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Back Lark Rise to Candleford Save as PDF
Chapters (44)
  1. Lark Rise to Candleford
  2. Copyright
  3. LARK RISE
  4. 1
  5. 2
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  11. 8
  12. 9
  13. 10
  14. 11
  15. 12
  16. 13
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  18. 15
  19. OVER TO CANDLEFORD
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  34. CANDLEFORD GREEN
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  44. 39

Then the young wives, unused to never having a penny of their own and sorely tried by their straitened housekeeping, began to look round for some way of adding to the family income. One, with the remains of her savings, bought a few fowls and fowl-houses and sold the eggs to the grocer in the market town. Another who was clever with her needle made frocks for the servants at the neighbouring farm-houses; another left her only child with her mother and did the Rectory charring twice a week. The old country tradition of self-help was reviving; but, although there was a little extra money and there were fewer mouths to feed, the income was still woefully inadequate. Whichever way the young housewife turned, she was, as she said, “up against it.” “If only we had more money!” was still the cry.

Early in the ‘nineties some measure of relief came, for then the weekly wage was raised to fifteen shillings; but rising prices and new requirements soon absorbed this rise and it took a world war to obtain for them anything like a living wage.

11

School

School began at nine o’clock, but the hamlet children set out on their mile-and-a-half walk there as soon as possible after their seven o’clock breakfast, partly because they liked plenty of time to play on the road and partly because their mothers wanted them out of the way before house-cleaning began.

Up the long, straight road they straggled, in twos and threes and in gangs, their flat, rush dinner-baskets over their shoulders and their shabby little coats on their arms against rain. In cold weather some of them carried two hot potatoes which had been in the oven, or in the ashes, all night, to warm their hands on the way and to serve as a light lunch on arrival.

They were strong, lusty children, let loose from control; and there was plenty of shouting, quarrelling, and often fighting among them. In more peaceful moments they would squat in the dust of the road and play marbles, or sit on a stone heap and play dibs with pebbles, or climb into the hedges after birds’ nests or blackberries, or to pull long trails of bryony to wreathe round their hats. In winter they would slide on the ice on the puddles, or make snowballs—soft ones for their friends, and hard ones with a stone inside for their enemies.