Lark Rise by Flora Thompson (best books under 200 pages .TXT) 📖
- Author: Flora Thompson
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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 farmhouses 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 doorstep. 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
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