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

a few moments, then said, ‘Which college

shall I go to when I am grown up, Oxford or Cambridge?’ and his

expression of innocent good faith checked his aunt’s inclination to

laugh.

 

‘There won’t be any college for you, my poor little man,’ she explained.

‘You’ll have to go to work as soon as you leave school; but if I could

have my way, you should go to the very best college in Oxford,’ and,

for the rest of the walk she entertained them with stories of her

mother’s family, the Wallingtons.

 

She said one of her uncles had written a book and she thought Edmund

might turn out to be clever, like him. But when they told their mother

what she had said she tossed her head and said she had never heard about

any book, and what if he had, wasting his time. It was not as if he was

like Shakespeare or Miss Braddon or anybody like that. And she hoped

Edmund would not turn out to be clever. Brains were no good to a working

man; they only made him discontented and saucy and lose his jobs. She’d

seen it happen again and again.

 

Yet she had brains of her own and her education had been above the

average in her station in life. She had been born and brought up in a

cottage standing in the churchyard of a neighbouring village, ‘just like

the little girl in We are Seven‘, she used to tell her own children.

At the time when she was a small girl in the churchyard cottage the

incumbent of the parish had been an old man and with him had lived his

still more aged sister. This lady, whose name was Miss Lowe, had become

very fond of the pretty, fair-haired little girl at the churchyard

cottage and had had her at the Rectory every day out of school hours.

Little Emma had a sweet voice and she was supposed to go there for

singing lessons; but she had learned other things, too, including

old-world manners and to write a beautiful antique hand with delicate,

open-looped pointed letters and long ‘s’s’, such as her instructress and

other young ladies had been taught in the last quarter of the eighteenth

century.

 

Miss Lowe was then nearly eighty, and had long been dead when Laura, at

two and a half years old, had been taken by her mother to see the by

then very aged Rector. The visit was one of her earliest memories, which

survived as an indistinct impression of twilight in a room with dark

green walls and the branch of a tree against the outside of the window;

and, more distinctly, a pair of trembling, veiny hands putting something

smooth and cold and round into her own. The smooth cold roundness was

accounted for afterwards. The old gentleman, it appeared, had given her

a china mug which had been his sister’s in her nursery days. It had

stood on the mantelpiece at the end house for years, a beautiful old

piece with a design of heavy green foliage on a ground of translucent

whiteness. Afterwards it got broken, which was strange in that careful

home; but Laura carried the design in her mind’s eye for the rest of her

life and would sometimes wonder if it accounted for her lifelong love of

green and white in conjunction.

 

Their mother would often tell the children about the Rectory and her own

home in the churchyard, and how the choir, in which her father played

the violin, would bring their instruments and practise there in the

evening. But she liked better to tell of that other rectory where she

had been nurse to the children. The living was small and the Rector was

poor, but three maids had been possible in those days, a cook-general, a

young housemaid, and Nurse Emma. They must have been needed in that

large, rambling old house, in which lived the Rector and his wife, their

nine children, three maids, and often three or four young men pupils.

They had all had such jolly, happy times she said; all of them, family

and maids and pupils, singing glees and part songs in the drawing-room

in the evening. But what thrilled Laura most was that she herself had

had a narrow escape from never having been born at all. Some relatives

of the family who had settled in New South Wales had come to England on

a visit and nearly persuaded Nurse Emma to go back with them. Indeed, it

was all settled when, one night, they began talking about snakes, which,

according to their account, infested their Australian bungalow and

garden. ‘Then,’ said Emma, ‘I shan’t go, for I can’t abear the horrid

creatures,’ and she did not go, but got married instead and became the

mother of Edmund and Laura. But it seems that the call was genuine, that

Australia had something for, or required something of, her descendants;

for of the next generation her own second son became a fruit-farmer in

Queensland, and of the next a son of Laura’s is now an engineer in

Brisbane.

 

The little Johnstones were always held up as an example to the end house

children. They were always kind to each other and obedient to their

elders, never grubby or rowdy or inconsiderate. Perhaps they

deteriorated after Nurse Emma left, for Laura remembered being taken to

see them before they left the neighbourhood for good, when one of the

big boys pulled her hair and made faces at her and buried her doll

beneath a tree in the orchard, with one of the cook’s aprons tied round

his neck by way of a surplice.

 

The eldest girl, Miss Lily, then about nineteen, walked miles of the way

back home with them and returned alone in the twilight (so Victorian

young ladies were not always as carefully guarded as they are now

supposed to have been!). Laura remembered the low murmur of conversation

behind her as she rode for a lift on the front of the baby carriage with

her heels dangling over the front wheel. Both a Sir George and a Mr.

