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

which was the men’s working

head-quarters were all in the village. The hamlet had only the inn.

 

Very early in the morning, before daybreak for the greater part of the

year, the hamlet men would throw on their clothes, breakfast on bread

and lard, snatch the dinner-baskets which had been packed for them

overnight, and hurry off across fields and over stiles to the farm.

Getting the boys off was a more difficult matter. Mothers would have to

call and shake and sometimes pull boys of eleven or twelve out of their

warm beds on a winter morning. Then boots which had been drying inside

the fender all night and had become shrunk and hard as boards in the

process would have to be coaxed on over chilblains. Sometimes a very

small boy would cry over this and his mother to cheer him would remind

him that they were only boots, not breeches. ‘Good thing you didn’t live

when breeches wer’ made o’ leather,’ she would say, and tell him about

the boy of a previous generation whose leather breeches were so baked up

in drying that it took him an hour to get into them. ‘Patience! Have

patience, my son’, his mother had exhorted. ‘Remember Job.’ ‘Job!’

scoffed the boy. ‘What did he know about patience? He didn’t have to

wear no leather breeches.’

 

Leather breeches had disappeared in the ‘eighties and were only

remembered in telling that story. The carter, shepherd, and a few of the

older labourers still wore the traditional smock-frock topped by a round

black felt hat, like those formerly worn by clergymen. But this old

country style of dress was already out of date; most of the men wore

suits of stiff, dark brown corduroy, or, in summer, corduroy trousers

and an unbleached drill jacket known as a ‘sloppy’.

 

Most of the young and those in the prime of life were thick-set,

red-faced men of good medium height and enormous strength who prided

themselves on the weights they could carry and boasted of never having

had ‘an e-ache nor a pa-in’ in their lives. The elders stooped, had

gnarled and swollen hands and walked badly, for they felt the effects of

a life spent out of doors in all weathers and of the rheumatism which

tried most of them. These elders wore a fringe of grey whisker beneath

the jaw, extending from ear to ear. The younger men sported drooping

walrus moustaches. One or two, in advance of the fashion of their day,

were clean-shaven; but as Sunday was the only shaving day, the effect of

either style became blurred by the end of the week.

 

They still spoke the dialect, in which the vowels were not only

broadened, but in many words doubled. ‘Boy’ was ‘boo-oy’, ‘coal’,

‘coo-al’, ‘pail’, ‘pay-ull’, and so on. In other words, syllables were

slurred, and words were run together, as ‘brenbu’er’ for bread and

butter. They had hundreds of proverbs and sayings and their talk was

stiff with simile. Nothing was simply hot, cold, or coloured; it was ‘as

hot as hell’, ‘as cold as ice’, ‘as green as grass’, or ‘as yellow as a

guinea’. A botched-up job done with insufficient materials was ‘like

Dick’s hatband that went half-way round and tucked’; to try to persuade

or encourage one who did not respond was ‘putting a poultice on a wooden

leg’. To be nervy was to be ‘like a cat on hot bricks’; to be angry,

‘mad as a bull’; or any one might be ‘poor as a rat’, ‘sick as a dog’,

‘hoarse as a crow’, ‘as ugly as sin’, ‘full of the milk of human

kindness’, or ‘stinking with pride’. A temperamental person was said to

be ‘one o’ them as is either up on the roof or down the well’. The

dialect was heard at its best on the lips of a few middle-aged men, who

had good natural voices, plenty of sense, and a grave, dignified

delivery. Mr. Frederick Grisewood of the B.B.C. gave a perfect rendering

of the old Oxfordshire dialect in some broadcast sketches a few years

ago. Usually, such imitations are maddening to the native born; but he

made the past live again for one listener.

 

The men’s incomes were the same to a penny; their circumstances,

pleasures, and their daily field work were shared in common; but in

themselves they differed; as other men of their day differed, in country

and town. Some were intelligent, others slow at the uptake; some were

kind and helpful, others selfish; some vivacious, others taciturn. If a

stranger had gone there looking for the conventional Hodge, he would not

have found him.

 

Nor would he have found the dry humour of the Scottish peasant, or the

racy wit and wisdom of Thomas Hardy’s Wessex. These men’s minds were

cast in a heavier mould and moved more slowly. Yet there were occasional

gleams of quiet fun. One man who had found Edmund crying because his

magpie, let out for her daily exercise, had not returned to her wicker

cage, said: ‘Doo’nt ‘ee take on like that, my man. You goo an’ tell Mrs.

Andrews about it [naming the village gossip] an’ you’ll hear where your

Maggie’s been seen, if ‘tis as far away as Stratton.’

 

Their favourite virtue was endurance. Not to flinch from pain or

hardship was their ideal. A man would say, ‘He says, says he, that field

o’ oo-ats’s got to come in afore night, for there’s a rain a-comin’. But

we didn’t flinch, not we! Got the last loo-ad under cover by midnight.

A’moost too fagged-out to walk home; but we didn’t flinch. We done it!’

Or,‘Ole bull he comes for me, wi’s head down. But I didn’t flinch. I

ripped off a bit o’ loose rail an’ went for he. ‘Twas him as did th’

flinchin’. He! he!’ Or a woman would say, ‘I set up wi’ my poor old

mother six nights runnin’; never had me clothes off. But I didn’t

flinch, an’ I pulled her through, for she didn’t flinch neither.’ Or a

young wife would say to the midwife after her first confinement, ‘I

didn’t flinch, did I? Oh, I do hope I didn’t flinch.’

