Lark Rise by Flora Thompson (best books under 200 pages .TXT) 📖

Then seed was sown, crops were thinned out and

hoed and, in time, mown, and the whole process began again.

 

Machinery was just coming into use on the land. Every autumn appeared a

pair of large traction engines, which, posted one on each side of a

field, drew a plough across and across by means of a cable. These toured

the district under their own steam for hire on the different farms, and

the outfit included a small caravan, known as ‘the box’, for the two

drivers to live and sleep in. In the ‘nineties, when they had decided to

emigrate and wanted to learn all that was possible about farming, both

Laura’s brothers, in turn, did a spell with the steam plough, horrifying

the other hamlet people, who looked upon such nomads as social outcasts.

Their ideas had not then been extended to include mechanics as a class

apart and they were lumped as inferiors with sweeps and tinkers and

others whose work made their faces and clothes black. On the other hand,

clerks and salesmen of every grade, whose clean smartness might have

been expected to ensure respect, were looked down upon as

‘counter-jumpers’. Their recognized world was made up of landowners,

farmers, publicans, and farm labourers, with the butcher, the baker, the

miller, and the grocer as subsidiaries.

 

Such machinery as the farmer owned was horse-drawn and was only in

partial use. In some fields a horse-drawn drill would sow the seed in

rows, in others a human sower would walk up and down with a basket

suspended from his neck and fling the seed with both hands broadcast. In

harvest time the mechanical reaper was already a familiar sight, but it

only did a small part of the work; men were still mowing with scythes

and a few women were still reaping with sickles. A thrashing machine on

hire went from farm to farm and its use was more general; but men at

home still thrashed out their allotment crops and their wives’ leazings

with a flail and winnowed the corn by pouring from sieve to sieve in the

wind.

 

The labourers worked hard and well when they considered the occasion

demanded it and kept up a good steady pace at all times. Some were

better workmen than others, of course; but the majority took a pride in

their craft and were fond of explaining to an outsider that field work

was not the fool’s job that some townsmen considered it. Things must be

done just so and at the exact moment, they said; there were ins and outs

in good land work which took a man’s lifetime to learn. A few of less

admirable build would boast: ‘We gets ten bob a week, a’ we yarns every

penny of it; but we doesn’t yarn no more; we takes hemmed good care o’

that!’ But at team work, at least, such ‘slack-twisted ‘uns’ had to keep

in step, and the pace, if slow, was steady.

 

While the ploughmen were in charge of the teams, other men went singly,

or in twos or threes, to hoe, harrow, or spread manure in other fields;

others cleared ditches and saw to drains, or sawed wood or cut chaff or

did other odd jobs about the farmstead. Two or three highly skilled

middle-aged men were sometimes put upon piecework, hedging and ditching,

sheep-shearing, thatching, or mowing, according to the season. The

carter, shepherd, stockman, and blacksmith had each his own specialized

job. Important men, these, with two shillings a week extra on their

wages and a cottage rent free near the farmstead.

 

When the ploughmen shouted to each other across the furrows, they did

not call ‘Miller’ or ‘Gaskins’ or ‘Tuffrey’ or even ‘Bill’, ‘Tom’, or

‘Dick’, for they all had nicknames and answered more readily to ‘Bishie’

or ‘Pumpkin’ or ‘Boamer’. The origin of many of these names was

forgotten, even by the bearers; but a few were traceable to personal

peculiarities. ‘Cockie’ or’Cock-eye’ had a slight cast; ‘Old Stut’

stuttered, while ‘Bavour’ was so called because when he fancied a snack

between meals he would say ‘I must just have my mouthful of bavour’,

using the old name for a snack, which was rapidly becoming modernized

into ‘lunch’ or ‘luncheon’.

 

When a few years later, Edmund worked in the fields for a time, the

carter, having asked him some question and being struck with the aptness

of his reply, exclaimed: ‘Why, boo-oy, you be as wise as Solomon, an’

Solomon I shall call ‘ee!’ and Solomon he was until he left the hamlet.

A younger brother was called ‘Fisher’; but the origin of this name was a

mystery. His mother, who was fonder of boys than girls, used to call him

her ‘kingfisher’.

 

Sometimes afield, instead of the friendly shout, a low hissing whistle

would pass between the ploughs. It was a warning-note and meant that

‘Old Monday’, the farm bailiff, had been sighted. He would come riding

across the furrows on his little long-tailed grey pony, himself so tall

and his steed so dumpy that his feet almost touched the ground, a rosy,

shrivelled, nutcracker-faced old fellow, swishing his ash stick and

shouting, ‘Hi, men! Ho, men! What do you reckon you’re doing!’

 

He questioned them sharply and found fault here and there, but was in

the main fairly just in his dealings with them. He had one great fault

in their eyes, however; he was always in a hurry himself and he tried to

hurry them, and that was a thing they detested.

 

The nickname of ‘Old Monday’, or ‘Old Monday Morning’, had been bestowed

upon him years before when some hitch had occurred and he was said to

have cried: ‘Ten o’clock Monday morning! To-day’s Monday, to-morrow’s

Tuesday, next day’s Wednesday—half the week gone and nothing done!’

