Lark Rise to Candleford Read Online Free

business,' was the reply; 'an' I think
I'd better give a slip of it to your mother to plant in a pot for you.' But no
such reproofs could cure them of the habit, although they soon learned who and
who not to question.
    In this way they learned the little that was known of the
past of the hamlet and of places beyond. They had no need to ask the names of
the birds, flowers, and trees they saw every day, for they had already learned
these unconsciously, and neither could remember a time when they did not know
an oak from an ash, wheat from barley, or a Jenny wren from a blue-tit. Of what
was going on around them, not much was hidden, for the gossips talked freely
before children, evidently considering them not meant to hear as well as not to
be heard, and, as every house was open to them and their own home was open to
most people, there was not much that escaped their sharp ears.
    The first charge on the labourers' ten shillings was house
rent. Most of the cottages belonged to small tradesmen in the market town and
the weekly rents ranged from one shilling to half a crown. Some labourers in other
villages worked on farms or estates where they had their cottages rent free;
but the hamlet people did not envy them, for 'Stands to reason,' they said,
'they've allus got to do just what they be told, or out they goes, neck and
crop, bag and baggage.' A shilling, or even two shillings a week, they felt,
was not too much to pay for the freedom to live and vote as they liked and to
go to church or chapel or neither as they preferred.
    Every house had a good vegetable garden and there were
allotments for all; but only three of the thirty cottages had their own water
supply. The less fortunate tenants obtained their water from a well on a vacant
plot on the outskirts of the hamlet, from which the cottage had disappeared.
There was no public well or pump. They just had to get their water where and
how they could; the landlords did not undertake to supply water.
    Against the wall of every well-kept cottage stood a tarred or
green-painted water butt to catch and store the rain-water from the roof. This
saved many journeys to the well with buckets, as it could be used for cleaning
and washing clothes and for watering small, precious things in the garden. It
was also valued for toilet purposes and the women would hoard the last drops
for themselves and their children to wash in. Rain-water was supposed to be
good for the complexion, and, though they had no money to spend upon beautifying
themselves, they were not too far gone in poverty to neglect such means as they
had to that end.
    For drinking water, and for cleaning water, too, when the
water butts failed, the women went to the well in all weathers, drawing up the buckets
with a windlass and carting them home suspended from their shoulders by a yoke.
Those were weary journeys 'round the Rise' for water, and many were the rests
and endless was the gossip, as they stood at corners in their big white aprons
and crossover shawls.
    A few of the younger, more recently married women who had
been in good service and had not yet given up the attempt to hold themselves a
little aloof would get their husbands to fill the big red store crock with water
at night. But this was said by others to be 'a sin and a shame', for, after his
hard day's work, a man wanted his rest, not to do ''ooman's work'. Later on in
the decade it became the fashion for the men to fetch water at night, and then,
of course, it was quite right that they should do so and a woman who 'dragged
her guts out' fetching more than an occasional load from the well was looked
upon as a traitor to her sex.
    In dry summers, when the hamlet wells failed, water had to be
fetched from a pump at some farm buildings half a mile distant. Those who had wells
in their gardens would not give away a spot, as they feared if they did theirs,
too, would run dry, so they fastened down the lids with padlocks and disregarded
all hints.
    The only sanitary