Lark Rise to Candleford (50 page)

At seven years old
The Bride
made such an impression
upon her that she communicated her excitement to Edmund, himself as yet unable
to read, and one night in their mother's bedroom they enacted the scene in the
bridal chamber; Edmund insisting that he should be Lucy and Laura the
bridegroom, although she had told him that a bridegroom was usually one of his
own sex.

'Take up your bonny bridegroom!' he cried, so realistically
that their mother came running upstairs thinking he was in pain. She found
Laura. crouching on the floor in her nightdress while Edmund stood over her
with a dagger which looked very much like his father's two-foot rule. No wonder
she said, 'Whatever will you two be up to next!' and took
The Bride of
Lammermoor
away and hid it.

Then a neighbour who had bought a bundle of old books for a
few pence at a sale lent them
Old Saint Paul's
, and the outhouse door
was soon chalked with a cross and the wheelbarrow trundled round the garden to
the cry of 'Bring out your dead!'

Between the ages of seven and ten, Laura became such a
confirmed reader that, when other books failed, she would read her father's
dictionary, until this disappeared because her mother thought the small print
was bad for her eyes. There was still the Bible, which could not be forbidden,
and she spent many an hour over that, delighting in the Old Testament stories
of the Pillar of Fire, and of Ruth and Esther and Samuel and David, and of
Jonah and the whale, or learning by heart the parables in the New Testament to
repeat at Sunday School. At one time she had a passion for the Psalms, not so
much from religious fervour as from sheer delight in the language. She felt
these ought to be read aloud, and, as she dare not read them aloud herself,
lest she should be overheard, she would persuade Edmund or some other child to
read them with her, verse and verse about.

Once, when Edmund was upstairs in bed with measles and her
mother was out, she and another girl were having a fine time imitating the
parson and clerk reading the Psalms in church, when Edmund, who could hear all
that was going on downstairs, called out to ask whose Bible Alice was using.
She was using his and when Edmund had his suspicions confirmed he was so
enraged that he dashed downstairs in his nightshirt and chased Alice all down
the garden to the gate. If his mother could have seen him out of doors with his
spots, in his nightshirt, brandishing his Bible and threatening the retreating
Alice, she would have been horrified, for measles patients were then told that
they must not put so much as a hand out of bed or the spots would 'go inward'
and the simple measles would turn to black measles, when they would probably
die. But no one saw him and he returned to his bed, apparently not a ha'penny
the worse for his airing.

A little later, Scott's poems came into their lives and
Edmund would swing along the field path to school reciting 'The way was long,
the night was cold', or stop to strike an attitude and declaim,

Come one, come all! this rock shall fly

From its stern base as soon as I

or wave Laura on with 'Charge, Chester, charge! On, Stanley,
on!' At that time their conversation when alone together was tinged with the
language of their favourite romances. Sometimes Edmund would amuse his sister
and himself by translating, when a battered old zinc bucket became 'ye antique
pail', or a tree slightly damaged by the wind 'yon lightning-blasted pine',
while some good neighbour of theirs whom they could see working in the fields
would have given Edmund what he would have called 'a darned good bommicking' if
he had heard himself referred to as 'yon caitiff hind'.

Sometimes they tried their hand at writing a little verse
themselves. Laura was guilty of a terrible moral story in rhyme about a good
child who gave his birthday sixpence to a beggar, and Edmund wrote a poem about
sliding on the ice with the refrain 'Slide, glide, glide, slide, over the
slippery pond'. Laura liked that one and used to sing it. She also sang one of
her own, beginning, 'The snowdrop comes in winter cold', which ran, with a
stanza for every flower, through the seasons, and to which she added yet
another stanza every time she saw or remembered a flower hitherto neglected.
One day her mother asked her what that 'unked thing' she was trying to sing was
about, and, in an unguarded moment, she brought out the scraps of paper on
which it was written. She did not scold or even laugh at her folly; but Laura
could feel that she was not pleased, and, later that evening, she lectured her
soundly on her needlework. 'You can't
afford
to waste your time,' she
said. 'Here you are, eleven years old, and just look at this seam!'