Looker, it appeared, were paying Miss Lily ‘particular attention’ at the

time, and their rival advantages were under discussion. Every now and

then Miss Lily would protest, ‘But, Emma, Sir George paid me _particular

attention_. Many remarked upon it to Mamma,’ and Emma would say, ‘But,

Miss Lily, my dear, do you think he is serious?’ Perhaps he was, for

Miss Lily was a lovely girl; but it was as Mrs. Looker she became a kind

of fairy godmother to the end house family. A Christmas parcel of books

and toys came from her regularly, and although she never saw her old

nurse again, they were still writing to each other in the

nineteen-twenties.

 

Around the hamlet cottages played many little children, too young to go

to school. Every morning they were bundled into a piece of old shawl

crossed on the chest and tied in a hard knot at the back, a slice of

food was thrust into their hands and they were told to ‘go play’ while

their mothers got on with the housework. In winter, their little limbs

purple-mottled with cold, they would stamp around playing horses or

engines. In summer they would make mud pies in the dust, moistening them

from their own most intimate water supply. If they fell down or hurt

themselves in any other way, they did not run indoors for comfort, for

they knew that all they would get would be ‘Sarves ye right. You

should’ve looked where you wer’ a-goin’!’

 

They were like little foals turned out to grass, and received about as

much attention. They might, and often did, have running noses and

chilblains on hands, feet and ear-tips; but they hardly ever were ill

enough to have to stay indoors, and grew sturdy and strong, so the

system must have suited them. ‘Makes ‘em hardy,’ their mothers said, and

hardy, indeed, they became, just as the men and women and older boys and

girls of the hamlet were hardy, in body and spirit.

 

Sometimes Laura and Edmund would go out to play with the other children.

Their father did not like this; he said they were little savages

already. But their mother maintained that, as they would have to go to

school soon, it was better for them to fall in at once with the hamlet

ways. ‘Besides,’ she would say, ‘why shouldn’t they? There’s nothing the

matter with Lark Rise folks but poverty, and that’s no crime. If it was,

we should likely be hung ourselves.’

 

So the children went out to play and often had happy times, outlining

houses with scraps of broken crockery and furnishing them with moss and

stones; or lying on their stomachs in the dust to peer down into the

deep cracks dry weather always produced in that stiff, clayey soil; or

making snow men or sliding on puddles in winter.

 

Other times were not so pleasant, for a quarrel would arise and kicks

and blows would fly freely, and how hard those little two-year-old fists

could hit out! To say that a child was as broad as it was long was

considered a compliment by the hamlet mothers, and some of those

toddlers in their knotted woollen wrappings were as near square as

anything human can be. One little girl named Rosie Phillips fascinated

Laura. She was plump and hard and as rosy-cheeked as an apple, with the

deepest of dimples and hair like bronze wire. No matter how hard the

other children bumped into her in the games, she stood four-square, as

firm as a little rock. She was a very hard hitter and had little,

pointed, white teeth that bit. The two tamer children always came out

worst in these conflicts. Then they would make a dash on their long

stalky legs for their own garden gate, followed by stones and cries of

‘Long-shanks! Cowardy, cowardy custards!’

 

During those early years at the end house plans were always being made

and discussed. Edmund must be apprenticed to a good trade—a

carpenter’s, perhaps—for if a man had a good trade in his hands he was

always sure of a living. Laura might become a school-teacher, or, if

that proved impossible, a children’s nurse in a good family. But, first

and foremost, the family must move from Lark Rise to a house in the

market town. It had always been the parents’ intention to leave. When he

met and married his wife the father was a stranger in the neighbourhood,

working for a few months on the restoration of the church in a

neighbouring parish and the end house had been taken as a temporary

home. Then the children had come and other things had happened to delay

the removal. They could not give notice until Michaelmas Day, or another

baby was coming, or they must wait until the pig was killed or the

allotment crops were brought in; there was always some obstacle, and at

the end of seven years they were still at the end house and still

talking almost daily about leaving it. Fifty years later the father had

died there and the mother was living there alone.

 

When Laura approached school-going age the discussions became more

urgent. Her father did not want the children to go to school with the

hamlet children and for once her mother agreed with him. Not because, as

he said, they ought to have a better education than they could get at

Lark Rise; but because she feared they would tear their clothes and

catch cold and get dirty heads going the mile and a half to and from the

school in the mother village. So vacant cottages in the market town were

inspected