 

The farm was large, extending far beyond the parish boundaries; being,

in fact, several farms, formerly in separate occupancy, but now thrown

into one and ruled over by the rich old man at the Tudor farmhouse. The

meadows around the farmstead sufficed for the carthorses’ grazing and to

support the store cattle and a couple of milking cows which supplied the

farmer’s family and those of a few of his immediate neighbours with

butter and milk. A few fields were sown with grass seed for hay, and

sainfoin and rye were grown and cut green for cattle food. The rest was

arable land producing corn and root crops, chiefly wheat.

 

Around the farmhouse were grouped the farm buildings; stables for the

great stamping shaggy-fetlocked carthorses; barns with doors so wide

and high that a load of hay could be driven through; sheds for the

yellow-and-blue painted farm wagons, granaries with outdoor staircases;

and sheds for storing oilcake, artificial manures, and agricultural

implements. In the rickyard, tall, pointed, elaborately thatched ricks

stood on stone straddles; the dairy indoors, though small, was a model

one; there was a profusion of all that was necessary or desirable for

good farming.

 

Labour, too, was lavishly used. Boys leaving school were taken on at the

farm as a matter of course, and no time-expired soldier or settler on

marriage was ever refused a job. As the farmer said, he could always do

with an extra hand, for labour was cheap and the land was well tilled up

to the last inch.

 

When the men and boys from the hamlet reached the farmyard in the

morning, the carter and his assistant had been at work for an hour,

feeding and getting ready the horses. After giving any help required,

the men and boys would harness and lead out their teams and file off to

the field where their day’s work was to be done.

 

If it rained, they donned sacks, split up one side to form a hood and

cloak combined. If it was frosty, they blew upon their nails and thumped

their arms across their chest to warm them. If they felt hungry after

their bread-and-lard breakfast, they would pare a turnip and munch it,

or try a bite or two of the rich, dark brown oilcake provided for the

cattle. Some of the boys would sample the tallow candles belonging to the

stable lanterns; but that was done more out of devilry than from hunger,

for, whoever went short, the mothers took care that their Tom or Dicky

should have ‘a bit o’ summat to peck at between meals’—half a cold

pancake or the end of yesterday’s roly-poly.

 

With ‘Gee!’ and ‘Wert up!’ and ‘Who-a-a, now!’ the teams would draw out.

The boys were hoisted to the backs of the tall carthorses, and the men,

walking alongside, filled their clay pipes with shag and drew the first

precious puffs of the day, as, with cracking of whips, clopping of

hooves and jingling of harness, the teams went tramping along the muddy

byways.

 

The field names gave the clue to the fields’ history. Near the

farmhouse, ‘Moat Piece’, ‘Fishponds’, ‘Duffus [i.e. dovehouse] piece’,

‘Kennels’, and ‘Warren Piece’ spoke of a time before the Tudor house

took the place of another and older establishment. Farther on, ‘Lark

Hill’, ‘Cuckoos’ Clump’, ‘The Osiers’, and ‘Pond Piece’ were named after

natural features, while ‘Gibbard’s Piece’ and ‘Blackwell’s’ probably

commemorated otherwise long-forgotten former occupants. The large new

fields round the hamlet had been cut too late to be named and were known

as ‘The Hundred Acres’, ‘The Sixty Acres’, and so on according to their

acreage. One or two of the ancients persisted in calling one of these

‘The Heath’ and another ‘The Racecourse’.

 

One name was as good as another to most of the men; to them it was just

a name and meant nothing. What mattered to them about the field in which

they happened to be working was whether the road was good or bad which

led from the farm to it; or if it was comparatively sheltered or one of

those bleak open places which the wind hurtled through, driving the rain

through the clothes to the very pores; and was the soil easily workable

or of back-breaking heaviness or so bound together with that ‘hemmed’

twitch that a ploughshare could scarcely get through it.

 

There were usually three or four ploughs to a field, each of them drawn

by a team of three horses, with a boy at the head of the leader and the

ploughman behind at the shafts. All day, up and down they would go,

ribbing the pale stubble with stripes of dark furrows, which, as the day

advanced, would get wider and nearer together, until, at length, the

whole field lay a rich velvety plum-colour.

 

Each plough had its following of rooks, searching the clods with

side-long glances for worms and grubs. Little hedgerow birds flitted

hither and thither, intent upon getting their tiny share of whatever was

going. Sheep, penned in a neighbouring field, bleated complainingly; and

above the ma-a-ing and cawing and twittering rose the immemorial cries

of the land-worker: ‘Wert up!’ ‘Who-o-o-a!’ ‘Go it, Poppet!’ ‘Go it,

Lightfoot!’ ‘Boo-oy, be you deaf, or be you hard of hearin’, dang ye!’

 

After the plough had done its part, the horse-drawn roller was used to

break down the clods; then the harrow to comb out and leave in neat

piles the weeds and the twitch grass which infested those fields, to be

fired later and fill the air with the light blue haze and the scent that

can haunt for a lifetime.