Laura looked; then turned away her face to hide her
confusion. She did try to sew well; but, however hard she tried, her cotton
would knot and her material pucker. She was supposed to be making stays for
herself from narrow strips of calico left over from cutting out larger things,
which, when finished with buttons and shoulder straps would make a lasting and
comfortable garment. Laura always wore such stays; but not of her own making.
If she had ever finished those she was working on, they would, by that time,
have been too small to go round her. She saw them thirty years later in an old
trunk of oddments with the strips puckered and the needle rusted into the
material half way up a seam, and remembered then the happy evening when her
mother told her to put it aside and get on with her knitting.

By the eighteen-eighties the fine sewing of the beginning of
the century was a lost art. Little children of six were no longer kept indoors
to work samplers, whip cambric frills or stitch seams with stitches so tiny
that a microscope was needed to examine them. Better uses had been found for
young eyesight. But plain sewing was still looked upon as an important part of
a girl's education, both at school and at home, for it was expected that for
the rest of her life any ordinary girl would have at least to make her own
underclothes. Ready-made clothes were beginning to appear in the shops, but
those such as working people were able to buy were coarse, ugly, and of
inferior quality. Calico stiffened with dressing which would all come out in
the wash and leave the material like butter muslin, edging which looked like
notched tape, and all put together with the proverbial hot needle and burning
thread, tempted few people with self-respect to give up making their own underclothes.

If those who gave up outdoor pleasure and worked so busily in
order that they might, as they said, know that all was good 'right to the skin'
could have seen in a vision the lovely garments made of rayon and other
materials of to-day, sold at less than their lengths of material cost, and all
ready to step into, they would have thought the millennium was approaching.

But perhaps not. They might have thought the material too
insubstantial to 'stand the wash' and so filmy it might show the figure
through. Their taste ran to plenty of trimming; lace and insertion and
feather-stitching on under-garments, flounces on frocks and an erection of
ribbon and artificial flowers on hats. Laura's mother showed an almost revolutionary
taste when she said: 'I don't care so much for an important-looking hat. I like
something small and natty. But,' she would add apologetically to her listener,
'that may be because my face is small. I couldn't carry anything off like you
can.'

The masterpiece of fashion during Laura's schooldays was what
was known as the kilted frock. The skirt of this, over a pleated bottom part,
had a kind of apron of the same material drawn up in folds round the hips and
bunched out behind. It was a long time before any one in the hamlet possessed a
kilted frock, but they were seen in church, and the girls in service came home
for their holidays in them; then, as the fashion waned in the outer world, they
began to arrive, either as gifts, or as copies of gifts made by some village
dressmaker. And, with them, came the story that some great Parisian dress
designer had invented the style after seeing a fisherwoman on the beach with
her frock drawn up over her kilted petticoat, just in that manner. 'It's a
corker to me how the de'il these 'oomen get to know such things,' said the men.

After that first visit to Candleford, it became the custom
for Laura's parents to hire the innkeeper's horse and cart and drive there one
Sunday in every summer; and, every summer, on the Sunday of the village feast,
their Candleford aunt and uncle and cousins drove over to Lark Rise.

Then, one day when Laura was eleven and Edmund nine years
old, their mother astonished them by asking if they thought they could walk
over, just the two of them, by themselves. They had often walked to the market
town and back, she reminded them. That was six miles and Candleford only eight.
But did they think they could be trusted not to stray from the road ('No going
into fields to pick flowers, Laura!') and would they be sure not to get into
conversation with any strangers they might meet on the road, or be persuaded to
follow them anywhere? It was their summer holiday from school and their Aunt
Ann had written to ask them to spend a week or two with her and their cousins.

