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

and often it seemed that the next week or the next month they

would be leaving Lark Rise for ever; but, again, each time something

would happen to prevent the removal, and, gradually, a new idea arose.

To gain time, their father would teach the two eldest children to read

and write, so that, if approached by the School Attendance Office, their

mother could say they were leaving the hamlet shortly and, in the

meantime, were being taught at home.

 

So their father brought home two copies of Mavor’s First Reader and

taught them the alphabet; but just as Laura was beginning on words of

one syllable, he was sent away to work on a distant job, only coming

home at week-ends. Laura, left at the ‘C-a-t s-i-t-s on the m-a-t’

stage, had then to carry her book round after her mother as she went

about her housework, asking: ‘Please, Mother, what does h-o-u-s-e

spell?’ or ‘W-a-l-k, Mother, what is that?’ Often when her mother was

too busy or too irritated to attend to her, she would sit and gaze on a

page that might as well have been printed in Hebrew for all she could

make of it, frowning and poring over the print as though she would wring

out the meaning by force of concentration.

 

After weeks of this, there came a day when, quite suddenly, as it seemed

to her, the printed characters took on a meaning. There were still many

words, even in the first pages of that simple primer, she could not

decipher; but she could skip those and yet make sense of the whole. ‘I’m

reading! I’m reading!’ she cried aloud. ‘Oh, Mother! Oh, Edmund! I’m

reading!’

 

There were not many books in the house, although in this respect the

family was better off than its neighbours; for, in addition to ‘Father’s

books’, mostly unreadable as yet, and Mother’s Bible and _Pilgrim’s

Progress_, there were a few children’s books which the Johnstones had

turned out from their nursery when they left the neighbourhood. So, in

time, she was able to read Grimms’ Fairy Tales, Gulliver’s Travels,

The Daisy Chain, and Mrs. Molesworth’s Cuckoo Clock and Carrots.

 

As she was seldom seen without an open book in her hand, it was not long

before the neighbours knew she could read. They did not approve of this

at all. None of their children had learned to read before they went to

school, and then only under compulsion, and they thought that Laura, by

doing so, had stolen a march on them. So they attacked her mother about

it, her father conveniently being away. ‘He’d no business to teach the

child himself,’ they said. ‘Schools be the places for teaching, and

you’ll likely get wrong for him doing it when governess finds out.’

Others, more kindly disposed, said Laura was trying her eyes and begged

her mother to put an end to her studies; but, as fast as one book was

hidden away from her, she found another, for anything in print drew her

eyes as a magnet draws steel.

 

Edmund did not learn to read quite so early; but when he did, he learned

more thoroughly. No skipping unknown words for him and guessing what

they meant by the context; he mastered every page before he turned over,

and his mother was more patient with his inquiries, for Edmund was her

darling.

 

If the two children could have gone on as they were doing, and have had

access to suitable books as they advanced, they would probably have

learnt more than they did during their brief schooldays. But that happy

time of discovery did not last. A woman, the frequent absences from

school of whose child had brought the dreaded Attendance Officer to her

door, informed him of the end house scandal, and he went there and

threatened Laura’s mother with all manner of penalties if Laura was not

in school at nine o’clock the next Monday morning.

 

So there was to be no Oxford or Cambridge for Edmund. No school other

than the National School for either. They would have to pick up what

learning they could like chickens pecking for grain—a little at school,

more from books, and some by dipping into the store of others.

 

Sometimes, later, when they read about children whose lives were very

different from their own, children who had nurseries with rocking-horses

and went to parties and for seaside holidays and were encouraged to do

and praised for doing just those things they themselves were thought odd

for, they wondered why they had alighted at birth upon such an

unpromising spot as Lark Rise.

 

That was indoors. Outside there was plenty to see and hear and learn,

for the hamlet people were interesting, and almost every one of them

interesting in some different way to the others, and to Laura the old

people were the most interesting of all, for they told her about the old

times and could sing old songs and remember old customs, although they

could never remember enough to satisfy her. She sometimes wished she

could make the earth and stones speak and tell her about all the dead

people who had trodden upon them. She was fond of collecting stones of

all shapes and colours, and for years played with the idea that, one

day, she would touch a secret spring and a stone would fly open and

reveal a parchment which would tell her exactly what the world was like

when it was written and placed there.

 

There were no bought pleasures, and, if there had been, there was no

money to pay for them; but there were the sights, sounds and scents of

the different seasons: spring with its fields of young wheat-blades

bending in the wind as the cloud-shadows swept over them; summer with

its ripening grain and its flowers and fruit and its thunderstorms, and

how the thunder growled and rattled over that flat land and what

boiling, sizzling downpours it brought! With August came the harvest and

the fields settled down to the long winter rest, when the snow was often

piled high and frozen, so that the buried hedges could be walked over,

and strange birds came for crumbs to the cottage doors and hares in

search of food left their spoor round the pigsties.

