Lark Rise to Candleford (80 page)

Chestnut Avenue stood, apparently firmly, as long as Laura
lived near and may quite probably be standing now, let at treble the rent to trebly-paid
wage-earners, with the chestnut trees fully grown and candled with blossoms and
a wireless mast in every back garden. As they were built, almost before the
paint was dry the villas were occupied and the new tenants tied back their lace
curtains with blue or pink ribbon and painted on the gate the name of their
choice: 'Chatsworth' or 'Naples' or 'Sunnyside' or 'Herne Bay'.

Laura, although conscious of disloyalty to 'the trade',
personified for her by her father and uncle, still thought the Chestnut Avenue
houses stylish. She had just enough taste, or sense of humour, to think some of
the names chosen for them by the occupiers were unsuitable—'Balmoral' was the
latest addition—but she saw nothing amiss with the wide-ribbon pale blue or
pink curtain ties, though she herself would have preferred green or yellow.
Except for the ex-villagers whom she already knew, the villas were occupied by
a class of people which was new to her, the lower fringe of the lower middle
class, of which she was to see a great deal later.

Her first introduction to this, to her, new way of life she
owed to a Mrs. Green of 'The Shack', the wife of a clerk in the Candleford Post
Office. She had come to know the husband in the way of business, he had introduced
her to his wife, and an invitation to tea had followed.

The Greens' villa was only distinguishable from the others by
its name and by the maidenhair fern which stood in place of the usual
aspidistra on a little table exactly in the centre of the small space between
the draped curtains at the parlour window. Mrs. Green said aspidistras were common,
and Laura soon discovered that she had a great dislike of common things and
especially of common people. The people who lived next door, she told Laura,
were 'awfully common'. The man was a jobbing gardener, 'a clodhopper' she
called him, and his wife wore his cloth cap when she hung out her washing. They
were toasting herrings, morning, noon, and night, and the smell was 'most
offensive'. She thought the landlord ought to be more particular in choosing
his tenants. Laura, who was used to the ways of those she called 'clodhoppers'
and their wives, and herself enjoyed a good bloater toasted on the coals for
supper, heard this with wonder. Of course men who worked on the land were
common, there were so many of them, but then there were a good many men in
every other trade or calling, so why complain of the number? When it gradually dawned
upon her that Mrs. Green used the word 'common' in a social sense, she was
rather afraid that she would be thought common, too; but she need not have
feared, for that lady did not think of her at all, excepting as the possessor
of eyes and ears.

Mrs. Green was a small, fair woman, still under thirty, who
would have been pretty had not her face habitually worn a worried expression
which sharpened her features and was already destroying her bloom. Her refinement,
or perhaps her means, did not run to visits to a dentist and, to hide decaying
teeth, she cultivated a thin, close-lipped little smile. But her hair was still
very pretty and beautifully cared for, and she had pretty hands which she
rubbed with cold cream after washing the tea things.

Her husband was also small and fair, but his manners were
more simple and his expression was opener and franker than that of his wife.
When he laughed, he laughed loudly, and then his wife would look at him reproachfully
and say in a pained voice, '
Al
bert!' He had not had the same training in
the art of keeping up appearances as his wife, for while she, as she said, had
come down in the world, having been born into what she vaguely termed 'a refined
family', he had begun to earn his living as a telegraph messenger and worked
his way up to his present position, which, though still modest, was in those
days something of an achievement. Left to himself, he would have been a
pleasant, homely kind of fellow who would have enjoyed working in his garden
and afterwards sitting down in his shirt-sleeves to a bloater or tinned salmon
for tea. But he had married a genteel wife and she had educated him as far as possible
up to her own standard.