Could they manage the walk? What a question! Of course they
could, and Edmund began to draw a map of the road to convince her. When could
they go? Not before Saturday? What a long time to wait. But she said she must
write to their aunt to tell her they were coming, then, perhaps, some of their
cousins would walk out to meet them.

Saturday came at last and their mother waved to them from the
gate and called out a last injunction not to forget the turnings, and, above
all, not have anything to do with strange men. She was evidently thinking of a
recent kidnapping case which had been front-page news in the Sunday newspaper;
but she need not have been afraid, no criminal was likely to be prowling about
those unfrequented byways, and, had there been, the appearance of the two
children did not suggest worthwhile victims.

'For comfort,' as their mother had said, they both wore soft,
old cotton clothes: Laura a green smock which had seen better days but did not
look too bad, well washed and ironed, and Edmund an ex-Sunday white sailor
suit, disqualified for better wear because the sleeves of the blouse and the
legs of the knickers had been let down and the join showed. Both wore what were
then known as Zulu hats, plaited of rushes and very wide brimmed, beneath which
they must have looked like a couple of walking mushrooms. Most of the things necessary
for their stay had been sent on by parcel post, but they still bulged with food
packets, presents for the cousins, and coats for themselves in case of rain.
Laura had narrowly escaped carrying an umbrella, for, as her mother
persuasively said, if there was no rain she could use it as a sunshade; but, at
the last minute, she had managed to put this down in a corner and 'forget' it.

They left home at seven o'clock on a lovely August morning.
The mounting sun drew moisture in a mist from the stooks of corn in the partly
stripped harvest fields. By the roadside all the coarse yellow flowers of later
summer were out: goat's beard and lady's finger, tall thickets of ragwort and
all the different hawkbits; the sun shone softly through mist; altogether, it was
a golden morning.

A new field had been thrown open for gleaning and, for the
first mile, they walked with some of their schoolfellows and their mothers, all
very jolly because word had gone round that young Bob Trevor had been on the
horse-rake when the field was cleared and had taken good care to leave plenty
of good ears behind for the gleaners. 'If the foreman should come nosing round,
he's going to tell him that the ra-ake's got a bit out of order and won't clear
the stubble proper. But that corner under the two hedges is for his mother.
Nobody else is to leaze there.' One woman after another came up to Laura and
asked in a whisper how her mother was keeping and if she found the hot weather
trying. Laura had answered a good many such inquiries lately.

But the gleaners soon trooped through a gate and dispersed
over the stubble, hurrying to stake out their claims. Then Edmund and Laura
passed the school and entered on less familiar ground. They were out on their
first independent adventure and their hearts thrilled to the new sense of
freedom. Candleford waited so many miles ahead of them and it was nice to know
that supper and a bed were assured to them there; but the pleasure they felt in
the prospect of their holiday visit was nothing compared to the joy of the
journey. On the whole, they would rather not have known where they were bound
for. They would have liked to be genuine explorers, like Livingstone in Africa;
but, as their destination had been decided for them, their exploring had to be
confined to wayside wonders.

They found plenty of these, for it did not take much to
delight them. A streak of clear water spouting from a pipe high up in the
hedgerow bank was to them what a cataract might have been to more seasoned
travellers; and the wagons they met, with names of strange farmers and farms
painted across the front, were as exciting as hearing a strange language. A
band of long-tailed tits, flitting from bush to bush, a cow or two looking at
them over a wall, and the swallows strung out, twittering, along the telegraph
wire, made cheerful and satisfying company. But, apart from these, it was not a
lonely road, for men were working in the harvest fields on either side and they
passed on the road wagons piled high with sheaves and saw other wagons go clattering,
empty, back for other loads. Sometimes one of the wagoners would speak to them
and Edmund would answer their 'An' where do 'ee s'pose you be off to, young
shaver?' with 'We are going over to Candleford'; and they would both smile, as
expected, when they were told, 'Keep puttin' one foot in front o' t'other an'
you'll be there before dark.'