In the production of their large families the parents appeared reckless. One obvious method of birth control, culled from the Old Testament, was known in the hamlet and practised by one couple, which had managed to keep their family down to four. The wife told their secret to another woman, thinking to help her; but it only brought scorn down on her own head. “Did you ever! Fancy begrudging a little child a bit o’ food, the nasty greedy selfish hussy, her!” was the general verdict. But, although they protested so volubly, and bore their own frequent confinements with courage and cheerfulness, they must have sometimes rebelled in secret, for there was great bitterness in the tone in which in another mood they would say: “The wife ought to have the first child and the husband the second, then there wouldn’t ever be any more.”

That showed how the land lay, as Laura’s mother said to her in later life. She herself lived to see the decline in the birth-rate, and, when she discussed it with her daughter in the early 1930s, laughed heartily at some of the explanations advanced by the learned, and said: “If they knew what it meant to carry and bear and bring up a child themselves, they wouldn’t expect the women to be in a hurry to have a second or third now they’ve got a say in the matter. Now, if they made it a bit easier for people, dividing it out a bit, so to speak, by taking over some of the money worry. It’s never seemed fair to my mind that the one who’s got to go through all a confinement means should have to scrape and pinch beforehand to save a bit as well. Then there’s the other child or children. What mother wants to rob those she’s already got by bringing in another to share what there’s too little of already?”

None of the unmarried hamlet girls had babies in the ‘eighties, although there must have been quite a crop of illegitimate births a few years earlier, for when the attendance register was called out at school the eldest children of several families answered to another surname than that borne by their brothers and sisters and by which they themselves were commonly known. These would be the children of couples who had married after the birth of their first child, a common happening at that time—and little thought of.

In the ‘eighties a young woman of thirty came from Birmingham to have her illegitimate baby at her sister’s home in the hamlet, and a widow who had already three legitimate children and afterwards married again managed to produce two children between her two marriages. These births passed without much comment; but when a young girl of sixteen whose home was out in the fields near the hamlet was known to be ‘in trouble’ public feeling was stirred.