Lark Rise to Candleford (19 page)

It certainly smelt strongly of lavender. The children handled
it lovingly, fascinated by a substance which had travelled so far and smelt so
sweetly.

She asked sixpence a slab; but obligingly came down to
twopence, and three pieces were purchased and placed in a fancy bowl on the
side table to perfume the room and to be exhibited as a rarity.

Alas! the vendor had barely time to clear out of the hamlet
before all the perfume had evaporated and the bark became what it had been
before she sprinkled it with oil of lavender—just ordinary bark from a pine trunk!

Such brilliance was exceptional. Most of the tramps were
plain beggars. 'Please could you give me a morsel of bread, for I be so hungry.
I'm telling God I haven't put a bite between my lips since yesterday morning' was
a regular formula with them when they knocked at the door of a cottage; and,
although many of them looked well-nourished, they were never turned away. Thick
slices, which could ill be spared, were plastered with lard; the cold potatoes
which the housewife had intended to fry for her own dinner were wrapped in newspaper,
and by the time they left the hamlet they were insured against starvation for
at least a week. The only reward for such generosity, beyond the whining professional
'God bless ye', was the cheering reflection that however badly off one might be
oneself, there were others poorer.

Where all these wayfarers came from or how they had fallen so
low in the social scale was uncertain. According to their own account, they had
been ordinary decent working people with homes 'just such another as yourn,
mum'; but their houses had been burned down or flooded, or they had fallen out
of work, or spent a long time in hospital and had never been able to start
again. Many of the women pleaded that their husbands were dead, and several men
came begging with the plea that, having lost their wives, they had the children
to look after and could not leave them to work for their living.

Sometimes whole families took to the road with their bags and
bundles and tea-cans, begging their food as they went and sleeping in casual wards
or under ricks or in ditches. Laura's father, coming home from work at dusk one
night, thought he heard a rustling in the ditch by the roadside. When he looked
down into it, a row of white faces looked up at him, belonging to a mother, a
father, and three or four children. He said that in the half light only their
faces were visible and that they looked like a set of silver coins, ranging
from a florin to a threepenny bit. Though late in the summer, the night was not
cold. 'Thank God for that!' said the children's mother when she heard about
them, for, had it been cold, he might have brought them all home with him. He
had brought home tramps before and had them sit at table with the family, to
his wife's disgust, for he had what she considered peculiar ideas on hospitality
and the brotherhood of man.

There was no tallyman, or Johnny Fortnight, in those parts;
but once, for a few months, a man who kept a small furniture shop in a neighbouring
town came round selling his wares on the instalment plan. On his first visit to
Lark Rise he got no order at all; but on his second one of the women, more
daring than the rest, ordered a small wooden washstand and a zinc bath for
washing day. Immediately washstands and zinc baths became the rage. None of the
women could think how they had managed to exist so long without a washstand in
their bedroom. They were quite satisfied with the buckets and basins of water
in the pantry or by the fireside or out of doors for their own use; but
supposing some one fell ill and the doctor had to wash his hands in a basin
placed on a clean towel on the kitchen table! or supposing some of their town relatives
came on a visit, those with a real sink and water laid on! They felt they would
die with mortification if they had to apologize for having no washstand. As to
the zinc bath, that seemed even more necessary. That wooden tub their mother
had used was 'a girt okkard old thing'. Although they had not noticed its
weight much before, it seemed almost to break their backs when they could see a
bright, shining new bath hanging under the eaves of the next-door barn.

It was not long before practically every house had a new bath
and washstand. A few mothers of young children went farther and ordered a fireguard
as well. Then the fortnightly payments began. One-and-six was the specified
instalment, and, for the first few fortnights, this was forthcoming. But it was
so difficult to get that eighteenpence together. A few pence had always to be
used out of the first week's ninepence, then in the second week some urgent
need for cash would occur. The instalments fell to a shilling. Then to
sixpence. A few gave up the struggle and defaulted.

