’ Laura paid her

penny and walked up, as did about a dozen others, the man and girls came

inside, the flap of the tent was drawn, and the show began.

 

Laura had never heard of tightrope dancing before and she was not sure

she was not dreaming it then. The outer tumult beat against the frail

walls of the tent, but within was a magic circle of quiet. As she

crossed to take her place with the other spectators, her feet sank deep

into sawdust; and, in the subdued light which filtered through the

canvas, the broad, white, pock-marked face of the man in his faded red

satin and the tinsel crowns and tights of the girls seemed as unreal as

a dream.

 

The girl who did the tightrope dancing was a fair, delicate-looking

child with grey eyes and fat, pale-brown ringlets, a great contrast to

her dark, bouncing gipsy-looking sister, and when she mounted to the

rope stretched between two poles and did a few dance steps as she swayed

gracefully along it, Laura gazed and gazed, speechless with admiration.

To the simple country-bred child the performance was marvellous. It came

to an end all too soon for her; for not much could be done to entertain

a house which only brought a shilling or so to the box office; but the

impression remained with her as a glimpse into a new and fascinating

world. There were few five-barred gates in the vicinity of Laura’s home

on which she did not attempt a little pirouetting along the top bar

during the next year or two.

 

The tightrope dancing was her outstanding memory of the great Queen’s

Jubilee; but the merrymaking went on for hours after that. All the way

home in the twilight, the end house party could hear the popping of

fireworks behind them and, turning, see rockets and showers of golden

rain above the dark tree-tops. At last, standing at their own garden

gate, they heard the roaring of cheers from hundreds of throats and the

band playing ‘God save the Queen’.

 

They were first home and the hamlet was in darkness, but the twilight

was luminous over the fields and the sky right round to the north was

still faintly pink. A cat rubbed itself against their legs and mewed;

the pig in the sty woke and grunted a protest against the long day’s

neglect. A light breeze rustled through the green corn and shivered the

garden bushes, releasing the scent of stocks and roses and sunbaked

grass and the grosser smells of cabbage beds and pigsties. It had been a

great day—the greatest day they were ever likely to see, however long

they lived, they were told; but it was over and they were home and home

was best.

 

After the jubilee nothing ever seemed quite the same. The old Rector

died and the farmer, who had seemed immovable excepting by death, had to

retire to make way for the heir of the landowning nobleman who intended

to farm the family estates himself. He brought with him the new

self-binding reaping machine and women were no longer required in the

harvest field. At the hamlet several new brides took possession of

houses previously occupied by elderly people and brought new ideas into

the place. The last of the bustles disappeared and leg-o’-mutton sleeves

were ‘all the go’. The new Rector’s wife took her Mothers’ Meeting women

for a trip to London. Babies were christened new names; Wanda was one,

Gwendolin another. The innkeeper’s wife got in cases of tinned salmon

and Australian rabbit. The Sanitary Inspector appeared for the first

time at the hamlet and shook his head over the pigsties and privies.

Wages rose, prices soared, and new needs multiplied. People began to

speak of ‘before the jubilee’ much as we in the nineteen-twenties spoke

of ‘before the war’, either as a golden time or as one of exploded

ideas, according to the age of the speaker.

 

And all the time boys were being born or growing up in the parish,

expecting to follow the plough all their lives, or, at most, to do a

little mild soldiering or go to work in a town. Gallipoli? Kut? Vimy

Ridge? Ypres? What did they know of such places? But they were to know

them, and when the time came they did not flinch. Eleven out of that

tiny community never came back again. A brass plate on the wall of the

church immediately over the old end house seat is engraved with their

names. A double column, five names long, then, last and alone, the name

of Edmund.

 

Transcriber’s note:

 

The edition used as base for this book contained the

following errors, which have been corrected. These

corrections are the readings found in the 1945 edition

of the trilogy:

 

Page 85 (Chapter V “Survivals”):

She dozed and woke again. it was still there.

=> She dozed and woke again. It was still there.

 

Page 245 (Chapter XIV “To Church on Sunday”):

No listener nooded or ‘lost the thread’ when he was in the pulpit

=> No listener nodded or ‘lost the thread’ when he was in the pulpit

 

[End of Lark Rise by Flora Thompson]