They were both touchingly proud of their home, and Laura on
her first visit had to be shown every nook and corner of it, including the
inside of the cupboards. It was furnished in accord with its architectural style.
The parlour, which they called the 'drawing-room', had a complete suite of
furniture upholstered in green tapestry, and there was a green carpet, but not
quite the right shade of green, on the floor. Photographs in ornate frames
stood on little tables and a set of framed pictures on the walls illustrated
the courtship of an insipid looking couple—'Lovers' Meeting', 'The Letter',
'Lovers' Quarrel', and 'Wedded'. There was not a book or a flower in the room
and not so much as a cushion awry to show that it was lived in. As a matter of
fact, it was not. It was more a museum or a temple or a furniture showroom than
a living-room. They sat in state in the bay window on Sunday evenings and watched
their neighbours pass by, but took their meals and spent the rest of their time
in the kitchen, which was a much pleasanter room.

In the bedroom above the parlour there was one of the new
duchess dressing-tables and a wardrobe with a long looking-glass door. These pieces
of furniture Mrs. Green pointed out as 'the latest', a description she also
applied to many other treasured objects which she seemed to regard as models of
fashion and elegance. Knowing only the cottage simplicity of her own home and
the substantial but old-fashioned comfort of Miss Lane's and her Candleford
relatives' houses, Laura had to accept her word for this. The people whom she
had hitherto known just put what they had or could get into their homes, old
things and new things, side by side with each other, with, perhaps, a few yards
of new chintz or a new coat of paint to smarten things up occasionally. So, naturally,
they did not make a show of their houses, beyond sometimes pointing out some
special treasure which had 'belonged to my old granny' or 'been in our family
for years and years'.

There were no such out-of-date objects in the Greens' home;
everything there had been bought by themselves when setting up house or later,
and the date of purchase and even the price were subjects for conversation. Seven
pounds for the drawing-room suite and ten pounds for that in the bedroom! Laura
was amazed; but then, she reflected, the Greens were comfortably off; Mr.
Green's weekly salary must be at least two pounds.

Everything was beautifully kept, furniture and floors were
highly polished, windows gleamed, curtains and counterpanes were immaculate, and
the little kitchen at the back of the house was a model of neatness. Laura
found out afterwards that Mrs. Green worked herself nearly to death. With only
one child and a house only a little larger than theirs, she worked twice the
number of hours and spent ten times the energy of the cottage women. They,
standing at their doors with their arms folded, enjoying a gossip with a
neighbour, would often complain that a woman's work was never done; but the
Mrs. Greens were working away while they gossiped and, afterwards, when they
were indoors having 'a set down with a cup o' tay', the Mrs. Greens, wearing
gloves, were polishing the silver. For, of course, forks and spoons and any
other metal objects possessed by a Green housewife were known collectively as
'the silver', even if there was not one single hallmark to be seen upon any of
them.

At the tea-table it was the turn of the Greens' only child to
be chief exhibit. Doreen was seven and, according to her parents, there never
had been and never again would be such an intelligent child. 'So cute. You should
hear some of her sayings', and specimens were repeated forthwith, the little
girl meanwhile munching her cake with a self-conscious expression. She was a
pretty, well-mannered child, well dressed and well cared for, and not so much
spoiled as might have been expected. Her parents adored her, and it came as a
shock to Laura to hear one of them say and the other repeat that they did not
intend to have any more children. Not
intend
to have more! What say
would they have in the matter? If married people had one child, they almost
always had more—a good many more in most cases. Laura had sometimes heard the
mother of a seventh or eighth say that she hoped it would be the last, 'Please
God', but she had never before heard one say definitely that it would be. Miss Lane,
when told of this incident, said she didn't think much of the Greens for
talking like that before a girl of Laura's age; but, as a matter of fact,
people nowadays had learned how to limit their families, and a good thing, too,
she thought. 'But you don't want to trouble your head about anything to do with
marriage,' she concluded, 'and if you take my advice you won't ever do so.
Leave marriage to those who are suited for it.' But Laura thought she would
like some children, a girl and two boys, perhaps, and to have a house of her
own with lots of books in it and no suites of furniture at all, but all sorts
of odd, interesting things, such as Miss Lane had.