Month after month the salesman came round and collected what
he could; but he did not try to tempt them to buy anything more, for he could
see that he would never be paid for it. He was a good-hearted man who listened
to their tales of woe and never bullied or threatened to County Court them.
Perhaps the debts were not as important to him as they appeared to his
customers; or he may have felt he was to blame for tempting them to order
things they could not afford. He continued calling until he had collected as
much as he thought possible, then disappeared from the scene.

A more amusing episode was that of the barrels of beer. At
that time in that part of the country, brewers' travellers, known locally as 'outriders',
called for orders at farm-houses and superior cottages, as well as at inns. No
experienced outrider visited farm labourers' cottages; but the time came when a
beginner, full of youthful enthusiasm and burning to fill up his order book,
had the brilliant idea of canvassing the hamlet for orders.

Wouldn't it be splendid, he asked the women, to have their
own nine-gallon cask of good ale in for Christmas, and only have to go into the
pantry and turn the tap to get a glass for their husband and friends. The ale
cost far less by the barrel than when bought at the inn. It would be an economy
in the long run, and how well it would look to bring out a jug of foaming ale
from their own barrel for their friends. As to payment, they sent in their
bills quarterly, so there would be plenty of time to save up.

The women agreed that it would, indeed, be splendid to have
their own barrel, and even the men, when told of the project at night, were impressed
by the difference in price when buying by the nine-gallon cask. Some of them
worked it out on paper and were satisfied that, considering that they would be
spending a few shillings extra at Christmas in any case, and that the missus
had been looking rather peaked lately and a glass of good beer cost less than
doctor's physic, and that maybe a daughter in service would be sending a postal
order, they might venture to order the cask.

Others did not trouble to work it out; but, enchanted with
the idea, gave the order lightheartedly. After all, as the outrider said, Christmas
came but once a year, and this year they would have a jolly one. Of course
there were kill-joys, like Laura's father, who said sardonically: 'They'll
laugh the other side of their faces when it comes to paying for it.'

The barrels came and were tapped and the beer was handed
around. The barrels were empty and the brewer's carter in his leather apron
heaved them into the van behind his steaming, stamping horses; but none of the mustard
or cocoa tins hidden away in secret places contained more than a few coppers
towards paying the bill. When the day of reckoning came only three of the
purchasers had the money ready. But time was allowed. Next month would do; but,
mind! it must be forthcoming then. Most of the women tried hard to get that
money together; but, of course, they could not. The traveller called again and
again, each time growing more threatening, and, after some months, the brewer
took the matter to the County Court, where the judge, after hearing the
circumstances of sale and the income of the purchasers, ordered them all to pay
twopence weekly off the debt. So ended the great excitement of having one's own
barrel of beer on tap.

The packman, or pedlar, once a familiar figure in that part
of the country, was seldom seen in the 'eighties. People had taken to buying their
clothes at the shops in the market town, where fashions were newer and prices
lower. But one last survivor of the once numerous clan still visited the hamlet
at long and irregular intervals.

He would turn aside from the turnpike and come plodding down
the narrow hamlet road, an old white-headed, white-bearded man, still hale and rosy,
although almost bent double under the heavy, black canvas-covered pack he
carried strapped on his shoulders. 'Anything out of the pack to-day?' he would
ask at each house, and, at the least encouragement, fling down his load and
open it on the door-step. He carried a tempting variety of goods: dress-lengths
and shirt-lengths and remnants to make up for the children; aprons and
pinafores, plain and fancy; corduroys for the men, and coloured scarves and
ribbons for Sunday wear.

'That's a bit of right good stuff, ma'am, that is,' he would
say, holding up some dress-length to exhibit it. 'A gown made of this piece'd last
anybody for ever and then make 'em a good petticoat afterwards.' Few of the
hamlet women could afford to test the quality of his piece goods; cottons or
tapes, or a paper of pins, were their usual purchases; but his dress-lengths
and other fabrics were of excellent quality and wore much longer than any one
would wish anything to wear in these days of rapidly changing fashions. It was
from his pack the soft, warm woollen, grey with a white fleck in it, came to
make the frock Laura wore with a little black satin apron and a bunch of
snowdrops pinned to the breast when she went to sell stamps in the post office.