This name, of course, was reserved for his absence; while he was with

them it was ‘Yes, Muster Morris’ and ‘No, Muster Morris’, and ‘I’ll see

what I can do, Muster Morris’. A few of the tamer-spirited even called

him ‘sir’. Then, as soon as his back was turned, some wag would point to

it with one hand and slap his own buttocks with the other, saying, but

not too loudly, ‘My elbow to you, you ole devil!’

 

At twelve by the sun, or by signal from the possessor of one of the old

turnip-faced watches which descended from father to son, the teams would

knock off for the dinner-hour. Horses were unyoked, led to the shelter

of a hedge or a rick and given their nosebags and men and boys threw

themselves down on sacks spread out beside them and tin bottles of cold

tea were uncorked and red handkerchiefs of food unwrapped. The lucky

ones had bread and cold bacon, perhaps the top or the bottom of a

cottage loaf, on which the small cube of bacon was placed, with a finger

of bread on top, called the thumb-piece, to keep the meat untouched by

hand and in position for manipulation with a clasp-knife. The

consumption of this food was managed neatly and decently, a small sliver

of bacon and a chunk of bread being cut and conveyed to the mouth in one

movement. The less fortunate ones munched their bread and lard or morsel

of cheese; and the boys with their ends of cold pudding were jokingly

bidden not to get ‘that ‘ere treacle’ in their ears.

 

The food soon vanished, the crumbs from the red handkerchiefs were

shaken out for the birds, the men lighted their pipes and the boys

wandered off with their catapults down the hedgerows. Often the elders

would sit out their hour of leisure discussing politics, the latest

murder story, or local affairs; but at other times, especially when one

man noted for that kind of thing was present, they would while away the

time in repeating what the women spoke of with shamed voices as ‘men’s

tales’.

 

These stories, which were kept strictly to the fields and never repeated

elsewhere, formed a kind of rustic Decameron, which seemed to have

been in existence for centuries and increased like a snowball as it

rolled down the generations. The tales were supposed to be extremely

indecent, and elderly men would say after such a sitting, ‘I got up an’

went over to th’ osses, for I couldn’t stand no more on’t. The brimstone

fair come out o’ their mouths as they put their rascally heads

together.’ What they were really like only the men knew; but probably

they were coarse rather than filthy. Judging by a few stray specimens

which leaked through the channel of eavesdropping juniors, they

consisted chiefly of ‘he said’ and ‘she said’, together with a lavish

enumeration of those parts of the human body then known as ‘the

unmentionables’.

 

Songs and snatches on the same lines were bawled at the plough-tail and

under hedges and never heard elsewhere. Some of these ribald rhymes were

so neatly turned that those who have studied the subject have attributed

their authorship to some graceless son of the Rectory or Hall. It may be

that some of these young scamps had a hand in them, but it is just as

likely that they sprung direct from the soil, for, in those days of

general churchgoing, the men’s minds were well stored with hymns and

psalms and some of them were very good at parodying them.

 

There was ‘The Parish Clerk’s Daughter’, for instance. This damsel was

sent one Christmas morning to the church to inform her father that the

Christmas present of beef had arrived after he left home. When she

reached the church the service had begun and the congregation, led by

her father, was half-way through the psalms. Nothing daunted, she sidled

up to her father and intoned:

 

‘Feyther, the me-a-at’s come, an’ what’s me mother to d-o-o-o w’it?’

 

And the answer came pat: ‘Tell her to roast the thick an’ boil th’ thin,

an’ me-ak a pudden o’ th’ su-u-u-u-et.’ But such simple entertainment

did not suit the man already mentioned. He would drag out the filthiest

of the stock rhymes, then go on to improvise, dragging in the names of

honest lovers and making a mock of fathers of first children. Though

nine out of ten of his listeners disapproved and felt thoroughly

uncomfortable, they did nothing to check him beyond a mild ‘Look out, or

them boo-oys’ll hear ‘ee!’ or ‘Careful! some ‘ooman may be comin’ along

th’ roo-ad.’

 

But the lewd scandalizer did not always have everything his own way.

There came a day when a young ex-soldier, home from his five years’

service in India, sat next to him. He sat through one or two such

extemporized songs, then, eyeing the singer, said shortly, ‘You’d better

go and wash out your dirty mouth.’

 

The answer was a bawled stanza in which the objector’s name figured. At

that the ex-soldier sprung to his feet, seized the singer by the scruff

of his neck, dragged him to the ground and, after a scuffle, forced

earth and small stones between his teeth. ‘There, that’s a lot cleaner!’

he said, administering a final kick on the buttocks as the fellow slunk,

coughing and spitting, behind the hedge.

 

A few women still did field work, not with the men, or even in the same

field as a rule, but at their own special tasks, weeding and hoeing,

picking up stones, and topping and tailing turnips and mangel; or, in

wet weather, mending sacks in a barn. Formerly, it was said, there had

been a large gang of field women, lawless, slatternly creatures, some of

whom had thought nothing of having four or five children out of wedlock.

Their day was over; but the reputation they had left behind them had

given most country-women a distaste for ‘goin’ afield’. In