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

the shearing or the harvest.

This provided them with ready money for boots and clothes; for food they

relied almost entirely on home produce. Tea was a luxury seldom indulged

in, for it cost five shillings a pound. But country people then had not

acquired the taste for tea; they preferred home-brewed.

 

Everybody worked; the father and mother from daybreak to dark. Sally’s

job was to mind the cow and drive the geese to the best grass patches.

It was strange to picture Sally, a little girl, running with her switch

after the great hissing birds on the common, especially as both common

and geese had vanished as completely as though they never had been.

 

Sally had never been to school, for, when she was a child, there was no

dame school near enough for her to attend; but her brother had gone to a

night school run by the vicar of an adjoining parish, walking the three

miles each way after his day’s work was done, and he had taught Sally to

spell out a few words in her mother’s Bible. After that, she had been

left to tread the path of learning alone and had only managed to reach

the point where she could write her own name and read the Bible or

newspaper by skipping words of more than two syllables. Dick was a

little more advanced, for he had had the benefit of the night-school

education at first hand.

 

It was surprising to find how many of the old people in the hamlet who

had had no regular schooling could yet read a little. A parent had

taught some; others had attended a dame school or the night school, and

a few had made their own children teach them in later life. Statistics

of illiteracy of that period are often misleading, for many who could

read and write sufficiently well for their own humble needs would

modestly disclaim any pretensions to being what they called ‘scholards’.

Some who could write their own name quite well would make a cross as

signature to a document out of nervousness or modesty.

 

After Sally’s mother died, she became her father’s right hand, indoors

and out. When the old man became feeble, Dick used to come sometimes to

do a bit of hard digging or to farm out the pigsties, and Sally had many

tales to tell of the fun they had had carting their bit of hay or

hunting for eggs in the loft. When, at a great age, the father died, he

left the house and furniture and his seventy-five pounds in the savings

bank to Sally, for, by that time, both her brothers were thriving and

needed no share. So Dick and Sally were married and had lived there

together for nearly sixty years. It had been a hard, frugal, but happy

life. For most of the time Dick had worked as a farm labourer while

Sally saw to things about home, for the cow, geese and other stock had

long gone the way of the common. But when Dick retired from wage-earning

the seventy-five pounds was not only intact, but had been added to. It

had been their rule, Sally said, to save something every week, if only a

penny or twopence, and the result of their hard work and self-denial was

their present comfortable circumstances. ‘But us couldn’t’ve done it if

us’d gone havin’ a great tribe o’ children,’ Sally would say. ‘I didn’t

never hold wi’ havin’ a lot o’ poor brats and nothin’ to put into their

bellies. Took us all our time to bring up our two.’ She was very bitter

about the huge families around her and no doubt would have said more had

she been talking to one of maturer age.

 

They had their little capital reckoned up and allotted; they could

manage on so much a year in addition to the earnings of their garden,

fowls, and beehives, and that much, and no more, was drawn every year

from the bank. ‘Reckon it’ll about last our time,’ they used to say, and

it did, although both lived well on into the eighties.

 

After they had gone, their house stood empty for years. The population

of the hamlet was falling and none of the young newly married couples

cared for the thatched roof and stone floors. People who lived near used

the well; it saved them many a journey. And many were not above taking

the railings or the beehive bench or anything made of wood for firing,

or gathering the apples or using the poor tattered remnant of the flower

garden as a nursery. But nobody wanted to live there.

 

When Laura visited the hamlet just before the War, the roof had fallen

in, the yew hedge had run wild and the flowers were gone, excepting one

pink rose which was shedding its petals over the ruin. To-day, all has

gone, and only the limy whiteness of the soil in a corner of a ploughed

field is left to show that a cottage once stood there.

 

Sally and Dick were survivals from the earliest hamlet days. Queenie

represented another phase of its life which had also ended and been

forgotten by most people. She lived in a tiny, thatched cottage at the

back of the end house, which, although it was not in line, was always

spoken of as ‘next door’. She seemed very old to the children, for she

was a little, wrinkled, yellow-faced old woman in a sunbonnet; but she

cannot have been nearly as old as Sally. Queenie and her husband were

not in such comfortable circumstances as Sally and Dick; but old Master

Macey, commonly called ‘Twister’, was still able to work part of the

time, and they managed to keep their home going.