Once every summer a German band passed through the hamlet and
halted outside the inn to play. It was composed of an entire family, a father and
his six sons, the latter graded in size like a set of jugs, from the tall young
man who played the cornet to the chubby pink-faced little boy who beat the
drum.

Drawn up in the semicircle in their neat, green uniforms,
they would blow away at their instruments until their chubby German cheeks
seemed near to bursting point. Most of the music they played was above the heads
of the hamlet folks, who said they liked something with a bit more 'chune' in
it; but when, at the end of the performance, they gave
God Save the Queen
the standers-by joined with gusto in singing it.

That was the sign for the landlord to come out in his
shirt-sleeves with three frothing beer mugs. One for the father, who poured the
beer down his throat like water down a sink, and the other two to be passed politely
from son to son. Unless a farmer's gig or a tradesman's trap happened to pull
up at the inn gate during the performance, the beer was their only reward for
the entertainment. They did not take their collecting bag round to the women
and children who had gathered to listen, for they knew from experience there
were no stray halfpence for German bands in a farm labourer's wife's pocket. So
after shaking the saliva from their brass instruments, they bowed, clicked
their heels, and marched off up the dusty road to the mother village. It was
good beer and they were hot and thirsty, so perhaps the reward was sufficient.

The only other travelling entertainment which came there was
known as the dancing dolls. These, alas! did not dance in the open, but in a cottage
to which a penny admission was charged, and, as the cottage was not of the
cleanest, Laura was never allowed to witness this performance. Those who had
seen them said the dolls were on wires and that the man who exhibited them said
the words for them, so it must have been some kind of marionette show.

Once, very early in their school life, the end house children
met a man with a dancing bear. The man, apparently a foreigner, saw that the children
were afraid to pass, and, to reassure them, set his bear dancing. With a long
pole balanced across its front paws, it waltzed heavily to the tune hummed by
its master, then shouldered the pole and did exercises at his word of command.
The elders of the hamlet said the bear had appeared there at long intervals for
many years; but that was its last appearance. Poor Bruin, with his mangy fur
and hot, tainted breath, was never seen in those parts again. Perhaps he died
of old age.

The greatest thrill of all and the one longest remembered in
the hamlet, was provided by the visit of a cheap-jack about half-way through
the decade. One autumn evening, just before dusk, he arrived with his cartload
of crockery and tinware and set out his stock on the grass by the roadside
before a back-cloth painted with icebergs and penguins and polar bears. Soon he
had his naphtha lamps flaring and was clashing his basins together like bells
and calling: 'Come buy! Come buy!'

It was the first visit of a cheap-jack to the hamlet and
there was great excitement. Men, women, and children rushed from the houses and
crowded around in the circle of light to listen to his patter and admire his wares.
And what bargains he had! The tea-service decorated with fat, full-blown pink
roses: twenty-one pieces and not a flaw in any one of them. The Queen had
purchased its fellow set for Buckingham Palace, it appeared. The teapots, the
trays, the nests of dishes and basins, and the set of bedroom china which made
every one blush when he selected the most intimate utensil to rap with his
knuckles to show it rang true.

'Two bob!' he shouted. 'Only two bob for this handsome set of
jugs. Here's one for your beer and one for your milk and another in case you break
one of the other two. Nobody willing to speculate? Then what about this here
set of trays, straight from Japan and the peonies hand-painted; or this lot of
basins, exact replicas of the one the Princess of Wales supped her gruel from
when Prince George was born. Why damme, they cost me more n'r that. I could get
twice the price I'm asking in Banbury to-morrow; but I'll give 'em to you, for
you can't call it selling, because I like your faces and me load's heavy for me
'oss. Alarming bargains! Tremendous sacrifices! Come buy! Come buy!'