Her acquaintance with the Greens brought Laura for the first
time in contact with the kind of people among whom much of her life was to be spent.
It was a class newly emerging in this country, on the borderline between the
working and middle classes. Its main type had many good points. Those belonging
to it were industrious, frugal and home-loving. Their houses were well kept,
their incomes well managed, and their ambitions on their children's behalf knew
no bounds. No sacrifice on the part of the parents was too great if, by it,
they could give a better start in life than their own to their offspring. The average
number of children in a family was two, but there were many only children and nearly
as many childless homes; a family of three was unusual.

The men's suits were kept well brushed, sponged and pressed
by their wives, and the women had the knack of dressing well on little. Many of
them were able to make, alter, and bring up to date their own clothes. They
were good cooks and managers; their homes, though often tasteless, were
substantially furnished and beautifully kept; and, although when alone they
might take their meals in the kitchen, they had elaborate afternoon tea-cloths
and fashionable knick-knacks for the table for festive occasions.

Those were the lines along which they were developing.
Spiritually, they had lost ground, rather than gained it. Their working-class
forefathers had had religious or political ideals; their talk had not lost the raciness
of the soil and was seasoned with native wit which, if sometimes crude, was
authentic. Few of this section of their sons and daughters were churchgoers, or
gave much thought to religious matters. When the subject of religion was
mentioned, they professed to subscribe to its dogmas and to be shocked at the
questioning of the most outworn of these; but, in reality, their creed was that
of keeping up appearances. The reading they did was mass reading. Before they
would open a book, they had to be told it was one that everybody was reading. The
works of Marie Corelli and Nat Gould were immensely popular with them. They had
not a sufficient sense of humour to originate it, but borrowed it from
music-hall turns and comic papers, and the voice in which such gems were
repeated was flat and toneless compared to the old country speech.

But those who had left village life and all it stood for
behind them were few compared to the number of those who stayed at home and
waited for change to come to them. Change came slowly, if surely, and right into
the early years of this century many of the old village ways of living remained
and those who cherished the old customs were much as country people had been
for generations. A little better educated, a little more democratic, a little
more prosperous than their parents had been, but still the same unpretentious,
warm-hearted people, with just enough malice to give point to their wit and a
growing sense of injustice which was making them begin to inquire when their
turn would come to enjoy a fair share of the fruits of the earth they tilled.

They, too, or, rather, their children and grandchildren, were
to come in time to the parting of the ways when the choice would have to be
made between either merging themselves in the mass standardization of a new civilization
or adapting the best of the new to their own needs while still retaining those
qualities and customs which have given country life its distinctive character.
That choice may not even now have been determined.

But only a few of the wisest foresaw that the need for such a
choice would arise when, for Laura, what appeared to be an opportunity offered and,
driven on by well-meant advice from without and from within by the restless
longing of youth to see and experience the whole of life, she disappeared from
the country scene. To return often, but never as herself part of it, for she
could only be that in her native county, where she had sprung from the soil.

On the last morning of her postwoman's round, when she came
to the path between trees where she had seen the birds' footprints on the snow,
she turned and looked back upon the familiar landmarks. It was a morning of ground
mist, yellow sunshine, and high rifts of blue, white-cloud- dappled sky. The
leaves were still thick on the trees, but dew-spangled gossamer threads hung on
the bushes and the shrill little cries of unrest of the swallows skimming the
green open spaces of the park told of autumn and change.

There was the stable tower with its clock-face and, near it,
though unseen, was the courtyard where she had been annoyed—foolishly annoyed, she
thought now—by the horseplay of the footmen. The chief offenders had gone long
before and with those who had taken their places she knew quite well how to
deal, even if they had been offensive, which they were not, for she was nearly
three years older. There, where the path wound past the two copses, she had met
Philip White—he, too, had left the estate—and away to the left were the meadows
where the cows had obstructed her path. Farther on, quite out of sight, was the
Post Office where, doubtless, Miss Lane was at that moment dispensing stamps
with the air of a high priestess, still a little offended by what she considered
Laura's desertion, but not too much so to have promised her as a parting gift
one of her own watches and chains. And around the Post Office and green was the
village where she had had good times and times not so good and had come to know
every one of its inhabitants and to count most of them as her friends.