 

It was a pleasant home, though bare, for Queenie kept it spotless,

scrubbing her deal table and whitening her floor with hearthstone every

morning and keeping the two brass candlesticks on her mantelpiece

polished till they looked like gold. The cottage faced south and, in

summer, the window and door stood open all day to the sunshine. When the

children from the end house passed close by her doorway, as they had to

do every time they went beyond their own garden, they would pause a

moment to listen to Queenie’s old sheep’s-head clock ticking. There was

no other sound; for, after she had finished her housework, Queenie was

never indoors while the sun shone. If the children had a message for

her, they were told to go round to the beehives, and there they would

find her, sitting on a low stool with her lace-pillow on her lap,

sometimes working and sometimes dozing with her lilac sunbonnet drawn

down over her face to shield it from the sun.

 

Every fine day, throughout the summer, she sat there ‘watching the

bees’. She was combining duty and pleasure, for, if they swarmed, she

was making sure of not losing the swarm; and, if they did not, it was

still, as she said, ‘a trate’ to sit there, feeling the warmth of the

sun, smelling the flowers, and watching ‘the craturs’ go in and out of

the hives.

 

When, at last, the long-looked-for swarm rose into the air, Queenie

would seize her coal shovel and iron spoon and follow it over cabbage

beds and down pea-stick alleys, her own or, if necessary, other

peoples’, tanging the spoon on the shovel: Tang-tang-tangety-tang!

 

She said it was the law that, if they were not tanged, and they settled

beyond her own garden bounds, she would have no further claim to them.

Where they settled, they belonged. That would have been a serious loss,

especially in early summer, for, as she reminded the children:

 

A swarm in May’s worth a rick of hay;

And a swarm in June’s worth a silver spoon;

 

while

 

A swarm in July isn’t worth a fly.

 

So she would follow and leave her shovel to mark her claim, then go back

home for the straw skep and her long, green veil and sheepskin gloves to

protect her face and hands while she hived her swarm.

 

In winter she fed her bees with a mixture of sugar and water and might

often have been seen at that time of the year with her ear pressed to

one of the red pan roofs of the hives, listening. ‘The craturs! The poor

little craturs,’ she would say, ‘they must be a’most frozed. If I could

have my way I’d take ‘em all indoors and set ‘em in rows in front of a

good fire.’

 

Queenie at her lacemaking was a constant attraction to the children.

They loved to see the bobbins tossed hither and thither, at random it

seemed to them, every bobbin weighted with its bunch of bright beads and

every bunch with its own story, which they had heard so many times that

they knew it by heart, how this bunch had been part of a blue bead

necklace worn by her little sister who had died at five years old, and

this other one had belonged to her mother, and that black one had been

found, after she was dead, in a work-box belonging to a woman who was

reputed to have been a witch.

 

There had been a time, it appeared, when lacemaking was a regular

industry in the hamlet. Queenie, in her childhood, had been ‘brought up

to the pillow’, sitting among the women at eight years old and learning

to fling her bobbins with the best of them. They would gather in one

cottage in winter for warmth, she said, each one bringing her faggot or

shovel of coals for the fire, and there they would sit all day, working,

gossiping, singing old songs, and telling old tales till it was time to

run home and put on the pots for their husbands’ suppers. These were the

older women and the young unmarried girls; the women with little

children did what lacemaking they could at home. In very cold winter

weather the lacemakers would have a small earthen pot with a lid,

called a ‘pipkin’, containing hot embers, at which they warmed their

hands and feet and sometimes sat upon.

 

In the summer they would sit in the shade behind one of the ‘housen’,

and, as they gossiped, the bobbins flew and the lovely, delicate pattern

lengthened until the piece was completed and wrapped in blue paper and

stored away to await the great day when the year’s work was taken to

Banbury Fair and sold to the dealer.

 

‘Them wer’ the days!’ she would sigh. ‘Money to spend.’ And she would

tell of the bargains she had bought with her earnings. Good brown calico

and linsey-woolsey, and a certain chocolate print sprigged with white,

her favourite gown, of which she could still show a pattern in her big

patchwork quilt. Then there was a fairing to be bought for those at

home—pipes and packets of shag tobacco for the men, rag dolls and

gingerbread for the ‘little ‘uns’, and snuff for the old grannies. And

the homecoming, loaded with treasure, and money in the pocket besides.

Tripe. They always bought tripe; it was the only time in the year they

could get it, and it was soon heated up, with onions and a nice bit of

thickening; and after supper there was hot, spiced elderberry wine, and

so to bed, everybody happy.

 

Now, of course, things were different. She didn’t know what the world

was coming to. This nasty machine-made stuff had killed the lacemaking;

the dealer had not been to the Fair for the last ten years; nobody knew

a bit of good stuff when they saw it. Said they liked the Nottingham

lace better; it was wider and had more pattern to