 

The children at the end house had their own private amusements, such as

guarding the clump of white violets they found blooming in a cleft of

the brook bank and called their ‘holy secret’, or pretending the

scabious, which bloomed in abundance there, had fallen in a shower from

the midsummer sky, which was exactly the same dim, dreamy blue. Another

favourite game was to creep silently up behind birds which had perched

on a rail or twig and try to touch their tails. Laura once succeeded in

this, but she was alone at the time and nobody believed she had done it.

 

A little later, remembering man’s earthy origin, ‘dust thou art and to

dust thou shalt return’, they liked to fancy themselves bubbles of

earth. When alone in the fields, with no one to see them, they would

hop, skip and jump, touching the ground as lightly as possible and

crying ‘We are bubbles of earth! Bubbles of earth! Bubbles of earth!’

 

But although they had these private fancies, unknown to their elders,

they did not grow into the ultra-sensitive, misunderstood, and thwarted

adolescents who, according to present-day writers, were a feature of

that era. Perhaps, being of mixed birth with a large proportion of

peasant blood in them, they were tougher in fibre than some. When their

bottoms were soundly smacked, as they often were, their reaction was to

make a mental note not to repeat the offence which had caused the

smacking, rather than to lay up for themselves complexes to spoil their

later lives; and when Laura, at about twelve years old, stumbled into a

rickyard where a bull was in the act of justifying its existence, the

sight did not warp her nature. She neither peeped from behind a rick,

nor fled, horrified, across country; but merely thought in her

old-fashioned way, ‘Dear me! I had better slip quietly away before the

men see me.’ The bull to her was but a bull performing a necessary

function if there was to be butter on the bread and bread and milk for

breakfast, and she thought it quite natural that the men in attendance

at such functions should prefer not to have women or little girls as

spectators. They would have felt, as they would have said, ‘a bit

okkard’. So she just withdrew and went another way round without so much

as a kink in her subconscious.

 

From the time the two children began school they were merged in the

hamlet life, sharing the work and play and mischief of their younger

companions and taking harsh or kind words from their elders according to

circumstances. Yet, although they shared in the pleasures, limitations,

and hardships of the hamlet, some peculiarity of mental outlook

prevented them from accepting everything that existed or happened there

as a matter of course, as the other children did. Small things which

passed unnoticed by others interested, delighted, or saddened them.

Nothing that took place around them went unnoted; words spoken and

forgotten the next moment by the speaker were recorded in their

memories, and the actions and reactions of others were impressed on

their minds, until a clear, indelible impression of their little world

remained with them for life.

 

Their own lives were to carry them far from the hamlet. Edmund’s to

South Africa, India, Canada, and, lastly, to his soldier’s grave in

Belgium. Their credentials presented, they will only appear in this book

as observers of and commentators upon the country scene of their birth

and early years.

III

Men Afield

 

A mile and a half up the straight, narrow road in the opposite direction

to that of the turnpike, round a corner, just out of sight of the

hamlet, lay the mother village of Fordlow. Here, again, as soon as the

turning of the road was passed, the scene changed, and the large open

fields gave place to meadows and elm trees and tiny trickling streams.

 

The village was a little, lost, lonely place, much smaller than the

hamlet, without a shop, an inn, or a post office, and six miles from a

railway station. The little squat church, without spire or tower,

crouched back in a tiny churchyard that centuries of use had raised many

feet above the road, and the whole was surrounded by tall, windy elms in

which a colony of rooks kept up a perpetual cawing. Next came the

Rectory, so buried in orchards and shrubberies that only the chimney

stacks were visible from the road; then the old Tudor farmhouse with its

stone, mullioned windows and reputed dungeon. These, with the school and

about a dozen cottages occupied by the shepherd, carter, blacksmith, and

a few other superior farm-workers, made up the village. Even these few

buildings were strung out along the roadside, so far between and so

sunken in greenery that there seemed no village at all. It was a

standing joke in the hamlet that a stranger had once asked the way to

Fordlow after he had walked right through it. The hamlet laughed at the

village as ‘stuck up’; while the village looked down on ‘that gipsy lot’

at the hamlet.

 

Excepting the two or three men who frequented the inn in the evening,

the villagers seldom visited the hamlet, which to them represented the

outer wilds, beyond the bounds of civilisation. The hamlet people, on

the other hand, knew the road between the two places by heart, for the

church and the school and the farmhouse